The man nodded and Jessica couldn’t read his face. She looked to Reynolds. ‘We’re going to have to either talk to the son or get some electrical experts in who know more than we do.’
Her boss had already started to stand, clearly thinking along the same lines. ‘I’ll try to contact the son first to find out if the camera that’s present actually stores the images.’ He turned back to the maid who was standing next to the politician, addressing the pair of them. ‘Do you know why the camera was placed? Is it there for you to see who’s at the gate?’
The man was shaking his head as he stood. ‘I have no idea. We have the intercom for people to say who’s at the front. I didn’t even know there was a camera. Until recently, I didn’t spend much time here. I was either in our flat in London and we have a place in France where we usually spend the summer.’
Reynolds asked Mr Johnson to phone his son as Jessica went to look for the camera. The maid insisted she didn’t know where it was so she was on her own. It seemed almost inconceivable there could be a camera on the politician’s property he didn’t know about. The maid said Christine Johnson had wanted it putting in but why would she do so without her husband’s knowledge and, if he did know about it, why hadn’t he told them?
Jessica let herself back out of the front door, walking down the driveway towards the front gate. When she reached it, she turned, looking for areas that would have a decent visibility of the opening. She peered at the large gateposts but there was nothing on top. Jessica walked back up the paved area, glancing from side to side. She couldn’t see anything on the house itself and, even if there was, it would have had to be zoomed in significantly to have a clear view.
After walking to the house and back to the gate another time, she decided to have a look at a large oak tree that was sprawled on the edge of the garden. The main trunk was thick and must have been many years old but the branches themselves had been trimmed at some point not too long ago. Jessica squinted up at the top of the trunk and, in a large circular knot, finally saw what she was looking for. It was too high to reach but there was definitely some kind of metal-looking object angled towards the entrance.
She returned inside where Reynolds was standing next to George Johnson talking on a portable home phone. Not long after she entered, the inspector passed the phone to the other man and moved next to Jessica.
‘I found it,’ she said. ‘It’s in a knot of that giant tree out there. It’s no surprise no one else saw it; you never would unless you were looking.’
Reynolds nodded. ‘The son says he put the camera in for his mother because she was worried about being on her own a lot. He doesn’t know if his dad knew or not.’
‘Does it keep recordings?’ Jessica asked.
‘He said the camera is wireless and stores a still image once every minute. I didn’t really understand it all but he said everything is recorded on a web server and, unless he specifically deletes something, everything is kept.’
‘Why didn’t he tell you this before?’
‘Maybe he thought we knew? I have no idea. I’m going to talk to some of the computer team out at Bradford Park and get them to contact the son. The system only takes a photo every minute but, unless she jumped over the hedge or left in between snaps, hopefully we’ll have something of her.’
17
With little more she could contribute, Jessica cheekily asked Garry Ashford for a lift back to the station as Reynolds was going to be a little while and would need the car. The journalist obliged and she told him he might want to make a check-call or two to the police press office a little later.
Back at Longsight, Cole already knew what they had found and had been in contact with one of the computer technicians to discover how long things would take. Jessica didn’t understand the technical talk entirely but there was some sort of problem they were trying to sort out with George Johnson’s son that wasn’t proving easy as he was having problems accessing the Internet wherever he was.
Jessica checked in with Rowlands and Diamond, neither of whom sounded like they’d had a fun day. Cornish had made them talk her through each step of where they were up to in the investigation, telling them how she would have done things differently. Jessica thought it was a sign she had matured, even if only a little, that those revelations hadn’t sent her into an instant rage. A few years ago it certainly would have done but she was at the point where, if someone thought they could do a better job, they were welcome to try – and have severed fingers addressed to them instead of her. Either way, it didn’t seem as if they had got any further and, once again, it looked as if they were going to have to work their way through the full list of college-leavers in an effort to find anything to move the case forward.
That evening, Reynolds called Jessica at home. He thanked her for her help, refusing to accept her point that the afternoon’s discovery was just luck and not much to do with her. From the tone of his voice, she figured a lot of the gratitude was simply down to relief that something had happened. She knew both the inspector and Cole were under a lot of pressure to make a breakthrough. He told her the computer experts had finally managed to figure out with the Johnsons’ son what was going on with the stored images. There were tens of thousands to scan through and the naming of the files wasn’t too efficient but, after hours of work, they had isolated three still-shots ‘of interest’.
From the day Christine Johnson had gone missing, one image showed the maid heading out via the gate at the front which was presumably to go shopping as she had told them, leaving Mrs Johnson alone in the house. Twenty minutes later a faded red van pulled up outside the large double gates at the end of the driveway. The vehicle was in the next three pictures before disappearing, meaning it had been outside for less than four minutes. In the final image, the rear door of the van had been open and there was a faded logo visible which they were now trying to identify.
The bad news was that, with the gap in between the photos, no actual people had been seen but it did at least give them something to work with. With the high-profile nature of the case, experts were going to spend the weekend enhancing the images as best they could in order to release them to the media. Reynolds also said he was looking into either getting permission to go to Luxembourg to visit the son, or seeing if they could arrange for him to return home to be interviewed. The man insisted he had set up the camera at the request of his mother and assumed it was done with his father’s knowledge. Given the lack of time his dad spent at the family home, it was plausible but certainly unusual.
When she woke up the next day, Jessica had almost forgotten that she had to go to the summer fete as part of the dreaded community engagement plan. She had finally read Cole’s email properly and it was clear a lot of it had been written under duress from people above him. Three separate times it mentioned that instructions had come down from the superintendent, presumably to stop the rest of the officers thinking too badly of him. The event was at Crowcroft Park, the recreation area closest to their station, and there was very little information other than the venue and a rota for the times they should arrive.
It was another scorching day and Jessica couldn’t remember a longer spell of uninterrupted good weather since she had moved to the area. When she arrived, Jessica could see the park itself was parched with large areas of sand-coloured grass. A lot of people had come out seemingly because of the weather and the whole spectacle took Jessica back to a different age when she was young.