Fatal Witness (Detective Erika Foster #7) (35)

23





McGorry was standing by the row of printers when Erika arrived back to the incident room.

‘Did you find the CCTV of Charles Wakefield at Blackheath station?’ asked Erika.

‘Yes, and no,’ he said, pulling a face.

‘What does that mean? Either he’s on the CCTV or not,’ said Erika.

‘He’s wearing a bloody hat,’ said Crane, who was sitting at his computer screen surrounded by coffee cups and empty crisp packets. Erika went over to him. ‘We’ve got him on the CCTV camera at Blackheath Station, buying his ticket at 1.55pm last Monday, the 22nd, and he took the 2pm train to London Bridge. I’ve also got him coming back into Blackheath station on the 5.12pm train from London Bridge. The only problem is that he’s wearing a wide-brimmed black trilby hat in all the images, and with his stoop the brim covers his face.’

He handed her a series of printouts. They all showed a portly figure wearing a long black trench coat and a black trilby, buying a ticket at the ticket office, and then walking across the concourse to board a train. There was a flash of his double chin, but the wide-brimmed hat obscured the top half of his face. Crane also twisted his computer screen around and showed her a CCTV video clip of Charles walking towards the train with bowed shoulders and hunched-over gait. She remembered seeing the long black trench coat and black trilby hanging on the coat stand in Charles’s flat.

‘Shit. Can you get anything from a camera on the train?’ she asked.

‘I’ve requested it,’ said Crane. Erika watched the footage as it played again.

‘When me and Moss looked around his flat, I saw his long black trench coat and a black trilby… But we can’t see his face!’

‘I’m going to keep looking, there’s CCTV requested from London Bridge station, too,’ said Crane.

‘That’s not the only CCTV footage we’ve found!’ said McGorry, coming back from the printer and handing her a sheet of paper with a series of blown-up colour CCTV images. Still warm from the printer, it was a series of three CCTV images taken from the roof-mounted camera of a bus stop awning. The first image showed Vicky standing on the other side of the glass of the awning running parallel with the pavement.

‘Where’s this?’ Erika asked, her heart leaping in her chest.

‘It’s the bus stop footage you asked me to pull at the north end of Morrison Road, about two hundred yards from Honeycomb Court,’ said McGorry. Erika looked back at the images. The first was very clear. Vicky was looking up at the camera, wearing a baseball cap. The next two images had been taken moments later; in the second, Vicky was looking down, her face now obscured by the peak of the baseball cap. The white Adidas logo was clear on the front. In the third image, Vicky had her head down and was moving away to the right. She had on a pair of blue jeans, a thin blue coat, and was carrying a black backpack.

‘When were these taken?’ asked Erika, peering at the time stamp and the very small writing on top of each image. ‘My eyesight is crap.’

‘The camera on that bus stop takes an image every two seconds,’ said McGorry. ‘The time stamp is 4.06pm. Monday. The same day you found Sophia’s body in her flat.’

‘How did you manage to get this so fast?’ said Erika.

‘I’ve got a contact at the TfL CCTV control room, and McGorry flirted with her on the phone,’ said Crane. ‘And it helped having a specific time frame and date.’

‘Good work!’ Erika looked back at the images of Vicky. ‘Why would she be looking up at the camera? I presume with the baseball cap, she’s trying to hide?’

‘On the newer bus stops in London, people don’t often see that there’s a CCTV camera next to the real-time departures board,’ said McGorry.

‘Okay. She could have been looking at bus times,’ said Erika. ‘So, what do we think, she found the body in her flat, ran, and didn’t have a plan… She was working out if she could take a bus somewhere?’

‘Unless she killed Sophia,’ said McGorry.

‘Really?’ said Erika, looking up at him.

McGorry opened his mouth and closed it again.

‘We shouldn’t rule it out.’

There was a silence as they mulled that over for a moment, coupled with the inconclusive CCTV images of Charles Wakefield.

‘I wonder if Vicky realised that there was a CCTV camera on the bus stop awning,’ said Erika, studying the photos. ‘Have you been able to find anything else?’

‘She didn’t take the bus, or at least a bus from that stop,’ said Crane. ‘We’re working on the basis that she wanted to travel to a larger transport hub, so we’ve just put in another request for CCTV footage in the same time frame from Blackheath train station. As we know from Charles’s potential journey, it’s only a five-minute walk from that bus stop. Trains from there go south towards Gravesend and Kent and into Central London.’

‘Yes,’ said Erika. ‘And her being on Morrison Road just after four puts her in the time of death range for Sophia.’

‘McGorry found something else, too,’ said Crane.

‘There’s more?’ asked Erika.

‘Oh yeah,’ said McGorry. ‘We also found an image of Shawn Macavity, taken at the same bus stop.’