False Tongues Read Online Free PDF

much, then?’
    â€˜Five hundred, easy. Maybe six.’
    â€˜Bloody hell.’ If it had belonged to the dead kid…
    He moved closer to the spotlights and examined it more closely. ‘Is that—was it—a glass screen?’
    â€˜A touch screen,’ confirmed Cowley.
    â€˜So that means fingerprints. Have you found the bits of glass?’
    The SOCO held up her hand to display a drop of blood on the index finger of her rubber glove. ‘Some of them. We’re working on it now, Guv. Fingertip search. We found the glass before we found the phone. Damn sharp, too. It went right through the glove.’ Her voice was rueful.
    Neville scowled at her. ‘Well, for God’s sake, put on a new glove before you contaminate the scene with your own blood.’
    â€˜Yes, Guv.’
    Another SOCO approached with a bag of glass shards. ‘The glass seems to be confined to that area over there,’ he reported, pointing. ‘In the grass. It’s a few metres away from where we found the phone.’
    â€˜Like someone smashed it, then threw the phone,’ Cowley pointed out. ‘Or dropped it.’
    He hated having to defer to Sid Cowley, but in matters relating to technology, Sid was streets ahead of him. Cowley knew his gadgets, even if he couldn’t afford them for himself. An aspirational techie—that’s what his sergeant was. ‘Okay,’ Neville said. ‘Tell me how this thing works. How do you turn it on?’
    Cowley took the bagged phone from him. ‘There’s a button here at the bottom,’ he explained, pointing at a small indentation in the surface. He pressed it; nothing happened. ‘Broken,’ he said.
    â€˜Which was presumably what the person who smashed it intended,’ Neville said patiently. ‘Does that mean we won’t be able to get any information out of it?’
    â€˜Not necessarily.’ Cowley turned it over. ‘It must have a SIM card, like any other phone. If that’s still in it, and hasn’t been destroyed, then—’
    â€˜The computer blokes can sort it,’ Neville concluded. At any rate, it wasn’t going to happen tonight. They weren’t going to drag Danny Duffy, the station’s resident computer boffin, out of his bed tonight. It could wait till morning.
    Neville was suddenly overcome with weariness—an overwhelming tiredness in every limb of his body, down to the bone. Everything could wait till morning, he decided, pushing down the niggling thought of worried parents somewhere, waiting for their son to come home.
    He dragged himself back to the spot where the young man lay for one last look. ‘You can take him away now,’ he said to the people who were waiting on the periphery for him to give the order. ‘I’m going home.’
    ***
    About the time that Neville headed toward his bed, Callie finally reached her destination—hours later than she’d expected. The final part of the journey was no more straightforward than the rest of it had been; by the time she arrived at the station in Cambridge, most of the cabbies had given up for the night and she’d had to wait nearly twenty minutes for one to show up. Then, arriving at the college, she’d faced the problem of getting in. Obviously she no longer had a key, and in any case the front gate was locked and barred—at midnight, she seemed to remember.
    Eventually she’d found the buzzer and roused an irate and grumbling porter from his bed. ‘You should’ve rung to tell us you’d be late,’ he said, glowering.
    â€˜I’m so sorry,’ Callie grovelled. ‘My phone is dead, and I never thought I’d be this late.’
    She remembered him; he’d always been grouchy. Evidently he didn’t remember her —she was just one of many who had passed through the institution through the years. One of the quiet, unexceptionable ones at that. He found his list