The Shadow at the Door, page 5
Aimes pushed the door shut. ‘I know it’s a very old-fashioned way of archiving files,’ she said, and she was right: now that you could store everything in the Cloud, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d worked with rewritable DVDs. ‘The Department of Education paid for the cameras on the school, but they won’t pay for any sort of digital-storage plan for this footage because it’s a “non-essential” cost. Go figure. But we can still write off DVDs as expenses, which makes zero sense.’ She pointed towards the shelves. ‘Anyway, as I mentioned before, there are some ground rules. You can’t take anything away – you’ll have to watch whatever you need to watch here – and whatever you do in here, it doesn’t go any further than this room. Like I said, there are potential privacy issues.’
I nodded. ‘I really appreciate this.’
She hovered for a moment.
I’d thought earlier that my work on the Megan Carver case, and Jessica Aimes being a teacher at Megan’s school at the time, had just been a slice of good fortune – and it clearly was. But now I realized there was another layer, buried further down.
‘My brother Eric,’ she said, almost sighing his name into existence, and then she stopped again, as if she didn’t know what she was trying to say. ‘I’ve got three brothers. Eric was the youngest. He disappeared when I was eleven – went to the shop to get Mum some milk. They found him in a field next to the motorway a year later.’
My heart swelled for her.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago, but I remember, when Megan Carver disappeared, it brought it all back. And I remember watching that case closely, and reading about what you did – how far you went to find her – and I don’t know …’ She paused again, shrugged a second time. ‘I guess I just wondered what it would have been like if we’d had someone like you looking for Eric. It could have been different.’
I didn’t say anything, just watched her.
‘I think the work you do, it’s important.’
Her gaze lingered on me for a second and then she opened the door to the staffroom and headed out. I watched her go, then turned back to the shelves full of DVDs.
I took out the discs for April.
There were four – one for each week of the month. Paul had gone missing on the night of the 8th, so I took the second disc out of its case, opened the tray in the PC and loaded the DVD. It took a few moments, the tower under the desk whirring mechanically. There was no one in the staffroom – even the receptionist at the photocopier had now finished up – but I pushed the suite door closed anyway.
When the DVD icon appeared on the desktop, I double-clicked on it and saw there were seven further folders inside: one for every day of that week. The 8th had been a Thursday. I clicked on that folder and found a single MP4 file inside.
The footage started at 12 a.m. on the morning of the 8th and was in the same quarter-screen format as the live feed. The camera – on the front of the school – that had the best view of the road that the watcher had potentially emerged from was in the bottom left. A security light was permanently on at the side of the school and that was both a plus and a minus: it cast a pool-like glow across the pavements beyond the school gates, making it easier to see people walking past, but it was also in a lower resolution than the other two feeds, perhaps because it was an older camera. I remembered Jessica Aimes saying that the camera under the overhanging roof, to the side of the building, had been added later on, after the vandalism had become a more regular fixture at the community centre.
As I let the video tick on, I double-checked my notes: Maggie had said Paul went upstairs to get his blood-pressure pill at the first ad break in an 8 p.m. programme they’d been watching, so that probably meant between 8.15 and 8.20; when I’d asked Seb what time he saw the man outside the house, he was less certain, but it was before Maggie came upstairs to look for Paul – so, in all probability, that meant sometime between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. In turn, that suggested the man had come into the road, at the earliest, around 6.30 p.m., and left, at the latest, around 8.30 p.m.
Probably.
It hit me again how big a punt this was: I was assuming Seb wasn’t mistaken; I was hoping the man had entered and exited Kilgor Terrace from this end and not the end near the shops and the wine bar; and I was hoping, if he had, there would be some way of identifying him on film.
Trying not to feel discouraged, I kept moving the footage on until I got to 6 p.m., when I slowed it down to 2x speed. People passed, a few even entered Kilgor Terrace, but all of them were in either pairs or groups, or had kids with them. After a while, I heard a bell outside the suite and then voices in the staffroom. It was lunch. I kept going, shuffling in closer once the timecode in the corner got to 7 p.m. Onscreen, night had crept in.
At 7.47 p.m., a man appeared.
He was alone.
And he was heading into the Conisters’ road.
I hit Pause, rewound a couple of seconds, then inched the video forward, frame by frame, using the cursor. He was in shot for a fraction less than six seconds, but it was enough: as he rounded the corner, into Kilgor Terrace, he passed under a street lamp. He’d already half turned by then, following the line of the street, so his profile was side on – and difficult to make out – but I could see what he was wearing.
Dark trousers. Dark boots.
A green raincoat.
The raincoat had some sort of logo on it.
I leaned in even closer to the monitor, trying to make it out. The logo was white and seemed to be vaguely shaped like a cross, or perhaps something like a pitchfork. I ran the footage on in real time, wondering if it might be clearer in motion, but the man vanished out of sight, into Kilgor Terrace, and I was no closer to any kind of answer.
From there, I let the footage continue rolling, dialling it up to 2x speed, to see when the man re-emerged from the road – but he didn’t. By the time the day’s video ended, at 11:59:59, he still hadn’t reappeared. The reason seemed pretty clear.
He’d exited out the south side, by the newsagent’s.
That meant I had a six-second look at him, so I rewound the footage all the way back to when he’d first come into shot and started playing it again. After the third or fourth time, I got out my phone and recorded the segment, then watched it back again. I took a shot of him – paused at the best angle I had – and fired it off to Maggie, Katie and Seb separately, asking if they recognized him.
As I waited for their responses, I ejected the DVD, returned it to its case and slotted the case back on to the shelf. Emerging into the staffroom and locking the door behind me, I noticed a few teachers looking up, but most were barely interested in me. Out in the corridor, I headed to Jessica Aimes’s office. The door was open and she was on a call.
She beckoned me in and I sat down and watched the video I’d recorded of the footage on my phone. When I got to the best angle of the man, I paused it, then pinch-zoomed in on him: it didn’t do much more than blur detail that I was already struggling to make out, but when I shifted back to the logo on his jacket, I decided it wasn’t a pitchfork, probably not a tool of any kind: it looked much more like a cross.
My phone pinged as Maggie replied.
Katie and Seb followed soon after.
No one recognized him.
Maggie asked who he was, and then so too did Katie, but I stopped short of an explanation for now. This was a vague, perhaps futile line of enquiry, a search for a man who may or may not have had something to do with Paul going missing. Until I had a firmer idea of his relevance, I wasn’t going to start floating unproven theories.
‘Any luck?’
I looked up. Jessica Aimes had finished her call.
‘I’m not sure. Maybe.’ I handed her the keys to the video suite. ‘But, like I said, I’m really appreciative of you letting me see the footage you’ve –’ I stopped.
‘Mr Raker?’
I still had the image of the man up on my phone.
And the logo on his jacket.
‘Mr Raker?’
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘just give me a sec.’
I swiped away the video, went to the browser and did a Google search for Tarrington Motors, Paul Conister’s former place of work. The home page was slick, rows of cars scrolling left to right, a horizontal menu below it and a designed header.
I’ve found it.
The word Tarrington in the header had been shaped vaguely like a vehicle, the T like the spoiler on the back of a sports car.
It wasn’t a white cross on the watcher’s jacket.
It was the T of the Tarrington Motors logo.
10
Paul Conister’s former place of work was just south of Croydon on a dreary trading estate. Most of the units belonged to much smaller businesses and were tucked away in a series of maze-like lanes, but Tarrington Motors was right out front, on the road.
Its fleet of used cars were lined up in three vast rows at the side of a flashy, glass-fronted showroom and, while the rest of the industrial estate appeared to have already descended into a pre-weekend slumber, the showroom and its forecourt were both packed. Even before I’d pulled into a parking space, I’d counted eight customers outside, all with salesmen, and there were at least ten or eleven others seated inside.
On the way down, I’d called Maggie again to ask her to take another look at the photograph of the man. I didn’t direct her to the logo on his jacket, and she didn’t pick up on it. Once again she told me that she didn’t know who he was. The picture quality was poor, and so while I didn’t blame her for not being able to ID the man, I was a little more surprised she didn’t even clock the spoiler-shaped T of Tarrington on the coat. Paul had worked for the company for almost fifteen years before he disappeared: she must have seen that unusual T frequently over that period, even if she’d only taken it in unconsciously.
‘Did you have much to do with the people Paul worked with?’ I’d asked her as I’d driven down.
‘Not really. Why do you ask?’
‘I’m just trying to explore all the angles.’
A pause on the line. ‘Is this something to do with Tarrington?’
‘No,’ I’d lied. ‘I’m just ticking boxes here.’
That had seemed to satisfy her. ‘To be honest, I didn’t really know a lot of the people he worked with all that well. I went to his Christmas do a few times, but while everyone was really nice, you know how these things can be for partners. It was the same when Paul used to come to my school functions. It’s a lot of polite conversation as everyone tries to involve you, and then people get on to office gossip and all you’re really doing is sitting there, pretending you know who’s being talked about, and laughing and smiling at the right moments. Quite a few years back, we both made a mutual decision to go to our work do’s alone – it was a lot less complicated that way.’
That certainly explained why she might not have recognized the man, and as I parked outside the showroom, switched off the engine and grabbed my phone, a two-second Google search showed me why she might not have recognized the logo: Tarrington had had a rebrand at the start of April to coincide with the opening of a brand-new showroom in Sevenoaks. Only days later, Paul disappeared.
I headed inside. In the foyer was a wall full of pictures: the entire team at this main branch of Tarrington Motors, their names below. I got out my phone and took some photos, counting twenty-nine employees in all. Of course, it was possible that the man in the jacket worked for one of the other branches, somewhere else in the south-east; it was also possible that he didn’t work for the company at all and had simply acquired the jacket for another reason. Maybe Tarrington had given them out to customers when they relaunched their logo, or he was a family member of someone who worked here. For now, I decided not to worry. Until I was certain that none of the people on the wall was the man I’d seen, this remained my best lead.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
I turned to find a smartly dressed woman in her early twenties standing at my shoulder. On the lapel of her jacket was a name badge: CARLY WOLSTENE – SALES.
I handed her my card.
‘Hi, Carly. My name’s David Raker. I’m a missing persons investigator looking into the disappearance of Paul Conister.’ I paused, watching her reaction. She clearly knew the name, her mouth forming an O, but I got the sense that she hadn’t had many interactions with Paul, maybe because she’d joined not long before he went missing.
‘I’d only just started working here then,’ she confirmed.
‘Okay.’
‘But obviously it was terrible, especially for his family.’ She seemed concerned that she’d come across as uncaring. ‘I don’t know how they’ve coped.’
‘Is your manager around?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Follow me.’
She led me between a series of desks, towards a glass-fronted office in the far corner. On the door there were two nameplates: one said MANAGER, the other was blank. Inside, two desks faced one another, and as Carly led me in, I could see the second desk was unused and piled high with files.
A man looked up from the occupied desk.
‘This is Leon,’ Carly said. ‘Leon, this man is an investigator. He’s looking into what happened to Paul.’ She glanced at me and frowned. ‘Sorry, I forgot your name.’
‘It’s just there on the business card,’ I said, pointing to her hands.
Suddenly, she seemed flustered.
‘Thanks, Carly,’ the manager said, as he pushed back on his chair and came around the desk. ‘Leon Hayes.’ He held out his hand and we shook, and Carly headed back to her desk on the floor. I watched her go: when she got to her seat, she seemed to realize she’d just taken my card with her, and stared at it for a moment – ‘You’re looking into what happened to Paul?’ Hayes was saying – and then, briefly, glanced towards me.
Our eyes met and she looked away again, and as she did I had the strangest sense we’d met before. Had we? Or was it my mind playing tricks?
‘You’re looking into Paul?’ Hayes repeated.
‘Yes,’ I said, returning my attention to him. ‘Maggie just wants some answers, so she’s asked me to look into his disappearance again. It’s what I do for a living. I find people.’
He glanced at the card I’d handed him. ‘Okay,’ he said, and wheeled a chair out from under the spare desk. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ I told him I was fine, and he slid back in under his desk.
‘Was this where Paul worked?’
‘You mean this office?’ Hayes nodded. ‘Right there,’ he added, gesturing to the empty desk. ‘Paul was my number two. We ran the whole business – all the Tarrington showrooms – from this room.’ It could have sounded arrogant, but it didn’t come across that way: it sounded wistful, if anything, and I got the impression that Leon Hayes and Paul were close, and Paul was missed.
Maybe it was the reason the desk was still empty.
I grabbed my notebook and went straight to a list of names that Maggie and Katie had given me of friends, colleagues, the crowd Paul had gone to Fulham matches with. Leon Hayes was on the list. So were a couple of others I’d seen on the wall out front. But because Maggie didn’t come to work functions with Paul, or hadn’t for a long time, she hadn’t got to see him mixing socially at Tarrington. That made people like Hayes important.
‘It sounds like you miss Paul,’ I said.
Hayes nodded. ‘He was a good bloke.’
‘Did you see each other socially?’
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘although I wouldn’t exactly call Paul a party animal. He liked to get home to his family and I didn’t blame him for that. We work hard here, sales can be stressful: some people, especially the younger guys out there on the floor, they like to let off steam at the pub; others, the elder statesmen like Paul and me, we just like to get home, put our feet up and watch the box in the evenings.’
‘Did the police ever come and talk to you?’
‘Once,’ he said, ‘just after he went missing.’
‘A Detective Sergeant Fox?’
‘That sounds about right, yeah.’
‘But you haven’t heard from him since?’
‘No. Nothing.’
I flipped to a fresh page in my notebook.
‘Paul was just a nice guy, you know?’ Hayes was saying. ‘No bullshit with him. Customers liked him because they knew he wasn’t playing them. I mean, basically the first thing we try to do when a customer comes through the door is reassure them that we’re not some stereotype of a car salesman – you know, just a bunch of wide boys who are going to bend the truth and promise the Earth until they get that signature on the dotted line. Paul was instrumental in creating that culture.’
He leaned back in his chair and began to swivel gently from left to right, his expression a little downcast. ‘I’ve been trying to recruit another sales director since April,’ he said softly, and then looked at me. ‘That tells you all you need to know.’
‘How did Paul seem to you in those last weeks?’
‘Just normal. Not happier, or upset. Not quieter, or louder. He didn’t seem any different. He was just …’ His silence filled the gap: He was just Paul. ‘What happened was a shock to everyone.’
‘How did you find out he was missing?’
‘When he didn’t turn up for work, I gave him a call. It was unusual for him to do that – when he was sick, he would always phone in; when he needed to take a few hours off and work them another time, he’d always let me know. I trusted Paul not to take the piss. If he needed to leave an hour or two early, he’d come in an hour or two early the next day. That day, though, he never called in, so at ten, eleven – something like that – I tried calling his mobile. It just went to voicemail.’
