Jack in the Box, page 21
‘That the victim?’ Fahey asked softly.
‘Aye.’
‘Christ. You must have seen it. The body. For real. You know, some folk ask me how I can do this job. I say I’ve got it easy compared to some.’
‘I won’t disagree with you.’
‘OK to move on?’
Lomond paused a second on the woman in white, then nodded. ‘OK. Let’s run it on.’
There were six videos in total, lengthy pieces that swooped over Ben Lomond, that Appalachian blue on a rare hot day in July, trails of hillwalkers like dropped sweetie wrappers on the path and a boat trailing a billowing saltire across the water. Geese on the wing, thrillingly, drew close to the drone in another film. Then there was a trail across white sands as the tide drew in on one of the islands as the sun rose – an image so lovely and mesmerising that neither man spoke until it ended with a woman struggling to control a black dog in the surf.
‘He’s got an eye, has Mr Finch,’ said Fahey.
‘Yeah, these are all excellent. Hey . . . see that?’
Fahey frowned at the new image. ‘That kid?’
‘It’s his son. Shane.’
On screen, a tall, broad-shouldered boy peered up at the drone, frowning slightly. A backpack was looped over one shoulder, and he was moving along the crescent, framed by a gap in the trees for an instant before the drone swooped away as if spooked.
‘Bit weird, eh?’ Fahey ventured. ‘Spying on your son? Looks like an accident, maybe.’
‘Maybe. Are there offcuts?’
‘Oh aye – plenty of them. But they’re all footage shot indoors, in his garage. Lots of false starts and crashes. Some only last seconds.’
Lomond nodded. Where once he had butterflies, now there was a sinking feeling. ‘I’m going to have to go through them all. One by one.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that,’ Fahey said, folding his arms. ‘Afraid, but prepared. Got them all lined up. Coffee?’
‘Good man. Milk, no sugar, please.’
Once the coffee was placed on the edge of the desk – on top of an AC/DC coaster, Lomond noted with a smile – he asked, ‘How about the security camera images?’
‘I had those ready. Two seconds . . .’ He brought up the images. ‘This one’s Myrtlewood Crescent, day of the murder. Recorded before, during and after. Weird of them to keep the camera running, but there it is.’
Lomond studied the image. ‘Can you speed it up for me?’ he asked. ‘Not too fast – just enough so that I can make everything out.’
‘Easy done.’ Fahey worked his magic again, and the images moved quickly. A slow dawn breaking through thick night. Lomond sensed the pinkening of the snow clouds, knowing this was an illusion. The shot kept changing, a wide angle taking in every expanse of the garden in a fish-eye style. It moved from wall to wall, sweeping back and forth, as the light poured into one end of the garden then distilled across to the other side before it was interrupted by the old lady’s frightened face. Even in the silence of the image, he thought he could hear her speaking, her flailing voice. Even at high speed, her mouth didn’t look out of sync with her normal tempo.
‘What’s going on?’ Fahey asked. ‘She speaking through the door?’
‘Maybe. I think she’s shouting past the fence to the kid in the car. Maybe just shouting. I’m not sure. No audio, is there?’
‘Nah, switched off.’
‘Manually?’
‘I checked that,’ Fahey said, offhand. ‘It had been switched off for weeks.’
‘Strange one.’
‘Yeah. It’s customisable, as part of the system. I thought it was weird, but it goes back as far as their residency.’
‘No chance it could have been turned off manually and deleted?’
‘It doesn’t look possible to do that and then re-upload the material to the server.’
‘So it’s more likely they just had it switched off.’
‘Guess so. Loud noise can trigger the alarm. Maybe they argued a lot. Maybe they didn’t want it recorded.’
Lomond pondered this for a moment as the footage spooled on. ‘Let’s go back to the time of death,’ he said.
‘Got it bookmarked,’ Fahey replied grimly. The dead woman’s mother receded, a plump, jerky marionette, creeping backwards, her hysterical face turning merely agitated, then becoming just concerned, before exiting stage left. ‘Here it is. One-sixteen p.m.’
‘Take it back maybe fifteen minutes before.’ Lomond sighed as he watched the image return to its familiar sweep.
‘Fast-forward again?’
‘No. Now we watch. Keep our eyes peeled.’
Back and forth went the camera. The decking, with its thin crust of snow, broken only by crows’ feet. The bird feeders, white-bearded sentinels. The lawn, its stiff green fronds breaking through the snow. By the wall to the left, beyond a row of white stones and the black soil, the hanging garden of the fake vine.
‘Bloody ridiculous, that,’ Fahey muttered.
‘What is?’
‘That plastic stuff.’
‘The lawn?’
‘Not just that. I mean, there’s an idea behind it all, a kind of aesthetic. Know what I mean?’
‘Kind of.’
‘I mean the stuff at the back. The vines. Look at it. All fake.’
‘You’re right. And there’s something else as well.’ Lomond pointed.
‘What – the hanging lamp?’
‘It’s off,’ Lomond said.
Fahey shrugged. ‘It is the daytime. Middle of winter, but it’s daytime.’
‘Then how come the ones in the opposite corner are on?’
‘Good point.’
‘They’ve not been on today. Make a note of this. We’ll check back to see when they went out. For now, let’s keep our eyes peeled.’
‘You’ve checked for other ways in? Windows, hole in the fence . . . Christ, a tunnel?’
‘Aye,’ Lomond said, with a tone close to disgust. ‘We’ve checked for that stuff. Early payday for the workies. And probably my P45.’
This would have been the time, Lomond thought. If he sneaked in, this is probably when he did it. Through the door and in. Right past the camera. But how? ‘Possible to run past?’ he speculated, the tip of his pen tracing the sweep of the camera.
‘It’s not out of the question. But running from where? He’d need to be behind the shed. Then he’d need to run full pelt up the path, without leaving any footprints. He might have reached the side of the decking, where the edge of that vine stuff cuts out the snowfall . . .’ Fahey tugged at his chin, a curious reproof. ‘I don’t buy it, though. The angle changes, but not enough to totally shield someone running, what, twenty-five feet?’
‘Twenty-eight and a quarter.’
‘Then there’s the snow. He’d have to have been a ballet dancer moving at the speed of light to get down those rocks, probably on his tiptoes, and the camera not pick him up.’
‘That’s true.’
They watched as the camera moved. One sixteen p.m. –
round about the time Minchin had estimated Kath had been attacked.
The camera paused in its sweep. Just a flicker.
‘See that?’ Lomond said.
‘Aye.’
‘That’s unusual.’
‘It doesn’t look like it’s happened any other time,’ Fahey agreed. ‘But it doesn’t actually pick up anything.’
‘Is the camera motion-sensitive?’
‘There is a motion sensor, but it’s not that sensitive. Otherwise it’d pick up every squirrel and sparrow that passed through the garden; alarms’d be going off all the time.’
Lomond sighed. A curious sense of panic cinched his guts tight. An awful sense of helplessness, as if they could rescue the doomed woman at the press of a button.
Then there was a flare of light. ‘That’s triggered by the sensor,’ Fahey said. He shifted his seat so he could peer more closely at the screen. ‘But there’s nothing.’
‘Something moved there,’ Lomond said suddenly.
‘Where?’
‘The vine. See it?’
Fahey paused and moved the image back two, three seconds, then ran it again, in slow-motion. ‘What’re we looking at?’
‘Here.’ Lomond indicated the leaves, a blanket of unseasonably bright green. Bloody eyesore, Lomond thought again. ‘You see that stirring?’
‘Could be wind.’
‘Could be, but it doesn’t correspond with the background. Look again.’
‘I kind of see what you’re getting at . . . but it could be nothing.’
‘It’s not nothing. It’s like a smudge, a smooth part appearing on a rough surface. And look – that stone, dead centre in the row.’ Lomond indicated the white humpbacks breaking the dark sea of soil, unmarked by the snow. ‘See that slight trail of light?’
‘Not sure what you mean, to be honest with you.’
‘There. See it? That sudden line of light.’
‘It is a bit weird. Could be interference. Could be the wind.’
‘There’s something there.’
‘We’ve watched it twice now. There’s nothing there.’
The figure appearing by the side of the bath. Lomond thought of it, a waking nightmare, a night terror siphoned from the darkest depths of your mind. It was scary enough for a grown man, a copper – for anyone. Naked in the bath, nice and warm – the water temperature had still been tepid when forensics had arrived. Still cosy. Thinking of a cup of tea. Plenty of time before school collection time. Then this figure, rudely conjured. What face did the devil have? Did he grin? Was he expressionless? Was he masked? Maybe utterly lost in whatever compulsion he served. No longer a human face. No longer a human being.
Lomond’s head snapped up. ‘These images can be messed with, can’t they?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Digital stuff. Hacking. These images can be hacked?’
‘We’ve run all the diagnostic tests there are. The image hasn’t been altered or uploaded. It would show on the metadata – be recorded on the system somewhere. No one’s been into that system. All the logs show is it being armed when they’re going out, or on full-time when the husband’s away. It’s a good system – high-spec.’
‘It’s here,’ Lomond said. ‘I know it. We’re looking at it. It’s here.’
Fahey said nothing. He sat awkwardly, cramped in on himself as the fatal minutes ticked away. There was no more stirring. No slickness on the stones lined up on the left.
‘OK,’ Lomond said. ‘Now the young lad. The house where he was murdered. We’re going to go through it all. I want to see it.’
47
No advance, no progress, nothing in Lomond’s mind but the after-images from Fahey’s screens. Nature’s screenburn, the pistol flares of the snow, the skies, the sweep of the camera, the thin creep of the winter sun. These reconstructions were a sluggish windscreen wiper every time he blinked: Lomond wanted to keep his eyes closed, despite this mental interference.
‘Hey.’ Slater tapped him roughly. ‘Not meditating or something, are you?’
‘Meditating?’ Lomond straightened up in his seat. ‘Don’t be daft. We don’t have time for any thinking round here.’
‘Fancy a roll and sausage?’ Slater held out a grease-stained paper bag.
Had he the talent, Lomond would have wanted to paint the beautiful image. He sighed. ‘Already had one.’
‘That’s not what I asked you.’
With the furtiveness of an addict pocketing his deal, the bag was in Lomond’s hands before Slater saw him move.
‘Chief been on the phone?’
Lomond nodded, taking in half of the roll in a single bite. ‘I gather you heard?’
‘Yeah, literally, from the other end of the office. Threaten you with your P45? Giving you twenty-four hours? Asking for results?’
‘He’d like to do all of that and more. But after a couple of lines of screaming he went really quiet. Like he was reading out a prepared statement with a gun at his head. That’s what threw me. Scared me, a bit, to be honest.’
Slater leaned on the edge of Lomond’s desk, arms folded. ‘You’re not going to get taken off the case, gaffer. It’s all he’s got to threaten you with.’
‘I know that. But he’s got to save face. And Sullivan will want to mutually assent him to death. I heard they don’t get on.’
‘Big deal.’ Slater looked exhausted, with lines etched on his already brutally thin features that Lomond hadn’t noticed before. He also seemed to have sprouted some impressive late-onset acne at one corner of his mouth, perhaps a reflection of the fuel he was taking in from the canteen. But this was a stage in the investigation where you couldn’t really judge anyone. Well, maybe Smythe could – she only ever moved a notch or two off immaculate, even on her worst days. ‘It’s a downer. But it looks like we’re chasing a ghost.’
‘Maybe we are.’ Lomond became alert at that. He finished the roll, scrunched up the bag and lobbed it casually into a wastepaper bin an impressive distance away. ‘What did you turn up at the shipping containers?’
‘Looks like that’s where fridge man was living,’ Slater said. ‘His personal effects were found in one of the containers. Edge of a life, gaffer. Grim. You seen a junkie’s flat lately?’
‘Not lately. Seen a few, though. Pre- and post-mortem.’
‘Like that, but worse. Looked like he was sharing his living space with every kind of creature you can think of.’
‘You lifted Laybourn?’
Slater nodded. ‘Talking to him. He’s on remand and saying nothing now. One was enough. He has solid alibis for the other two. But here’s another thing. He was delivering near Nicole Kingsley’s house when the kid-on bomb arrived. Made a drop six miles away, twenty minutes before, then nothing until two hours later after he went back to the depot. No sign of him on CCTV. Claims he pulled into a lane and had a sleep.’
‘At least it wasn’t another high-risk pee.’ Lomond drummed his fingers. ‘You’re not sure about him, are you?’
‘Nah. I think he’s been used. Even if he did deliver the dodgy computer.’
‘Any of his sacred receipts telling us anything?’
‘Nah, nothing about a job to the Kingsleys’ house. And he’s not saying anything about one.’
‘I don’t think he’s our Jack,’ Lomond said. ‘But I have to admit he’s the closest we’ve got to drawing a line between all three cases.’
‘Doubt he’ll say a word to us now, though. “No comment”, that’s all we got. Want a crack at him?’
Lomond shook his head. ‘Nah. Tait can have it. Or you, if you want.’
‘I was thinking Tait is welcome to it.’
‘Tait is looking forward to it,’ said Tait, as he entered the room. He had an imperious air to him, Lomond thought, but then he usually did, despite being as crumpled as the rest of them. Swanning in. Leading with the chin. ‘I think he’s the guy.’
‘He’s a fit for the first victim, maybe. The rest . . . I don’t see it,’ Lomond said. ‘Work on him, though. Hard.’
‘You weren’t expecting me to do anything else, sir?’
‘He might spill a detail he forgot. This is a guy who was ordered to deliver boxes of rats and creepy-crawlies to new flat developments, thought about it, and decided to dump the live cargo back where he found them. If I’d murdered someone out there, I think the last thing I’d do would be to go back. In fact, I’m amazed he hasn’t torched it. Who owns the place? Do we know?’
Tait gave a twisted grin. ‘Would you believe it’s part of Vincent Finch Enterprises?’
Lomond frowned. ‘Seriously? This is getting tangled now.’
‘Aye, he owns the land, and he owned the shipping containers, though no one’s quite sure why. Apparently, he was planning to turn it into an out-of-city storage depot. Plans submitted to clear the woodwork and level it out, perimeter fence, security guards, the lot.’
‘Enterprising boy,’ Lomond remarked.
‘The dead guy lived there. Lot of empty tins stacked up. Might have been on a survivalist trip.’
‘I would have thought that was more Laybourn’s thing.’
‘Maybe so. We’ll find out.’
Smythe appeared, with a giant refillable coffee mug, and nodded to all three. She was pale, and some of her hair had come loose.
‘Hiya, Cara – how’ve things been?’ Lomond asked.
Smythe laid her cup down, cleared her throat and counted off her fingers. ‘I’ve eliminated the window cleaner, the guy wandering around with the dog lead but no dog, the private-hire driver who parked near Myrtlewood, and the guy who was reported for being a prowler. That was a good one – he was a school lollipop man just changing out of his uniform in a side street.’
‘Lollipop not a giveaway?’ Slater asked.
‘Apparently not. So that was my day.’
‘Good work,’ Lomond said. ‘He’ll turn up soon.’
The other three stared at their shoes and said nothing, until Tait asked, ‘Nothing from Myrtlewood Crescent?’
‘No,’ Lomond told him simply.
‘Even, like, a panic room or something?’
‘I said no.’
There was another silence.
Lomond crossed over to the whiteboard near his desk and wiped a space clean. ‘I just wanted to tell you what I think happened.’ Next to the whiteboard was a corkboard, with printouts attached. ‘This is an analysis of the back windows. Now, Kath Symes had an appointment calendar on the wall opposite the kitchen window. Big boxes, big letters. Easy to read if you fly a drone overhead. We know for a fact that Vincent Finch flew drones over the gardens. He claims his machines got taken out of the air by another one.’
‘Maybe it was a hawk?’ Tait said. After a moment of astonishment, he went on: ‘That’s how you can take out a drone – fly a hawk. They do it at airports. Saves a fortune on counter-drone technology. Train a bird to recognise them, they sort the thing out, pronto.’ He insisted: ‘I’m telling you. Look it up.’
