A Dark Matter Episode 56

Kyle narrowed his eyes. “What’s this about?” Hannah looked around the shop, glossy adverts selling hitech stuff that would be obsolete in a year or two. “She’s dead.” “Oh no,” Kyle said. “Sorry.”

“She was strangled.”

“Jesus.” Kyle looked at the Polish guy for help, but he kept his head behind a computer screen.

“I need to find out what happened,” Hannah said. Kyle looked at the receipt again. “And you think this phone has something to do with it?”

“It wasn’t her main phone,” Hannah said. “She was using it for something else.” “A burner.”

“What?”

“It’s what drug dealers call it,” Kyle said, looking uncomfortable. “Like on Breaking Bad. A pay-as-you-go phone you change or ditch regularly to avoid getting traced.” “That’s not what Mel was doing.” Kyle’s eyes widened. “I didn’t mean that.” “She was my friend and she’s dead.” Kyle shuffled his feet. “Let me see her picture again?”

Hannah held out her phone and Kyle examined it, running his fingers along his tiny beard. “She’s pretty,” he said eventually. “I remember her.”

“Really?”

“Sure. She wasn’t dressed like this.” His finger smudged the screen on Mel’s tight red dress. “Of course not,” Hannah said. “Was she alone?”

Kyle sighed. “It was a long time ago.” “With a guy?”

Kyle screwed up his face. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Hannah took her phone back and googled. “This guy?”

She held up a picture of Peter Longhorn from his Edinburgh Uni page, sensible smile, blue shirt.

Kyle shook his head. “I couldn’t honestly say.”

“What about CCTV?”

Kyle nodded at a camera in a corner of the shop. “It only gets kept for two weeks then we write over it.”

“Can you check?”

“There’s no point.”

Hannah let out a loud sigh. “What about your database, the sale must be in your system.”

“Sure, but it’ll just be the same information as on the receipt.”

“If she was with someone else, maybe they paid.”

Kyle looked around the shop. It was busy, people waiting to get served, to walk away with shiny new handheld dreams. “OK.”

He went to one of the screens behind the desk and typed in the transaction number from the receipt. He typed some more info, then flattened his lips together as he turned the screen to show her. “It was paid for by Melanie Cheng, was that your friend?”

Hannah nodded as she scanned the screen. “What about the number, can you give me that?”

Kyle turned the screen back towards himself. “It’s against policy to give out that information.”

Hannah balled her fist around her phone. “This is a murder investigation.” “You’re not the police.”

Hannah breathed deeply. “No, but I was her best friend and I’m a private investigator.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Do you have a licence or something?” Hannah shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“So how do you get to be a private detective?”

“Investigator.” Hannah shrugged. “You just become one. Now can I have that number?”

Kyle looked around, unsure. Hannah moved in and lowered her voice. “The alternative is that I get the police to ask you, would you like that?”

“I don’t know.”

Hannah looked at the Polish guy, the other young men working in the shop. “How many burner phones do you sell here every week? What if the police had a look at your CCTV and cross-referenced it with sales for the last fortnight?”

Kyle stared at the screen for a long time then turned it to show Hannah. She plugged the number into her phone and pressed “call”. Waited a few seconds then heard a dead tone. She redialled, the same, then a third time. Dead.

Kyle moved the screen back and looked around at the customers. “I need to get back to work.”

Hannah tried one more time as she left the shop and emerged into the sunshine, buses rumbling along the street, the chatter of shoppers around her. The dead tone in her ear again. At least now she had a number to give Thomas to trace calls.

She put her phone away and crossed the road, dodging a tram, thinking about who Mel was calling.

Dorothy

She stood with the SD cards in her fist as she stared at the view out of the kitchen window. It always amazed her how much green space there was in Edinburgh, and the Braid Hills sprawled south for miles, woodland and gorse, the burn down below.

She heard the toilet flush, then a while later Jacob appeared in the doorway.

“Sorry about that, when I have to go, I have to go.” He eased himself on to a kitchen chair. Dorothy thought about the footage of him going to the toilet over and over again.

“When the body fails,” Jacob said, “it’s a real struggle”.

“You do pretty well.”

“You mean considering I’m 94.” “You look younger.”

“You’re very kind,” Jacob said.

“But I feel much older. Every morning when I wake up, it’s with a mixture of relief and disappointment, if I’m honest.”

Dorothy joined him at the kitchen table. “You don’t mean that.”

“I’m serious. I never wanted to end my life, even when I had to leave my parents in Germany, knowing I would probably never see them again. Even when Kristina died.”

Dorothy presumed Kristina was the wife. “But I do now,” Jacob said. “I don’t have the courage to end it, but I wish I did. And now this.”

He waved his hand around, presumably indicating having hired a private investigator to catch a thief in his home.

Kyle stared at the screen then turned it to show Hannah. She plugged the number into her phone and pressed ‘call’

More tomorrow.

A Dark Matter by Doug Johnstone is published by Orenda Books, as is Black Hearts, his latest in the same series. www.orendabooks. co.uk