Dead Man's Grip

96

Grace, followed by Branson, sprinted up three floors at Brighton’s John Street Police Station, hurried along a corridor and went into the CCTV Control Room, which was manned around the clock.

It was a large space, with blue carpet and dark blue chairs, and three separate workstations, each comprising a bank of CCTV monitors on which was a kaleidoscope of moving images of parts of the city of Brighton and Hove and other Sussex locations, keyboards, computer terminals and telephones. Every police CCTV camera in the county could be viewed from here.

Two of the workstations were currently occupied by controllers, both hunched over them with headsets on. One of them looked busy, engaged in a police operation, but the other turned as they came in and nodded a greeting. He was a fresh-faced man in his late thirties with neat brown hair, wearing a lightweight black jacket. His badge gave his name as Jon Pumfrey. Moments later they were joined in the room by Chief Superintendent Graham Barrington, the Gold Commander.

Barrington, in his mid-forties, was a tall, slim man with short, fair hair, and the athletic air of a regular marathon runner. He wore a short-sleeved white uniform shirt with epaulettes, black trousers and shoes, held a radio in his hand and had a phone clipped to his belt.

‘Jon,’ the Chief Superintendent said, ‘which are the nearest cameras to the Regency Square car park?’

‘There’s a police one right opposite boss,’ Pumfrey said, ‘but it’s hopeless – there’s some constant interference with it.’

He tapped the keyboard and a moment later they saw successive waves rippling up and down one of the screens directly in front of him.

‘How long’s it been like that?’ Roy Grace asked suspiciously.

‘At least a year. I keep asking them to do something about it.’

He shrugged. ‘There are also cameras to the east and west – which direction do you want?’

‘We’ve just done a quick recce,’ Grace said. ‘If you exit in a vehicle from the Regency Square car park, you have to turn left on the seafront, on Kings Road – unless you go around up to Western Road, but that’s complicated.’

Part of that road was buses and taxis only. Grace did not think the abductor would take the risk of getting stopped there.

‘I’ve set some parameters,’ he said. ‘What we need to see is the video footage showing all vehicles in motion close to the car park, travelling east or west on King’s Road between 11.15 a.m. and 11.45 a.m. today. We’re looking particularly for a dark-coloured Toyota Yaris saloon, with a single male driving, either accompanied by a twelve-year-old boy or solo.’

Graham Barrington said, ‘All right, you guys, I’ll leave you to it. Anything you want, just shout.’

Grace thanked him, and the two detectives then stood behind Pumfrey and began to watch intently.

‘The Yaris is a popular car, sir,’ Pumfrey said. ‘Must be thousands on the roads. We’re likely to see a few.’

‘We’ll put markers on the first five we see, to start with,’ Grace said. ‘If they’re turning left, they’re heading east, but that might be only for a short distance, before they make a U-turn and head west. Let’s check east first.’

Almost as he spoke they saw a dark-coloured Yaris heading east, past the bottom of West Street. The camera was on the south side of the road.

‘Freeze that!’ Branson said. ‘Can you zoom in?’

Jon Pumfrey tapped the keyboard and the camera zoomed in, jerkily but quickly, on the driver’s door and window. It was a grainy zoom, but they could see clearly enough that it was two elderly ladies.

‘Let’s move on,’ Grace said.

They watched the fast-forwarding images, cars darting by in flickering movements.

Then Grace called out, ‘Stop! Go back.’

They watched the tape rewind.

‘OK! That one.’ They were looking at a dark grey Yaris with what appeared to be a single occupant, a male, driving. The time said 11.38.

‘Now zoom in, please.’

The image was again grainy, but this time it looked like a male, most of his face obscured by a baseball cap and dark glasses.

‘It’s not that bright out there. Why’s he wearing dark glasses?’ Pumfrey queried.

Grace turned to Branson. ‘That was the description by the school teacher – the taxi driver was wearing a baseball cap. And so was the man who rented the car from Avis!’ Suddenly he felt his adrenalin pumping. Turning back to Pumfrey, he asked, ‘Is that the best image you can get?’

‘I can send it for enhancement, but that would take a while.’

‘OK, run forward. Can we get the registration?’

Pumfrey inched the car forward frame by frame.

‘Golf Victor Zero Eight Whisky Delta X-Ray,’ Branson read out, as Grace wrote it down.

‘Right. Can you run an ANPR check from here?’ he asked Pumfrey.

‘Yes, sir.’

They continued watching. Then, to Grace’s excitement, the car reappeared, this time travelling west.

‘It’s gone round the roundabout at the Palace Pier, doing a U-turn!’ he said. ‘Where’s the next camera?’

‘Other than the dud one opposite the Regency Square car park, the next is a mile to the west, on Brunswick Lawns.’

‘Let’s look at that one,’ Grace said.

Five minutes later, which indicated the vehicle was sticking rigidly to the speed limit, and allowing for a couple of traffic-light stops and the roadworks delay, the car appeared, still travelling west.

‘Where’s the next?’ Grace asked.

‘That’s the last of the city’s CCTV cameras in this direction, sir,’ Pumfrey said.

‘OK. Now let’s see if this vehicle has triggered any ANPR camera since 11.15 a.m. What’s the first one west of this position?’

Pumfrey turned to a different computer and entered the data. Grace noticed his partially eaten lunch on the wooden table beside him. An empty plastic lunchbox, a coil of orange peel and an unopened yoghurt. Healthy, he thought, depending of course on what had been in the sandwich.

‘Here we are: 11.54 a.m. This is the ANPR camera at the bottom of Boundary Road, Hove, at the junction with the end of the Kingsway.’

Suddenly a photograph of the front of a dark grey Yaris appeared on the screen, its number plate clearly visible, but the occupant hard to make out through an almost opaque screen. By looking very closely it was possible to distinguish what might have been someone in a baseball cap and dark glasses, but without any certainty.

‘Can’t we get a better image of the face?’ Branson asked.

‘Depends how the light hits the windscreen,’ Pumfrey replied. ‘These particular cameras are designed to read number plates, I’m afraid, not faces. I can send it for enhancement if you want?’

‘Yes, both of those images, please,’ Grace said. ‘Is that the only ANPR it’s triggered?’

‘The only one showing today.’

Grace did a mental calculation. If the driver avoided breaking the law, and with a kidnapped child on board he would not want to risk getting stopped… The exit from the car park on to King’s Road was a left turn only… That meant he would have driven east to the end of King’s Road and then gone round the roundabout, by the Palace Pier, and then come back on himself. Allowing for the distance and hold-ups at traffic lights, that would put the car there at the right time from its sighting on King’s Road. Excitement was growing inside him.

The car’s location was alongside Shoreham Harbour, close to Southwick. He was certain that the sadist knew this area. A lot of villains perpetrated their crimes in the places they knew, their comfort zones. He made a note of a new line of enquiry, to have Duncan Crocker do a search on all previous violent crimes in this area. But first, still staring at the frozen image of the front of the Yaris and the faint silhouette of its driver, on the monitor, he called for a PNC check on the car.

The information came back almost immediately that the owner was a male, Barry Simons, who lived in Worthing, West Sussex, some fifteen miles to the west of Brighton. Grace’s excitement waned at this news. That fitted with the car’s occupant and position, heading in the direction where he lived. The only thing that kept him hopeful was the fact that the Yaris appeared to have stopped somewhere in Shoreham or Southwick. He was about to call Gold to ask him to get the helicopter over there and block off the area when his phone rang.

It was Duncan Crocker. ‘Roy, we’ve found a car, a Toyota Yaris, driving on those switched plates taken from the service station at Newport Pagnell – the plates from the woman’s car – that twenty-seven-year-old who was stopped on the M11 near Brentwood. It’s just pinged an ANPR camera, heading north from Brighton on the A23.’