Mark Billingham - Bloodline

At that moment the man let his head drop, then turned away from the camera.

‘Fuck…’

‘Gets worse,’ Kitson said.

The image froze, then jumped to a shot of the building’s lobby: a wide expanse of grey stone with stairs running up on either side towards the coffee shop, the dining halls and the upstairs bars.

‘We pick them up coming into the lobby five minutes after we last saw them.’

‘Where were they for five minutes?’ Brigstocke asked.

‘Maybe one of them needed the toilet. A quick snog? Who knows? Here they come…’

The slight figure of Greg Macken and his taller, better-built friend appeared at the bottom of the right-hand staircase and began walking towards the camera. The man had dark hair, wore jeans and a denim jacket, but Thorne still could not make out the face in any detail. As they reached the point where the features were becoming clearer, the man put a hand on Macken’s shoulder. He leaned in to whisper something, then angled his face away from the camera.

‘He knows where all the cameras are,’ Thorne said.

Kitson nodded as she moved on to the final clip. The camera above the main entrance picked up the couple as they stepped outside, almost immediately after the previous camera had lost them. This time the face was already turned from view, and stayed like that until the man was some distance away. The last image, which Kitson left frozen on the screen, was a nice, clean shot of the back of his head as he and Macken walked away along the pavement.

Kitson tossed the remote back down on top of the trolley.

Brigstocke got up and moved to the chair behind his desk. ‘He’d been in there quite a few times, that’s what some of the students said, right?’

‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘Letting Macken get a good look at him while he got a good look at where all the security cameras are.’

‘Why go to all that trouble?’ Holland said. ‘We know he’s changed his appearance anyway.’

Thorne thought Holland was probably right, but they could not be certain. As Kitson had suggested earlier, the discrepancies in the witness statements could simply be down to the normal lack of reliability when it came to stranger-stranger descriptions. The fact was that very few people could commit a stranger’s appearance to memory, to the extent that some coppers did not even bother noting such things down. Thorne himself had lost count of the number of times a heavy-set six-footer had turned out to be a short-arse who’d need to run around in the shower to get wet.

But whatever the reasons, the three descriptions they had tallied in only two respects: the man was in his late twenties or early thirties and was six feet tall. ‘He knows he’s been seen,’ Thorne said. ‘And I don’t think he’s too worried about that. Getting caught on camera’s something else, though. He doesn’t want to take that risk.’

‘It’s probably a ten-minute walk from the Rocket back to the Mackens’ flat,’ Kitson said. ‘We might have got him on three or four more cameras between the two.’

Brigstocke told her to chase it up, as it was his job to do. Kitson said she already was, even though, based on what they’d just seen, it would probably be a waste of time.

Thorne shook his head, said he knew it would be. He stared at the screen. ‘I think we can forget what I said about him getting careless.’

There was a knock and Sam Karim put his head around the door, waving a slip of paper. ‘The FSS have been on,’ he said. ‘They’ve put the bits of X-ray from the Mackens together with the other two.’

Thorne stuck his hand out for the piece of paper.

‘They’re getting a proper scan organised,’ Karim said, handing it over. ‘They’ll email that across in an hour or so, but meantime they said they’d fax over what they’ve got already and we can call if we’ve got any questions.’

Thorne grunted a ‘thanks’ as he squeezed past Karim into the corridor, then turned towards the Incident Room. A minute later, when he had reached the corner of the room where the fax machine sat, he called the FSS lab in Victoria and asked for the doctor whose name Karim had scribbled down.

‘Bloody hell, that was fast, I haven’t even sent it yet.’ Doctor Clive Kelly asked Thorne to hold on. After a rustle of papers and some slightly tetchy muttering Thorne heard a series of tell-tale beeps. Then the doctor came back on the line: ‘Right, it’s on the way.’

‘I’m standing over the fax machine,’ Thorne said.

‘Not that I could tell you where it is while it’s on the way,’ Kelly said. ‘These things are a mystery to me.’

The fax machine hummed into life and a sheet of paper started to appear. ‘You’re supposed to be the scientist,’ Thorne said.

Kelly laughed. ‘Not my speciality,’ he said. ‘You give me a document and I’ll tell you where the paper came from and when the ink was produced and, if I’m having a good day, I might even tell you how many times the bloke who wrote it scratched his arse. But me putting that document on a machine and pressing a button and you taking it out of another machine in a room miles away… that’s just bloody witchcraft.’

As soon as the fax had been received, Thorne took the sheet from the tray and stared down at the new and extended sequence of letters and numbers:

VEY48

ADD597-86/09

SYMPHONY

Said, ‘What am I looking at?’

‘Let’s start at the bottom,’ Kelly said. ‘That’s the easy bit. “Symphony” is just a type of MRI scanner. It’s basically the name of the machine that did the X-ray. It’s not strictly speaking an X-ray, of course, as it uses magnetic resonance as opposed to radiation, but-’

‘X-ray of what?’

‘Still can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. But we know where it was done. See the second line?’

‘I’m looking…’

‘We thought the numbers might be some Health Service reference or other, and it turns out to be the area code for Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. And the three letters – ADD – that’s the hospital itself.’ Kelly waited, as though expecting Thorne to start guessing.

‘Right…?’

‘Addenbrooke’s.’

‘In Cambridge?’

‘Easy when you know the answer, isn’t it? There isn’t too much more we can tell you, I’m afraid.’

Thorne said it was OK, that he didn’t really need any more. At forty or so miles away, it was not the nearest hospital to Her Majesty’s Prison Whitemoor, but Addenbrooke’s had a worldwide reputation when it came to neurosurgery. Now Thorne knew exactly what kind of X-ray the pieces of plastic had been cut from.

‘That first line’s still got us all racking our brains,’ Kelly said.

VEY48

Thorne thanked Kelly for his help, then said, ‘I think “ 48” is probably the age of the patient when the X-ray was done.’

‘Easy when you know the answer.’

‘And “VEY” are the last three letters of his name.’

Sally puts down the phone for the third time that day and walks slowly back to her armchair. Buzz is asleep in front of the gas fire, twitching like he’s dreaming of chasing cats or something, and she has to step across him to get to the chair. She reaches down to tug at his soft brown ears, which he loves, before she sits down.

She’s been ringing every day since it happened, trying to get some information. ‘Wasting my time,’ she told her friend Betty. ‘Nobody wants to tell me anything.’ She talked to the police on several occasions in the days immediately afterwards and gave a full statement in the end, but now they speak to her as though she were annoying them. Like they have far better things to do, which always makes her laugh.