Once we were back in her office, Caldera tapped at her keyboard for a second, then beckoned to me. “Take a look.”
I walked around the desk. Filling most of the computer screen was a headshot of a man in his thirties. The face was long and angled, eyes expressionless and grey. The beard was thinner, and there were no sunglasses this time, but I recognised him all the same. “Look familiar?” Caldera asked.
I reached to the keyboard, scrolled right. A series of photos went past, different angles, different places. Alone, none of them was a perfect match, but putting them together . . . “It’s him.”
“You sure?”
“Ninety percent.”
Caldera nodded. “Jean-Jacques Duval, thirty-four years old, mage name Chamois. Born in Lyons, travels all around Europe as a freelance battle-mage—he works for Dark or Light, anyone who’ll pay the bills. Suspected assassin but he’s never quite made it onto the wanted list. He uses France as a base and does all his dirty work out of the country, then stays on just good enough terms with the French Council to get away with it. Pretty tough reputation. The people who want to talk him up call him Silence, or The Silent.”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d found the video of the battle in Stratford station. It was grainy and low quality, but it wasn’t hard for me to recognise myself. “I think I know where that came from.”
We watched the fight play out. I saw myself jump away from Chamois’s implosion spell. “You run fast when you want to, don’t you?” Caldera said.
“Practice.” On the video, Chamois leapt onto the train and disappeared from view. “How long’s he been in the country?”
“His passport’s not registered as having entered,” Caldera said. “Not that that means anything.”
“Any other sightings?”
Caldera shook her head. “He probably gated out as soon as that attack failed.”
“Huh.” The video ended and I searched quickly through the folders. “Where’s the video from Pudding Mill Lane?”
“Yeah, well, that’s the bad news,” Caldera said. “You know those cameras you saw at Pudding Mill Lane, the ones you went back to take a closer look at? All dead. Early Thursday evening, they lost the feeds from platform and approach CCTV.”
I looked up at her sharply. “That’s the same time that report was called in.”
“Mm-hm.”
“What killed the cameras?”
“‘Electrical failure,’ whatever that means. Not like a bunch of TFL engineers are going to know what to look for in a magic attack.”
“Yeah, I’m guessing we can rule out coincidence.” I thought for a second. “When did the feeds go?”
“Between six twenty-three and six twenty-six. The call-in was seven-oh-four.”
“Not collateral damage, then.”
“Safe bet,” Caldera said. “So someone decides to do some business around the station, and they don’t want anyone watching.”
“Why would they pick a station?” I said. “Why not somewhere private?”
“Maybe they didn’t want somewhere completely private. Picked a place that was away from the public eye, but public enough that it’d discourage a fight.”
I tried to picture it in my head. Two people, maybe more, coming to that station to do . . . what? A meeting, an exchange? I remembered what Xiaofan had told us. A younger boy and a man, and the man had held the focus only a little while. Maybe the data focus had passed between the two of them, given or taken. Then the man had lost it, for it to fall into the gravel beyond the platform . . . but how?
“So something goes wrong,” Caldera continued when I stayed quiet. “There’s a fight, we get the call. Somewhere along the way, that focus gets lost. You pick it up, and sometime after that our Mr. Chamois figures out the thing’s missing. He gets the idea that if he hangs around, he might find out who took it. You show up, he spots you, and everything plays out from there.”
“Why was he trying to kill me then?”
“Probably wasn’t. Just wanted to cripple you badly enough that he could take you somewhere for a proper interrogation before he finished you off.”
“You’re a real ray of sunshine about this stuff, aren’t you?”
“Well, that’s enough guesswork for now,” Caldera said. “Check the folder. I’ve got every CCTV recording I can find from the Stratford area over that time period, plus all the recordings from Pudding Mill Lane from earlier. I’ve shared access with your computer, so go through them and see what you can turn up.”
I clicked on the folder and started scrolling down. When I saw just how much footage there was, my eyebrows went up.
It was a few hours later.
The sun had set, and the sky through the small office window was dark. Around us, Keeper headquarters was quieter, though still nowhere near empty. Every now and then footsteps would go past in the corridor outside, but Caldera and I were alone in the office.
I leant back from the computer with a groan. My eyes were aching and it was getting hard to focus on the screen. “I’m not getting anything.”
“Nothing from the stations?” Caldera said.
“He jumped on that train at Stratford, but he didn’t get off at Bow Church or any of the stations after that. No sign of him on the station cameras before or after. I don’t think he was even there.” I shook my head. “And once he stops casting spells and walks into the crowd, he looks just like all the other five thousand people on these tapes. This is like looking for a needle in a haystack, except you don’t know if the needle’s in the haystack. I don’t think he’s on any of these tapes at all.”
“Probably.”
I stared gloomily at the computer screen. “I wish we had Sonder for this.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who’s figured out that timesight’s useful,” Caldera said. “Sonder’s on the upward track now. He’s on the exchange program in Washington.”
“What are we doing here?” I asked Caldera. “I mean, we’re looking at footage from one to two days ago. Even if we see anything, is it going to help us catch this guy?”
“If he’s smart, he’s out of the country by now.”
“So . . . ?”
Caldera shook her head. “You’re like all the other mages. You think Keeper work’s all about mage duels and chasing people down. We only have those kinds of fights when stuff goes wrong.”
“So what’s the plan?”
Caldera laughed. “We know what happened, we know what crime was committed, and we’ve got a positive ID on the suspect. We basically solved the case already. This is just the wrap-up.”
“But we have no idea how to find the guy.”
“Don’t need to,” Caldera said. “IDing the suspect and proving what they did is the hard part. Once we’re done with this, you can write up a report and we’ll get a warrant issued for Chamois’s arrest. He attacked you and a civilian on camera: it’s pretty open-shut. Then we pass it on and wait for the next case.”
“And wait for some other Keeper to pick him up?”
“What, you wanted to take the guy down yourself? We’re an organisation. Quit with the lone-wolf stuff.”
I shrugged. “Seriously, though,” Caldera said, “you did a good job on this one. As soon as you managed to get away from the guy at Stratford, you won. The rest is just cleanup.”
“Doesn’t feel like we’ve won.”
“You get used to it. Come take a look at this.”
I got up and crossed the room to look over Caldera’s shoulder. On the screen was a nighttime video of a London A-road, two lanes each way. The time stamp read 7:03, two days ago. “What am I looking at?” I said.
“CCTV from Stratford High Street,” Caldera said. “Same time that the 999 call was made.” She pointed at the bottom-right of the picture. “See the corner there? That’s the side street that leads over the canal to the Pudding Mill Lane construction site. Watch.”