Chapter 7
Or what I did for a living. It seems highly unlikely I’ll be able to pick up my old career at this point.
I take photos of nice houses.
It’s not a huge money-spinner – even per job it’s not spectacular, and if I was trying to pay rent on the proceeds, I’d be in trouble – but for a man with my style of living it pays perfectly well.
And it does mean I get to see some of the most beautiful places going (I work at the upper end of the market).
Needless to say, it helps with the interloping no end too.
Quite a lot of the photos I take don’t end up being made public, of course – they’re circulated to a discreet number of poshos looking for their new place. That doesn’t matter. It’s not like I crave publicity, and I get paid whether or not the pictures go online.
And now I have just realised that my camera – with a memory card full of photos of recognisable homes around the country, homes I have recently been paid to go and snap – is sitting in the house of a murdered man, with no earthly reason to be there.
The camera is going to ruin my life. I am literally Canon fodder.
Tremendous.
Back in the van, Em has just asked me a charming question.
‘Why the shit did you bring a camera, Mister Rules?’
‘So I could …’ I consider telling them all about my job, then remember I have no idea who these three are.
Rule 16: Don’t give people anything more than they need.
Embellishing your story is the equivalent of tying a load of tripwires as you’re heading into a place.
Don’t do it, because unless you remember every single wire, they’ll mess you up on your way back out.
I’ll give them a bit of the truth instead. ‘It’s part of my process. I take pictures so I’ll have a record of the rooms. I do it everywhere I go.’
‘So it’s just photos of the houses?’
‘They’re not selfies. But I think you might be able to piece together who I am from the memory card.
’ That’s an understatement. Any copper with half a brain could just look for the properties I’ve snapped – the main front-of-house shots in particular – reverse-image-search the locations, and work out what ties them together.
Might take a thick work-experience kid half an hour.
‘Well,’ says Elle, slowly, as though she’s feeling her way towards the most optimistic possible view of the matter and coming up with nothing, ‘that does sound like a problem.’
‘I would say so. If you guys want to go on without me, I’ll understand.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ says Em. ‘Jonny’s got his fingerprints problem, you’ve got the camera problem, we’re all on the CCTV. We’re all involved.’
Elle says, ‘But they might not even look at your camera. If you were the police, which bits of the house would you examine most closely?’
‘The hall first. That guy will presumably have been in lots of other rooms, but they’d surely pay most attention to the spot where he was killed, right?’
‘So the odds are they’ll never even open the camera case.’
Elle is my new favourite member of the group. ‘Thank you.’
‘Unless, of course …’ She tails off. ‘No. That seems unlikely.’
‘What?’
‘Well, barring your camera bag, did you leave any trace that you’d been in the study?’
Damn. ‘I may have accidentally smashed a marble bust by the door.’
‘Oh. Well. In that case, they’ll definitely search there.’
‘All right,’ Em says. ‘Enough worrying about Al’s holiday snaps. We’re in plenty of trouble without having to spend the night agonising over that. Where next?’
‘The pub, tomorrow morning,’ I say. ‘Get that CCTV and get out. If we can secure the footage, that’s one bit of evidence linking us to here we can knock out.’
‘What about your camera?’
‘Ideally we can sort that straight after.’
‘The pub opens at ten,’ says Elle, looking at her phone. ‘That’s nice. They must do brunch.’
Cut to 11 a.m. the following morning.
We slept in the van – not recommended; I feel like I’ve been beaten up by the Yakuza – then tried to avoid detection by driving aimless loops along the back roads of Oxfordshire.
Nobody’s washed, although we did stop in a field for some discreet changes of clothes, so we’re feeling a bit fresher (Jonny and I took the driver’s side, Em and El the offside.
Anyone observing us would have thought they were watching a party of shy swingers).
And now we’re back at the Ram’s Head. We’re not going in as a four – too conspicuous – so Em and Jonny are doing this one.
Em because there’s a chance her boyfriend will be on duty again, Jonny because he actually knows what he’s talking about with CCTV.
Elle and I are waiting in the van, watching the road in the rear-view mirror and jumping whenever a car passes.
‘This is something, isn’t it?’
I glance at Elle, who is giving me a kind of isn’t-life-funny look.
‘Elle, don’t get me wrong, I’m sincerely glad to have met some people in the same line of work as me, but this is the first time I’ve ever worked with anyone else, and it’s the worst the job has ever gone.’
She nods, sympathetic. ‘Us too.’
‘It’s insane. Were we just in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time?’
She shrugs. ‘Must be. Why? Do you think we were set up?’
‘Nah. Nobody would have known we were coming, unless one of you three did it.’
‘Oh, no.’ She looks shocked. ‘Jonny wouldn’t do that to us.’ The idea that Em might have dropped her in it seems to be too laughable to even deny. ‘It did cross my mind that you might have something to do with it, of course.’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. You turn up, and our very next job, not only is the owner on the premises, they get murdered. Hard not to draw a connection.’
‘I didn’t even know where we were going until you told me, the day before.’
‘Well, quite. So we don’t need to consider that eventuality.’ She looks brighter, then frowns again. ‘That poor man. He probably did something wrong, but what an awful way to die.’
I can think of far worse, but Elle’s Pollyanna act is strangely comforting, so I don’t correct her.
‘Shall we talk a bit before they get back? Get to know each other better?’
‘Actually, I think that’s them.’
I’m lying, to avoid getting to know Elle better, but as we look, the door of the pub opens and two familiar figures pace towards the car.
‘Not good,’ says Em, hauling the door open.
‘Double-plus-ungood.’ Jonny follows her in.
‘Sorry?’
‘Jonny read Nineteen Eighty-Four last year,’ says Em. ‘He hasn’t really got over it yet.’
‘Was Marco on duty?’
‘He was. That’s the only good news.’
‘So?’
‘I told him I wanted footage of us arriving and leaving.’
The main positive was that Em’s young barman was not only on site, he was in charge today.
He listened with a bit of sympathy to their pretext (some cobblers about a regional tech survey, with an on-the-spot cash inducement of ￡100 for anyone participating).
He trousered Em’s fifties, then sneaked Jonny into the office.
The bad news was that the chain of pubs, Webb and Mayde, uses the same CCTV system everywhere: an advanced one that uploads the last ten days of footage to a server and then deletes it on a rolling basis.
There was no way of deleting it remotely, according to Jonny – he could look at it, even download it, but he couldn’t tamper with it.
‘So, our options are: firstly we find out which of the world’s million servers the data is being held on, then fly to western California or wherever, physically break into the server building, hack the databanks, wipe the data, and come back, all while avoiding detection, which will be hard, because the footage will have been circulated before we even board our flight. ’
‘Yeah. Was there a “secondly”?’
‘Oh. Sorry, no. I was just trying to say what the first and only option was really, which is obviously impossible.’
Clearly Elle’s rubbed off on me, because I try to present the positive side. ‘Right. So we’re on the server. Fine. But there’s a good chance the cops won’t look, or won’t tie it to us even if they do. This place was full last night.’
‘Yeah. And there’s one other bit of good news, too: from where the camera is, you really only see the entrance and exit to the road. The internal camera’s been on the fritz for a year, but nobody’s come out from the management firm to fix it.’
‘Thank God for lazy landlords.’
‘There is more bad news, though.’ Jonny and Em give each other a worried look.
‘Go on.’
‘Someone came here this morning asking for exactly the same thing we were looking for.’
This is how it went, in Marco’s telling: a very tall, shaven-headed man, who looked ‘a bit like Mark Strong’, was waiting at the Ram’s Head before opening time.
He flashed some ID, told Marco there was a wanted fraudster in the pub’s recent clientele, bossed his way into the office, and downloaded the last twenty-four hours of camera footage to a stick.
Now that Marco thought about it, he didn’t say which law-enforcement agency in particular he’d come from, and he seemed like ‘the sort of guy you don’t want to piss around with’, hence Marco caving immediately and letting him in.
The Strong-alike then got back into his car, a low-to-the-ground number clearly beyond the budget of any local police force, and left.
After Em and Jonny have finished relating that, we sit and think.
‘He was probably after someone else, I reckon.’
Nobody is quite willing to take the baton off Elle in the optimism relay, and we sit in silence as we drive through the village to drop me off near the house. At least I’ve dressed for what comes next.
Remember earlier, when I played the vicar before getting into this whole disaster? As I said then, you want someone who’s unpopular locally, and the proportion of people in central London genuinely keen to talk to their local clergyman is somewhere between 0 and 1 per cent.