The Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club, #3)(22)

‘The car then seems to disappear,’ says Ibrahim. ‘It goes missing for several hours, until it is finally captured again at two forty-seven a.m., approximately a mile from Shakespeare Cliff.’

‘Meaning it has taken her more than four hours to complete a forty-five-minute car journey,’ says Elizabeth.

‘Telling us,’ says Ibrahim, ‘that she must have stopped somewhere on the way. To meet someone, to do something, perhaps to die. And when the CCTV picks up the car again near the cliff, there appear to be two figures in it, not one.’

‘Very blurry though,’ says Pauline. ‘To be fair.’

‘The next morning,’ says Elizabeth, while registering Pauline’s intervention, ‘Bethany’s car is found at the bottom of the cliff. Her body is no longer in it, which is not altogether unsurprising. I once had to push a Jeep with a corpse sitting in the front seat into a quarry, and it popped out almost immediately.’

‘Why did you have to push a –’ says Mike.

‘No time, Mr Waghorn, sorry,’ says Elizabeth. ‘The Conversational French class will scream blue murder if we’re out of this room as much as a minute late. Traces of Bethany Waites’s blood, and fragments of the clothing she was last seen wearing, were found in the wreckage of the car. A houndstooth jacket, and yellow trousers.’

‘Well, that’s another thing,’ says Pauline. ‘Who wears a houndstooth jacket with yellow trousers?’

Elizabeth glances at Pauline. Two interventions now.

‘Her body has never been found,’ says Ibrahim. ‘Usually it would wash up at some point, but not always. Her bank cards and bank accounts have never been used since, nor was there significant activity in her accounts before this incident. She wasn’t squirrelling money away for a disappearance.’

‘The secret might lie in Heather Garbutt’s financial records,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We’ll know more as soon as we’ve spoken to our consultant.’

‘When she says “consultant”, she means my daughter,’ says Joyce.

‘And that’s pretty much where we are,’ finishes Elizabeth.

‘You heard back from Connie Johnson?’ Ron asks Ibrahim.

‘Nothing useful yet,’ says Ibrahim. ‘She said something about knitting, but her Wi-Fi is quite patchy. She has complained to the Home Office about it.’

There is a knock at the door. The Conversational French class which uses the Jigsaw Room after them is early. Elizabeth resolves to give them a piece of her mind.





18





Chris and Donna are looking at a map of Fairhaven on the wall in their Incident Room.

There is a pin in the map, showing Bethany’s apartment, and further pins showing the location of the CCTV cameras that had been checked on the night of her death. Her car hadn’t triggered a single one until she got to Shakespeare Cliff. They are trying to plot her route out of Fairhaven, to see where she might have stopped. Once she was out of Fairhaven, a camera-free route was pretty easy. Just take the back roads. But in the town itself? Much harder.

Where on earth had she been for those missing hours? And who had she met?

‘It’s impossible,’ says Chris. ‘There are so many cameras in Fairhaven, and she could only take Rotherfield Road or Churchill Road. No other way out of town that takes you towards Shakespeare Cliff.’

Strictly speaking, they are supposed to be investigating the death of the man in the burned-out minibus, but they are still waiting for a forensics report, so they thought they might spend the morning looking at the Bethany Waites case. Also, Elizabeth had asked them to. Elizabeth has access to many things, but not the exact position of every CCTV camera in Fairhaven.

Donna starts to plot a course from Bethany’s apartment, avoiding the cameras. At every corner she turns, there is a camera. It’s like a maze, with no way out. ‘And the cameras were all working?’

‘For once,’ says Chris.

‘Whatever happens,’ says Donna, tracing a finger along the map, ‘I can’t get past Foster Road. She must have driven down it, but I can’t take a left out of it, and I can’t take a right out of it without hitting a camera. So how does she do it?’

Chris goes over to his computer and opens the Google Street View of Foster Road. ‘Let’s see if there are any little cut-throughs we can’t see on the map.’

They scroll along Foster Road. It is largely residential, some big apartment blocks, some Victorian terraced houses, a small parade of shops. No obvious cut-throughs.

‘Stop there,’ says Donna. She takes control of the mouse now, and she revolves the image on the screen. It shows a large, modern apartment building called Juniper Court. On the left-hand side of the building is a ramp, leading down to the security grille of an underground car park.

‘Worth seeing if there’s an exit at the back of the building,’ says Donna. She navigates the arrows along Foster Road, up Rotherfield Road, past the CCTV camera, and then right into Darwell Road, which runs along the back of Juniper Court.

‘You’re very quick at this,’ says Chris.

‘I spend a lot of time on Rightmove,’ says Donna. ‘Looking at houses I can’t afford.’

And there it is. The back of Juniper Court. Another ramp leading underground, this one with a NO ENTRY sign on it. The exit of the underground car park.