He moved to the spare bedroom where Claire often worked late at night on her computer. She often said that most of what the Security Service knew could be found on the internet, and a lot more. You just had to know what you were looking for and where to look.
Sunlight bounced off a glass-topped desk, highlighting a thin layer of dust over everything. Jake noticed that there were breaks in the dust layer. The new iMac, which Claire had received as a birthday present from her father, was missing.
98
Wednesday
5 October 2005
0845 hours
Pimlico, London
Jake entered the living room, which overlooked a central communal garden. Claire’s car keys were on the coffee table alongside her purse and mobile phone.
His heart was thumping heavily.
‘Think, Jake, think…’ he said aloud to himself.
He remembered a conversation he had had with Claire, some months before the bombings. They’d been drinking cocktails in a bar; they were both slightly drunk. She’d grabbed him, kissed him on the cheek and had said in his ear, ‘If something happens to me, just look in the box by the bed.’
He’d laughed it off at the time. Asked her if the computers she worked with at Thames House were likely to blow up. She’d said nothing in response, just smiled.
Jake went back to the main bedroom. There was a white bedside table with a single door; he pulled it open. Inside he found three tatty paperback books, some frayed hairbands, a vibrator with no batteries in it and a porcelain Dusty Bin figure from the 1980s television game show 3-2-1. But there was no box.
Jake picked up the Dusty Bin figure. It had a slot in his head.
‘A box by the bed…? She meant this? A money box?’ Jake looked at the four-inch-high figurine in his hand.
He shook it. It was empty. He pulled out the rubber bung from the bottom and looked inside. Nothing. Still holding the figurine, he walked back out into the dark hallway. He checked through the spyhole in the door. The communal stairway was clear; it was time to leave the flat. He pulled the door shut behind him and didn’t lock the mortice. He might need to go back.
Claire’s apartment block stood on a corner. Immediately opposite the main entrance was a newspaper shop. Jake crossed the road. Within five minutes he was leaving the shop with all of the previous week’s CCTV on a DVD.
99
Wednesday
5 October 2005
1145 hours
The flat above the sari shop, Whitechapel, East End of London
He sat down at his own computer, pushed the DVD tray into the computer tower and selected the CCTV-viewing-software icon.
Within a few seconds, he was watching footage from the previous day. The Asian shopkeeper was selling cigarettes to some kids at 1534 hours. Jake played around with the settings until he found the camera that looked toward the door of Claire’s block.
He made himself a coffee. CCTV wasn’t always a quick job, especially when you weren’t sure what you were looking for. Each frame of film had to be watched, sometimes several times. Claire had been missing for three days. This was going to take some time.
He rewound the digital recording and went back in time to 1900 hours on Sunday night. He’d spoken to Claire on the phone at 1930 hours; she’d said she was just arriving home after finishing up at the office. It was a good point from which to start looking.
At 1900 hours, Jake could see that the parking space, which now held her car, stood empty. At 1918 hours, Claire’s silver Volkswagen Golf pulled into the space. Claire got out of the car and went into the main entrance of the block. Excellent. This was a start, thought Jake.
He played the CCTV footage forward at five times its normal speed, slowing it down when he saw movement at the main doors of the block. Each twenty-four hours would take him about five hours to watch. He settled down to begin.
He’d been looking at the CCTV for around sixteen hours. It didn’t make sense. He’d seen Claire go in, but she hadn’t come out. Jake had even seen himself arrive and leave on the same CCTV, but Claire still hadn’t come out. He needed sleep. He threw the pile of washing that sat atop his bed onto the floor and climbed in, fully clothed.
He closed his eyes. The darkness of sleep crept over him. Suddenly he was chasing Wasim’s car down the motorway, sounding his horn and desperately trying to make it pull over. Reflected back in the car ahead’s mirrors, he could see Wasim looking drunk or drugged as he drove. Jake had no voice. In the dream, he was shouting but no sound came out.
He awoke suddenly. He was standing up in his bedroom holding a jumper in one hand. His bedside table had been knocked over and his lamp was in pieces on the floor. He sat down on the bed, head in hands.
The nightmares were getting worse. More recently they’d started to become physical night terrors. He would often wake to find himself standing, fighting imaginary things in the room he was in or, worse, breaking things. Deliberate drunkenness was sometimes the only way to stop himself waking up.
He began to cry. He wanted it to stop. Where was Claire? What was going on? He lay back down, sobbing to himself, and fell back to sleep.
When he awoke, he was sweating; the clothes he’d fallen asleep in were damp. He thought he had heard Ted at the window, but there was silence. No black cat appeared.
Jake took off his wet clothes and threw them into a heap on the floor. He showered quickly and then sat back at his computer with a black coffee.
He’d been fixated on the idea of spotting Claire coming out of the building, but she certainly was not visible on exit. He’d watched all the footage now.
He’d missed something. Part of the answer was here. It had to be.
If she were dead inside the apartment, he would have smelled her, wouldn’t he? It didn’t make sense. He’d definitely missed something. He thought back.
What else had stood out?
Jake rewound the CCTV to watch the sections where more than one person had entered or exited the building at the same time. He noticed two men leaving in a white Ford Transit van.
Jake rewound to the section where the two men had arrived at the building. They’d arrived separately. Not together. Very odd. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t bothered with them on the footage yesterday?
The first man, short, stocky and dressed like a delivery driver, arrived at the building at 0650 hours. Jake watched him use the intercom, whereupon, after a brief discussion, he entered the building. Someone had let him in. Then, less than two minutes later, Jake saw the white Transit van pull up outside and a second man get out of it, before it moved off and parked in a loading bay.
The two men, both dressed in overalls, left the building together on Monday at 0721 hours, the same day Claire was supposed to have left for Travannon House.
He watched the same section of CCTV over and over again.
Presumably, the first man had let the second inside, and a third, the driver, had been waiting in the van. Half an hour later, as the two men exited the building together, they were carrying a red holdall. Jake had not previously noticed it, but the bag looked heavy. Each man held a handle and had a strap over his shoulder. Each time Jake rewound and rewatched the footage, frame by frame, he became more convinced by the obvious weight of the bag. Why did a large, red sports holdall require two men to carry it together?
Claire was only slight; maybe they’d drugged her and somehow fitted her into the bag?
As the two men walked out of the doors, one of them appeared to flick his head. It was an obvious movement as the man left the foyer. Jake rewound and reviewed it again and again. It was more deliberate each time he saw it. The man was clearly indicating something to someone as he came out, with a nod downwards and a jerk of his head to the right. Within a few seconds of the head movement, the white Transit van returned and moved across Jake’s field of vision from right to le
ft. It was so fast that you couldn’t even see the registration with the naked eye.
Jake needed to get the registration of the white Transit van, but these images were too grainy and the cameras weren’t facing in exactly the right direction. He needed more footage from a different angle so he could see the number plates. He grabbed his stuff and left his flat.
Twenty minutes later and Jake was standing back at the entrance to Claire’s apartment block.
On foot, Jake began to trace the route that the white Transit van had taken. He walked out past her Golf, still parked in the same spot it had been since Sunday night, wishing he could see her belted safely in the driver’s seat. She would be laughing as she always did when, in a mock-stern voice, he graded her useless attempts at reverse parallel parking. But the car sat parked. Abandoned. Idle without her.
He headed up the street toward Victoria. The main road outside was filled with residential houses and high-rises with no cameras. Ahead he saw a bank. As he neared the entrance, he spotted a CCTV camera at the door. The angle looked ideal to catch cars moving up and down the road.
He headed inside, up to the teller sitting behind the glass screen, and asked to speak with the manager. After several minutes, a pale, rotund, forty-something woman in a badly fitting, taupe suit appeared. Her name badge proclaimed her as Sandra.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I hope so. You’re the manager here?’ he asked, pointing at her badge and producing his police warrant card with the other hand.
‘Yes, what can I do for you?’
‘I need to view some of your CCTV footage. The camera out the front.’
‘You’ll have to request that through our head office. I can give you the form to fill out…’ she replied.
‘It’s a matter of national security, I need to look at it now. I can’t wait. I need your help,’ Jake interrupted, trying to play upon the gravity of the situation.
He knew the protocols, but the forms, that all took time. He didn’t feel that he had the luxury of time right now.
‘Follow me,’ she said. Jake breathed a silent sigh of relief. Sandra was clearly excited at the prospect of doing something to aid national security.
100
Thursday
6 October 2005
1530 hours
Bank’s CCTV room, Victoria
‘What is it you’re looking for?’ asked Sandra, obviously hoping to glean as much information as she could to embroider the story when recounting it back to her mates in the pub.
‘Three days ago, Monday morning, 3 October. I need the camera from the corner of your building,’ Jake said. ‘We are looking for a van…’
The ‘we’ was deliberate. His way of trying to make it look like it was more than just him.
‘…that we think may be involved in some form of surveillance for a terrorist group.’
There was a short gasp from Sandra.
‘OK,’ she said, as her eyes widened and she became engrossed at looking at the screen.
‘It’s a white Ford Transit van,’ said Jake as Sandra rewound the recording. ‘We should be looking at footage from 7 a.m.’
Jake stood over the desk, eyes glued to the screen, as Sandra found the right part of the recording.
Jake knew that the van had travelled from the newsagent toward the bank at 0721 hours. He checked the current time on his phone against both the newsagent and the bank CCTV. They were five minutes apart.
CCTV clock times were as varied as people’s watches but, on top of that, British Summer Time and Greenwich Mean Time made things even more confusing when some places didn’t alter their clocks. It could be 0613 hours on the bank CCTV and 0721 hours on the newsagent’s CCTV and they’d actually both be showing footage taken at exactly the same moment in time.
Sandra wound through the footage to 0700 hours on Monday morning. She played it forward at three times the normal speed. Jake watched as several cars drove up the road; the camera angle was nigh on perfect.
‘There!’ Jake made Sandra jump as he shouted in excitement on seeing the white Transit van fill the screen. The clock time was 0716 hours. Three men sat in the front of the van, all wearing what appeared to be overalls.
Sandra rewound the images, frame by frame, using a special dial on her controller. Moving images were good except when you needed to read registration numbers, which often blurred as you froze the frame.
‘May I?’ asked Jake, indicating the chair where Sandra was sitting.
Sandra got up and allowed Jake to sit in the padded, high-backed chair. It was warm from her well-rounded bottom.
Jake moved the dial left and right to toggle backward and forward. You could read some of the registration on one or two frames and then the rest on the third.
‘Yes… We’ve got it, Sandra,’ Jake said through gritted teeth.
There was a pen and paper in front of him. He grabbed it and wrote down the registration number. Jake stood up and shook Sandra’s hand vigorously.
As he left, Sandra shouted after him, ‘Sorry, err… Where did you say you wanted a copy of the CCTV sent for evidence purposes? We keep it for thirty days.’
Jake turned reluctantly, remembering his role. ‘Oh, yes… thank you. I’ll be in touch about getting a copy. I’ll let you know.’
‘Glad I could help you,’ said Sandra, beaming.
Stood on the pavement outside the bank, he called the Reserve Room. He asked the operator to run a PNC check on the registration of the white Transit van.
Jake never took the Police National Computer as gospel. Sometimes it could be a liability. The force’s IT systems were limited. They took the DVLA database and added it onto the PNC. But the DVLA database changed by the second. It was a live database, whereas the PNC was only updated every few days. It was always playing catchup. Jake knew, unlike some, that even at its very best, the PNC was only moderately useful in an investigation.
‘Sir, no reports, not lost or stolen, on a white Transit van registered to ABC Van Hire at 44 Mount View, Ilford, Essex. Anything else you need, sir?’ asked the operator.
‘No, that’s great, thanks,’ replied Jake.
Jake got in the car and looked up the address in his map book. He could be there fairly quickly on blue lights from central London. This was an emergency, he reasoned.
As he wove through the heavy traffic with the magnetic blue light on the car roof and the two-tone sirens blaring, Jake played out the different scenarios that might greet him at the car-hire place in Ilford.
Always be prepared, he thought.
101
Thursday
6 October 2005
1802 hours
ABC Van Hire, Ilford, Essex
The journey had taken longer than he had expected. There had been no room to get through the traffic. It was edging toward dusk when Jake arrived at Mount View and the vehicle-rental place was closed.
ABC Van Hire was in a small industrial unit; an office with a large enclosed storage area to its right. He pulled up outside the address. The lights were off inside. He’d thought that might be the case. There was only one way to get the owner to an address after hours. He couldn’t wait until the morning.
Jake looked up and down the street. There was no CCTV anywhere to be seen and he could see no one inside the premises.
He took out his baton and broke the window in the door with one quick and purposeful swing. The burglar alarm went off immediately.
Jake walked back to his car and called the Yard again. The same operator he’d spoken to earlier answered his call.
‘Yes, sir, how can I help?’ The alarm was ringing loudly in Jake’s ears. The operator could hear it in the background. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Fine. I’m at that hire place. Just arrived here. It’s an insecure premises. Must have had a break-in. Can you create a CAD
and send it to the local station? Just explain that I’ve attended and found the window broken,’ Jake continued. ‘I need the keyholder here immediately please,’ he told the operator.
He waited in his car for about an hour until a grey Mercedes pulled up behind him and a very dark-skinned, Sri Lankan-looking man in a suit got out. The door to Jake’s car was open and his magnetic blue light was still on top of the car. The man came straight over to him.
‘Hello, I’m Rajid Patel. ABC Hire is my business. Did you find it like this?’ asked the man, gesturing to the shattered glass in the door.
‘Yes. Actually, I’d come here on an unrelated enquiry and found the window on the door broken. I think my lights and sirens must have scared the burglars off. It’s your lucky day, mate,’ replied Jake.
‘Thank you, it’s very kind of you,’ replied Mr Patel.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Jake Flannagan. I’m from the Anti-Terrorist Branch.’ Jake offered his hand to the man. ‘I’m looking into a missing-persons case. Needed to look at your files on one of your hire vans.’
Jake felt a slight pang of guilt about what he’d done. Mr Patel seemed like a decent, hard-working guy. He needed this information though, and certain ways and means served a purpose.
Rajid Patel unlocked the door to reception and silenced his alarm with the code. The reception area was small, but there was a large garage attached to the side.
‘I should probably go and have a look around to make sure there’s no one here, Mr Patel.’
Jake wanted to have a poke around for the white Transit van. He would’ve needed a warrant from a court to do that normally, but not for an insecure premises or when ‘lawfully’ accompanied by the owner, however.
‘Good idea,’ replied Mr Patel, waving Jake toward the garage area.
Jake glanced up and down the rows of vehicles and located the van by its registration. This was good news. He looked through the back windows of the vehicle. No red bag. No obvious signs of blood. He walked back through to the reception area where Mr Patel was waiting.
THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author. Page 28
