I See You(17)

I know all these things, because it’s never occurred to you that anyone is watching you.

Routine is comforting to you. It’s familiar, reassuring.

Routine makes you feel safe.

Routine will kill you.





6


Kelly was leaving the briefing room when her job phone rang. Number withheld meant it was almost certainly the control room, and she held the phone between her ear and her right shoulder as she zipped up her stab vest.

‘Kelly Swift.’

‘Can you take a call from a Mrs Zoe Walker?’ came the voice. Kelly heard the buzz of voices in the background; a dozen other operators taking calls and resourcing jobs. ‘She wants to speak to you about a theft on the Circle line – something taken from a bag?’

‘You’ll need to put her through to Dip Squad. I finished my attachment there a few days ago; I’m back on the Neighbourhood Policing Team now.’

‘I did try that, but no one’s picking up. Your name’s still attached to the crime report, so …’ the operator trailed off, and Kelly sighed. The name Zoe Walker didn’t ring a bell, but in her three months with the Dip Squad she had dealt with more victims of stolen wallets than she could possibly remember.

‘Put her through.’

‘Thank you.’ The operator sounded relieved, and not for the first time Kelly was glad she was at the sharp end of policing, not stuck in a windowless room, fielding calls from irate members of the public. She heard a faint click.

‘Hello? Hello?’ Another voice came on the line; this one female, and impatient.

‘Hello, this is PC Swift. Can I help you?’

‘Finally! Anyone would think I was trying to phone MI5.’

‘Not nearly that exciting, I’m afraid. I understand you wanted to talk to me about a theft on the Underground. What was it you had stolen?’

‘Not me,’ the caller said, as though Kelly was failing to keep up. ‘Cathy Tanning.’

Calls like this were a regular occurrence whenever a police officer was quoted in the paper. Contact from members of the public; often with no relation whatsoever to the article itself, as though possession of your name and shoulder number alone made you fair game.

‘She had her keys taken from her bag when she fell asleep on her way home,’ Mrs Walker went on. ‘Nothing else, only her keys.’

It was the type of theft that had made the job unusual. On her way to take the initial report Kelly had been in two minds about whether it should have been reported as a theft at all, but Cathy had been insistent the keys hadn’t been lost.

‘I keep them in a separate compartment in my bag,’ she had told Kelly. ‘They couldn’t have fallen out.’ The pocket was on the outside of a rucksack-style handbag; a zip and a leather buckle stopping them from falling out. Both had been undone.

CCTV footage had showed Cathy entering the Underground at Shepherd’s Bush, the buckle on her rucksack pocket apparently securely fastened. By the time she left the station at Epping, the strap hung loose, the pocket gaping slightly open.

As jobs went, it was a straightforward one. Cathy was the perfect witness: she always took the same route home from work, even choosing the same carriage on the Central line and sitting – where possible – in the same seat. If only everyone was so predictable, Kelly remembered thinking, it would make her job so much easier. She had picked up Cathy on the CCTV footage within minutes of looking for her, but it wasn’t one of their core nominals moving in on her. The biggest offenders on the Underground right now were the Curtis kids, but they wanted wallets and iPhones, not keys.

Sure enough, when Kelly seized the footage from the train Cathy had been on at the time of the theft, she almost missed the culprit altogether.

Cathy had been asleep, leaning against the wall of the carriage with her legs crossed and her arms folded protectively around her bag. Kelly had been so busy scanning the carriage for lads in hoodies; for pairs of women with headscarves and babies in arms, that she had barely noticed the man standing close to Cathy’s legs. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of someone running with the usual pickpocketing crowd. Tall, and well dressed, with a grey scarf wound twice around his neck, then pulled up over his ears and the lower part of his face, as though he were still outdoors, battling the elements. He had his back to the camera; his face turned resolutely to the floor. In one swift movement he bent down, leaned towards Cathy Tanning, then stood up; his right hand disappearing into his pocket too fast for Kelly to see what was held in it.

Had he thought there might be a purse in that outer pocket? Or a phone? A lucky dip, turning to disappointment, when he realised all he had was a bunch of keys? Taking them anyway, because returning them was a pointless risk; dumping them in a bin on his way home.

Kelly had spent her last day on the Dip Squad trying to track Cathy’s thief through the Underground, obtaining a still of such low resolution there was no point even circulating it. He was Asian, that’s all she could be certain of, and around six feet tall. The CCTV cameras were colour, and the quality was impressive – you could almost imagine you were watching news footage of commuters on the Underground – but that didn’t guarantee a positive ID. The cameras needed to be pointing in the right direction; be positioned just right for a full frontal image capture. Too often – as in this case – the offence happened on the periphery of the camera range. Zooming in for a better view meant a gradual pixellation of the image, until the all-important details blurred into a homogenous figure you didn’t stand a hope in hell of getting an ident on.