After that evening they’d spoken over the hedge, Josh, whenever he could, began watching Michael. He wanted to understand him, to discover what he wanted. Was it Samantha? Is that why he was spending so much time with her? Was she what this was all about? Josh couldn’t be sure, not without knowing more about Michael. So he watched him. He became familiar with the times his bathroom light came on in the morning, and his study light turned off at night. He followed him, at a distance, to his favourite cafés, or to the archives of the local museum. Just the other week he’d watched from up the street as Michael had helped Samantha carry her prints from the framer’s, loading them into the back of his old Volvo. And he’d watched, too, as Michael had walked to his fencing club on a Thursday, then taken the same route across the Heath for his lessons on a Saturday. Which is when Josh had first seen the Heath’s conservation team unloading tools from a storage shed at the school.
It was a shed they shared, it seemed, with the school’s caretaker, in whose office they also took their breaks when working on the Highgate side of the Heath. On that same afternoon Josh had seen them at the school he’d also noticed the security camera angled above the entrance to its sports hall. Had Slater viewed the tape from this camera on the day Lucy fell? Had she seen, for sure, Michael enter the building? But, more important, Josh had wanted to know as he’d walked back across the Heath to his flat, how might he find a way to see the tape himself? How might he witness, with his own eyes but without raising the suspicions of Slater, the truth of Michael’s story?
Josh had told Samantha it was Nathan, the gardener at Willow Road, who’d put him forward for the job with the Hampstead Heath team. But that had been a lie. Instead, he’d applied directly, using Nathan as a reference and an old City connection on the corporation’s board to push it through. Josh began working with them the following month, but he’d known he’d have to be patient, that there were no guarantees. He was acting purely on speculation. But then wasn’t that what he’d always done, and what he’d always been so good at with Lehman’s? Speculating, betting on outcomes, playing a waiting game, then striking when the opportunity came.
In time, his patience won out. It was early in April when Josh and his team were sent to cut back the rhododendrons on the Highgate side of the Heath. The area they were working edged the grounds of the school, and as Josh had seen the year before, to save themselves the daily trip across the Heath, they borrowed one of the school caretaker’s storage sheds while they were there.
Jim, the caretaker, was a widower in his early sixties, talkative and sociable. As well as caretaking the school, he performed groundsman duties for the leisure centre. It was the Easter holidays, and the school was empty. So Jim was more than pleased to offer the team the use of his office again. To make teas and coffees, get out of the rain, or just to take the weight off their feet for a few minutes in one of his broken-down armchairs.
―
Josh was sitting in one of these armchairs, slung back in its spongy springs, when he’d first seen the videocassette. Once he had, he’d been unable to take his eyes off it. He’d assumed, having first got to know Jim, he’d then have had to find a way to steer him onto the subject of the school’s security cameras, and then again on to where their footage might be kept. Beyond that he’d had no other plan about how to get hold of the footage for himself. So to see a tape above him, written with that date, it almost seemed like a bait, as if someone was setting him a trap.
He looked around the rest of the room, on the other shelves, for other cassettes. But there were none. Just this crooked pile on the shelf above him, each spine written with a date. While Jim talked on — about his time as a semi-pro footballer, his grandkids — that top tape seemed to gather a luminescence at the edges of Josh’s vision, its black numbers burning into his mind.
As Josh and his colleagues finished up, the three of them putting their mugs in the sink, Josh nodded at the shelf. “Those tapes,” he’d asked Jim. “What are they?”
Jim looked up at the shelf, squinting, as if he hadn’t considered that part of his office for a while. Josh swallowed. He was nervous. He felt he should have given some kind of explanation for his question. The other members of his team had already left the room. “The date on that top one,” he’d said, taking off his glasses to clean them on his shirt. “Seventh of June. It’s my daughter’s birthday.”
“Oh!” Jim nodded, seeing them. “Those. Yeah, they’re old security tapes. CCTV. The police had them for a while. Can’t remember why. We’d switched the whole system by the time they came back.” He looked back at Josh. “All digital now, see? More cameras, too. Isn’t a metre of this bloody place that isn’t covered.”
Josh nodded. “Right. Well, better safe than sorry, I guess.” He went towards the door. “Thanks for the tea, Jim,” he said as he left.
“How old is she?” Jim called from inside. Josh looked back into the room. “Your daughter,” Jim said. “How old is she?”
“Four,” Josh replied, his knuckles white on the door frame. “She’s four.”
“Lovely age,” Jim said, smiling from his desk. “Lovely age.”
―
Josh waited until their last day working alongside the school before he took the cassette. Jim wasn’t going anywhere, so he’d had to ask him about the settings on one of the mowers he had parked up outside to get him to leave. Once they were at the mower, Josh patted at his pockets. “Shit,” he said. “My phone. Won’t be a sec.”
Jogging back to the office, he’d pulled out Jim’s chair, stood on it, and reached up for the cassette, slipping it into the back of his shorts. Its spine, he saw, as he took it off the shelf, was thick with other dates, layered-on stickers reaching back through weeks and months.
Josh was back with Jim in less than a minute. As Jim talked him through the mower’s operation he’d tried to listen, but his mind was already rushing through possibilities. It could be nothing. There was no reason, other than the date, that the police hadn’t requested the tape for another investigation entirely. But then, he’d told himself, what were the chances of that? This was, after all, where Michael had said he’d been. That must be why they took it. But surely if there’d been anything in it, then wouldn’t Slater have noticed? Wouldn’t she have pulled Michael in? But still, Josh had been waiting for months, for something more than just a sense or a few crumbs of once-damp soil. So he had to see it. He had to know.
He bought the TV the following day, from a Cash Converters on the Finchley Road. It was an old silver portable with a VHS player embedded under the screen. “I’ve got loads of films for that, too,” the checkout clerk told him as he paid. “There’s some great eighties porn. Classic hairstyles.” Josh told him he was good, thanks. He just wanted the TV. That was all he needed.
The image quality was poor. Black-and-white, with the occasional jump and shiver in the image. But it was clear enough. An elevated view of the sliding doors at the entrance to the sports hall. At first Josh began viewing it in real time, watching as a shard of sunlight slid across the floor, stretching the shadows of the door’s lettering. But then, remembering the time of Michael’s lessons, he’d pressed fast-forward, sending the counter in the corner of the screen climbing through the hours of the day. In jerky speed, a cleaner mopped the tiles, a pigeon hopped in, got trapped, then flew out. Every hour or so Jim would appear, carrying a different tool each time. Then, for several accelerated hours, the view remained empty. Just the municipal floor, the edge of a notice board and the encroaching shadow of a branch beyond the glass doors.
As the counter reached three o’clock, then three-fifteen, Josh slowed the tape to real time again. He didn’t care how long it would take. He just didn’t want to miss anything. He wanted to be sure. Michael’s lesson had been at four o’clock. It always was. But if he didn’t arrive, or if he was late, then maybe, just maybe that would be enough. So with the TV propped on the coffee table, his elbows on his knees and his fists under his chin, Josh watched the empty entrance, glued to the filmed minutes in front of him. As the counter reached three-twenty he felt a stab of guilt. It must have been around then, in the world on the screen, that he’d left his house by the front door. He tried to focus, to forget, as the minutes continued their steady climb, the moment he’d abandoned his daughter, and what else had followed.