At Risk

35

Liz stared despairingly at the image on her laptop. Lifted from the Avis car-hire CCTV at Waterloo, it showed the woman who had hired the Astra. Hair, eyes, body shape, all were obscured. Even the wrists and ankles, which might have given a clue as to physical type, were covered by clothing. The only clue lay in the lower planes of the face, which were tautly defined, with none of the puffiness which might have accompanied a larger body.

She’ll be fit, guessed Liz. Someone who can move fast if need be. And she looks medium height-perhaps a little taller. Other than that, though-nothing. The image was too blurred to give up any useful information about the clothes, except that the parka buttoned on the right and had a small dark green rectangle on one faded shoulder.

From a military surplus wholesaler in the Mile End Road, which they had visited shortly before 9 a.m., the Investigations team had learned that this was almost certainly where a sewn-on German flag had been removed. The parka was ex-Bundeswehr, they were told, of a type sold in street markets and government surplus shops all over Europe. The hiking boots they had been less sure about, and staff from Timberland and several other footwear companies had been approached. The boots would turn out to be some worldwide brand, Liz was sure. Their target was a professional, and she wasn’t going to make anything easy.

She glanced at her watch-ten to eleven-and snapped the laptop shut. It was cold outside the hotel, and a wet wind had been rattling Temeraire’s leaded windows all morning, but she needed to walk. For the moment, there was nothing that she could do. The description and registration number of the Astra had gone out to all forces nationwide that morning, and Whitten’s team was checking with all garages within fifty miles of Marsh Creake. Did anyone remember the car? Had anyone taken a substantial cash payment in the twenty-four-hour period preceding the shooting of Ray Gunter?

Liz herself had rung Investigations a couple of times to check on the Eurostar passenger-list search. The Investigations team was being led by Judith Spratt, who had been in the same intake as Liz a decade before.

“It’s going to take time,” Judith had told her. “That incoming train was at least half full, and two hundred and three of the passengers were women.”

Liz had absorbed this piece of information. “How many of them are British?” she asked.

“About half, I’d say.”

“OK. Claude Legendre specifically remembered an English woman in her early twenties, and Lucy Wharmby, the woman whose stolen driving licence our target used, is twenty-three and British. So we’re right to focus first on female passengers between seventeen and thirty who hold British passports.”

“Sure. That brings the number down to, let’s see… fifty-one, which is a bit more manageable.”

“And can you also get on to Lucy Wharmby and have her e-mail you half a dozen recent photographs; there’s a good chance that she looks quite like our target.”

“You think the driving licence was stolen to order in Pakistan?” Judith asked.

“I’d say so.”

When the photographs came in an hour later, Investigations forwarded Liz a set. They confirmed the evidence of the driving licence, and showed an attractive but not especially memorable-looking young woman. Her face was oval, and her eyes and her shoulder-length hair were brown. She was five foot eight tall.

The team wasted no time. Of the fifty-one female passengers to be checked, thirty had addresses in the area served by the Metropolitan Police; the rest were spread countrywide. To help the police eliminate those who were clearly not their target-black or Asian women, for example, or the very tall, short or obese-the Avis CCTV stills were e-mailed to all the relevant forces.

The police responded to the investigation’s urgency by drafting in as many officers as it took to man the phones and make up the door-knock teams. The process, however, was still a slow one. Every woman’s story had to be confirmed and every alibi checked. Waiting was an inevitable part of any investigation, but Liz had always found it deeply frustrating. Taut-wired, and with her metabolism geared up for action, she paced the windy sea front, waiting for news.

Mackay, meanwhile, was in the village hall with Steve Goss and the police team, making personal calls to the heads of all the major civilian and military establishments in East Anglia that might possibly constitute Islamic Terror Syndicate targets. There were a huge number of these, from police dog-handling schools and local Territorial Army halls to full-scale regimental HQs and American air bases. In the case of the latter, Mackay suggested, perimeter patrols were to be doubled and vulnerable approach roads closed off from use by the public. Elsewhere, the Home Office was upgrading the security status of all government establishments.

At midday Judith Spratt rang her to request a call-back, and Liz returned to the shelter of the public phone box on the sea front, with whose every scratched obscenity and faded graffiti-scrawl she was now wearily familiar.

Out of the fifty-one women on the police check-list, she learned, twenty-eight had been interviewed and cleared as having verifiable alibis for the night of the murder, five were black, and so clearly not the target, and seven were “of a body size not compatible with existing subject-data.”

That left eleven of the women uninterviewed, of whom five lived alone, and six lived in multi-person households. Nine had been out all morning, and were uncontactable by mobile phone, one had not returned from a party in Runcorn twelve hours earlier, and one was on the way to a hospital visit in Chertsey.

“The Runcorn one,” said Liz.

“Stephanie Patch, nineteen. Catering apprentice employed by the Crown and Thistle Hotel, Warrington. Lives at home, again in Warrington. We’ve spoken to the mother, who says that she was working at the hotel on the night of the murder and returned home before midnight.”

“What was Stephanie doing in Paris?”

“Pop concert,” said Judith. “The Foo Fighters. She went with a friend from work.”

“Does that check out?”

“The Foo Fighters were playing at the Palais de Bercy on the night in question, yes.”

“Has anyone spoken to the friend?”

“She apparently went to the same party in Runcorn and hasn’t come home either. Stephanie’s mother thinks they’ve stayed away because one or both of them has gone out and got a tattoo, which they were apparently threatening to do. She told the police that her daughter has a total of fourteen ear-piercings. And can’t drive.”

“Which rather rules her out. What about the hospital one?”

“Lavinia Phelps, twenty-nine. Picture-frame restorer employed by the National Trust, lives at Stockbridge in Hampshire. Visiting her married sister who lives in Surrey and gave birth last night.”

“Have the police spoken to her?”

“No, they’ve spoken to Mr. Phelps, who owns an antique shop in Stockbridge. Lavinia’s taken the car, a VW Passat estate, but her phone’s switched off. Surrey police are waiting for her at the hospital in Chertsey.”

“That’ll be a nice surprise for her. Any of the others look even faintly possible?”

“There’s an art student from Bath. Sally Madden, twenty-six, single. Lives in a studio flat in a multi-occupancy building in the South Stoke area. Holds a driving licence, but according to her downstairs neighbour doesn’t own a car.”

“What was she doing in Paris?”

“We don’t know. She’s been out all morning.”

“She sounds like a possible.”

“I agree. Somerset police have their tactical firearms group standing by.”

“Any word on the rest?”

“Five of them announced to other household members that they were going Christmas shopping. That’s all we have at the moment.”

“Thanks, Jude. Call me when you have more.”

“Will do.”

At 12:30, following a call from Steve Goss, Liz made her way to the village hall, where an air of unhurried urgency prevailed. More chairs and tables had been set up, and a half-dozen computer screens cast their pale glow over the intent faces of officers that Liz didn’t recognise. There was muted but dense phone chatter as Goss, in shirt sleeves, beckoned her over.

“Small garage outside a place called Hawfield, north of King’s Lynn.”

“Go on.”

“Just after six p.m. on the evening before the shooting at the Fairmile Café, a young woman pays with two fifty-pound notes for a full tank of unleaded fuel, plus several litres which she takes away in a plastic screw-top container. The assistant particularly remembers her spilling fuel on her hands and coat-he remembers a green skiing or hiking-type jacket-presumably while filling the container. He makes some friendly remark to her about this but she blanks him and hands him the notes as if she hasn’t heard him and he wonders if perhaps she’s deaf. She also buys-get this-an A to Z of Norfolk.”

“That’s her. It’s got to be her. Any CCTV?”

“No, which is presumably why she chose the place. But the guy has good recall of her appearance. Early twenties, wide-set eyes, mid-brown hair held in some sort of elastic band. Quite attractive, he says, and with what he describes as a ‘mid-posh accent.’ ”

“Has the garage still got the fifty-pound notes?”

“No. Banked them a couple of days ago. But Whitten’s got an Identifit artist on the case. He and the garage guy are putting a portrait together right now.”

“When can we see it?”

“We’ll have it on our screens within the hour.”

“She’s right under our noses, Steve. I can practically smell her.”

“Yeah, me too, petrol and all. That A to Z suggests that whatever the hell she’s up to-it’s right here. Has London come up with anything?”

“They’re down to a dozen or so possibles. No sighting of the Astra, I assume?”

“No, and I wouldn’t hold your breath on that either. We’ve circulated the details and hopefully the reg number’s taped to every squad car dashboard in the country, but… well, you need a hell of a lot of luck with cars. We usually only find them once they’re dumped.”

“Can we recirculate to the Norfolk force? So that every single policeman or -woman in the county is looking for that black Astra as a matter of absolute priority?”

“Sure.”

“And have spotters in unmarked cars lying up on the approach roads to the American air bases.”

“Mr. Mackay’s already suggested that, and Whitten’s on to it.”

Liz looked around her. “Where is Mackay?”

“He told Whitten he was driving down to Lakenheath, to liaise with the station commander there.”

“OK,” said Liz. Good of him to keep me in the picture, she thought.

“I’ve heard they do a very nice hamburger down at those bases,” said Goss.

Liz glanced at her watch. “Would you settle for a ploughman’s at the Trafalgar?”

“Reckon so,” he nodded.