‘Cigarette? Where?’
Zoltan pointed up the ramp onto Cheshire Street.
‘So you didn’t check the Jaguar in?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You didn’t see the driver? You didn’t give him a ticket when he entered?’
‘No, miss. Is there a problem?’
‘Not yet, there isn’t.’ Cara could see that he was anxious. ‘I’m just asking some questions.’
She walked towards the Jaguar, looking around for CCTV. There was a dusty, fixed position camera on the far wall, a dome lens in the ceiling closer to the hut. Standing in an empty parking space beside the Jaguar, Cara cupped her hand against the driver’s window and looked inside. Nothing had been left on the seats.
‘So you didn’t see them?’
‘Excuse me, miss?’
‘You didn’t see who got out of this car? Three men, ten minutes ago.’
‘No. Like I tell you, I was having cup of coffee.’
‘Oh, it’s coffee now?’ said Cara. ‘A minute ago it was a cigarette. You should make your mind up, Zoltan.’
He took off the woollen hat and quickly flattened down his hair as if it would help him to organise his thoughts more carefully.
‘Cigarette with coffee. Both. On my break.’
Cara walked back towards the hut. A sign bolted to the wall said: ‘Petroleum Spirit. Highly Flammable. Switch Off Engine’. As she passed Zoltan, she said: ‘So who was minding the car park while you were away?’ and watched his eyes slip at the question.
‘Sorry, miss?’
‘I said who was minding the shop?’
‘Nobody. They just came in.’
Guilt was coming off him like the smell of old oil and rats’ piss in the car park. It annoyed Cara that Zoltan was so bad at lying, that he couldn’t even summon the energy to deceive her with a basic degree of competence.
‘They just came in,’ she repeated. ‘Who? The men in the Jaguar?’
‘Yes. That is right. The men in the Jaguar.’
‘They didn’t need a ticket?’
‘No. They come here all the time. That’s their space.’
The guard pointed at the Jaguar. It was the first meaningful attempt he had made to deceive her, but the remark sealed his fate.
‘So this is a branch of Europcar, is it?’ Cara asked.
Zoltan looked bewildered.
‘What, please?’
‘Never mind.’
Without bothering to seek his permission, she walked into the security hut. Zoltan followed her. A digital radio was tuned to a station playing ‘Tiny Dancer’. Zoltan turned it down as a Serbian-speaking disc jockey began speaking over the end of the track.
‘Are those CCTV cameras in operation?’ Cara asked.
‘Not working.’
‘Is that legal?’
Zoltan shrugged.
‘Mind if I see for myself?’
He didn’t have the courage to demand a warrant or to try to buy time by calling his boss. He managed to say only: ‘OK, sure’ before indicating the bank of television screens above his filthy, cluttered desk. Within minutes Zoltan had showed her how the security system worked, comprehensively contradicting his earlier claim that the CCTV in the car park was broken. The footage was blurred and indistinct, but as she moved through it, Cara was able to see images of every car and human being that had been on the ramp between midday and half-past twelve.
‘Where’s the rest of it?’ she asked when the footage suddenly cut off.
‘No more,’ he replied. ‘I go on coffee break, cameras they stopped working.’
‘Because you switched them off?’
Zoltan smiled broadly and shook his head in apparent amusement as he said: ‘No! Of course not.’
‘No?’ She watched him put the woollen hat back on his head. ‘You sure about that, Zoltan?’
‘One hundred percentage, yes. I am sure.’
Cara’s patience was now running low. She fixed the guard with the look her father described as ‘Medusa on crack’ and waited for him to come clean. He was standing next to an old kettle and a newly opened box of Yorkshire teabags, rocking very slightly backwards and forwards as he ducked in and out of eye contact.
‘Zoltan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Who switched off the cameras?’
‘Nobody.’
Cara leaned towards the bank of screens and fast-forwarded from the point at which the images had blacked out. Sure enough, new footage appeared shortly after twelve fifty. Zoltan made a noise in the back of his throat as Cara clicked through several still images of the white van marked ‘Kidson Electrical Services’ as it moved up the ramp. There was no sign of Kite, nor of the two men from the Jaguar.
‘Seemed to be working ten minutes ago,’ she said and waited for what she hoped would be a suitably earnest and detailed apology. When it wasn’t immediately forthcoming she said: ‘How much did they pay you?’
At that point Zoltan broke. He collapsed onto a squeaking office chair with some of the foam leaking out of it. He put his head in his hands. The wheels on the chair kept dragging back and forth on a torn section of the Daily Express as he shuffled and begged and moaned. He started speaking in Serbian, doubtless cursing his wretched luck and his shabby, half-baked lies. It was probable that his whole life had been a series of failures, each following relentlessly on the heels of the last, leading to this final humiliation.
‘What’s that, love?’ Cara asked. ‘You want to tell me something?’
‘I cannot,’ he said eventually. ‘I promised.’
‘Promised who?’
‘The man.’
‘What man?’
‘The man who paid me.’ Zoltan looked up with pleading eyes. ‘He said if I tell anyone what he did, he kill me.’
Cara called Vosse and told him everything. While she waited for him to make the journey from Acton to Mayfair, she instructed Zoltan to close the car park then took a more detailed look at the CCTV. The white van had been parked in the space beside the Jaguar where she had stood and looked through the driver’s window. A bollard had been placed beside it to reserve a slot which the Jaguar had later occupied. Cara knew that Kite had most likely been transferred into the back of the van which had driven past her on Cheshire Street. She passed the vehicle details by text to Vosse, wondering why Kite had so readily agreed to get into the Jaguar in the first place. Was it a
