Woman in Black (26 page)

All of that meant there were certain hotels that were almost as famous for the building they were in than for the brand. Jessica finished looking through the camera angles from outside the main Piccadilly train station and uploaded footage from Victoria instead.

‘Did you hear Erica Tomlinson and Jordan Benson were remanded this morning?’ Izzy asked.

‘I caught it just before I went to the school. If they keep blaming it on each other, they’ll both get sent down for robbery. I hope the CPS do him for it as well and don’t downgrade the charges.’

‘Did you see the statements about how she was actually caught?’ Izzy asked.

‘Sort of, it was a mad day. Some bloke hiding in the toilet, wasn’t it?’

‘Almost. I took the statements from the shopkeeper. The other guy who phoned us was his mate. His friend had let him use the staff toilet in the back and, on his way out, he’d seen the woman with the knife. He called us then shoulder-charged her.’

‘Brave thing to do considering Erica had a knife,’ Jessica said.

‘He was called Frank something. The funny thing was he kept saying he’d never hit a girl before. I was telling him he wasn’t in trouble but he was saying how he’d just got a new girlfriend and he didn’t know how she’d take it if she knew he was going around bashing women.’

Jessica laughed. ‘I think it’s a bit of a special circumstance.’

‘I told him that but he wasn’t having it and the shopkeeper kid kept saying how he’d be in trouble with his dad for letting a non-staff member use the toilet.’

Jessica flicked a dial on the dashboard in front of her. ‘People are strange, don’t you think? We’ve got this one guy worrying about being a woman-beater because he tackled a female threatening his mate with a bloody great knife but, meanwhile, there’s some lunatic cutting off people’s hands seemingly without bothering about it.’

‘That’s the job though, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the job.’

Jessica tried not to sound too disheartened but it was hard not to let things get to her considering whoever was responsible for leaving the hands knew who she was.

‘What do you think about the rumours about the MP?’ Izzy went on.

Jessica paused before replying, wondering how she should respond. ‘We’ve got to keep it quiet.’

‘Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to…’

‘No, I know. The minute something is supposed to be kept under wraps everyone starts talking about it.’ Izzy didn’t say anything and Jessica sighed before continuing. ‘I wasn’t telling you to stop, just that you’ve got to be discreet if it comes up at the station. I trust you and Dave enough to talk about it in front of you but it can’t go beyond us.’

‘What’s going on then?’ Izzy asked.

Jessica could almost hear herself from a few years ago, fishing for information and trying to learn the station’s internal politics.

‘What have you heard?’

‘That we’re now looking into George Johnson himself.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Everyone knows.’

Jessica sighed again. ‘It’s supposed to be a secret. We got a warrant this morning to look at his bank records. We want to go through his emails too but don’t want to let him know anything yet. We don’t need to tell him to obtain a warrant but his emails are more complicated because they could contain sensitive information due to his position. I think Jack’s hoping there’s something in his finances because it’s going to be too hard to keep things from him otherwise. The super’s looking into how it all stands legally. There was even some talk about MI5 but I think that’s just because no one knows the law.’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Who knows? I think everyone automatically assumes it’s the husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. I really don’t think he knew about the camera. At the time I thought the look on his face was surprise but perhaps it was panic because he had an idea of what might have been captured?’ Jessica switched the footage she was watching onto another day and yawned. ‘You bored yet?’

‘Yeah, I wonder how Dave’s getting on?’

‘Probably zooming in on any women wearing a low-cut top.’

‘Ha! He is pretty good, y’know?’

‘I know. Why do you think I pick you guys to work with? Just don’t tell him I said that.’

Izzy’s voice suddenly raised in pitch. ‘Hey, look.’ Jessica stopped her footage and spun to look over her colleague’s shoulder. ‘I think that’s her,’ the constable added.

Jessica could see what she meant. There was figure in the distance from one of the camera angles but it was hard to see. ‘Where are you looking at?’

‘One of the street cameras on the bottom of the road that leads to Oxford Road train station. It points down the side of the Palace Hotel.’

‘Is that the one with the giant clock tower?’ Jessica asked.

‘Exactly.’

‘Is there a different angle?’

Izzy clicked through a couple of windows and brought up some new footage, scrolling through it to get to the same time as the frames she had been watching. ‘This one is pointing in the other direction,’ she said.

They watched in silence as a figure in a long dark cloak walked into frame. Jessica said nothing but knew it was who they were after. It felt like the constable had read her mind as she slowed the footage, zooming in.

‘She knows where the cameras are again,’ Izzy said.

‘I know. Where’s she going though?’

The constable had learned the system quickly and was easily able to swap from one shot to another. They had the figure from three separate camera angles but there was a blind spot before they first appeared in the frame and any number of alleys or side streets the person could have emerged from.

Once they established they couldn’t narrow down where the cloaked figure had come from, Izzy moved the footage forward again and they watched in real-time as the person walked along the side of the ancient building and bent down to place the hand under the canopied corner entrance. Given the thousands of people who walked past the spot on a daily basis, it was inconceivable no one had contacted them. The drop had happened two days previously. Jessica looked at the timestamp at the bottom of the screen. It was just after five in the morning and, though the streets were almost empty, people would have been around.

‘Shall we phone it in and get some to visit there?’ the constable asked.

‘Let it play through first,’ Jessica said.

Izzy left one of the two screens focusing on the corner where the hand had been placed, while, on the second one, she switched to the camera that gave them the best view of the figure walking away. The figure started by returning the way they had come but then crossed the street – a different direction to the one from which they had entered the shot.

Throughout the footage, the figure moved in the exact way they had done on the other occasions. They kept their head angled away from the cameras, the robe dropping to just above their ankles leaving a little flesh and the choice of footwear, the low black heels, on display.

The person in the cloak disappeared out of the shot. ‘Is there another camera watching that spot?’ Jessica asked.

Izzy had already stopped the footage and was looking through the list of cameras available. She clicked through a few options but they weren’t the ones she wanted. ‘Do you know what that road’s called?’

‘No idea.’

They could have looked it up but it was as quick to use trial and error. Izzy continued to scan through the options until eventually they stumbled across the one they had been looking for. The figure in the cloak walked confidently down the street, moving past a couple of shops towards the camera which, from the angle of the images, was high up on the corner of a building. After passing the stores, they paused next to the entrance of an alley and, without turning towards it, gave a thumbs-up to the camera.

Izzy gave a little laugh in disbelief. ‘I didn’t expect that.’

‘Unbelievable,’ Jessica said. ‘Right, we’ll have to get someone else to clean this footage up and get us a zoomed-in still-shot. Let’s find out what happened to the hand though.’ She pointed at the first screen and asked the constable to speed the footage up.

Almost fifteen minutes had passed since the hand had been dropped and one person had walked past it completely oblivious to what was on the ground. The two detectives then saw why the appendage hadn’t been found. A stray dog bounced down the street, sniffed the hand and picked it up before trotting down the road the person in black had first come from and disappearing into an alley that ran along the back of the hotel.

TWENTY-FOUR

Jessica drove more loosely without the other two detectives in the car. She left Izzy and Dave to see if there was any trace of either the dog or their figure in black emerging from the alleyways. Someone was also working on enhancing the still frames they had.

She told the constables to contact the station as she weaved through traffic to get to the Palace Hotel. It wasn’t too far from the offices of the security company who operated the cameras but the traffic was barely moving. She wondered if she would have been better walking as she hammered the horn on her car in protest at a driver who was indicating to change lanes, blocking her path. He flicked her a V-sign and shouted an insult that would have certainly made her pull him over if she wasn’t in her own vehicle and in such a hurry. Regardless of that, he did finally move and she powered through an amber traffic light, swerved late to avoid a cyclist and parked on double yellow lines blocking the alleyway that not long ago she had been watching on the CCTV cameras.

Other officers hadn’t yet arrived but the area would be taped off when they did. Her vehicle was causing an obstruction as it blocked half a lane of a main road and cars beeped their horns as they waited, before swerving around her. She ignored the protests and started to walk slowly down the alley looking from side to side. It was littered with rubbish but, despite the ongoing good weather and brightness of the day, the narrow walkway was completely in the shade.

Jessica moved a few boxes with her hands, scanning the verges on each side as car horns blared behind her. In the distance were police sirens, which she hoped meant her colleagues were on their way as opposed to some other major incident happening.

As Jessica neared the area where the hotel’s large metal bins were, the smell of something rotting increased. There were scraps of food and a few takeaway wrappers on the floor but Jessica was struggling to breathe because of the stench. She took a few steps backwards and inhaled a large breath of clean air before moving quickly down the alley.

Her eyes darted from side to side before being drawn to an object just past a fire exit. She crouched and, although she didn’t want to touch it, she could see clearly it looked like a hand. It had been badly chewed, either by the dog or, given its proximity to the bins, possibly by rats. It reminded her of an undercooked piece of steak she had once spat out in a restaurant: a mixture of lumpy soft meat. The only thing that really identified it as a hand was the fact three of the fingers and a thumb still had nails attached.

Jessica stepped away and made her way further down the alley to take another breath. She didn’t know if the stink belonged to the hand or the bins and scattered takeaway leftovers. With a fresh lungful, Jessica returned to the hand. The digits themselves were largely mangled but she looked closely to see if she could pick out any further letters on the skin. According to what the lab worker had told Cole, the finger that had been sent to her had an ‘A’ tattooed on it, which would be the second letter in whatever was spelled across the knuckles. There was definitely a gap where the ring finger had been removed and on one of the other fingers she could make out what she first thought was a ‘W’, before realising she was looking at it from the wrong way and that it was actually an ‘M’.

She squinted to see if it was possibly a ‘H’, which would have backed up the love–hate theory, but it really did look like an ‘M’. The markings on the other two fingers were difficult to work out because of the scratches and teeth marks. They could have been ‘I’s, ‘L’s, ‘T’s or possibly ‘P’s, or any combination of those.

Jessica stood, walking back towards her car. There were still plenty of vehicles beeping their horns but she could also hear police sirens very close too. In her head, she tried to work out what the word could be if it wasn’t ‘hate’. Without anything to write on, she struggled slightly but none of ‘malt’, ‘halt’, ‘hail’ or ‘mail’ made much sense, unless the victim had been a postman and was particularly proud of it.

As Jessica was trying to think, she could hear vehicles braking loudly and saw the flash of white as police cars stopped either side of her car at the end of the alley. A few uniformed officers started to look at the Fiat Punto but Jessica emerged from the alley showing her identification. ‘It’s mine,’ she said. The officer nodded. ‘Are the Scene of Crime team coming?’ Jessica added. ‘It stinks down there.’

‘I’m surprised they’re not here now to be honest.’

Jessica interrupted the man. ‘Matt!’

‘Er, no, I’m Ian.’

‘No, sorry, I didn’t mean you. The tattoo: it could say Matt.’ The man looked at her, confused, but Jessica dismissed him. ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to head off. Don’t let anyone else down there until the lab team arrive. Tell them what they’re looking for is on the right past the bins and the fire exit. It’s in a proper state.’

Jessica got into her car and manoeuvred herself out of the small gap that was left now the police cars had parked either side of her. As she drove back to Longsight, she tried to remember if any of the players from the rugby photo were called either Matthew or Matt. Off the top of her head it didn’t ring a bell but the photo itself, as well as the bits of research they had on each person, was back at the station. If either Dave or Izzy had been back there, she would have called them but they were stranded at the CCTV offices.

After parking at Longsight, Jessica called Izzy to tell her the hand had been found. The constable said there were no camera angles that had caught their figure in black emerging from the alley. She made a crack about having to catch a bus back to the station and added that they had a good grab of the person sticking their thumb up to the camera. A digital version of the footage had also been sent off to the police’s own labs to be analysed officially.