Part Five
41
To gain full access to someone’s telephone and financial records, the NCA simply have to have that individual declared a person of interest by a senior officer. So at eight a.m. the next morning, Mike Bolt told DCS Sheryl Trinder about what he’d found the previous night in Ray Mason’s old phone records. She wasn’t hugely enthusiastic that it would lead anywhere but, given the lack of progress in every other area of the inquiry, she was willing to give it a shot, and gave him the authorization he needed.
Things can move fast in a police inquiry if the will is there to drive them forward, and the will to apprehend Mason either dead or alive was most definitely there, so it took less than an hour for copies of the Brennans’ bank, credit card and phone statements to be on Bolt’s desk. Rather than waste the time of any of his team, he closed his office door and scanned them himself with his second large Americano of the day.
A few small things stood out, most particularly a phone call from an unidentified mobile number to the Brennans’ home landline a couple of days earlier that had lasted nine minutes. It stood out not only because it was one of only seven calls made to the number in the previous two weeks (the others all appeared to be sales calls), but because of the timing. The call had been made two days ago at 11.39 a.m. – the morning after the Kalaman killings, the same day that Tina almost certainly collected fake documents for Mason, and was then subsequently arrested after the murder of her neighbour and the police chase. A search of Brennan’s mobile phone records also showed that he’d received a call from the same number at 20.02 that same Saturday night, and another eleven minutes later.
There was also a payment on Steve Brennan’s Visa debit card to P&O Ferries, made three hours after the phone call to his landline, followed by a second payment, made yesterday, to a branch of Hertz in Fougères, France. The payment was for more than €800, suggesting that he’d rented a car for a reasonably substantial length of time. Bolt had no idea where Fougères was but when he checked on Google Maps, he saw that it was some fifty miles east of the ferry port of St Malo.
Now all of these things could have simply been coincidence, but if the Brennans had travelled to France by ferry, it did seem strange that they’d hire a car that far from the port. Either way, as far as Bolt was concerned, it merited further investigation.
He called Mo in and suggested he use a couple of the analysts on the team to help him get a better picture of Steve Brennan’s movements over the past forty-eight hours.
While that was going on, Bolt got an update from the SIO on the Mary West murder. There was no real progress, although one witness reported seeing a woman walking briskly up the hill behind Mrs West’s house around the time of the shooting. Unfortunately the witness could give no further details of what the woman looked like as she’d been too far away. Next he called the SIO on the Kalaman killings. Her team hadn’t turned up any further clues either during the extensive search of the crime scene and were still trying to work out how Mason had got onto the rooftop.
‘He either broke into an apartment or rented one,’ Bolt told her.
‘I know that,’ she answered testily, ‘but it’s hard to get inside any of the apartment buildings. That whole block’s like a ghost town. No one lives there. Most of the owners aren’t even on the same continent.’
And that was the problem. Mason had planned his assassination well, and he’d had help. The two men who’d broken him free from the prison van still hadn’t been accounted for. Who the hell were they? And where had they been hiding Mason?
It was just short of midday and Bolt was contemplating an early lunch when Mo knocked on the office door and walked in, carrying some papers in his hand. It was immediately obvious from the look in his eyes that there’d been a development.
‘Steve Brennan’s helping Mason,’ he said, sitting down opposite Bolt and putting the papers on the desk. ‘So’s Tina.’
Bolt sighed. ‘So what have we got?’
‘That call from the unidentified number to the Brennans’ landline on Saturday morning belongs to an unregistered burner phone. But we triangulated its location, and the call was made from Tina Boyd’s house. As you know, there was a second call made from the burner phone to Brennan’s mobile number at 20.13, which was around the time Mrs West was shot dead and Tina fled the scene. That call was made from woods about half a mile east of Tina’s house.’
‘You can get to those woods from Tina’s back garden,’ said Bolt. He’d often walked there with Tina himself.
‘We also triangulated Brennan’s phone’s location when he took the call. It was two miles away from Tina’s place, and it’s definitely him because his car was picked up on ANPR cameras on the M25 four minutes earlier, and then again thirteen minutes later driving the other way. The phone and the car then travelled back to the Brennans’ home in Hampshire where they stopped overnight. And then yesterday morning, the phone and car were at the ferry port at Portsmouth. P&O Ferries have confirmed that Steve Brennan and his Audi travelled to St Malo on the ferry. We can’t track the car any further without help from the French police but, according to Brennan’s mobile provider, his phone was in a rural area about
