Peter James - Not Dead Yet

‘You see her again shortly,’ Potting said.

Two minutes later, she walked back into frame, briefly, then left the premises.

‘Shit!’ Haydn Kelly exclaimed.

‘What?’ Branson asked him.

‘I can’t be sure, I need to see more footage,’ the podiatrist said.

‘Sure of what?’

‘The gait.’

‘What is it telling you?’

‘I need to see more of this person walking before I can be certain.’

‘The CCTV room at John Street Police Station would be bound to have caught her on camera,’ Guy Batchelor said. ‘The whole of Queen’s Road’s covered.’

Branson turned to Nick Nicholl. ‘Nick, take Haydn down there right away.’

As Nicholl stood up, Glenn Branson asked, ‘Does anyone know how to get still photographs off video like this?’

‘Ask Martin Bloomfield down in Imaging – he’ll be able to do it.’

Thirty minutes later Branson left the building, with two printed and enhanced blow-ups of the woman in the leather cap. One was full-length, the other of just her face. He climbed into his allocated unmarked car and drove out through the green gates of the building, heading towards the seafront, and The Grand Hotel.

The pavement outside The Grand was crowded with fans with their mobile phone cameras, and paparazzi with their long lenses, all hopeful of catching a glimpse of the icon.

The doorman stood well back against the front entrance, as if defending it, as he studied the photograph Glenn Branson held up.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, very definitely.’

‘No doubt at all?’ Glenn asked.

‘Part of my job is to remember faces, sir,’ Colin Bourner said. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time. Regulars get upset if you don’t recognize them. I never forget a face. If you need verification, we are bound to have her on CCTV.’

‘I would like to see that,’ he replied. ‘Not because I don’t trust your judgement, but I’d like to take a look for myself.’

‘I’ll speak to Security, sir, won’t keep you a moment.’ He hurried into the building.

Glenn looked at his watch. 11.23 a.m. Gaia was staying here. One of the greatest stars in the world, and Ari had refused to let their kids play with her son. How shit was that? He stared up, wondering which her room was. One of these on the front façade, with a sea view, for sure. He had to make sure he got her autograph for Sammy and Remi while she was staying here, at least. He stared at the slow-moving traffic, and at people ambling along the promenade on the far side, occasionally being pinged out of the way by an irked rider as they trespassed unwittingly on the cycle path. Early June, and already it looked as if many of them were holidaymakers.

Holiday, he thought wistfully. The last holiday he’d had was in Cornwall with Ari nearly two years ago. It had rained for a solid fortnight. That hadn’t done their failing relationship much good.

‘Right, sir, they’re just setting it up for you now!’

Branson turned. ‘Great, thank you.’

‘No, sir, it’s my pleasure, absolutely my pleasure.’

Roy Grace had just arrived back from two awkward meetings. The first with ACC Peter Rigg who wanted to know how, despite the tight security that Grace had been requested to plan, someone had managed to hide directly above where the filming was taking place – and had been a fraction of a second away from killing Gaia’s son. The second had been with the Chief Constable, who had been a little more understanding, but unhappy, nonetheless.

But Rigg had not tried to hide his fury. Sitting in front of him, Roy Grace felt as if he were back in the presence of his former boss, the acerbic Alison Vosper, who delighted in putting him on the spot at any opportunity. When he attempted to explain the difficulties of securing a site to which the general public had daily access, the ACC snorted in derision. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, pompously. ‘You were tasked with overall responsibility for Gaia’s safety while she is a guest in our city – and so far you’ve given a less than impressive performance. You knew there was a threat to her life; did it not occur to you to check the roof spaces, as something utterly elementary?’

‘It did, sir, and they were checked. The police checked thoroughly, initially, and it has been down to the Pavilion’s own security since then. I’m a homicide investigator, not a security analyst or expert.’

‘Thank God you’re not. I’d hate to be in a situation where my life or the safety of my family was dependent on any plan you produced to protect them. What’s up, man, were you sleepwalking, or something? It’s all over the bloody news – you’ve seen the front page of the Argus ?’

Gaia son escapes death by inches

The ACC’s criticism wasn’t fair, Grace knew. If they’d had an unlimited budget, no one would have got into that damned roof space, but the truth was, with the battle he’d had to get even very limited resources for Gaia’s security, there were inevitably going to be gaps. It wasn’t unreasonable to expect that the Pavilion would have been capable of protecting itself.

And Rigg was very definitely being unreasonable at this moment. But he wasn’t about to tell him that. The police force was a hierarchical system. In many ways it was like the military; you respected ranks senior to yourself and obeyed them without question, whatever you really thought.

‘There were gaps in the security that should not have been there,’ Roy Grace conceded. ‘It looks like we were lucky.’

‘I don’t like that word lucky ,’ the Assistant Chief Constable said.

Being lucky was better than the alternative, Grace thought, but did not say.

Shortly after 4 p.m., the steady concentration of the seventeen people currently packed around the three large workstations in MIR-1 was broken by a loud curse from Norman Potting. Several people looked up. Then the steady putter of keyboards resumed. A mobile phone rang, playing ‘Greensleeves’, and Nick Nicholl answered it quickly.

Bella crunched on a Malteser. She had been tasked with contacting all the bidders on this and previous eBay auctions of Gaia memorabilia, in the hope one of them might know the elusive Anna Galicia personally. Meanwhile, down in the High Tech Crime Unit, Ray Packham was trying to navigate a path through a complex trail of encrypted email accounts. If they’d hoped to find her quickly by following the trail back from PayPal, they were going to have to be very patient. It was going to take days, and possibly weeks – if ever.

Potting cursed again. Then he said, ‘Bloody banks! Can you bloody believe it?’

‘Believe what, Norman?’ Glenn Branson asked, secretly pleased that Potting was struggling. Badly though he wanted this case solved, he really hoped it wouldn’t be Potting who made the breakthrough.

Potting turned to face him. ‘We’re reasonably certain that Anna Galicia went to one of the two HSBC hole-in-the-wall machines in Queen’s Road, at around 8.30 p.m. on Monday. The CCTV room has images of her approaching the machine and then leaving at around that time. The bank are telling me there were seven withdrawals from those two machines between 8.15 and 9 p.m. that night – and all of them were male accounts.’

‘Maybe her card didn’t work in those machines?’ Branson said. ‘We’ve all had that happen. Don’t they have CCTV running – a lot of them have a camera that looks outward – so you can see the faces of everyone using the machines.’

‘I’ve asked for that,’ Potting said. ‘It’s going to take them an hour or so – they’re going to email me the image sequence they have, along with all the names and addresses of the people who used the machine. So we’ll see then if she appears.’