53
Alex laid the ninth diary face down on the floor beside her chair, and leaned back wide-eyed. She took a deep breath, blinked hard, then nodded, a decision made.
She jumped from her chair and ran through to her bedroom. Ten minutes later, the reincarnation of Myra Graham emerged once more, smoothing the dress against her thighs, flexing and thrusting out her breasts in the brassiere, which was fastened at its tightest notch, and giving the suspender belt a final adjustment.
She stepped out into Woodlands Road and looked around. The pubs in the area were peaceful and friendly, fine for Alex, but not for Myra, and not for the dress. She walked towards the City Centre for a few minutes, until a taxi came towards her, its orange sign lit up, and she hailed it. ‘Maitland Hotel, please.’
Barely three minutes later, the black cab pulled up outside the high-rise, five-star hotel. She paid the driver and strode confidently through the automatic doors. Inside, the foyer was plush and inviting. She looked around, selected an available table and sat down. As she lowered herself into the leather chair, the black dress rode up, revealing thigh almost up to the top of her nylons.
She glanced across at a waiter, summoning him with a faint smile and a flick of an eyelash. As he strode briskly across the room, almost at a trot, she felt a surge of exultation. ‘Yes, miss?’ he asked, a little too eagerly.
‘Gin and tonic, please.’
He returned, within a minute, with her drink and a bowl of potato crisps, setting them before her with a flourish, which turned into a bow as she told him to keep the change from the five pound note.
She sat there, sipping her drink and looking coolly around. The foyer bar was far from being at its busiest, but even late on a Sunday afternoon, it was alive with guests. A few of them were women, all accompanied, but mostly they were single men.
She spotted her target at once. Even seated she could tell how big he was from the size of his shoes and the length of his legs crossed in front of him. His reddish-blond hair was cropped tight and the yellow-tanned pallor of his skin marked him out as an American. She had sensed him watching her as she had swung, long-legged, into the hotel.
Slowly and deliberately, she turned her eyes around to look at him. She held his gaze for a few seconds, smiled briefly, then looked away. She picked up her drink, took a sip and looked over her shoulder, around the rest of the big area. When she turned back to replace her gin and tonic on its mat on the table, he was standing over her.
‘Good evening, ma’am,’ he said, in a light Texan drawl. ‘Mind if I join you?’
She glanced towards the door. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was late arriving. So I’ve either been stood up, or my date’s given up on me. Sure, go ahead, sit down.’
She watched as he lowered himself into the seat opposite her. He was around thirty, at least six feet six and running slightly, but not unacceptably, to fat. ‘What a well filled lunchbox,’ she thought to herself, as he sat down.
‘Been in Glasgow long?’ she asked, almost casually.
‘Two days,’ said the American. ‘My name’s Randall. Randall Garland, a lonely man from Austin, Texas.’ He held out a hand.
She shook it, looking him full in the eyes, and holding it for just a second longer than necessary. ‘Myra,’ she said. She grinned, with a lift of that right eyebrow. ‘Myra Graham, a friendly lady from Glasgow, Scotland.’
54
Tom Whatling’s warning had been well placed. Many of his salvaged negatives bore an FA heading, and even in negative form, many of them were harrowing to see.
There was a two-car pile-up outside the Cramond Brig Hotel, in which Skinner and Masters counted eight bodies, before the DCC ripped the negative from the viewer. There were shots of pedestrian accidents, most of them involving children, but one of a man, his head and upper body protruding from beneath the double front wheels of a heavy vehicle. Not all the deaths had been road casualties. There were scenes of a family of three burned to death in a house fire, bodies shining white in the negative image. There was film from another incident on a railway line, in which they could make out a woman’s severed torso beside the track.
Three times, Skinner asked Pamela to leave him to the grim task, and three times she refused, saying that if he wanted her to leave he would have to order her. Each time, smiling at her tenacity, he had pulled out another rack of negatives.
They had been surveying the grim scenes for almost three hours when they found the negatives which they were beginning to fear had been lost after all. There were four strips each bearing file number FA 4782. As soon as Skinner fed the first image into the viewer and switched on the back-lit screen, he knew. They had learned to read colours in negative, and when the DCC saw the light-brown shape of a tree, he stiffened and recoiled slightly.
It was a long shot, taken from the other side of the road, but the shapes of the car against the tree, and of the figure inside were clearly visible. All of the photographs on the strip had been taken from a distance, recording the crash from all around the vehicle, most of them showing the direction in which the Cooper S had been travelling.
Skinner withdrew the strip and fed in the next. The first frame, the second, the third and the fourth showed, from different distances and angles, deep tyre tracks in a patch of mud on the road. He pulled the strip through to the fifth photograph.
Pamela Masters cried out in horror as it appeared. It had been taken through the shattered windscreen and showed a close-up of Myra’s body in the car, the steering column through her chest, her eyes staring wide at the sheer surprise of her last second of life.
Bob Skinner sucked in his breath and looked away. Suddenly he was back in his dream, thrust back into the depths of his recovered memory, seeing everything, hearing everything, smelling everything.
‘Come on,’ he said, thickly, to Pamela. ‘This is what we came for.’ He forced himself to look back at the screen, ripping images through quickly, one by one, looking for the right angle, hoping against hope that it was there.
It was the eighth shot on the fourth strip. The attending officer had taken the photograph from the exact point at which Skinner had looked into the car. The field of vision of the lens seemed to replicate his memory exactly.
He picked up a small magnifying glass which he had found in the studio, and held it close to the bottom right-hand corner of the negative image, searching, millimetre by millimetre. Suddenly, he stopped. His left hand shot out and grabbed Pamela’s arm. ‘There, Pam, there. Look.’ He leaned back, holding the glass steady to allow her to see the spot upon which it was trained.
‘I can’t make out detail from this, but I’ll swear that’s the brake fluid pipe. You can see, it’s been broken.
‘When Tam gets back, I’ll have him make me a print of this section, big as he can. Then, pray God, I . . . we’ll . . . have what we need.’
55
The drive down to Alnwick took just over two hours: because Martin, driving his swift silver Mondeo with McIlhenney in the passenger seat, did not wish to suffer the embarrassment of tripping one of the many speed cameras on the A1; because behind them came a dark blue Ford Transit with black barred windows, and six burly uniformed policemen inside; and because, for the first time in several days, there was, simply, no need to rush.
Martin had never been to the old Northumbrian town before, but street signs took him, without difficulty, to its police station, past its castle and its prison.
Leaving the escort officers outside in the Transit they announced themselves to the Sergeant in reception,
