Secret Asset

19

Irwin Patel had never wanted the cameras. As he had explained to his wife Satinda, “What good is this thing supposed to do then? I know which of those little boys stuffs packets of crisps under his jacket. I don’t need a camera to identify them. And I can tell when the drunks try and put the wine bottles in their bags. Suppose I catch them on this wretched thing? Do you really think the police will take the time to look at movies of a petty theft? It is not realistic.”

But Satinda was insistent. “That is not the point, Irwin,” she said sternly, in a tone he had long ago learned was not worth arguing with. She had been a beauty when they met, so presumably she must have thought him a promising prospect. How had she put up with the disappointment of his career? Simple, he thought ruefully; she had taken over and now she called the shots.

He had never appreciated being a stereotype, though being an intelligent man, he knew that is what he was. His parents had been Ugandan Asians, thrown out of their country by Idi Amin when Irwin was just five. In England, they had altered the names of their children. Irwin was an English name and Christian, and they liked it, failing to realise that the retention of “Patel” would give the game away anyway.

Still, his name would hardly have mattered if Irwin had prospered, like the children of so many of his parents’ fellow immigrants, and become a lawyer or doctor. But Irwin had struggled, failing the eleven-plus just twelve months before it was abolished by a Labour government, and suffering accordingly. Nearly thirty years after his parents’ arrival, he still ran the same newsagent shop his father had bought and run all those years before. True, it carried a wider range and a better class of magazine, but Irwin was all too aware that his was simply one of thousands of shops throughout Britain owned by men called Patel.

“The purpose of the cameras,” Satinda declared, “is to deter. Whether it catches the offender, that is not important. It keeps people from thieving in the first place.”

And that was that, the end of the argument. So he had paid Steinman Son, the local security firm, to come in and install the camera, and at Satinda’s insistence, had even paid them to make sure it continued to work. And the result? Hour after hour of footage, all of it easily reviewed in the back room of the shop whenever he wanted. Which, rapidly, he did not care to do, since what was the point of looking at footage of the same three rows of shelves in his shop with the same customers buying the same items—a loaf of sliced white, a packet of tea biscuits, a pint of milk—day after day?

So he was puzzled when a local policeman appeared at the till that morning. Usually they came in once or twice a week for cigarettes or a packet of Polo mints, and would chat sometimes, about Arsenal’s latest match or when the road repairs in the High Street would finish. Today, however, this constable was all business, with a clipboard, a pencil, and a ground-down expression on his face. “Morning,” he said, “I need a word about your CCTV. It works, doesn’t it?”

Irwin nodded, a little warily. He had always thought of the police as allies, if unreliable ones, but he tried to ask very little of them and they had never before asked anything of him.

“We need all your footage for the last ten days,” the policeman said curtly. “Please,” he added as an afterthought.

“Gladly,” said Irwin, wondering how on earth to provide it. He would have to ask his son, Oscar, when he got home from school. Oscar understood these things; he even had his own computer, in the bedroom he shared with his sister, upstairs above the shop. “What are you looking for?”

The constable shrugged. “Ours is just to do or die, PC Plod does not ask why.”

He laughed, rather shortly, and Irwin thought it politic to laugh with him. “Would this afternoon be all right?” he said.

“Only if you can deliver it to the station. I’m trying to collect it all today.”