‘Other forensics?’
‘Fibres obtained from clothing and the body are still being examined and tested, but assuming the Met’s own unit missed nothing, I don’t expect us to have anything worthwhile to report, either.’
Fletcher chewed on her lip before responding. ‘So we have four victims, that we know of. All four were sex workers of some description, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. Each of them went missing for between a week and ten days prior to being murdered. Chances are they were all strangled to death somewhere other than where their bodies were dumped. And all were left naked, out in the open, next to a pile of clothing.’
‘Under or close to a tree,’ Bliss added. ‘That aspect also feels like part of his signature, to me.’
‘There appears to be no racial element,’ DCI Warburton said. ‘We have young women from vastly different backgrounds here.’
Fletcher nodded, but raised a hand. ‘This is all very well, but all I’m hearing is what we have and where we are as things stand. What I want to know is the direction we are heading in. What’s your next move?’
‘We have a clear strategy with two different paths,’ Bishop told her. ‘As you’re aware, our initial focus fell upon Lewis Drake’s little empire – the part that relies on escort agencies and other forms of prostitution. Admittedly, this was when we thought we were dealing with a single victim, because she was flagged as being one of his agency escorts. It was an obvious way to go.’
‘And now?’ Fletcher prompted.
‘We see no reason to give up entirely on that area of focus. While it appears likely that Drake’s organisation had nothing to do with Majidah’s murder, they remain the people who were closest to her before her abduction. It’s certainly possible that her killer was one of her clients. The Met were keen to look into that angle, and although they were unable to pinpoint a single client connected to each of the earlier victims, it remained an open and valid line of enquiry.’
‘I agree. What else, DS Bishop?’
‘We’ve divided the squad into two separate units. DI – DS Bliss, together with ERSOU in the form of Investigator Ashton, is looking into the Drake side of things. In addition, we can’t rule out the two business cards found in our victim’s bra – well, in what we believe to be hers, at least. Jimmy himself mentioned anomalies earlier, and this is a significant one. So he and his group are running with that, also.’
‘And you and your team?’
‘We were originally going to follow up on the possibility of the murder being committed by a random punter. Now we know that’s not the case, we’ll shift across to looking at possibilities other than clients – so, in this case, men who have something against sex workers. Something so deep they’d be willing to kill them for it. We’re also concentrating our efforts on the clothing and the HOLMES data.’
‘If my reading of this is correct,’ Fletcher said, ‘we don’t have a great deal to go on.’
With the attention still on Bishop, he gave a single nod and a long sigh. His shoulders sank as if deflating. ‘We don’t,’ he admitted. ‘Other than letting us know we have a serial on our hands, nothing we have from the Met is of help, as far as I can tell. That means our own investigation is still only two days old. For a bog-standard murder that would be a long time, and we’d expect to have a suspect in our sights at this stage. This case is anything but, though, and we should keep in mind that the Met team had no success in two months or more.’
‘How is it that we have so little by way of CCTV evidence?’ Fletcher asked.
‘More by judgement than luck, I’d say,’ Chandler offered. ‘Since the start of this operation we’ve been asking ourselves why the chalk pits. We still don’t have an answer to that question, but what we do know is that there’s not a huge amount of CCTV in the area. There’s a note in the Met’s case file suggesting they hit a similar barrier. Add to that the fact that we have no idea where the victims were taken from, and only a vague idea of when, and you can start to see why it’s been so difficult.’
‘Clearly. But can we try to pin some of that down? Check CCTV close to our victim’s home on the days when we think she might have been taken?’
‘Yes, ma’am. But there’s very little to pinpoint, and that has to be by design.’
‘Speaking of pinpointing, where are we on the phones?’
Glen Ashton raised a finger. ‘I ran an eye over the case file to see how far the Met got with that, Superintendent. As with our victim, no phones were found with the bodies, and none have surfaced since. They appear to go dark at the approximate time these girls are believed to have gone missing. The Met traced the records of each device, which provided them with an approximate location of the phone the last time it was used; actually, the last time the relevant SIM cards were used. They were thorough, so they also traced the IEMI number of all three devices, and achieved the same end results.’
‘None of which took them any further, correct?’
‘Correct.’
‘And where are we with obtaining data for our own victim?’
Bishop was up to speed with that aspect of the op. He explained that while
