Felix Francis - Guilty Not Guilty

I looked at the image of the swimming pool on the screen and it was bright, sharp and in colour. I obviously should have gone swimming in the middle of the night.

I remembered what Douglas had said.

‘How about the electronic door locks?’ I asked. ‘Does the system keep a record of when they were used?’

‘I think so,’ Karen said. ‘It certainly records the last time someone unlocked the door, but I’m not quite sure how to access it. I’d have to ask our IT man.’

‘I can wait,’ I said encouragingly.

She pushed a button on the desk. ‘I’ve paged him. He’ll be here soon.’

‘Didn’t the police ask for that information?’ I asked.

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

We waited in silence and, presently, a twenty-something bespectacled young man wearing blue dungarees came into the office.

‘Ah, there you are, Gary,’ said Karen. ‘Mr Gordon-Russell here wants to know if our room locks keep a record of when they were used.’

‘Sure do,’ Gary said. ‘Last sixty times for each one.’

Things were looking up.

Gary sat down at one of the computer terminals and started tapping on the keyboard.

‘Which room?’ he asked.

‘Three-ten,’ Karen said.

I was glad she could remember the number. I only knew where it was.

Gary tapped some more.

‘There you are,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Easy as pie.’

I looked at the list on the screen

The last sixty times, Gary had said, and it was none too many. It seemed that room 310 was regularly opened many times per day and the sixty activations of the lock only took us back to Tuesday morning of last week, the very day of my arrival. If I’d left it another day, the data would have disappeared for ever.

‘Can you print this?’ I asked.

Gary looked at Karen, who nodded.

‘No problem,’ he said and tapped yet more.

A printer on the side whirred and out popped a sheet of paper with the information neatly tabulated upon it.

Not only did the list give the time the lock was opened but it also recorded the reference number of the card that opened it.

‘Those first two are Lindy, one of the chambermaids,’ Gary said. ‘I know her keycard number.’ I had the impression it wasn’t the only number of hers he knew. ‘And the next one is Jess, the housekeeper.’

‘She would have been checking that the room was ready,’ Karen said.

‘Then that must be me arriving,’ I said, pointing to an activation at seven minutes past six with the code 4579053.

‘Gordon-Russell, you say?’

‘I checked in as Mr Russell.’

Gary tapped some more on the computer.

‘It was you,’ he said. ‘I cross-referenced your name against the machine that programmes the cards. Keycard 4579053 was created at eighteen-oh-four in the name of Mr Bill Russell.’

The next activation was at 23.34.

‘That’s me returning from the dinner at the cricket ground.’

And the very next activation on the list was at 09.21 on Wednesday morning, with nothing in between.

‘That’s me coming back from breakfast,’ I said with a degree of excitement. Was something finally going my way?

Maybe not.

‘But the system doesn’t record it when someone leaves the room, only when they arrive,’ Karen Wentworth said.

‘That’s right,’ Gary said. ‘It only registers when the keycard is used and you don’t need the card to leave the room — there’s a handle on the inside that opens the door without it.’

So, even though the system clearly showed that I hadn’t entered the room between 23.34 Tuesday and 09.21 Wednesday, it didn’t prove that I was in there all night. I could have left at any time, not just for breakfast.

I sighed.

‘Thanks, anyway,’ I said. I folded up the piece of paper. ‘Can I keep this?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Karen said. ‘Do you also want a DVD of the CCTV tapes? Gary can burn you one easily. He made the copy for the police on Monday.’

‘Gordon-Russell,’ Gary said slowly, the cogs in his memory obviously now turning. ‘Bloody hell...’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t kill my wife, and I’m trying to prove it.’

With the useless DVD and the inconclusive lock data in my pockets, I walked down the side of the building to the hotel car park, and specifically to the spot in the far corner next to the rear wire fence where I’d parked my car the previous week.

I stood and looked about me.

The car park backed on to the rear of a parade of local shops, with a service delivery road between them and the car-park fence. I went over to the fence for a closer look. I could see that one of the shops had a security camera pointing along the service road. Maybe the images would also show the hotel car park.

I walked back round the hotel to the shop. It was a local grocery store

Yes, the woman behind the counter told me, the camera made an on-going recording of the previous twenty-eight days, but why did I want to see it?

Rather than explain the real reason, I made up a story of having had my car vandalised while in the hotel car park and their camera might have caught who had done it.

‘Don’t know about that,’ she said unhelpfully. ‘It’s only there to cover our back door.’

‘Please could I see anyway?’ I asked patiently.

She looked around as if wanting some customers to make her too busy, but the shop was deserted.

‘I’ll have to get my husband,’ she said. ‘He deals with the CCTV. We had it put in last year after someone tried to rob us.’

She looked at me suspiciously as if I might have the same mission.

‘And where is your husband?’ I asked.

‘Having a rest. We open from seven in the morning until eleven at night, seven days a week. Every day but Christmas Day. It’s a lot of hours for just the two of us.’

‘It must be,’ I said in my most sympathetic tone. ‘But this is very important to me.’

She hesitated but then went over to the door to the rear, all the while keeping her eyes firmly on me — just in case I tried to pilfer something.

‘Faisal,’ she shouted through the door. ‘There’s a man here to see you.’

A bearded man appeared, rubbing his eyes as if he had been woken by the call.

‘What do you want?’ he asked gruffly.

I repeated my story about having had my car vandalised and asked if he could show me the recordings from the camera out the back. The man didn’t seem to be at all happy at being roused from his slumbers for such a paltry reason and he gave his wife a severe stare. She, meanwhile, patently ignored him.

‘This way,’ the man said reluctantly, and I followed him into a room behind the shop that was crammed full to the ceiling with boxes of spare stock.

He moved a case of Heinz tomato soup tins from a chair and then sat down at a desk.

‘What date did you say?’ he asked.

‘A week last Tuesday. Nine days ago.’

‘Time?’

‘About quarter to six in the afternoon.’

He entered some numbers into the CCTV recorder via a remote control and an image appeared on a screen above.

In the very top corner of the screen, I could see the car-park wire fence and a little way beyond it, but there was no car visible.

‘Can you fast-forward?’ I asked. ‘I arrived a little after that.’

The image shimmered a little as he did so and then, as if by magic, we could see the back end of my silver Jaguar appear as I reversed into the empty space. The number plate was clearly visible,

‘That’s my car,’ I said excitedly, placing my finger on the screen. ‘Can you wind it on a bit more? Until after it got dark.’

He did so and the colour drained from the image as the system switched from visible to infrared but, crucially, the back of my car was still visible, in ghostly grey.