The Ardmore Inheritance by Rob Wyllie (reading the story of the .txt) 📕

'Doesn't bother me,' French said, shrugging. 'A man can dream, can't he?'

'Aye, well dream on mate. Anyway Eleanor, where were we before we interrupted you?'

'These are the locations where we know he was active,' she repeated, pointing at the flashing dots. 'So Jayden plugged the times and places into his cool software and ran a cross-reference sweep.'

'It's cool,' Jayden confirmed, his lilting Caribbean accent a perfect match for his laid-back demeanour, 'but I can't take the credit for it. It was developed by a bunch of hucksters over at GCHQ, really smart guys. I just run it.'

'Not just guys,' Eleanor said sharply.

'I think Jayden means guys in the non-gender-specific sense,' Frank said, jumping in. The last thing he wanted was the easily-offended forensic officer having a punch-up with the spook who was going to help him crack the case.

Jayden shrugged. 'Yeah, it's like Frank said. But we need to keep that kind of information secret, even the gender of the computer scientists. We don't want any of the bad guys getting to know too much. You'll appreciate that Eleanor of course.'

Frank doubted if she did, but their joint intervention seemed to have calmed the situation.

'Sweet,' she said, somewhat uncertainly. 'So can you demo it Jayden?'

'Sure,' he said, 'pass me the keyboard.'

She slid it along to him and without looking up, he punched in a few characters. On screen, a dense grid of numbers popped up to obscure the map, the rows scrolling downwards quicker than the eye could read.

'This is the cell-phone sweep,' he said. 'There's a heap of tin in their datacentre so it can process six million records a minute. It's awesome.'

'Tin,' Frank said, recalling Eleanor's earlier explanation. 'That's the computers, isn't it?'

'Yeah, we call it tin,' French said, nodding. 'Us IT geeks.'

Along the bottom of the display, a green progress bar was edging gradually towards one hundred percent.

'Should only take another minute or so,' Jayden said, nodding towards the screen. 'We've ran it before so it'll remember all the index records. Speeds it up by a factor of eight, sometimes ten.'

'Good to know,' Frank said, uncomprehending.

The sat in silence as the computer sped towards completion, announcing its victory with a pop-up dialogue-box that read Match Successful.

'See, that's it,' Jayden said, pointing again at the screen. 'There's the match.'

'There's two numbers in that wee box,' Frank said, squinting to read the small type. 'Am I reading that correctly?'

'Sure,' Jayden confirmed. 'We're assuming one's his normal phone and the other's one of the burners he uses for his iCloud hacking. Although both of them are unregistered pay-as-you-goes.'

'Shit,' Frank said, unable to hide his disappointment. 'So that means we can't track him down after all?'

Eleanor shot him a smug smile. 'Why don't you show him Jayden?'

'Sure,' Jayden said for the third time, prompting Frank to wink at Frenchie. This MI5 guy was nothing if not obliging.

'So once we can tie a number to an individual, it makes no difference whether they're on contract or not. We might not have their name and address, but we just dial in our hotspot clustering add-on. That nails them every time.'

Frank laughed. 'I've been doing pretty well to keep up so far, even if I say so myself, but this one's got me. Hotspot what?'

'Hotspot clustering,' Eleanor repeated in the teacher-to-five-year-old tone that she liked to use on him from time to time.

'We wouldn't expect the layman to understand,' Jayden interjected, his tone apologetic. 'What it does, is it looks for concentrations of cell registrations in particular geographical locations over a defined period of time.'

'Meaning?' Frank asked.

'It can show the locations that the suspect visits the most.'

'Got it. And now I hope you're going to show me?'

'Sure man.' He stretched over to grab the mouse from Eleanor then focussed the pointer on a scrolling menu at the top of the screen. 'The option's in here somewhere. Yeah, there it is.'

This time a series of flashing green dots appeared on the map, Frank noticing they were of varying intensity.

'What are we looking at?' he asked, although he thought he might already have figured it out.

'This is a twelve-month visualisation,' Jayden explained. 'It looks back over that timeframe and shows the places he's visited most often in that period, or at least where his phones have been. We can extend it back five years if we want, although that takes an age to process. But yeah, the bigger and brighter the dot, the more times he's been there. And just to be clear again, it tracks where his phone has been. Doesn't mean he was with the phone at the time.'

'But it's pretty likely he was.'

'Sure,' he conceded.

'But I do get it, what it's telling us,' Frank said, nodding at the screen. 'It's all the places he likes to visit.' Suddenly, he had a thought.

'Jayden mate, can you scroll it up to the right a bit? Aye, that's it. Just there.'

And there it was. Confirmation. Once again he kicked himself for not cottoning on to the bleeding obvious, and before the obvious connection was pointed out to him by his brother too.

'Look here Frenchie, seems like he's a Newcastle supporter. Season ticket holder I'd guess by the number of times he must have been up there.'

'Poor bastard,' French said, laughing. 'Poor Geordie bastard.'

So the guy was from Newcastle. It was good to know, but Frank wasn't sure how that would help them identify him. But at least they had a pretty good idea where he lived, given the location of the brightest dot on the display. Right here in London.

Frank wandered up to the screen and pointed. 'And this one here, I'm guessing this is where we hit the jackpot?'

'That's right,' Jayden nodded. 'That would be where he lives, most likely.' He flicked the scroll-wheel on the mouse to zoom in. 'Vicarage Crescent, SW1.' The screen filled with the image of a