‘What did they look like?’

‘I don’t know really. You know about the cloak, don’t you?’

‘Tell me.’

‘It was a woman, maybe around my height, wearing this black robe thing. It had a hood pulled down over her face and I could only see her mouth.’

Jessica was hanging on his replies. ‘How do you know it was a female?’

The man shook his head slightly as if it were a stupid question. ‘The voice, it was a woman’s voice. She was just so calm.’

‘What did she say?’

‘“Open the till”.’

‘That was it?’

‘Well, she repeated it. It happened so quickly. You know when you think you’ve heard what somebody has said to you but it’s not really gone in? It was like that. Then I saw the knife.’

Jessica knew she had to be careful with her words. ‘What did it look like?’

‘It was a kitchen knife, like something you might cut meat up with.’

‘What did her voice sound like? Was there any type of accent?’

‘I . . . I don’t know. It just sounded normal, I wasn’t thinking about it.’

It was what Jessica would have expected. ‘Okay, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘What happened after she repeated herself?’

‘I just . . . it was like I was someone else. Have you ever felt like you’re in a corner of a room watching yourself do something? It felt like somebody else was controlling me and I was just looking at things. I only know because I showed the people downstairs the video. I opened the register and stepped backwards.’

‘What happened then?’

‘She reached across and pulled the notes out. It’s the one thing I clearly remember because there was a moment where she was on tiptoes stretching forward. It was just a fraction where I thought about . . . well, I don’t know, trying to grab the knife or something. She was off-balance but it wasn’t as if I really had time to think. As soon as it crossed my mind she had taken everything and moved away.’

Jessica could see he was starting to get a little emotional and there were tears in his eyes. He wiped them away and was almost shouting as he continued. ‘It’s not even the money but it could have been my wife, y’know? We’ve had our kids in here before . . . and I just did nothing.’

Jessica knew there wasn’t much she could say. Even for a man who wasn’t sexist at all, she guessed it would be hard to be robbed by anyone but perhaps the fact it was a woman made it a little worse.

‘I’m sure there’s nothing you could have done, Mr Burnham,’ Jessica said as reassuringly as she could. The man shrugged, clearly fighting to stop himself crying. ‘Did anything happen after she had taken the money?’ Jessica added. ‘Did you notice anyone else in the shop?’

The man shook his head again. ‘I don’t really remember. I think she just left.’

‘Where is the camera footage stored, Mr Burnham?’

Victor pointed towards the bedroom door he had indicated before. ‘It’s in there, my brother put it in. The wires come up through the ceiling and it’s all stored on a hard drive. Once a week I have to switch them over but it looks after itself apart from that. The system has been in for almost two years and this is only the second time I’ve ever used it. The first was just some lads nicking porno mags.’

‘Did you report it?’

The man actually laughed a little as he answered. ‘No, I knew the parents of one of them. I could’ve come to you but he was so terrified of me telling his mum, he paid for everything. I could’ve still reported him or whatever but what’s the point? He’s only fifteen or so.’

‘Can you show me the footage from earlier?’

‘Okay – I’m not very good with the equipment though.’

Victor stood, leading Jessica into the bedroom. It was a little larger than she would have guessed but shared the same stale smell as the rest of the flat. The bed was unmade, a duvet cover half on the floor and the sheets ruffled into the centre. The room wasn’t very bright, the only illumination coming through one small window before the man turned on the lights.

A desktop computer was on a table with a large plastic-looking box next to it. Victor sat in front of the machine and pointed to the box. ‘Those are the external hard drives,’ he said, then indicated a set of wires running up the wall. ‘It all connects to the cameras downstairs. The computer doesn’t need to be on to record but it does if you want to watch anything back. I turned it on earlier.’

The man moved the mouse and the screen lit up, then he clicked around the screen to bring up a new window. ‘I’m not brilliant with this but my wife’s gone around to my brother’s family’s house so he can’t come over. He’d be the best one to explain the system. I can show you this though.’ After moving the mouse around some more, a new box appeared that had a still image looking at the front door of the shop from the inside. He then pressed a button on the keyboard and the view cut to the camera that was over the top of the cash register looking down. He pointed out to Jessica which buttons moved the action forward and backwards and where she needed to press to change the camera angles.

‘I’ll let you look for yourself because you know as much as me now,’ he said.

Victor stood and offered the seat to Jessica. He clearly didn’t want to watch the footage again, moving across to the bed and starting to make it. Jessica sat as the constable stood behind her. It took her a few moments to get used to how everything worked and the thought crossed her mind that so much of what she’d been working on in the past few weeks revolved in one way or another around cameras.

The shop owner had left the video at the start of the morning’s footage and, using the timestamps at the bottom of the screen, Jessica moved it forward to a little after half past two. She watched it at triple speed but there was only one visitor into the shop, a middle-aged man who didn’t buy anything, before the timer clicked over to three o’clock. Jessica set the camera angle to the one watching the front door. At two minutes past, Jessica saw what she was waiting for. The door opened and a figure in a black cloak walked confidently into the shop. They shut the door behind them and turned into one of the aisles without looking up.

Jessica had to switch to the second camera angle and saw everything happen exactly as Victor said it had. It was chilling to watch the coolness the person moved with. There was no hesitation and not even a trace of anything that could be seen as emotion in the body language. If anything, the shop owner had underestimated the size of the knife. From the footage, Jessica could see it had been concealed in the wide sleeve of the gown and then taken out when they were halfway into the shop. It had a wide fearsome-looking blade and she could see why Victor had almost switched off mentally at the sight of it.

Jessica rewound the recording and watched it three times in a row, each time looking for different things. She tried to see if the gloves the figure was wearing looked like the ones that had been seen in the footage of the person leaving the hands. On the third viewing, she watched the shape of the robe and the way the person moved. The only time she could see the person’s shoes properly was when they stretched across and snatched the cash, then walked away. There were only a few brief frames but they looked very similar to the style of low dark heels from the recordings taken in the city centre.

When she had looked for all she could, Jessica realised Victor wasn’t in the room. She found him at the sink in the kitchen area washing up. ‘Are there any cameras outside, Mr Burnham?’

He replied without turning. ‘Not that belong to me. I’ve never noticed anything else.’

Jessica didn’t know what else she could add. The forensics team would take the video and try to enhance some of the still frames in case there was a clear image of the person’s face. From what she had seen, Jessica didn’t think they would get one. The entire time she had been watching the video, Jessica had been looking for any sign to disassociate the robber from the person leaving the hands. When she had first heard about the robbery and throughout Victor’s description, she had been thinking the person was a copycat.