He was a sneaky devil, my cousin. She was neither sweating nor shaking and was far from being hypoglycaemic as yet, so far as I could tell. But it did not occur to her to doubt him. He was being far too convincingly matter-of-fact and also slightly embarrassed about having to impose on her in such a manner, for that. She obediently did as he asked, not for herself, but so that she could perform what she saw as an essential duty to the best of her abilities. She barely even pulled a face as she drank down her tea.
“Thank you,” he said politely when she’d finished. “Let’s just give it a few minutes before we start on the footage, shall we? I’ll just pour us all a cup while we’re waiting. How do you prefer your tea normally, Mrs Price?”
“Strong and unsweetened with a little milk,” she told him unthinkingly, keen to wash the sickly taste out of her mouth.
He brought a fresh cup for her and another for me before serving Annie and himself. Such a normal, everyday thing to do, sipping at tea in company, and she was so focused on the task before her by then that she didn’t even notice that she’d automatically taken a cheese-topped cracker from another offered plate, mimicking my own actions. Whatever her emotional state, the body knew what it wanted. A heartening step in the right direction.
“The footage?” I asked once Shay had whisked the cups away again.
“Second tab. There are several clips from two locations that seemed promising. I’ve added in some cleaned up stills of the best frames at the end of each section.”
Vanessa leaned forward alertly, waiting for me to start the clips.
I’d heard Shay quietly get up at around four last night but had dozed off again almost immediately. He often split his sleep into a few hours at night and odd little naps here and there. He’d got another thirty minutes in on the flight over, although how he managed that was a mystery to me. And I’d had no idea that he’d got so much work done before I finally went downstairs myself, a little after six this morning.
The footage he’d found was the usual low resolution black and white stuff, but the frames he’d cleaned, enhanced and blown up were exceptionally good images, considering their source. The ferry had sailed at 14:10, so he’d run through the four hours before then on each of the available cameras and edited out all the useless parts. It was a shot from inside a petrol station on the road to the Uig ferry terminal that got a reaction from her, a man coming up to the counter to pay. Their CCTV camera must have been set to upload its data regularly, or Shay wouldn’t have had any means of gaining access to it remotely.
She frowned at the short, jerky clip uncertainly. When the following still came up, she actually jumped a little. The man fitted the description she’d given. He was also wearing a beanie, with barely a strand of hair left loose, not that that mattered in a black-and-white image.
“That’s him!” she told us, not a flicker of doubt in her face or her voice. “That’s the man I saw talking to Damien.” I didn’t insult her by asking if she was sure. I just let out a long, relieved breath.
“Thank you, Mrs Price,” I said feelingly. “You have just given us the best possible lead we could have hoped for.”
“Zoom in a little,” Shay requested. “The inside of his right wrist.” I did as he asked. What looked like part of a tattoo was showing beyond the edge of the man’s sleeve as he reached across the counter to pay for his purchases. “I spotted that earlier. It looks like it might be part of a compass design.”
A popular choice among merchant seamen, I recalled from somewhere.
“Possibly,” I decided, unable to be sure, “but whether it is or not, we can get this photo distributed and start running it through our facial recognition software, see if he’s already in the database.”
At my side, Vanessa Price had paled somewhat and trembled slightly as she stared fixedly at the screen. Not from fear, as I could see very well, but furious, murderous rage.
“Is there anything else I can help you with, Inspector?” she asked through whitened lips. Actually, there was.
“Your husband was here in Lewis and Harris last week, I believe? Part of a business trip around the islands?” I hastily minimised the image.
“Yes, he was.” She shifted her gaze back to me. “Do you think that man saw him then? Picked him out?”
“Again, Mrs Price, it is no more than a possibility at this stage, but one that we can’t afford to overlook. Did your husband take any photographs whilst he was here? I’d like to see those if he did… and any you may have taken yourself on the ferry yesterday, too. There’s always a chance our man there accidentally got caught in the background of a shot.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t take any on the boat, but Damien is always snapping away, every chance he gets…” The wrong tense in that statement stopped her dead for a moment. “That is, my husband was always taking photographs. He was a very keen amateur wildlife photographer.” She stood and went to open the wardrobe where a pile of unopened bags were heaped up. She pulled out an expensive-looking photographer’s bag and came to sit down again. I couldn’t help but notice her eyes beginning to water as she opened it and carefully removed Damien’s camera from its padded rest, an object he’d cherished.
Mr Price had certainly been a real enthusiast. There were three large lenses snuggled down in their individual padded beds, and a long teleconverter lay along the other side of
