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Helen nodded. ‘We get busier throughout the day and then we’re fully staffed by 8p.m. for the peak hours of nine until two in the morning.’
‘That late?’ Kim asked.
‘Yes, callers have had a drink or two, partners are in bed, it’s a long and lonely time of the night. A time when we all tend to evaluate our lives.’
‘And they call a psychic hotline?’ Kim queried.
‘Most are seeking comfort, reassurance.’
‘For an extortionate rate per minute,’ she said before she could stop herself. Kim couldn’t help but think it cost nothing at all to call the Samaritans.
‘We’re a business,’ Helen said, with a slight edge in her tone. ‘We’re providing a service.’
‘But you’re not really though, are you?’ Kim asked. She had no problem with an exchange of goods for money, even high-priced ones. If anyone knew what she’d recently paid for an authentic Vincent Black Shadow carburettor, they’d think she’d lost her mind, but it was a genuine part that was now in her hand. ‘You’ve not got real psychics on the end of every phone line?’
‘We give comfort and reassurance and ensure we don’t say anything that can negatively impact the caller.’
Kim marvelled at the human capacity for justification.
Helen shifted uncomfortably. ‘Is this what you wanted to talk about?’
It wasn’t.
‘Would you have been made aware if Azim had taken a bad phone call?’ she asked.
‘Every phone call is recorded.’
Kim felt a surge of hope. ‘So if Azim had a hostile caller, it would be saved somewhere.’
‘Of course.’
‘Did he make you aware of any such call, of any threats or aggression?’
Helen shook her head.
‘Do your callers have to identify themselves?’
‘Our operatives only know the caller by their first name, and they give a false first name so it’s unlikely that Azim was specifically targeted.’
‘But there’s a chance that one of your people spoke to someone who became irate and…’
‘Of course, but you have to understand that the calls don’t come locally. Callers ring a national line, and the calls are farmed out to call centres like this around the country. At any one time there’s in excess of two hundred people taking an average of three calls per hour, more than that for the peak hours I’ve already mentioned.’
Kim’s quick calculation told her that was more than fourteen thousand calls per day. There was no way they could investigate on that scale. Her mind tried to find alternatives.
Okay, maybe the calls couldn’t be interrogated, but perhaps there was another way, she thought as she heard the low hum of voices speaking into headsets as work on the call floor restarted. She supposed business didn’t stand still for long.
‘But these callers have to register payment details: debit cards, bank accounts?’ she asked, pulling herself back.
‘Payment information and personal details are kept in a separate database at headquarters, in Leeds. We don’t have access from this office.’
‘But we could search them?’ Kim asked with a growing excitement.
‘With a court order you could certainly search the payment details of almost two hundred thousand people, especially if you knew what you were looking for.’
The futility of that exercise hit her like a wrecking ball.
Kim had no doubt that their killer was in there somewhere, but with those kinds of numbers, she had no choice but to accept that this was not how they were going to find them.
