‘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.