Blood Evidence Page 16

  We end up sitting side by side, cross-legged on the bed, the laptop laying on the covers in front of us. We watch as the last bit of the footage – the time that is critical for us, from the evening before Isabelle was murdered through to the morning – unspools before our eyes. It’s hard to watch it fast and still see everything we need to, so it takes longer than all of the rest of the footage did before.

  People move like an old, sped-up movie, jerking across the screen from the view of the front door. They gather in groups to enter the party, getting out of cars together somewhere off screen. They pass through the entrance, and we can see them progress down the hall only as far as the door to the restaurant before they are out of view. The hours pass, and then they are leaving again: in small groups this time, twos and threes, calling taxis or supported by a designated driver.

  Jude appears, disappears, reappears on his rounds. People stand outside the door to smoke before going back inside or heading to their cars.

  Finally, nothing. Jude reappears one last time before heading inside, presumably to the staff room where he would gather his things and leave by the back door. Nothing, nothing, nothing – until the area around the door visibly lightens, and finally a policeman arrives and enters, a colleague close behind.

  “Nothing,” Will sighs heavily, leaning back in his chair and throwing his pen down onto the bed in a gesture of frustration.

  “It was a long shot,” I remind him. “The police did watch this before us. They would have noticed if there was something obvious.”

  “You would hope. I just felt like there might have been something, you know? Some clue to tell us where to look next.”

  “If only they had installed more cameras,” I sigh. “It’s so irresponsible, only having the one. At least if there was something in the corridors, like you’d find at a chain hotel…”

  “That’s not like you,” Will says, elbowing me in the ribs. “Where’s Mr. ‘Privacy from the Government’?”

  “Considering I was recently exonerated by CCTV evidence, I’ve started to change my views on it,” I tell him, ignoring the jab. “I mean, the government are still pigs and all. I just can see how surveillance can be used as a preventative measure against crime.”

  “If they one day manage to prevent all crime, we’ll be out of a job,” Will reminds me.

  “Not so, we’ll still be able to track down lost cats,” I say with a grin.

  “Cats don’t get lost,” Will frowns. “They just decide to live somewhere else for a while.”

  “Then I guess we’ll be out of a job,” I laugh.

  “I guess it’s easy for you to stop caring. You don’t have any secrets.”

  I give him an odd look. Strange of him to forget. “I have one.”

  There’s a pause, the air pregnant with the elephant in the room.

  “We share San Francisco,” Will says, at length. “It’s not a secret if more than one person knows about it.”

  “Still,” I say. “I wouldn’t want the government finding out. Or the police, for that matter.”

  For another long moment, Will’s hand strays on top of mine. The lightest touch, but a reminder that what we went through was together. I have the urge to tear my hand away, because I don’t deserve his comfort. Not for what I did.

  But he deserves to have it from me, so I resist.

  “I’m going to watch through one more time,” Will says. “What time was it, when the chain went missing?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say, looking through his hand-written notes. All neatly legible, and organised by a new page for each speaker. “Everyone told us lunchtime, I don’t think we have a specific time.”

  Will drags a slider, trying to find the right moment to check. “One, maybe? Twelve?”

  “Go back to just before twelve, and we can go from there.”

  “Wait a second…” Will hunches forward, focused intently on the screen. “There’s something… wait, this is – this isn’t right!”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Let me check again – no, this isn’t… Ram, I’ve got it,” he says. “Just watch closely, right?”

  “I’m watching,” I assure him.

  “Watch everything. I’m pressing play just past one in the afternoon. Ready?”

  I make an impatient motion, and watch the screen. Nothing happens. There’s no one in the hallway, no one coming out or going into the building. Nothing happens at all.

  “There!” Will says triumphantly, hitting the spacebar to pause the footage. “Did you see it?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” I say.

  “Watch again,” Will says. He drags the slider back, then presses play again. This time, he holds his finger near the edge of the screen, on the timestamp that ticks forward incessantly in the corner.

  13:12. 13:14. 13:16. It ticks onwards in increments, time sped forwards. 13:18. 13:20. 13:30 –

  Wait. What?

  “The time,” I say, excited now as well.

  “Just under ten minutes of missing footage,” Will confirms. “Someone came in, or out. They must have.”

  “And they don’t want us to know about it,” I add. “Wait, this was the lunchtime of the day before, right? So, it has to do with the gold chain.”

  “That’s right,” Will said. “I don’t know how, but it must be linked somehow. It has some kind of bearing on the whole case, I know it. Remember how Cameron said he couldn’t remember taking the chain, that it was something he would never do?”

  My mind is racing ahead. “What about the night – when the murder would have taken place?”

  Will nods, and speeds the slider forwards. Action unfolds before us so quickly there’s no time to take it all in and interpret what our eyes have seen. Then the clock shows 1:45 – right before the window in which everyone allegedly went to bed, and in which Isabelle must have been killed.

  Jude appears outside the building for his final check at 2:02, jumping around on the screen even at this much reduced frame rate, looking around rapidly and going back inside. 2:04. The building seems quiet, the party done. 2:06. 2:08. 2:10.

  3:10.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say under my breath.

  “A whole hour missing,” Will says. “How did they not see this?”

  “You missed it, the first time,” I point out. “It all looks innocent. Nothing was happening around then anyway. It looks like all is peaceful and quiet. No patterns to be disturbed, no fading light, no people disappearing into thin air.”

  I pull my phone out of my pocket and dial his number before Will has to say it. I switch on the speakerphone so we can both hear.

  “DCI Fairlight.”

  “Fairlight – we’ve found something,” I say. “The CCTV footage. Get your team to look at the timestamps again.”

  “The timestamps?” he repeats. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “There’s missing time. Ten minutes around lunchtime, followed by an hour after two in the morning. It jumps right ahead to just after three. That matches with the potential window for Isabelle’s murder. Someone must have tampered with the footage.”

  Fairlight grunts. “This isn’t one of your far-fetched detective shows,” he says. “That sounds like a software glitch to me. They come up all the time. The camera probably switched off to regain battery or to buffer the recordings. It just came back on again when it was ready.”

  “Seriously?” I say.

  “It’s at the exact right time,” Will says. “That would be a huge coincidence.”

  “Contrary to what some people may tell you, coincidences do happen,” Fairlight says. “We had a bloke a few years back, managed to try and deliver a parcel at exactly the same time the homeowner lost control of his ride-on mower. That wasn’t pretty stuff, believe me. But it wasn’t some home electrical goods conspiracy – poor bloke was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You’re not even going to look into it?” I ask.

  “We’l
l have a check,” Fairlight says. Why do I get the feeling that he sees us as a couple of annoying kids to be humoured and then ignored? “But we’ve got more promising lines of enquiry to follow. To be honest, I think Winter is going down for this. We’ve got a trial date through already.”

  “That quick?” I ask.

  “Well, he confessed. It’s an open and shut case. A clear win for the prosecution. We’re going ahead with it, so you boys need to make a move soon if you’re going to.”

  This is our move, I want to tell him. But I tell him goodbye instead and put the phone down, my brain working.

  “Alex,” Will says, at exactly the same time that the thought comes into my head, too.

  Twenty-six – Will

  As Ram sat on the phone with Alex, trying to convince him that this was worth an investment of the Met’s time and energy – which was likely to be a losing battle – my mind was still working. If someone meddled with the footage, when or where did they do it?

  If it was done on site – maybe by turning the cameras off and then on again manually – then it had to be a member of staff, or someone who was on site and had the opportunity to get into the controls.

  The only way I could think of it being an outside party would have been if the raw footage itself had been doctored. And how would that work? Maybe it could be edited at source, a chunk of time deleted and removed from the file’s memory. Maybe through some kind of programming, taking the delivered footage from the Inn and altering it – but then it would have to have been done while it was in police custody.

  Which was a chilling thought, and certainly not the first place my mind was willing to go.

  So, if it had to be someone in the Inn itself, then we had a list of everyone who was around on both days. And since there were two days covered, we could go through those lists and eliminate anyone who was present at one but not at the other.

  I went through my notes, quickly, checking the names of those who were already at the Inn for the lunch service and would have known to make the changes: Reed, Johnny, Cameron, Lina, Jude, Beverley, Richard.

  And again for those who were still in the Inn, or at least could have been, when Isabelle was killed: Reed, Miranda, Andrew, Mike, Rosie, Cameron, Jude, Beverley, Richard – and Ram and I.

  Lina had gone home, witnessed by several others. And Stacey was presumably gone too, but she would have used the staff exit, and the car park wasn’t covered by the camera. So, I had to add her to the list – there was no way to be sure that she really had gone home.

  The overlap was much smaller: Reed, Johnny, Cameron, Jude, Beverley, Richard.

  And while I thought about it, there was something else I had been meaning to look up. I pulled out my phone and typed something in quickly, checking the search results.

  “Well, will you at least fucking talk to him?” Ram asked, rubbing a hand across his forehead in frustration. “No, I know it’s not your jurisdiction, but that’s not the point, is it? No, it isn’t, because this poor fucker is going down for something he didn’t do! Oh, yes, I’m sure that will be a great help… Thanks a fucking bunch, Alex.”

  Ram pulled the phone away from his ear and jabbed at the screen to end the call, groaning in frustration.

  “Alex won’t help?”

  “He says his job would be on the line if he used Met resources to investigate a case that was already assigned elsewhere, without permission,” Ram explained. “He tried to give me some big speech about departments and protocol and stepping on toes.”

  “Well, it’s not as if he owes us anything. And we can still look at things from our side,” I said, feeling much more optimistic than Ram looked. “All is not lost. Look at this: there were only six people who were on the site at both times, and therefore had the opportunity to either switch off the cameras or delete bits of footage without anyone else knowing.”

  Ram looked over my list. “Bad news is our boy is on there,” he pointed out.

  “Good news is, he’s not alone,” I countered. “Johnny has a record, remember. ABH. We should have made more of that at the time. Look, we know someone’s lying, so why not him? Richard and Beverley I’m not convinced on, I don’t think they would be strong enough to pull something like this off.”

  “Mentally, maybe,” Ram said. “But physically, you probably have a point. Richard bounds about like a spring chicken, but his left knee hardly bends, and he doesn’t have a lot of mobility in his wrists and hands.”

  “Beverley I just don’t see having it in her. Stabbing, it’s more of a man’s crime, right? I might be tempted to dismiss that stereotype if she was younger and fitter, but…”

  “So we have four,” Ram said. “Reed’s an odd one – we both noticed that, and so did all the others. That doesn’t mean he’s a killer. But he is weird.”

  “Personally, I kind of like him,” I smiled. “He’s what they call an odd bird. Just born in the wrong time or place, or something. He seems harmless.”

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Ram said, patting my knee with a decisive pace. “Let’s focus in on those four.”

  “There’s something else, too,” I said, holding up my phone and showing him the screen. “Sennockian Prime – that’s the company Cameron said he had an interview with. It doesn’t seem to exist. No Companies House listing, no Maps result, no social media, only a website with very little information and no way to contact them. And check this: I cross-referenced the content on the ‘About’ page. It’s lifted straight from a different company’s site, and that one definitely does exist.”

  “Huh,” Ram said, looking at the evidence on the screen in front of him. “That’s another question mark in a whole box of question marks.”

  27 – Ram

  “Ah, my two favourite ladies,” I say, slipping onto a stool at the bar.

  Lina laughs, but Stacey shoots me a look that is pure flirtation. “Can I get you something?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I’ll have another Grouse. Make it a double,” I tell them. “How’s it going? Quiet night?”

  “Weekdays usually are,” she says, grabbing a glass and fitting it to the optics. “Almost everyone has checked out. Just you two left, and a couple of boring old businessmen who are in town for meetings. They’ve not come back yet, so I guess they’re out with the company.”

  That’s a shame. Seems like we missed our chance to talk to Reed again. If it becomes an issue, we can always ask Fairlight to track him down.

  Unless he’s actually the killer and has just got on a plane to Barcelona, from where he will transfer to Peru and never be seen again; but that’s probably just speculation.

  “No Will with you tonight?” Lina asks.

  “He’s upstairs,” I shrug. “He doesn’t mind being cooped up all day and night working on a case. Me, I’m a social animal. I have to get out and see humans otherwise I go stir crazy.”

  “What’s the deal with you two, anyway?” Stacey chips in. “Lina said you’re -”

  “Lina said nothing,” Lina interrupts quickly, blushing a little.

  “Lina said you’re a couple,” Stacey continues, ignoring her.

  I laugh heartily. “We’re not a couple,” I say. “We just couldn’t get two separate rooms when we first checked in.” I still don’t see the point in telling her that I’m gay.

  “So, are you single then?” Stacey asks.

  Lina tuts loudly, earning herself a sharp look from the younger woman.

  “A complete bachelor,” I grin.

  “No girlfriend at all? You must have broken up with someone recently,” Stacey says, eager to get to the bottom of whatever criteria she is ticking off in her head.

  “I haven’t had a girlfriend in years,” I say. Not only do I want her on-side, but it’s always fun to skirt the truth like this. To see how much of it I can tell before I’m forced into a lie. “Too much work to focus on.”

  “I can’t believe it,” she says, her eyes gleaming. “But you must have had, you kn
ow, the odd fling. A night here and there.”

  “I’ve been known to check the old dating apps,” I agree, giving her my best wolfish look. “If the occasion calls for it, and I have a room to myself to use.”

  “You know, most of the rooms upstairs are empty now,” Stacey says, ignoring a dramatic cough and splutter from Lina.

  I lean forward slightly on the bar. “Wouldn’t Jude object to guests going into places they shouldn’t?”

  “Oh, him,” Stacey says dismissively. “He doesn’t do that good of a job. And he’s not here tonight, anyway. And even if he was, I’m higher up than him.”

  “You are?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “Yep, I’ve been here longer. Two years next month.”

  “Wow. So, how long has Jude been here?” I ask. Slowly does it: we’ll get to the information I really want.

  “Let me think – two months, maybe? Three?” Stacey says, looking to Lina for confirmation.

  “Two and a half, I think,” Lina says.

  This is news to me. Very interesting news. So, Jude hasn’t been around for as long as we would have thought.

  I get a text alert on my phone, and look down at the screen. It’s a message from Will.

  Pizza guy is outside. Go pay him.

  I get up from the bar, draining my glass and raising it to Stacey and Lina in salute. “Well, that’s me,” I say. “Have a good night, ladies. See you tomorrow.”

  “Night,” Stacey says, almost shouting it in her desperation to bring my attention back to her. It doesn’t matter how hard she pouts. I’m not going to be going into an empty room with her after her shift ends.

  I grab our delivery from a teenager on a motorbike at the door, relief flooding his face when he sees me. He was probably too scared to go inside. This place will have gained a local reputation already, and it will either entice visitors or drive them away.

  Upstairs, I fold the lids of the boxes underneath them to make them more compact, and lay out our food across the bed so that Will and I can both reach everything at the same time from our seated positions against the headboard.