Cal had to think about it for a while, but eventually he said, ‘Well … I’ve never actually tried hacking into archived recordings, but it should be easy enough. All the public surveillance cameras in Hey are operated by the council, and they probably store the archived footage on hard disks in their system …’ He grinned at me. ‘The security on the council’s computer system is notoriously pathetic. In fact, it’s so ridiculously easy to get into that some hackers think it’s an insult to their intelligence and they refuse to go anywhere near it on principle — ’
‘Right,’ I said impatiently. ‘So you can get into it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And if I tell you as much as I know about Anna’s whereabouts that night, do you think it’s possible to track her?’
‘It all depends on the location of the cameras,’ he said, turning to his laptop. ‘All right, let’s see … the first thing we need is a site map of all the cameras …’
I must have sat beside Cal, watching him do his thing, for at least a couple of hours, maybe longer. It was an incredible experience. Most of what he was doing was way beyond my comprehension, but although I didn’t really know what he was doing, it was impossible not to admire the skill and tenacity with which he was doing it — his fingers skipping gracefully over the keyboard while his eyes focused almost fanatically on the screen … it was entrancing, like watching a genius at work. Of course, the amphetamine was really buzzing through me now, and I’m sure that played some part in the sheer intensity of my enchantment, but still … it was a hell of a thing to witness.
We didn’t speak very much for the first hour or so when Cal was actually getting into the system, and that was fine with me. I’d done enough talking over the last few days to last me a lifetime, and I was perfectly happy just sitting there quietly, smoking cigarettes and staring dumbly at the inner workings of cyberspace as they streamed up and down the screen.
Once Cal had accessed the system though, we needed to work together, and that’s what we did for the next hour and a half. Cal asked me questions — what time did Anna leave The Wyvern? what route would she have taken to get to London Road? what time did she get there? what time did she get picked up by the Nissan? — and I did my best to answer them as accurately as possible. We didn’t get all that far at first because London Road was right at the edge of the area covered by the council’s CCTV cameras, but Cal quickly realised that both the railway bridge itself and the neighbouring mainline and branchline tracks were covered by a number of Network Rail CCTV cameras, and once he’d hacked into their archived footage — which didn’t take him long — we finally had the coverage that might just be enough to show us something.
‘Now all we’ve got to do is find her,’ Cal said.
It took us a long time, at least another three hours, and it was a painstakingly tedious task which gave both of us throbbing headaches and aching eyes, but eventually we reached the stage where we’d managed to track Anna — through a series of blurred and stuttered images — from the bottom of Miller’s Row all the way down to London Road. And now Cal had loaded the footage from a camera that was located about fifty metres south of the railway bridge, looking back at the lay-by, and we were both peering intently at the screen, our eyes fixed on the smallish grey blob of a figure that we knew to be Anna Gerrish. We’d seen her arrive at the lay-by at 01.31, and now — according to the read-out at the bottom of the screen — it was 01.47. So far, nothing had happened. Although the picture quality was poor, the view from the camera couldn’t have been better. It showed the whole of the lay-by, the tunnel entrance/exit, and the road leading towards it from the bridge. There was very little traffic around at that time of night, and none of the cars we’d seen so far had stopped at the lay-by.
We just had to wait.
‘What time did Tasha say she saw the Nissan?’ Cal asked me, without taking his eyes off the screen.
‘She thought it was around two-ish.’
Cal nodded.
I leaned closer to the screen as headlights appeared in the tunnel … but the car didn’t stop. I watched it drive past the lay-by, approach the camera, and then disappear.
I said to Cal, ‘Where does this road go anyway?’
‘South from here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘London Road ends at the entrance to the tunnel. After that it becomes Great Hey Road. It follows the railway tracks for a while, maybe half a mile, then there’s a right turn that takes you back into town, but if you stay on Great Hey Road and keep going … hold on, what’s that?’
Another pair of headlights had appeared in the tunnel, this time moving quite slowly. We both leaned in closer to the screen again. The headlights were on full, the glare making it impossible to see what kind of car it was. But as it approached the end of the tunnel, it definitely seemed to be slowing down.
‘This could be it,’ Cal said quietly.
The car was coming out of the tunnel now, its left-side indicator flashing. It pulled in at the lay-by, and as I watched the grey blob that was Anna walking towards it, I felt an irrational urge to shout out to her — Don’t do it, Anna! Don’t get in the car! But of course, after leaning in through the passenger window and talking to the driver for ten seconds or so, she got in.
‘Shit,’ Cal whispered.
The headlights were still on full beam as the car pulled away, and at that distance there was no chance of identifying the driver. But now the car was coming towards us, getting closer all the time … and we both had our faces almost pressed to the screen … and just as the car was about to pass the camera and disappear from view, another car appeared, travelling in the opposite direction, and our driver had to dip his lights. And just for a second, we had a relatively clear picture of our car. But it was, literally, only for a second, and then the car was gone.
‘Did you see him?’ I asked Cal.
‘No, it was too quick.’
‘Shit.’
He grinned at me. ‘It’s not live …’
‘What?’
‘It’s a recording, we can watch it as many times as we want.’ He started tapping the keyboard. ‘You didn’t really think it was live, did you?’
I leaned back in the chair, rubbing my eyes, trying to bring myself back to reality. I knew exactly where I was and what I’d been doing for the last few hours, but I was feeling that slightly odd sensation — a kind of gradually dawning awareness — that can come to you at the end of a really engrossing film. And that, in turn, was making me feel really uncomfortable. Because what I’d just witnessed wasn’t a film … it wasn’t a drama, played out by actors. It was real. A real girl, getting into a real car with a real man … a man who was quite possibly about to kill her.
There was nothing engrossing about that.
‘There,’ said Cal. ‘That’s as clear as I can get it.’
I looked at the screen. He’d re-run the CCTV footage and frozen it just before the car disappeared from view. The static image was still fairly blurred and grainy, but it clearly showed a man in the driving seat, and a girl in the passenger seat, and when I half closed my eyes and squinted at the faces, it was just possible to see — or, at least, to imagine — that the man matched Tasha’s description, and that the girl was Anna. But, of course, my imagination was probably swayed by the fact that I already knew it was Anna.
‘What do you think?’ Cal said.
‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘I could enlarge it, but all that’d do is make it even blurrier.’
‘You can’t get it any clearer?’
‘No … I know someone in the States who could maybe clean it up a bit. But he’s really expensive, and he’s got a really long waiting list. He probably couldn’t do it for at least a couple of weeks, probably a month.’