Not Dead Yet

109

Norman Potting sat at his workstation in MIR-1, puzzled. He now had images emailed to him from all the hole-in-the-wall machines within a short walking distance of Café Conneckted. HSBC, Barclays, Halifax and Santander banks had responded quickly and efficiently.

He scrolled through them, looking, in turn, at four female and sixteen male faces, and something was not making sense. All twenty people had made cash withdrawals from these machines, within his parameter of 8.15 and 9 p.m. Monday evening. Despite the poor image quality, one woman bore a reasonable resemblance to Anna Galicia. She had apparently attempted a transaction from an HSBC machine on Queen’s Road at 8.31 p.m. But there was no withdrawal showing under her name. One explanation, the bank had told him, was that her card had been declined. But they were still a bit mystified why no record showed up at all. Another suggestion was that she was using a card that had been stolen but not yet reported missing: a withdrawal was made one minute later, at 8.32 p.m. in a man’s name.

The Detective Sergeant was on the verge of deciding he had drawn a blank with this particular line of enquiry, when for the second time this afternoon, the normal studious quiet of the Major Incident Room was broken. This time there was an exuberant whoop from Haydn Kelly, who entered with such speed and force that the door swung back and struck the wall behind it with a bang loud enough to make everyone look up with a start.

‘I’ve cracked it!’ he shouted across the room at Roy Grace, beaming like an exuberant kid and brandishing two CD cases in the air.

‘What? What have you cracked? Anna Galicia?’ Grace asked.

The forensic podiatrist moved Grace’s keyboard aside and set his laptop down on the worktop. He flipped open the lid and tapped in his code. Moments later Grace was staring at a screen that was split vertically. On the left-hand side he saw what looked like CCTV footage of the woman he recognized from earlier, Anna Galicia, walking along a street in Brighton. On the right-hand side of the screen was a balding man in a business suit. Along the top were several columns of spinning numbers and algebraic symbols that seemed to be calibrating and re-calibrating as each person walked.

Haydn Kelly pointed at the left screen. ‘See our mysterious Anna Galicia?’

Grace nodded.

‘There’s a good reason why no one’s been able to find her.’

‘Which is?’

Kelly pointed at the right-hand screen. At the balding man in the business suit. ‘Because that’s her.’

Grace looked at the forensic podiatrist’s face for an instant, in case he was joking. But he appeared deadly serious. ‘How the hell do you know?’

‘Gait analysis. See all those computations on the screen? I can do the analysis visually, to a pretty high degree of accuracy because I’ve done it for so long, but those calculations done by the algorithm I developed add certainty. There is a very minor variation because the woman is on high heels and the man is wearing conventional male shoes. But they’re the same person. No question.’

‘Beyond doubt?’

‘I’d bet my life on it.’