Read Online False Tongues by Kate Charles - Free Book Online Page B

not sweet. He knew what was expected of him; it was time to get on with it. DS Cowley was waiting for him, and together they went to see Danny Duffy, the station’s resident techie. Danny was disgustingly young—as one would have to be to do that job—and seemed revoltingly chipper this morning, when Neville was feeling old and weary.
    â€˜There was no ID on the body,’ Neville explained to Danny as Cowley handed over the evidence bag with the damaged iPhone. ‘And nothing very helpful turned up at the PM. No tattoos, no birthmarks. No dental work, either. Kids these days—they take better care of their teeth,’ he added ruefully.
    â€˜In other words, you’re counting on me.’ Danny smiled, holding the bag up.
    â€˜You’ve got it in one. We’re counting on you.’
    â€˜It’s all right for me to take this out?’
    â€˜They’ve already tested it for prints,’ confirmed Cowley, who had been to the forensics lab while Neville was at the postmortem. ‘Not a lot to go on, apparently. Some smeary prints—nothing conclusive. And we don’t even know that it belonged to the dead kid,’ he added. ‘It wasn’t on the body. They found it a few metres away.’
    Danny tipped the phone out onto the table in front of him and bent over it, frowning. ‘Someone wanted to make sure this phone was never used again,’ he observed. He fiddled with the switch at the top, pressed the ‘on’ button, and shook his head.
    â€˜But there must be something inside that you can get out,’ Neville suggested, remembering what Cowley had said in the wee hours of the morning. ‘A SIM card?’
    â€˜These phones have internal memory chips—quite substantial ones—as well as removable SIM cards.’ Danny opened a drawer, poked round in it for a moment, and took out some implements, including a pair of tweezers. ‘Let’s see what we can do.’
    Cowley was practically salivating, Neville observed. ‘That is one slick bit of kit, that phone,’ he enthused. ‘That would set you back…what? Five, maybe six hundred quid? More?’
    Danny probed the top of the phone with the tweezers. ‘It’s a dead cert I couldn’t afford one. Not even on a contract.’
    â€˜Me, neither. But if I won the lottery…’ Cowley leaned forward, obstructing Neville’s view.
    Time to get rid of Cowley. ‘Sid, there’s something you could do for me,’ Neville said.
    â€˜Can’t it wait?’
    Neville ignored the plaintive question. ‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to the desk sergeant this morning,’ he went on. ‘Could you pop down to see him, and make sure he knows we have an unidentified body? If he gets any missing persons reports involving teenage boys, he needs to ring me straightaway.’
    Cowley went, reluctantly but obediently, with a longing backwards glance, as Neville turned back to the table and watched the delicate operation.
    After what seemed a very long time, Danny gave a grunt of satisfaction and held something up with the tweezers: a tiny rectangle of bent plastic. ‘Ordinarily,’ he said, ‘I could put this card into something else—another phone, a card reader—and retrieve the information off it quite easily. But you can see how badly mangled this is. Whoever broke this phone, they were pretty thorough.’
    â€˜So you can’t do anything with it.’ Neville frowned: another dead end.
    â€˜I didn’t say that. The information may still be there. Or on the chips inside the phone. But I’m going to need specialised equipment, and it will take time.’
    Time. That was something they didn’t have much of, Neville was well aware. The press…as soon as they got a whiff of this, they’d be on it like vultures on road-kill.
    Bracing the phone on the table, Danny inserted a thin blade along the side