Night Vision (11 page)

Telling himself that Eddison and co could wait, he showered and changed his shirt. There was little he could do now about the crumpled suit. Then he headed for the restaurant. They were already there, halfway through their breakfasts. Parks indicated an empty chair, and Alec nodded then went to the buffet. He was hungry, he realized. Surprisingly ravenous, in fact. With a loaded tray he returned to the table and plonked his breakfast down on the already overcrowded table.

‘I like to see a man who enjoys his food,' Eddison intoned.

Parks laughed. Alec ignored him and nodded acceptance as a waitress arrived with tea. ‘Thank you,' he said, and then focused on his breakfast.

‘So,' Eddison continued, as though Alec had already been there, ‘that's David and Alec looking through the CCTV footage. We've already got a lead on that, so get yourselves briefed and then relieve the overnight team.'

Who's David? Alec wondered, then realized Eddison was referring to Parks.

‘Phillip and I are going back to talk to Robinson's sister,' he added.

Phillip, Alec thought, almost surprised that Munroe had a first name. He couldn't recall Eddison referring to anyone by their first name until now. Was he trying to make like they were a proper team? ‘Travers?' he asked.

‘Spent a comfortable night and is stable. Family Liaison Officer Susan Moran is with the wife, and the friend is planning on going home later today.'

Alec nodded, satisfied. He had dreamt about Travers, he remembered now. An incident from when the pair of them had still been in uniform and had been called on to cover some kind of protest. He tried hard now to recall what it was about. A factory closure, maybe? Some kind of government contract that had been withdrawn and the workers were protesting.

He could not at this time and distance grasp at the details, but Jamie had been there too, reporting on the protest for the local paper. Alec remembered placards and shouting and – a sit-in, that was it. Workers had occupied the building, and it had made quite a splash in the local press at the time.

He'd not thought about it in years, but in his dream the memory had been clear as day, and now that he tried hard to recall details that were already slipping away, as dreams so often do, he was left with some scrap of a joke Jamie had been making about her new jacket. It had a blue striped lining, and she'd had the sleeves turned back because they were too long for her—

‘Alec?' Eddison said sharply, and Alec realized he must have been speaking to him. He apologized automatically. Tried to catch up with the last bit of the conversation he remembered hearing.

‘The sister? Neil Robinson's sister?'

‘What other bloody sister have we been talking about?'

Alec shrugged. ‘Why talk to her again?'

‘Because she was holding back,' Munroe said.

‘Holding what back?'

‘If we knew that we wouldn't need to talk to her again!'

‘No, I mean about what happened to Neil Robinson, or, I don't know, whatever she told Jamie on his behalf.'

Munroe shrugged. ‘Why?' he said.

‘I don't know. It's something no one's talked about much. How did he know about Jamie in the first place? He wasn't local to Pinsent, so he didn't know about her from when she started out. So what made him choose her? And how did the sister make contact? No one's told me that either.'

A beat of silence.

‘Maybe you didn't bother to ask,' Eddison said.

Maybe he hadn't. Maybe he'd been waiting for Travers to ask that sort of question. Maybe he'd just been caught up in Trav's concerns to the extent that he really hadn't been doing a proper job. ‘I'm asking now.'

‘We don't know, is the short answer. Clara, Neil Robinson's sister, says she got a message from him. One time she said he called her, another she said she thinks he wrote her a letter telling her to get in touch with Jamie Dale and say that her brother Neil had a story for her.'

‘She'd know the difference. If he'd written her a letter she'd have kept it. That would be the natural thing to do. People . . .
families
don't throw away personal letters.'

‘Ah, thanks for the insight, Professor Friedman,' Parks teased. ‘No, we figured as much too.'

‘And someone like Jamie Dale wouldn't get in touch with anyone just because they said there might be a story. When she worked the local paper she reckoned she got a dozen calls a day like that. Usually, it was just a vindictive neighbour or a lost cat.'

Munroe nodded agreement. ‘And since she started to make a name for herself, it is reasonable to assume she got even more “hot tips”.'

‘So what did the sister tell her that was sufficient bait? Neil Robinson must have offered something very specific. Something Jamie would have recognized; known about already. Have we looked at what she was working on? Looked to see if there was a link?'

‘Course we bloody haven't,' Eddison said irritably. ‘We've all been sitting here waiting for you to come up with that one.'

Alec ignored the sarcasm. ‘So?' he asked, slicing into his second sausage and layering it with bacon before dipping his fork into his egg. ‘What was she working on?'

Parks and Eddison exchanged a glance. Munroe just shrugged. ‘On the face of it, nothing that would have got Neil Robinson's juices going,' Munroe told him. ‘She was almost done with filming a documentary, a two part exposé thing on how many ex servicemen end up as rough sleepers. Especially those from special forces.'

‘Not news, surely?' Alec said. ‘I've seen a couple of films like that in the past few years.'

‘No, but she was doing something on comparative care. Here, the USA, some of the old Soviet Bloc countries.' He shrugged. ‘Previous to that she'd been part of a team, each making a kind of personal reflective thing on the changing face of Britain or Britishness or some such. It seems to be the fashion at the minute from what I can gather. You know, who we are and if multiculturalism works or is some kind of myth put about by politicians.'

I guess you could say it worked for Jamie, Alec thought. Her mother had been Welsh but working in Pinsent when she had met and married a man who was, if Alec recalled correctly, half French and half Nigerian. Jamie had spoken about half a dozen languages, largely because of family connections. How had Jamie thought of herself ? Alec realized he hadn't the foggiest idea. She'd just been Jamie Dale, a pen name she'd adopted so early in her career that he found he couldn't recall what her actual family name was.

He thought hard while attacking more of his breakfast. Fouquet, that was right. Or was it Foucault? ‘Have you seen the films?'

Parks shrugged. ‘Bits of them. Neither was a finished product yet.'

‘So we're back with the original question. Why contact her, and what hooked her?'

‘Which is what we're going back to ask the sister. Again.'

Eddison got to his feet and stretched, the movement untucking his shirt enough to expose a small area of hairy belly. Munroe followed his example, but he didn't stretch. Munroe, Alec found himself thinking, was not a man who would stretch. Such extravagance of motion was available only to those people who were capable of relaxing. Munroe was not one of them.

‘So that leaves us,' Alec said to Parks when the others were gone.

‘Looking at CCTV footage,' Parks confirmed.

They both accepted the offer of more tea, and Alec pushed his now empty plate away. Hunger had been replaced by incipient indigestion. ‘So I've not been thrown off the investigation.'

‘It would appear not. But don't relax, Alec. I think it's more a case of keeping your enemies closer, than hanging on to your friends.'

‘And who views me as the enemy? You, Munroe or Eddison?'

‘I already told you. I do my job and then—'

‘Go home. Yeah right. What's going on here? What am I not being told?'

‘That's just it, Alec,' David Parks told him. ‘No one's keeping you in the dark. You're not being told because we just don't know.'

They relieved the uniformed officers who had spent the last several hours looking through the feeds from the cameras closest to the motel. Alec figured that he was still in disgrace, even if he had been permitted to stay; this was a job for uniform, not for detective inspectors and their sergeants, who could reasonably be expected to be off investigating, not drinking yet more tea and looking through hours of random comings and goings.

Eddison and Munroe were just keeping him on hold and out of the way, Alec figured, and Parks was there to make sure he didn't have any ideas they hadn't sanctioned.

Initial images of Travers' attacker had not been hard to find, and they were shown CCTV pictures of the suspect crossing the scrubby area of gravel and lawn and going into the staff car park. He got into a car that had been parked there, into the passenger side.

‘A light blue saloon,' a uniform told them. ‘We don't see the registration number at any time as they drive out, and we don't get a look at the driver either.'

He skimmed through the footage they had isolated so far, and Alec watched as the car, viewed from various cameras, took a circuitous route through the main car park in front of the hotel and then, instead of taking the most direct exit, snaked through the car park at the motorway services. At no time were either the registration plate or the driver and passenger fully visible.

‘I think it's safe to say they know their way around,' Parks said. ‘They've got to know what each of the CCTV cameras is seeing.'

‘Are they all fixed camera angles?' Alec asked.

‘Mostly. The majority of them concentrate on the lorry parking. There's a history of thefts. The cameras in the car park are mostly just to make the punters feel more comfortable. Half of them are dummies, the rest are fixed, and at least one was offline last night,' the uniform explained.

‘So much for our surveillance society,' Parks joked. ‘But what about when we get on to the motorway?'

‘I'll show you.'

The blue saloon could be seen on the slip road leading from the services, and for a brief second or two the number plate was visible, but so dirty as to be unreadable. The car then left the slip road, tucked in close behind a lorry it had followed down and effectively disappeared from the next set of cameras.

‘He comes off at the next junction, takes the first exit at the roundabout and then we lose him. It's all country roads from there. No cameras.'

‘Search teams out looking for the car?'

‘Soon as it got light. Nothing yet.'

‘They'll have dumped the car,' Parks said.

‘And probably torched it,' Alec predicted. ‘OK, let's go back to where we see him crossing the grass at the back of the hotel.'

The officer reset the system, made sure they knew what to do, and then he and the remainder of the night team took their leave. Parks and Alec were left alone.

‘Not much doubt about it being him,' Parks said, nodding at the screen.

‘No,' Alec agreed. He stepped through the footage frame by frame. The suspect was, he guessed, in his thirties, casually dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that seemed to have some kind of logo emblazoned across it – though it was rather hard to see what it was, for the shirt, the jeans, and the man's bare arms were all heavily stained with blood. His face, though, was always kept turned away from the camera.

He was on camera for maybe fifteen seconds, Alec counted. Long enough to walk quickly across the patchy lawn and into the car park. The car engine was already running. He got in, and they drove away.

Alec shook his head. ‘White male. Thirties, would you say? Short cropped sandy hair. Some kind of logo on the back of his T-shirt.'

‘Something on the front too, but, well, it's hard to see what. With all the blood. Maybe it can be enhanced?'

‘The original image is pretty poor.' Alec wasn't hopeful.

Slowly, they tracked back through the rest of the footage. Then began the slow trawl through camera angles that hadn't yet been examined.

‘We can hope someone in the main car park got a better look. Put out an appeal.' Parks sounded discouraged.

‘Who's handling the press call? I thought Munroe said the media had started to arrive last night.'

‘Get with the programme, Alec. Eddison did his bit to camera first thing ready for the breakfast news. The motel will be officially closed today, hence the excellent service at breakfast.'

He hadn't noticed, Alec thought, only belatedly recognizing that the dining room had been practically empty, the space inhabited only by the odd remaining guest and breakfasting police personnel.

‘Eddison's promised the scene will be released by tomorrow – all except Travers' room and the corridor it's on.'

‘Are they expecting anyone to want to stay?'

‘Well, I expect the first few days it'll be media types, but it'll get back to normal after that. It's the only half-decent place for thirty miles. The next services are a long way up or a long way back.'

Alec nodded. In his experience people were oddly pragmatic about such things. Once the shock had worn off, a spot of notoriety could be good for business. Especially if the news was soon released of an arrest. He wondered how Munroe was going to stage-manage that. He could imagine the story courtesy of the sergeant – or whatever he actually was. Police find a burnt out car linked to the hotel attack. Body inside, possible murder-suicide scenario. A suspect with known history of mental health problems, who, coincidentally, none of the local hospitals would admit to having had as a patient, never mind having released.

He pushed the idea aside. Conspiracy theories, he thought, but he could not shake the idea that his appraisal of the situation might turn out to be close to the truth.

‘Have you met the sister?' Alec asked, returning to what he thought might be safer ground.