“The fuck’s it got to do with you?” asked the man in the leather jacket, turning to Liz.
“Give her a break,” said Liz. “Her till’s going to be out.”
The man addressed his pint. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone who gives a shit.”
“Is there a problem?” asked Steve Goss, materialising at Liz’s side.
“No problem,” said Liz. “This guy accidentally pocketed some extra change, but he’s about to give it back.”
“Ah,” said Goss sagely. “I see.”
The man in the leather jacket took in the sober bulk of the Special Branch officer. Shaking his head and smiling as if in the presence of the mentally unhinged, he slapped a ten-pound note down on the bar and carried his drink away.
“Thanks,” said the barmaid, as soon as the man was out of earshot. “I have to make it up out of my wages if I’m short.”
“Local guy?” asked Liz.
“No. Never seen him before. When he came in he was asking me about the…”
“The murder?”
“Yeah. At the Fairmile. If I knew the dead man and that.”
“Did you?” prompted Liz gently.
She shrugged. “Knew him to look at. He came in a few times. In the public bar.” She flicked over the pages of her pad and handed Liz the bill. “That’s seven pounds exactly.”
“Thanks. Can you do me a receipt?”
The nervousness returned to the barmaid’s eyes.
“On second thought,” said Liz, “don’t worry about it.”
When they got outside, the wind was throwing down irregular spatters of rain.
“That was neatly handled,” grinned Goss, forcing his hands into his overcoat pockets. “What would you have done if the guy had refused to give back the money?”
“Left him to your tender mercies,” said Liz. “We’re just an intelligence-gathering organisation, after all. We don’t do violence.”
“Thanks a lot!”
They turned back in to the village hall, where Don Whitten, the detective superintendent in charge of the case, had just arrived back from the Fairmile Café. A bulky, moustached figure, he shook Liz’s hand briskly and apologised for the spartan conditions in which they found themselves.
“Can we sort out some heating for this place?” he demanded, looking exasperatedly around the bare walls. “It’s brass bloody monkeys in here.”
The constable, who was crouched in front of the VCR, got uncertainly to her feet. The DS turned to her. “Ring the station and ask someone to bring over one of those hot-air blowers. And a kettle, and some tea bags and biscuits and ashtrays and the rest of it. Jolly the place up a bit.”
The constable nodded and thumbed a number on her mobile. A plainclothes officer held up a video cassette. “Norwich have identified the footage and run us off a copy of the Fairmile CCTV tape,” he announced. “But the quality’s terrible. The camera wasn’t set right, and the tape’s all ghosting and flare. They’re working on an enhanced version, but we won’t see it before tomorrow.”
“I was afraid that might be the case,” Goss murmured to Liz. He pointed her to one of the canvas-backed chairs, and took one for himself.
“Can we have a look at what we’ve got?” said Whitten, lowering himself into a third chair. He took out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, and then remembering that there were no ashtrays, irritably returned them to his pocket.
The plainclothes officer nodded. As he had said, the CCTV footage was pretty much unwatchable. The time code, however, flickered strong and clear. “We’ve basically got two bursts of movement between four and five a.m.,” he said. “The first is this.”
Two shuddering white lines scribbled across the blackness as a vehicle arrived in the park, slowly reversed out of shot, and extinguished its lights, returning the screen to blackness.
“From the distance between the head- and taillights we reckon that’s an HGV of some sort, probably quite a long one, and probably nothing to do with our case. As you can see, that sequence is time-coded 04:05. At 04:23 things get a bit more interesting. Watch this.”
A second vehicle appeared to enter. This time, however, there was no reverse-parking manoeuvre. Instead, the vehicle, which was clearly shorter than the earlier one-a truck, almost certainly-performed a three-point turn, came to a halt, and extinguished its lights in the centre of the parking area. As before, the screen returned to blackness.
“Now we wait,” said the officer.
They did so. After approximately three minutes a lower, smaller vehicle-a saloon car, Liz guessed-suddenly switched on its lights, reversed at speed from its position at the left-hand edge of the parking area, swung round the parked truck or van, and disappeared out of the front gates. More time passed-at least another five minutes, and then, rather more slowly, the truck followed it out.
“And that’s it until five a.m. So given that the pathologist has given us four thirty as the time of death, give or take fifteen either way…”
“Can you show us again?” asked Whitten. “Speeding up the bits where nothing’s happening.”
They watched it again.
“Well, it’s certainly not going to win any Oscars for best camerawork,” said Whitten. He rubbed his eyes. “What’s your reading of it, Steve?”
Goss frowned. “I’d say the first vehicle we saw is just a regular commercial rig. It’s the second one I’d like to see more of. It doesn’t park up, so is obviously expecting to be on the move pretty sharpish…”
Unobtrusively, Liz removed her laptop from its carrying case. There were a couple of queries that she had e-mailed to Investigations at Thames House, and with a bit of luck the answers might have come through. Logging on, she saw that there were two messages, with numbers in the place of sender names.
Liz recognised these as Investigations sender codes. The messages took a couple of minutes to decrypt, but they were short and to the point. They could only trace one UK citizen named Faraj Mansoor, and he was a sixty-five-year-old retired tobacconist living in Southampton. And Pakistan liaison had confirmed that Faraj Mansoor was no longer working at the Sher Babar auto repair shop on the Kabul road outside Peshawar. He had left six weeks earlier, leaving no forwarding address. His present whereabouts was unknown.
Switching off her laptop and replacing it in its case, Liz stared at a curling hand-lettered poster on the wall, advertising a production of HMS Pinafore by the Brancaster Players. As Whitten had said, the hall was bitterly cold, and it had the dour, institutional smell of all such buildings. Pulling her coat tightly around her, Liz allowed her mind to wander through the incoherent mass of loose ends that the case had so far thrown up. Before long, she began to meditate on the subject of 7.62mm armour-piercing ammunition.
17
Faraj Mansoor woke thinking that he was still at sea. He could hear the crash of waves, feel the sucking undertow as the Susanne Hanke reared up the side of the next peak to come crashing down into the trough. And then the noise and the sea seemed to recede, to recede beyond a window-a small wooden window framing a steel-grey sky-and he realised that the waves were some distance away, dragging at a beach of stones, and that he himself was lying fully clothed in a bed, unmoving.
With this realisation came the knowledge of where he was, and the surreal memory of the landing on the beach and the attack in the café toilet. He revisited the attack, ran it through his mind like a film, frame by frame, and concluded that the fault for the way things had turned was ultimately his own. He had played the role of the downtrodden migrant just a shade too effectively, and had failed to allow for the Briton’s sheer venal stupidity. From the moment he had allowed him to approach, the outcome had been inevitable.
Faraj was not greatly troubled by the fact of having taken another man’s life, and had examined Gunter’s smashed skull with cold dispassion before deciding that a second shot was unnecessary and that it was time he was on his way. But the killing would attract attention to the area, and that was bad. The British police were not fools, they would calculate that the shooting was something out of the ordinary. And they would take the necessary steps.