‘Hello Sir,’ said Sarah Cobb, rubbing her eyes on the small sofa, a laptop still on at his desk and displaying the station’s screensaver. ‘It got busy in the mess room last night, so I came up here for some quiet. You don’t mind do you?’
‘You’ve been here all night?’ He noticed then her zippered jumper and grey jogging bottoms.
‘Well, I went home after a few hours,’ she said, rising from her sleeping position and tending to the coffee maker, ‘but then I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I went for a run about nine, and accidentally/on purpose found I was running past the station… You know how it is, when you’re on a case.’
‘I do,’ he said sadly. ‘But still…’ He found himself torn between guilt at letting his staff go so far beyond the call of duty for him, and eagerness to learn what she may have found. ‘You really didn’t have to…’ Grey found himself asking, before her eagerness took over,
‘But it was worth it, sir. Come and see.’ He joined her as she placed two piping cups from the machine by the laptop, and pulled another chair around in front of the computer screen,
‘So I was looking through the CCTV footage, from the cameras overlooking the services carpark. Once you’d given me a starting point, I found the camera nearest to the hotel and began scanning from around seven o’clock on the Tuesday night.’ She tapped at laptop keys and found for Grey a blurred black and white still of parked cars, and behind them what could just be made out to be the hotel frontage at night.
‘You’ve put all this film on your PC?’ he asked.
‘No, they have an electronic hard drive system. All the cameras feed through and store their data there. I can access it online. Anyway, over the very first few frames I found this…’
In the film, its frames progressing in stop-motion, was a man, little more than an outline, approaching and then pausing by — just at the edge of the frame — a car Grey noted to be a contender for the one described by Maria, the evening receptionist. And then there she was herself, casting a backward glance as Thomas as she made for the hotel front door to begin her shift. The car did indeed seem larger than the others, its glinting chrome showing clearly against the darkness around it.
‘You’ve found Thomas!’
‘Yes sir… and after that I thought I’d just keep working through all the CCTV film. That’s not all I found though,’ she added, a note of caution in her voice.
Grey watched ominously, as Sarah’s fingers moved to speed up the sequence of images,
‘This is about seven minutes later,’ she explained, slowing the playback to a crawl; as firstly the figure identified as Thomas seemed to look across sharply at something out of shot, before dashing off in the opposite direction so quickly that by the next still he had vanished from the frame completely.
‘What happened?’ asked Grey, his question answered though by the very next image, where a second figure — no more than a blur — shot across past the parked car, coming from the direction Thomas had been looking towards and then moving in the direction in which he had then fled.
‘Who was that?’ he asked.
‘They’re moving too quickly to see,’ Sarah replied, ‘but they are a bit clearer later on.’
Moving expertly to queue up another stream of images, scenes of night-time and movement, caught in low resolution, Sarah explained,
‘So, I asked Records, and they found me an Ordinance Survey map of the area,’ (Grey noticing it then folded up by the computer.) ‘I had a look around, at how it all fitted together — the hotel, the Corridor, the motorway and the services.
‘I started in our corner of the carpark, and then marked on it where there were cameras and what direction they looked out at; then I began scanning the footage for the remainder of the evening…’
‘So you had another load of cameras to go through? No wonder you’ve been here all night. Sarah, you didn’t have to…’
‘Sir, just let me show you this one thing.’ Now she looked really worried.
‘Go on.’
‘Now I couldn’t see anything on the film from the next two cameras along the carpark, and so with nothing specific to go on I was all set to pack up then, and let the general scanning of all hours of all the tapes resume tomorrow. But as I say, I had a second wind, and wouldn’t have slept with all this going on in my mind.’
‘Okay.’ He sensed she was building toward something.
‘So I came back and studied the map some more; and tried to see where someone could have run off to, in the general direction Thomas was going, without being caught on either of the next two cameras? And it’s here,’ her finger moved to the map she had opened out in front of the computer, ‘this path around the side of the hotel, which if it’s caught on a camera is going to be one of the hotel’s own. So I rang them up…’
‘At that time? They must have loved you.’
‘I think the guard I spoke to was glad of the company; he sounded lonely there all night.’
The Sarah Grey knew would have said this jokingly, he thought, with relish, with hints of innuendo; so why was she instead finding the pathos in the guard’s situation?
‘And luckily they have the same security system,’ she continued, ‘so he gave me the internet link and their pass code.’
And there, with more deft touches of the keyboard, was Thomas on screen again, dashing around the front corner of the building, Grey relieved Sarah had rejoined the trail of his journey, even as he began to dread how this chase could end.
‘There is nothing though on the camera covering the back of the hotel, so I looked to see where he might have gone next; and the only option I could see would be leaving the path here,’ she directed his view across the terrain with a quickly moving finger, ‘which looks like it might involve climbing a fence — we’d have to check — but I think he did because of this.
This next shot, though just as grainy as the others — its tones reduced to black and white, shapes dumbed down to blur and static — nevertheless showed what might, just might, have been a person running very quickly past a signpost fixed and unmoving. The image haunted Grey, offering the illusion of the signpost being visible through that wraithlike form, the dashing spectre half there and half not, a creature neither of this world or the next.
‘Running this way would bring you out quite near to the services,’ continued Sarah, she beginning to flag a little now as she ran through her narrative. ‘There are eight separate cameras around the restaurant and petrol station — and you know even a busy place like the services can seem deserted at certain times of the day, once rush hour has passed. I found a couple of people coming and goings, some lorry drivers talking… it might have taken hours for me to find Thomas’ trail again. But I had one last idea before I packed it in for the night, and that was that there was one particular way they could have gone which would have definitely have passed by a camera. So I thought, I’m here now, I’ll do a quick scan of the cameras either side of the footbridge over the motorway — you know, for people who are travelling south and so have parked on the other side.’
Although there was a road bridge, linked to sliproads and roundabouts and so forming something of a minor junctions, for some drivers heading south and not requiring meals or shop goods, or who didn’t mind the walk across, there was a carpark on that side too.
She queued up the next screen. The opening shot was of a dimly lit walkway leading to steps heading upward, and of a man, though you wouldn’t want to say who, starting up the metal staircase as if leaping over water in a steeplechase. A dramatic, startling image, but nothing compared to the next…
Threatening enough to be the cover of a video nasty, dripping as it was with implied violence, in this new image were two figures seen only as outlines, stark, in equal parts blurred and jagged, each an inverted silhouette of bunched and crumpled clothing, of strong light reflecting from pale clothes and skin. They seemed to be circling each other within the narrow tunnel of the covered bridge. Grey shuddered.
‘Sir, once you see them both a bit more clearly, I’m not sure that the other one couldn’t be…’
‘Stephen Carman.’
‘Yes. After seeing his photo yesterday, it really could be him. If only he were turned a bit more towards us.’
‘They told us in Nottingham his car had passed this way on Tuesday.’
‘So what does he have to do with Thomas Long?’
‘I hope to soon find out.’
Both remained looking at the screen. By the men’s body language one seemed to be tending forward at the
