The corridor was endless, with a door on either side at regular intervals. Eventually, they came to a room near the end of it.
“Here we are. Let’s see if Hudson can help you out.” He poked his head into the room. “Can you spare five minutes to help out two damsels in distress?”
“What’s it worth?” a man with a gruff voice replied.
“You’ll have to ask them that, they’re standing right behind me.”
“Shit! Okay, send them in, I’ll see what they need.”
The man stepped to one side, smiled and motioned for Katy and Charlie to enter. He leaned in and whispered, “He adores helping people really, I promise.”
“We’ll take your word for that,” Katy chuckled. “Hello there, I’m DI Foster, I wondered if you could do me a favour and try to enhance a grainy image we have, please.”
The thirty-something man with blond spiky hair held out his hand. “Let me see what I can do. You want to wait?”
“We were hoping to, yes.”
“Grab a stool. Grainy you said? What am I about to see?”
“Images of a man leaving work; he was later found dead. What we need to establish is who the person in the car that appears to follow him out of the car park is.”
“Should be simple enough.”
Katy and Charlie sat on the two spare stools and the three of them watched the image flicker onto the screen.
“Shit, this is really poor quality. If I manage to get anything clearer for you, it’ll be a bloody miracle. Not the clearest footage I’ve seen over the years.”
Katy grimaced. “Can you do your best for us?”
“Oh, I will. But I was just pre-warning you, doubt it’s going to be good enough for what you need, that’s what I’m saying.”
Katy’s gaze remained on the screen, emphasising her need to get on with things quickly. Hudson took the hint. He jabbed at a few keys and within seconds, the graininess dispersed and the image became a lot clearer. “Wow, that’s amazing and you thought it wouldn’t be possible.”
“Okay, I’ve cleaned up the pixilation, we’ve still yet to see if it produces anything useful.” He ran the disc for a few more seconds until the car came into view.
“That’s what we need.”
He concentrated his efforts on trying to highlight the vehicle and, before long he had homed in on the number plate, only for Katy to curse under her breath. “I should have known it would be too good to be true.”
“Ah, yes, the old lay-thick-mud-on-the-plate routine. It would appear you have a very crafty killer on your hands, ladies.”
Katy could have done without Hudson pointing out the bloody obvious.
“What about the driver? Can you possibly get a clearer image of them?” She crossed her fingers until it became painful as if resorting to some kind of personal torture as punishment.
“I can but try. Let’s see what happens when I do this?” He prodded another couple of keys and all three of them stared intensely at the screen.
The driver came into view, sort of. There were no streetlights on the driver’s side of the vehicle, only on the passenger side, therefore the driver remained in the shadows.
“Damn! Can either of you make them out, tell whether it’s a male or female?”
Charlie shrugged. “I think it’s impossible to tell from this angle.”
“I have to concur.” Hudson’s tone was one of disappointment. “Let me have a fiddle for a few more minutes.”
Katy watched him punch in a code or two, but nothing on the screen really changed. “It’s utterly pointless, isn’t it? We’ve hit a brick wall and it has frigging smacked us in the face, hasn’t it?”
Hudson hitched up a shoulder and his mouth turned down at the sides. “Sorry the news isn’t better.”
“You’ve done your best. Thanks, Hudson. Is it possible for you to print us off a few of the clearer images? You never know, they might prove handy later on.”
“At least you have the make and colour of the car, that’s got to count for something.”
Katy stared at the dark coloured Mini on the screen. “I wouldn’t go that far. Is the vehicle black, dark green, dark blue, brown or what?”
“Ugh… okay, maybe the information is going to be as much use as a bag of crisps in a pig sty, then.”
Katy wrinkled her brow at the analogy. “That’s a new one on me, I won’t even try to interpret what it means.”
“Yeah, I shouldn’t bother, my colleagues always take the piss out of me about using them. All I seem to do is confuse people.”
Katy jumped off her stool and patted him on the shoulder. “Never mind, at least you tried.”
The printer churned into life. Katy was expecting the usual black and white on grade B paper; instead, he printed out coloured pictures on glossy photo paper, not that it made much difference, given the crappy images they were working with.
They got back on the road and headed towards the station. “We’re no further forward, are we? Which is bloody depressing, considering the amount of time we were caught up in damn traffic in our eagerness to get to the lab,” Katy complained.
“Hard to figure out what’s going on at this early stage. Want to know what I think?”
Katy shot her a quick glance and then refocussed on the road ahead once more. “Go on, don’t hold back, never do that, Charlie.”
“It sounds foolish, even to my ears. I wasn’t about to spill my guts in front of a total stranger, the thought of being mocked rankles with me.”
“No one would have mocked you for having an opinion. Come on, spit it out.”
Charlie sucked in a large breath. “Well, I’m just throwing this out there, but I believe the two crimes are connected.”
“You’re going to have to give me more than that, love.”
“Did you see the frame of the driver?”
“I couldn’t really make out
