One of Us Is Dead

36 Monday 3 October 2022

Malling House, the Sussex Police HQ, was situated on the northern edge of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex. The sprawling campus, which also housed the HQ of the East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service, got its name from its crown jewel, the handsome and imposing eighteenth-century Queen Anne mansion that dominated the entrance and housed the top brass of both services.

Most of the rest of the buildings were bland and functional, except for the Control Room, an incongruously futuristic-looking, two-storey brick structure. The 999 call centre for the Police and Fire services for the county was located inside, as well as stations, of ten monitors each, showing CCTV footage from the 1,320 cameras located around the city of Brighton and Hove, and other key hotspots across the county, manned on a 24/7 shift rota.

Now, at midday on the first Monday in October, two of the three operators, along with Norman Potting and Will Glover, were focused on footage from the cameras in and around Western Road, Brighton, from just over three weeks ago, mid-afternoon, Saturday, 3 September. They were looking, among the teeming Saturday shopping crowds, old and young, smart and shabby, weird and even weirder, for a blind man in a white jacket, wearing large dark glasses and a peaked cap, with a black Labrador guide dog.

‘Gottim!’ Will Glover shouted suddenly. ‘Camera 6!’

The CCTV operator, a diligent woman in her forties, now a wheelchair user after being knocked off her bike by a van driver ten years ago, instantly freeze-framed the image. It showed the blind man, with his dog, turning left a few blocks west of the Organica supermarket onto Preston Street, a road lined with restaurants that led down to the seafront.

‘Click it forward!’ Will urged.

She did so, but all that happened was the man and his dog disappeared from view.

‘OK, he’s heading for the seafront, what cameras do you have along there, Elaine, that might pick him up?’ he asked.

‘There’s one either side of the bottom of Preston Street,’ she said. ‘Another, a quarter of a mile further along to the east, and one a similar distance to the west. Unless he vanishes into thin air, we’ll pick him up.’

Allowing their target only a couple of minutes to reach the seafront, in case he had started to run, she then selected the recordings from both these cameras, found the correct time and date, then let them play on adjoining monitors. Monitor 1 showed east and Monitor 2 west.

Will watched both of them intently. He saw an androgenous man, his hair a kaleidoscope of primary colours, shoot past on an e-scooter. A drunk-looking female in a bride’s rig, followed by a posse of similarly inebriated-looking hens wearing sashes. Two smart-suited Asian men arguing fiercely. A mother dragging a reluctant child along beside her.

No blind man and his dog.

After fifteen minutes, there was still no sighting of him.

Will went over to Norman Potting, who was studying all the CCTV footage from the same time but to the north of Organica, in case. He told him the findings.

‘Disappeared into thin air, did he?’ Potting retorted.

‘It seems that way, sir,’ Glover said.

Potting shook his head. ‘Listen, sunshine, this isn’t my first rodeo. If I’ve learned anything in over thirty years as a copper it’s that nobody disappears into thin air, unless they’re an illusionist called Derren Brown, right?’

Glover nodded, dubiously.

‘A blind man and his dog turn left and head down Preston Street towards the seafront, then don’t appear on any more CCTV cameras. Correct?’ Potting said.

The DC nodded again.

‘Right, so, in the absence of any UFO sightings around this time, it’s safe to assume they’ve not been captured by aliens and spirited away to Planet Zog, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I would, yes, Norman.’

‘So I’m all ears. Where are they?’

‘I... I’ve no idea.’

‘Oh yes you have. You want to be a detective, then you’ve got to have an idea. A hypothesis. So do you have one?’

‘I do. The blind man turns into Preston Street and does not appear the other end. So perhaps he gets into a parked car somewhere along there, or in a road off — there is just one — and drives away.’

‘A blind man gets into a parked car and drives off?’

‘If he’s faking being blind, then yes, and it seems probable from what Detective Superintendent Grace said that he is faking it. Instead of driving, he could have got into a taxi. Another hypothesis is that he lives somewhere down Preston Street or off it. It’s a busy street of mostly restaurants. Some of them surely will have outward-facing CCTV cameras, and might give us something. I also have a further hypothesis.’

‘Which is?’ Potting encouraged him.

‘That he went into a restaurant with his guide dog and had a meal. In which case we should be looking at the footage on the cameras at the bottom of the street over a much longer period after he entered it.’

‘All good points,’ Potting agreed. ‘But you are overlooking one more thing.’

Glover gave him a puzzled look.

‘Criminals can be crafty bastards. Often when they are being pursued they will turn and double back in the direction they came from. We need to check the footage along Western Road, either side of Preston Street, for at least two hours after he went in.’

‘As well as any private cameras in Preston Street around then?’

‘You’re cottoning on. And we need to check the taxi companies. A driver would remember picking him and his dog up. We can do that while we’re watching more footage. And then it’s time for some shoe leather.’

‘Shoe leather?’ Will Glover asked.

‘Good old-fashioned detective work,’ Potting replied. ‘It’s not all about sitting on your jacksie watching television. We’ll go door-knocking down Preston Street. See if we can find the black hole into a parallel universe our blind man went through.’

The DC frowned, then realized Potting was joking. It wasn’t always easy to tell with him.