Thirty-Four
The image was in black and white and it was a little grainy but she was looking across the main street of the village. There wasn’t much to see, the tarmac of the road, the bus stop and the little bus shelter behind it that was built into the sheer cliff side that climbed to the moorland above. If it weren’t for the time code in the top left corner of the screen, it could have been a still photograph except that, when she looked closely, she could see the birch tree beside the shelter swaying slightly, its naked leafless branches rippling. Tabitha felt tears coming to her eyes. She could almost feel the northerly wind from the Channel on her cheeks. She could almost smell the salt and the seaweed and the mud at low tide.
She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Think, Tabitha, she told herself. Calm. Think calmly. She opened her notebook at a clean page and wrote “CCTV” at the top and underlined it. She looked at the image. Nothing was happening. There was nothing to note down. There was an absurdity about it. A static image of nothing happening in an irrelevant part of the village. What good was that to her?
She mustn’t give in to thoughts like that. It would drive her mad. Think, Tabitha, she told herself again. She tried to place herself at the scene. If she were standing there, with her back to the village shop, seeing what the camera saw, what else would she be able to see? If she turned right, she would be on the road leading up and out of the village, the road that had been blocked by the fallen tree. What time was that? She looked through the notes she had made. It must have been shortly after nine-thirty.
Next door to the village shop was the church and next to that was the little vicarage where Mel lived. After that was a row of houses and then the hotel, closed up for the winter. On the other side, the side away from the sea, were two rows of houses on the hillside under the cliff.
If you turned left instead of right, you would see the little cove and stony beach down on your left. Tabitha swam there every morning. Just beyond the cove, the road looped round on itself. If you stayed to the left, you went up the broad drive to the Reeses’ house. If you veered right, a rough and uneven track led to Tabitha’s house. Beyond the two houses there was just the cliff wall as it curved round the bay that Okeham sat in. There was no way up or round. The coastal path didn’t go through Okeham, it veered away from it, up on the moors, and only rejoined the actual coastline three miles further along.
But the camera couldn’t see to the left or to the right. It just blankly looked straight across at the bus shelter. And then suddenly two girls walked into the frame. They were young, about nine or ten, wearing thick coats and hats. Tabitha realized that this was going to be a problem. The twenty-first of December had been a cold, blustery day. Even if people were caught on this grainy footage, it might be a challenge to identify them. The girls walked across the road toward the camera and disappeared underneath as they entered the shop. Tabitha thought she recognized one of them. Beth Tally’s daughter, she thought. She wrote the name down. Another group of children appeared, two boys this time and a girl standing apart. They were waiting for the school bus. The girl crossed the road and entered the shop. Tabitha had got used to seeing them in the shop in the mornings, buying packets of crisps and giggling and escaping the cold.
A car pulled up on the far side of the road and two people got out. Tabitha instantly recognized Rob Coombe. The girl getting out of the passenger side must be his daughter, though Tabitha had never seen her before. The two of them crossed the road and went into the shop. Tabitha noted the name and the time.
The two boys were hunched over against the cold, hands in pockets. One of them laughed, then the other seemed to hear something and looked round to his right. What had he seen?
A compact figure entered the frame, so wrapped up in a heavy jacket and a hat and a scarf that they were almost entirely hidden. For a moment Tabitha wondered who it was and then she felt a rush of emotion that left her feeling faint. She was looking at herself. She seized the control and froze the image.
She looked at the time code: 08:11:44. At that moment, eleven minutes past eight on December 21, Stuart Rees was home, alive, and Tabitha Hardy had walked to the village shop to buy a carton of milk. Tabitha felt a terrible impulse to shout at that woman, frozen there in the street, to tell her to forget everything, to go back home, get in her car and drive out of the village, to go anywhere, just get away. Not that it would have done any good. She had never been much good at taking advice. As she came closer to the shop, unaware she was being observed, she looked as if she were frowning, thinking hard about something. Tabitha wondered what it could have been.
At almost the same moment as Tabitha disappeared into the shop, a huge shape filled the frame. The school bus had arrived. She could see the face of a boy staring through a cracked window of the bus, his face heavily
