Body Line (10 page)

‘Yes, into Masbro Road. But don’t call him “the perp”. You’re not on
CSI
.’

‘Sorry, guv. Well, I was on the canvass and I’m going down Masbro in the same direction – like as if I’d turned left out of Hofland – and I get this feeling someone’s looking at me. You know what I mean. I looks round and I see this security camera. It takes a minute to register—’

‘I’m sure it did,’ Slider murmured.

‘There’s this school down the end of the road.’

‘Yes, Masbro Primary.’

‘Well, the camera’s in the school yard, high up on a pole. I s’pose they’ve all got security problems these days. But I reckon if this one’s aimed at the school-yard walls, maybe there might be a bit of the street in it as well. So I goes in and talks to the school seckertree, and she lets me have a look at the tapes. And this is Mundy’s.’

‘Stop hanging it out,’ Slider said. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘Yes, guv. That’s what I’m telling you.’

Slider grabbed the tape and walked rapidly through the CID room to the cubby where they kept the viewing equipment, gathering a little trail of his firm as he went. It was the usual sort of security video, grey and grainy, with the date and time in the corner. The view was the brick wall dividing the school yard from the street, with the iron gate in the middle of it; but true enough, the camera had been set high enough to see over the wall as well, and a section of the street, heavily parked on both sides, was visible, with the junction with Hofland Crescent in the distance.

Using the time cue, Slider ran it forward to six fifteen. There were few people about, just the occasional man or woman walking jerkily down the street on their way to the tube, and the odd car passing. The cue ran on towards six twenty.

‘There!’ said Fathom. He had the benefit of having viewed the tape a few times already. The rest of them squinched up their eyes and prayed. A small figure had appeared in the distance, apparently leaping out of nowhere, because of the way these tapes took exposures with breaks in-between. As he jerked towards the camera, it could be seen that he was wearing dark trousers and a blouson-type top.

Right place and roughly the right time. It
could
be their man. Slider wasn’t getting excited yet. He almost did when the figure reached under his jacket – were they going to see him dump the gun? – but what he got out was something small enough to conceal in his palm. Next minute, it became obvious what it was, for the man squeezed between two parked cars into the road, then passed along the offside of the front one and bent to aim the key and plip the door open. He got in, backed and filled a bit to get an angle, and drove away in the direction he had been walking, the bulk of the car disappearing below the line of the school wall and out of shot.

The breathless silence was broken.

‘We got something at last.’

‘Good on yer, Fathom.’

‘Brill, Jezza!’

‘It could be our man.’

‘Can you see the number?’

Slider, ever cautious, said, ‘We can’t be
sure
it’s him.’

‘There aren’t that many people around,’ Atherton said. ‘And he must have come out from Hofland – you could see he didn’t come from further down the road.’

‘Guv, there’s something else,’ Fathom said eagerly. ‘If you go back a bit further, you can see him arrive. He had to park there, it was the only space. He’s trying to look normal, he just takes the space, and walks, not hurrying I mean, up the road and disappears down Hofland. But here’s the thing – he arrives about ten past six, and no one else arrives at that time. So it’s gotter be him, hasn’t it?’

Slider ran the tape back further and watched for himself.

The man sat in the car a few minutes before he got out, but they couldn’t see what he was doing. ‘What’s he up to?’ Swilley complained.

‘Psyching himself for the deed? Putting on gloves?’ Atherton offered.

‘He’d made the appointment for six fifteen,’ Hollis observed, ‘and he wanted to be on time.’

‘What the hell did it matter?’ Atherton complained. ‘Who was going to argue about a minute either way?’

‘I s’pose he’s just efficient.’

‘Bloody ’ell, that’s creepy,’ said McLaren. He watched the man reappear, returning from Hofland Crescent. ‘You can’t see his face properly,’ he complained. ‘He’s got his head down. Do you reckon he knew the camera was there?’

‘No,’ said Atherton. ‘He wouldn’t have parked there if he had.’

‘Nowhere else to park,’ Swilley pointed out.

‘He was early enough to have parked further off.’

‘It was cold,’ Slider reminded them, still watching the tape. ‘And windy. He’s hunched into his collar, that’s all.’

‘And he wasn’t very long. Was there time for him to be the murderer?’ Swilley asked, worried.

‘It doesn’t take long to shoot someone,’ Slider said. ‘Also, Miss Aude said that while she was hanging off the balcony, she heard some kind of beeper go off. I’m wondering if this man set himself a specific time-limit to do his search after shooting Rogers – say, two minutes – to make sure he was away before anyone came.’

‘But no one heard anything,’ Fathom complained.

‘He couldn’t know they wouldn’t,’ Slider said. ‘If someone had heard the gunshot and called the police, the response would have been rapid. Also there might have been hidden alarms he knew nothing about. This man was so precise he sat in his car to make sure he arrived exactly on time. Setting himself a time limit on his search fits in with that.’

‘That’s true,’ Atherton said. ‘And we don’t know yet what it was he was searching for.’

‘Or if he found it,’ Swilley concluded.

‘Damn, with all this talking I missed it,’ Slider said, and ran the tape back, then forward again, watching the man walk towards the camera. ‘Ah,’ he said, with immense satisfaction, ‘this was the bit I wanted. I thought I was right.’ He waited until the figure squeezed between the two cars again and froze the image. ‘Look.’

They looked in silence. It was McLaren who got it. ‘He’s put his hand on the bonnet, the plonker.’

There it was, the pale starfish outlined on the dark metal of the bonnet of the car parked behind his own. An instinctive movement to balance himself as he squeezed through the inadequate space. And after he had driven away, the parked car’s number was quite clearly visible.

‘Chances are it’s a resident’s car,’ Slider said, ‘and if they haven’t washed it since then—’

‘Cars get washed on Sundays,’ Fathom said hopefully.

‘And he wasn’t wearing surgical gloves,’ Slider added, and a few crests fell.

‘And, of course, we still have to find him,’ Atherton pointed out.

‘But if we do,’ said McLaren.

‘And we get a print off the bonnet,’ said Hollis.

‘We’d have a piece of concrete evidence against him,’ Slider finished. ‘Let’s get this tape to the lab, get it enhanced, see if we can get the number of his car, and get some stills made.’

Everyone was more cheerful. ‘It’s a breakthrough,’ McLaren said. ‘Good on yer, Jezza!’ and slapped Fathom so hard on the back his teeth clicked together.

‘It
may
be,’ Slider said. But he couldn’t be churlish with the lad, who, to be fair, didn’t sparkle all that often. ‘Well done, Fathom.’

Connolly, unaware of all the excitement she was missing, had made her way out to Sarratt, shocked to discover how far away it was and how long it took her to get there. Your man Frith’d want to find a job nearer, she thought, or make Lady Constance move back home: it was a hell of a commute.

She found the stables without difficulty, and saw at once it was a superior establishment, not just from the grandness of the buildings, but the quality of the horses’ heads looking out over the doors. Like most stables it seemed deserted, though a chained dog emerged from a kennel at one end of the yard and barked in a bored fashion, wagging at the other end without much hope that this incursion would lead to a nice walk, any more than any previous one had.

Connolly walked over to what she surmised was the office, and found that abandoned too. As well as the usual pegboard covered with rosettes, there were a lot of photographs on the wall, of triumphal moments for the stable, she supposed. A child on a palomino pony receiving a cup – presumably for showing, given the exaggerated backward seat. An old black-and-white glossy of a dark young man on a big horse soaring over a show jump. Press photo, she reckoned: an amateur would be lucky to get an action shot like that. A young woman in a crash cap bending from the saddle to receive a rosette from a woman in powder-blue coat and hat and unsuitable shoes: cross-country, to judge by the mud liberally coating the horse’s legs and splashed on the girl’s beaming face. A dark-haired man, also mud spattered, on his own two feet, holding the reins of a steaming horse and smiling into the camera, his hair blown by a winter wind. A faint similarity suggested this was the same man as the earlier showjumper; and there were two other photos of him as well, receiving prizes. If this was your man Frith, Connolly thought, he was definitely ridey. No wonder Lady Connie wanted him. And fair play to her, she must have something herself, if he was still with her after nine years. Either she was hot stuff in the scratcher, or she had some other hold on him, because a hunky Bob like him, surrounded by horse-mad girls, would never be short of something to sling his leg over, and she wasn’t talking about the horses.

A shadow came over the doorway and she turned to see a young woman in breeches, boots and a thick sweater, with a weather-reddened face and the usual scraggly blonde hair, dragged back into a thin tail, who asked, ‘Can I help you?’

Connolly did her bit. ‘Hi. Yeah – I used to ride a lot, but I haven’t done it for a few years and I want to get back into it. I was thinking of getting my own horse, but I thought maybe a few lessons first’d be a good idea, to get me back in the way of it. It’s cross-country I’m really interested in. I understand you do training, too – the horse and the rider?’

‘Oh yes, we’ve coached some of the Olympic team here,’ she said proudly.

‘Is that right?’ Connolly sounded impressed. ‘It is you that’s the coach?’

‘Well, I do a bit, but it’s really Robin. He’s brilliant. He’s won Badminton twice himself.’ Her eyes took on a dedicated look as they drifted towards the photograph with the windswept hair. ‘That’s him with Top Gun – you must have heard of
him
.’

‘Wow, yeah,’ Connolly said fervently. ‘Great horse. But Badminton’s as much about the rider, sure it is?’

‘Yeah, and Robin’s the best.’ The girl warmed to a fellow enthusiast. ‘I’m Andy Bamford, by the way. You’re from Ireland, aren’t you? Is that where you rode?’

It’s as easy as that, Connolly thought. She was almost disappointed that it was not more of a challenge.

‘I’d worried I might have trouble getting people to talk,’ she told Slider when she got back, ‘but the trouble was getting them to stop.’

Frith himself, it turned out, was out all day, taking a horse that had a sprain to a specialist hydrotherapy facility; which was a blessing in a way because it left the field open for Andy Bamford to talk about him. The rapport with her was established so rapidly that she accepted the invitation from Connolly to go for a jar when her lunch break arrived shortly afterwards, leaving another groom – younger and rather miffed-looking – in charge. Following Andy’s battered, mud-and-rust streaked Fiesta, with tangled hemp halters and terminally sick plastic buckets rattling about in the back, Connolly drove to The Cock in Sarratt, and over toasted cheese sandwiches and a half of shandy, she got a full dose from Bamford of how wonderful Robin Frith really was.

‘She’s pure dotey on him, but I did get one thing out of all the drivel,’ Connolly said, ‘which was that he’s only been at Hillbrow since October ninety-eight, when he bought the place. It was a bit of a kip until then. The previous owners had let it run down, and he was the one that built it up to the piece o’ glory it is now. Before that he was working at another stables across the other side of Sarratt, place called Chipperfield—’

‘Which was where Amanda Sturgess said she and Rogers had their house,’ Slider remembered.

‘Is that so?’ said Connolly. ‘Well, that makes it interesting. Anyway, he’d been working at this stables, training horses, and competing himself, and then Hillbrow came on the market and he saw a chance to set up his own place and do it his own way. He’d his prize money saved, and he sold his house and used the money from that, but here’s the thing, guv – Andy says he also took on a partner, who put the rest of the cash up, but nobody knows who it is. He keeps it a secret, and it’s only his name on the headed paper, but Andy reckons it’s one of his sponsors who wants to keep his name out of the limelight.’

‘I thought the limelight was the whole point of sponsorship.’

Connolly shrugged. ‘She thinks it’s an eccentric millionaire, the looper! She didn’t like my suggestion at all, that it was a married woman he was having an affair with. Assured me
her
Robin wasn’t like that.’

‘You’re thinking it was Amanda put the money up,’ said Slider.

‘It crossed me mind. But there’s more. This one had to go back to work, but she’d said earlier that the Friths were an old Sarratt family. I said I’d settle the bill, and when she was gone I had a crack with the barman. I made out I was interested in local history and – well, long story short, he said I should have a word with this barmaid Maureen Hodges at The Boot, who knew everything about the place. So I went over there, got meself a jar, got into it with this Maureen, and struck gold.’