By three o’clock coming home was getting old. She had a crick in her neck, a sore back, and a much lower opinion of office jobs—especially if they came with chairs like the orthopedic disaster she’d ended up with in the Hamleys camera room.
“Walk me through it again,” she said, leaning subtly away from Jeanine from HR, who occupied the middle seat, and who in turn was discreetly avoiding Sydney from Security’s mouse-elbow.
Sydney expectorated glutinously, then croaked: “Yerss, mam.” With a degree of dainty fingertip precision that belied every other aspect of his appearance, he scrubbed the mouse cursor back along the camera feed timeline. “’Ere’s where our perps walked in.”
The cameras in Hamleys’ lobby area recorded in full-color HD plus infrared. They were a far cry from the usual grainy corner-shop crap Wendy was used to. Nevertheless, she had a hard job identifying the figures Sydney was intent on tracking—there was just too much foot traffic. Finally she got a handle on them when Sydney paused and moused over their faces.
“Huh. Give me a second.” She jotted down notes. Perp 1: tall white male, lightly built, clean-shaven, gray or check coat, dark trousers, white open-necked shirt, hair covered by a narrow-brimmed hat. Perp 2: average height white male, average build, dark hair and eyes, clean-shaven, wearing a suit so deplorable it might have been in its owner’s family since his grandfather was demobbed from national service in the fifties. “Hm, not exactly your average toy shoppers.” Perp 3: Black female in fleece windbreaker, exercise leggings or … “Cycling kit?” She had her hair tied back in dreadlocks, and wore no jewelry (or at least nothing visible on video). Perp 4: shorter-than-average East Asian or Chinese male, black hoodie with hood raised, jeans, trainers—the only one who carried an obvious shoplifter vibe, which meant he was a decoy, except—“There’s something off about this one.” She tapped the screen. “Something about the way he walks.”
“I dun’t see’t,” Sydney grumped.
“The hips.” Jeanine from HR said suddenly. “He swaggers. He’s putting too much effort into it. Like he’s…”
“Tryin’ ter ’tract attention,” Sydney agglutinated.
Wendy winced, hoping he couldn’t see her. “He swaggers like he doesn’t care where he’s going, but he doesn’t bump into anything,” she said. “Or anyone.”
The perps took the escalator up to the first floor. Wendy watched as Short Hoodie bounced up to Hat Guy and exchanged words in Model Railways. Hands pressed up against a gleaming display cabinet, beseeching. “Did you dust that for prints?”
“Too late,” Jeanine said apologetically. “The front of store display cases get polished every time there’s a lull in business. Nobody linked it with the robbery until the police ran the tapes a couple of hours later.”
A couple of hours? Wendy stifled a groan. Either somebody senior had lost the plot, or the cuts to Metropolitan Police funding were worse than she’d realized—armed/transhuman robbery of a cash room ought to rate an emergency response. “Did you get anything?”
“Mebbe.” Sydney scrubbed forward. The cameras jerked and jumped, following the foursome through Party Costumes and as far as the changing room. “Look.” He froze the stream, then stepped frame by frame through an altercation: Black Biker Babe shoving a bishoujo maid’s frock at Short Hoodie, who reacted as if it were kryptonite, recoiling and falling back against a rail of costumes. “Maybe we’ll lift some prints there.” He zoomed the image in closer. There being no CSI-style enhance button in the real world, all this gave her was an eyeful of blurry block pixels. But she got to see Black Biker Babe’s hand wrap around a chromed rail as she leaned close to her homie.
“Did you check that?” Wendy demanded.
“No, no we didn’t!” Jeanine sat up. “And they don’t polish the clothes rails anything like often enough! Good catch, Sid!”
The video stream played on. Wendy watched as Hat Guy, who was apparently the ringleader or instigator, thrust superhero costumes at his posse. They changed, picked up their zombified store detective escort, and headed into the back.
“The store detective—what happened to him?” she asked.
“Oh, we fired his sorry ass.”
Wendy resisted the urge to grind her teeth. “I mean, what did they do to him? Was he an inside man, or—”
“Oh no, the raiders messed with everybody’s head! The bloke with the hat, you know, the Joker? He has some kind of mind control power. Ralph barely remembered anything from the moment he intercepted them until after they left.”
So why did you bloody sack him? Wendy kept her trap shut. Ours not to wonder why. Mistakes were made, management needed a scapegoat, same old story. “Next.”
She watched in silence as the heist went down in the strong room. Then she watched it again in slo-mo, slack-jawed, as Chinese Hoodie Dude—now dressed as Robin—executed the most amazingly slick slapstick routine she’d ever seen carried out in a single shoot, without a stunt double in sight. “Now that’s something else.” She peered at the screen. “What happened to the guards?”
“They fell over,” Sydney opined.
“It looks like they tried to hit Robin, missed him and hit each other, then accidentally handcuffed themselves to the furniture upside-down and back-to-front.”
“Yeah. We fired them, too,” Jeanine observed.
“Do you lot do anything but fire people?” Wendy demanded. “You realize I’m going to have to track them down and interview
