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‘Not once.’

‘And if she only needed her car to drive from Dalston to Carlisle, which is what … five miles?’

‘Six.’

‘Twelve miles a day for two weeks. Easily done on a full tank.’

‘Easily,’ Bradshaw agreed.

‘Car sharing?’ Nightingale asked. ‘Don’t BAE encourage it? Part of their corporate responsibility policy.’

‘They do,’ Bradshaw replied, ‘but it’s unlikely in this case. Rebecca Pridmore had a highly classified job and she usually made phone calls while she drove. I called Malcolm Sparkes to see if she’d had access to a car we didn’t know about. She hadn’t.’

‘Anything else, Tilly?’ Nightingale said. She’d gone from sceptical to convinced right about the same time Poe had when Bradshaw had explained it to him half an hour earlier.

Bradshaw brought up a different image.

‘Her phone records. BAE have a strict policy on mobile phones. They don’t allow them inside. Very few exceptions and Rebecca Pridmore wasn’t one of them. As you can see’ – she pointed at the list that was far too small to read – ‘she only ever made calls before and after work.’ The next image came up. ‘But in the two-week period we’re interested in she made calls and sent emails at all sorts of times.’

‘So she wasn’t on leave and she wasn’t at BAE,’ Nightingale said. ‘She could have been working from home, I suppose. Maybe she was ill?’

Bradshaw shook her head. This time when the image changed it showed three sets of phone records, side-by-side.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘there were times during that two-week period, sometimes for hours at a time, when none of the victims used their phones.’

‘OK, that is weird,’ Nightingale admitted.

‘And that’s not all,’ Bradshaw said. ‘When one of them eventually used their phone, the other two invariably did as well, within minutes of each other. Amanda Simpson would usually check her social media pages and send some texts, Rebecca Pridmore would send emails or make phone calls and Howard Teasdale would play online games or look at pornography.’

‘OK, that’s too much of a coincidence to ignore,’ Nightingale said. ‘Can we locate where they were by their phones?’

‘Too long ago, Detective Superintendent Nightingale. That’s why we don’t have information on what was in the texts or emails. There’s no depth to these reports. It’s to do with data protection and how long companies can hold on to our information.’

‘OK,’ Nightingale said. ‘This is a job for the main investigation team. I’ll flood Carlisle with cops and photographs of the victims. Someone will remember something.’

Poe wasn’t so sure. It was three years ago and Carlisle was a transient city. He thought they needed to go bigger.

‘What about Crimewatch?’ he said. The popular BBC programme that reconstructed major unsolved crimes in order to jog the public’s memory had helped catch some of the country’s most notorious villains over the years. Poe had seen the policy for submitting crimes to the programme on Nightingale’s bookcase.

‘Crimewatch doesn’t run any more, Poe,’ Bradshaw said. ‘It became redundant at the same time linear television did. Other than major sporting events, we rarely view live television; the trend is to record and watch later.’

‘Tilly’s right,’ Flynn said. ‘By the time viewers were getting round to watching it no one was on the phone lines any more.’

‘The jury was out on how effective it was in the shire counties anyway,’ Nightingale added. ‘It tended to work best in metropolitan areas with high-density populations. Lots of potential witnesses.’

Poe froze.

‘I need to make a phone call,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘I think the Curator’s real …’

Chapter 53

‘I think the three victims were on jury service,’ Poe said. ‘That’s why they were in Carlisle at the same time.’

Nightingale stared at him. ‘Explain,’ she said.