by James Oswald
‘But you knew I was coming back, right? To help you go through the CCTV footage.’
‘Yeah, and thank fuck for that. I thought the NCA was all about travelling the country and seeing new places, but I’m still stuck in the same old station with the same old arsehole constables. And scanning camera footage isn’t exactly glamorous either. You’ve no idea how much shit there is to wade through. You want to get a coffee before we start?’
I try not to laugh at her moaning. If she didn’t realise plain-clothes work is ninety-nine per cent sitting on your backside leafing through piles of hay in search of a needle some other bugger’s already nicked, then she’ll learn it soon enough. The offer of coffee is tempting, but then I think about all the uniform constables down in the canteen, the sneers and disdain. ‘Maybe just grab something from the vending machine, yeah?’
Karen gets it in an instant, which bodes well for our future working relationship. I follow her through the station to the makeshift CCTV viewing room, picking up something that’s at least an approximation of coffee on the way.
‘Council-run cameras are on these two feeds.’ She points at a complex arrangement of screens, scroll wheels, keyboard and switchgear that will allow me to search and view the various recordings. ‘That’s what door-to-door managed to get from the local shopkeepers and suchlike.’
I look at the boxes, piled up with video cartridges for a dozen different security systems. Most places have switched to digital now, storing footage in the Cloud for instant access. My neighbourhood’s not exactly rich though, even if you don’t have to walk far to find multi million-pound houses like Charlotte’s. It’s a miracle we’ve got anything at all.
‘Where do you want me to start?’ I look around the room, see a map pinned to the wall opposite the screens. ‘This our area?’
‘Yeah. That’s your place in the middle. I’ve made a start marking the camera locations. We could really do with a couple of dozen folk working on this.’
I can’t argue with that. But for now at least it’s just the two of us. Staring at the map, I picture the area I’ve lived in for years, trying to remember the major flows of traffic, pedestrian and vehicular. The lane at the back of my block opens up onto a main road at one end, but the other’s a less-frequented residential area. Following that route is the quickest way to the park where the last dead body was found, but there’s no way someone with injuries as bad as those inflicted on Dan Jones could walk all that way. Even if he was on some powerful narcotic. And if I remember rightly, there’s a small cluster of local shops and a kebab place at the road end.
‘He had to have come either this way or that.’ I point out the lane ends. ‘There’s a post-mounted CCTV camera there.’ I stab the main road entrance. ‘You want to scan that from the feed, and I’ll see if we’ve got anything from Shami’s Kebabs?’
Karen doesn’t even try to hide the sigh from her voice. ‘Already watched and re-watched the playback from all the public feeds. There’s nothing around the time you found him, or for about four hours beforehand. I’ll push that back a bit further, but it’s unlikely he walked there in daylight without anyone noticing him. Door to door’s not turned up anything either.’
Of course it was never going to be that easy. I go back to the boxes and start hauling out the tapes, discs or whatever it is they’re recorded on. At least they’re all labelled, and it doesn’t take too long to find the tape from the kebab shop. There’s another from the corner store too, although whether either camera will give a view of what’s going on outside is unlikely. They’re two different formats, too.
‘VHS first, or CD-Rom?’ I hold them up like Christmas presents. Karen points at the chunky black plastic rectangle. ‘Shami’s it is, then.’
It takes the better part of an hour to get the elderly video cassette recorder working properly, and I try playing an old tape I found in the same cupboard as the machine first before trusting it with Shami’s security footage. One of my abiding memories as a child is my father recording rugby matches from the BBC on to these old cassettes, and the number of times the tape got eaten was remarkable.
The quality of the image, once we get the thing to play properly, leaves a great deal to be desired. I wonder what Shami, if that’s really his name, was thinking when he installed the camera, as the out-of-focus picture, taken from a spot high in the corner opposite the entrance, makes it almost impossible to identify anyone coming or going. All we can see as we peer at the screen is the tops of people’s heads, and the occasional full face as someone notices the camera and gurns at it.
I’m surprised at just how busy the place is. For all it’s only a few hundred metres from my flat, I’ve only been in a handful of times over the years. The kebabs aren’t bad, I seem to recall, and you get plenty in them, but I always find the raw onion repeats something awful. Waking up with the feeling that something’s crawled into my mouth and died in the night usually puts me off going back for a few months. I’ve never had a dodgy stomach after eating one of Shami’s kebabs, but they’re not a patch on Mrs F’s curry.
‘We any idea if that timestamp’s accurate?’ Karen asks after we’ve both been watching for half an hour. It’s something that’s been bothering me too, although the time of evening would fit in with a steady stream of customers. My main focus is the not very clear view out through the window to the street beyond, improved a tiny bit every time someone opens the door. Against all the odds, it shows the opening to the lane, directly across the road and lit by a working street lamp.
I’m concentrating so hard on the scene outside, I don’t at first notice much about the figure who comes in as the time scrolls past half ten in the evening. I’m more grateful for the clear view of the street I get for a short moment before the door closes. It’s only when he goes straight back out again that something registers in my brain, and I scramble for the remote to pause, then click back.
‘What is it?’ Karen asks, but paused the image is even worse.
‘That guy doesn’t buy anything, see?’ I scroll back a bit further until he’s disappeared, then hit playback at half speed. The door opens again, he steps up to the counter and speaks briefly to the man serving, who shakes his head. Then the man doing the asking looks briefly up at the camera, swiftly away, and walks back out through the door. Not more than twenty seconds in total, blurred, and the briefest full-on view.
‘Guess he wasn’t hungry.’
‘No, he was asking something, see?’ I point at the black greasy hair of the server as he shakes his head again, then hit pause as the young man looks up at the camera. It’s not a good image, but it’s good enough. And the clothes he’s wearing are another unsettling clue.
‘We got the footage from the shop next door? That’s a CD. Might be a better picture.’
Karen fetches it from the console desk, slots it into a different player and takes a minute or two to work out how to show the image on another screen. When it finally appears, I’m pleased to see it’s much sharper, and the camera’s been set up to show the faces of people as they come into the shop. I fast-forward to the time shown on Shami’s video, then let it run at double speed until the same figure walks in. It’s much easier to see his features here, and now I’m certain.
‘Someone you know?’ Karen asks, but I’ve already got my phone out, placing a call. DCI Bain’s mobile goes straight to voicemail, so I leave a message asking him to call me, then try another number. This one’s answered almost immediately.
‘Hey, Con. How’s it going?’ DC Harrison’s Edinburgh accent is soothing compared to Karen’s East-London tone.
‘Not bad, thanks. Listen, Janie. Is DCI Bain still up there? Only I can’t get him on his mobile.’
‘He’s in a meeting wi’ the boss man. I’m keeping well away, ken?’
I’ve met her sergeant, so she must mean someone higher up the food chain. It would make sense that Bain would
be liaising with someone senior, maybe another DCI. ‘You couldn’t do us a favour, then, could you? Might work out well for your investigation too.’
‘Oh aye?’ Such sarcasm in one so young. ‘What you wanting?’
‘I need a mugshot of the dead man you showed me. You can just text it to my number if you want. If he’s dry, so much the better.’ I can only remember him lying where we found him, skin glistening with rain, thin hair plastered to his face. Eyes closed.
‘Mortuary photos should do you. I’ll have to run it past Grumpy Bob first. You going to tell me why you want it?’
Grumpy Bob? He seemed quite cheerful when I met him. For a Scotsman. ‘Think we might have a sighting of him down here from a week or so ago.’
‘Have we any idea who he is?’
DCI Bain’s face fills most of a screen screwed to the wall of the conference room at the back of the station. I’ve never much liked videoconferencing, but with Bain and DS Latham still in Scotland it’s the easiest way to get most of the team up to speed. I’ve no idea where Diane Shepherd is, although Karen’s tried to get in touch with her. Something about a meeting with the deputy commissioner.
‘Nothing from facial recognition yet, but then that’ll have been done at your end anyway, won’t it?’
‘Things move at a different pace up here. But so far his mugshot’s not pinged on any of Police Scotland’s databases. NCA might have a bit of a wider scope, so keep on it.’
I glance at the printout of the image DC Harrison sent me, alongside stills taken from the two security videos. It’s easy enough to tell that they all show the same young man. Unless he has an identical twin, of course.
‘You said you thought you might have a lead, Fairchild. Care to let us in on it?’ DS Latham’s voice is all sneer. He’s not exactly pleasant to Karen either, so it might just be old-school misogyny that fuels his hatred. Bain notices it too, giving his underling a withering glance that goes unnoticed. The two of them look somewhat less comfortable than Karen and me, crushed into a small booth somewhere in a police station in Edinburgh.
‘The clothes he’s wearing in the security footage. I’ve seen them before. It’s kind of a uniform.’
‘Uniform?’ Bain looks down at his own copies of the printouts, showing off the bald spot on the crown of his head. ‘Looks like smart casual to me.’
‘It could be, which is why I’m not a hundred per cent. The more I think about it though, the more I reckon I’ve seen him before. Here, in London. What he’s wearing there, that’s what triggered the memory. It’s kind of a uniform, only not. It’s what the followers of the Church of the Coming Light wear.’
‘Church of the what?’
‘The Coming Light. Surely you’ve heard of it. Reverend Doctor Edward Masters?’
The blank looks from Bain and Latham suggest that they haven’t. It’s possible that I’m seeing patterns where none exist, of course. It might just be a coincidence that this young man was wearing clothes similar to the ones I saw on the group working Euston station.
‘They were up in Edinburgh the same night this body was found. Masters was conducting a prayer meeting or something.’ I hold up the photograph; dead man, not living.
‘And you know this how?’
I’m tempted to ask Latham why it matters, but he’s a sergeant and I’m still just a constable. ‘There was a bunch of them at the park, taking the Spice addicts off to their shelter, remember? And I saw them at Euston when I was heading out of town. Handing out leaflets, chugging the commuters, talking to some young rough sleepers. That’s pretty much what they do, if you believe what they say.’
‘And what, you just happened to recognise him from a chance encounter over a week ago?’ Latham is sneering again. It’s not pretty, and not particularly helpful either.
‘He shoved a leaflet in my hands. I remember faces. Particularly ones linked to specific incidents. Don’t you?’
Bain is either telepathic or used to dealing with Latham. He cuts in before we can start shouting at each other. ‘What’s your play here, then, Fairchild? We can’t exactly go knocking on some church door based on your hazy recollections from a week ago.’
Actually, that was exactly what I’d been thinking of doing, just as soon as I worked out where the church was based. But then I remember Masters and the aura of power about him. The very fact of him being at my brother’s wedding suggests he’s well connected, and there’s the court case that was dropped suddenly too. Going in unprepared could be a big mistake.
‘I think following up on this lead as carefully as we can is the best option. Let’s see if we can’t get an ID on the guy, then see if it links back to the Church.’
‘Agreed.’ Bain looks down again and I get a second glimpse of his bald spot. ‘We’re going to be here another couple of days sorting things out with the locals. You two keep going through the CCTV, and we’ll pull everything together at the end of the week, OK?’
It’s nice that he makes it a question, but I’m not so stupid as to miss that it’s an order.
‘Yes, sir. We’ll keep you up to speed if there are any developments.’
‘You do that, Fairchild. I’ll speak to you soon.’ He hits the button to kill the conference call before we can descend into awkward ‘bye bye’s.
‘Well, that was short and sweet. Nice to be congratulated on our hard work,’ Karen says.
‘You’d best get used to it. Praise is rare in plain clothes, although blame tends to get spread around a bit more.’ I pull the photographs into a small pile and tidy them into an envelope. Nobody wants to stumble across a photograph of a dead man, even in a police station.
‘So what next? We just head back to that stinking room and work our way through all the rest of the tapes?’
Put like that it’s about as enticing as spending an afternoon with my mother. I look at Karen, think about the mountains of surveillance footage still to watch and how little chance we have of finding any more clues. CCTV is fine up to a point, but nothing beats getting out on the streets and asking questions.
‘Fancy a kebab?’
37
Shami’s Kebabs is unhelpfully closed when we get there, a sign in the window telling me it won’t be open again before eight. I tap on the door, just in case someone’s preparing food in the back, but there’s no response. Nothing from the buzzers at the door leading to the flats above the shop either.
‘Nobody home?’ Karen asks, as if it was necessary. I shrug by way of an answer, and point to the road end.
There’s more life in the corner shop. I don’t know the name of the old lady behind the counter, although she’s served me enough times over the years. Milk and bread, emergency bacon, that sort of thing. This shop has just about everything you could need, and it’s not all that much more expensive than the supermarket. The sell-by dates on most of the processed stuff don’t bear too close scrutiny, although the fruit and veg stacked up outside the door looks fresh enough. It just needs a thorough wash to get rid of the London grime.
‘Can I help you with anything?’
I’d been hoping to speak to the middle-aged man who’s usually working here when I come in, but I guess I’ll have to take what I can.
‘We’re following up on the incident a week or so ago. The young man found in the alley over there.’ I point in the general direction. ‘You very kindly gave us some video footage from your security camera. I was wondering if I might talk to whoever was working in here that night?’
I’ve probably never spoken as much to this woman before, but she smiles at me in a friendly way before saying, ‘You are the posh cop, aren’t you? You live just over there, no?’
I can hear Karen stifling her laughter, and decide it’s probably best not to turn and face her.
‘Yes. That’s me in the papers. But you know what they’re like, eh? I’m not that posh really.
’ I wait just a couple of seconds, rolling up my sleeves slightly to reveal the twirling patterns inked into my forearms, then add, ‘Were you working here that night?’
Whether it’s the sight of the tattoos, or something else unrelated, she turns from smiling to serious in an instant. ‘I’ll go get my son,’ she says, then disappears through a bead-curtained doorway behind the counter. A few moments later the man I was hoping to speak to arrives.
‘Detective Constable Fairchild. How can I help?’
At least he’s not sniggering about my press coverage. ‘You handed over some CCTV footage to constables going door to door. I was wondering if you remembered anything about the night in question. In particular, this man?’
I have the still photographs taken from the footage in an envelope. The one of the man dead is in there too, so I take a moment to choose the right ones before placing them down on the counter.
‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’
‘He was in the kebab shop first, asking questions, not buying. We think he might have been trying to find the same young man we found. Only I don’t think his intentions were quite as noble as ours.’
He frowns, picks up the clearer of the two pictures and squints at it. Then he turns and shouts ‘Mother,’ followed by a string of words in a language I neither recognise nor understand. The old lady comes back through, trailing her hands in the beads behind her, and then they both enter into what sounds very much like an argument over the picture. I let them take their time; the longer they study the image, the more chance they’ll remember something about the man. Finally she turns away, flipping her arm at him as she goes back through into the room behind the shop. He turns to me, and places the picture back down on the counter.
‘Mother says she thinks she might recognise him. There was someone that night asking around, but then there were police officers asking around as well. This is a good neighbourhood. You know this. Not like the estate with all its drugs and violence.’