Jessica laughed. ‘I think it’s a bit of a special circumstance.’

‘I told him that but he wasn’t having it and the shopkeeper kid kept saying how he’d be in trouble with his dad for letting a non-staff member use the toilet.’

Jessica flicked a dial on the dashboard in front of her. ‘People are strange, don’t you think? We’ve got this one guy worrying about being a woman-beater because he tackled a female threatening his mate with a bloody great knife but, meanwhile, there’s some lunatic cutting off people’s hands seemingly without bothering about it.’

‘That’s the job though, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the job.’

Jessica tried not to sound too disheartened but it was hard not to let things get to her considering whoever was responsible for leaving the hands knew who she was.

‘What do you think about the rumours about the MP?’ Izzy went on.

Jessica paused before replying, wondering how she should respond. ‘We’ve got to keep it quiet.’

‘Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to . . .’

‘No, I know. The minute something is supposed to be kept under wraps everyone starts talking about it.’ Izzy didn’t say anything and Jessica sighed before continuing. ‘I wasn’t telling you to stop, just that you’ve got to be discreet if it comes up at the station. I trust you and Dave enough to talk about it in front of you but it can’t go beyond us.’

‘What’s going on then?’ Izzy asked.

Jessica could almost hear herself from a few years ago, fishing for information and trying to learn the station’s internal politics.

‘What have you heard?’

‘That we’re now looking into George Johnson himself.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Everyone knows.’

Jessica sighed again. ‘It’s supposed to be a secret. We got a warrant this morning to look at his bank records. We want to go through his emails too but don’t want to let him know anything yet. We don’t need to tell him to obtain a warrant but his emails are more complicated because they could contain sensitive information due to his position. I think Jack’s hoping there’s something in his finances because it’s going to be too hard to keep things from him otherwise. The super’s looking into how it all stands legally. There was even some talk about MI5 but I think that’s just because no one knows the law.’

‘What do you reckon?’

‘Who knows? I think everyone automatically assumes it’s the husband, wife, boyfriend or girlfriend. I really don’t think he knew about the camera. At the time I thought the look on his face was surprise but perhaps it was panic because he had an idea of what might have been captured?’ Jessica switched the footage she was watching onto another day and yawned. ‘You bored yet?’

‘Yeah, I wonder how Dave’s getting on?’

‘Probably zooming in on any women wearing a low-cut top.’

‘Ha! He is pretty good, y’know?’

‘I know. Why do you think I pick you guys to work with? Just don’t tell him I said that.’

Izzy’s voice suddenly raised in pitch. ‘Hey, look.’ Jessica stopped her footage and spun to look over her colleague’s shoulder. ‘I think that’s her,’ the constable added.

Jessica could see what she meant. There was a figure in the distance from one of the camera angles but it was hard to see. ‘Where are you looking at?’

‘One of the street cameras on the bottom of the road that leads to Oxford Road train station. It points down the side of the Palace Hotel.’

‘Is that the one with the giant clock tower?’ Jessica asked.

‘Exactly.’

‘Is there a different angle?’

Izzy clicked through a couple of windows and brought up some new footage, scrolling through it to get to the same time as the frames she had been watching. ‘This one is pointing in the other direction,’ she said.

They watched in silence as a figure in a long dark cloak walked into frame. Jessica said nothing but knew it was who they were after. It felt like the constable had read her mind as she slowed the footage, zooming in.

‘She knows where the cameras are again,’ Izzy said.

‘I know. Where’s she going though?’

The constable had learned the system quickly and was easily able to swap from one shot to another. They had the figure from three separate camera angles but there was a blind spot before they first appeared in the frame and any number of alleys or side streets the person could have emerged from.

Once they established they couldn’t narrow down where the cloaked figure had come from, Izzy moved the footage forward again and they watched in real-time as the person walked along the side of the ancient building and bent down to place the hand under the canopied corner entrance. Given the thousands of people who walked past the spot on a daily basis, it was inconceivable no one had contacted them. The drop had happened two days previously. Jessica looked at the timestamp at the bottom of the screen. It was just after five in the morning and, though the streets were almost empty, people would have been around.

‘Shall we phone it in and get someone to visit there?’ the constable asked.

‘Let it play through first,’ Jessica said.

Izzy left one of the two screens focusing on the corner where the hand had been placed, while, on the second one, she switched to the camera that gave them the best view of the figure walking away. The figure started by returning the way they had come but then crossed the street – a different direction to the one from which they had entered the shot.

Throughout the footage, the figure moved in the exact way they had done on the other occasions. They kept their head angled away from the cameras, the robe dropping to just above their ankles leaving a little flesh and the choice of footwear, the low black heels, on display.

The person in the cloak disappeared out of the shot. ‘Is there another camera watching that spot?’ Jessica asked.

Izzy had already stopped the footage and was looking through the list of cameras available. She clicked through a few options but they weren’t the ones she wanted. ‘Do you know what that road’s called?’

‘No idea.’

They could have looked it up but it was as quick to use trial and error. Izzy continued to scan through the options until eventually they stumbled across the one they had been looking for. The figure in the cloak walked confidently down the street, moving past a couple of shops towards the camera which, from the angle of the images, was high up on the corner of a building. After passing the stores, they paused next to the entrance of an alley and, without turning towards it, gave a thumbs-up to the camera.

Izzy gave a little laugh in disbelief. ‘I didn’t expect that.’

‘Unbelievable,’ Jessica said. ‘Right, we’ll have to get someone else to clean this footage up and get us a zoomed-in still-shot. Let’s find out what happened to the hand though.’ She pointed at the first screen and asked the constable to speed the footage up.

Almost fifteen minutes had passed since the hand had been dropped and one person had walked past it completely oblivious to what was on the ground. The two detectives then saw why the appendage hadn’t been found. A stray dog bounced down the street, sniffed the hand and picked it up before trotting down the road the person in black had first come from and disappearing into an alley that ran along the back of the hotel.

24

Jessica drove more loosely without the other two detectives in the car. She left Izzy and Dave to see if there was any trace of either the dog or their figure in black emerging from the alleyways. Someone was also working on enhancing the still frames they had.

She told the constables to contact the station as she weaved through traffic to get to the Palace Hotel. It wasn’t too far from the offices of the security company who operated the cameras but the traffic was barely moving. She wondered if she would have been better walking as she hammered the horn on her car in protest at a driver who was indicating to change lanes, blocking her path. He flicked her a V-sign and shouted an insult that would have certainly made her pull him over if she wasn’t in her own vehicle and in such a hurry. Regardless of that, he did finally move and she powered through an amber traffic light, swerved late to avoid a cyclist and parked on double yellow lines blocking the alleyway that not long ago she had been watching on the CCTV cameras.