Читать книгу Scared to Death: A gripping crime thriller you won’t be able to put down - Kate Medina, Kate Medina - Страница 21

Marilyn stared at the snowstorm on the screen in front of him.

‘Is this mid-winter in Alaska?’

Workman sighed. ‘Old CCTV, sir.’

Tipping back on his heels, Marilyn blew air through his nose. ‘You can say that again.’ His gaze moved from the screen that covered the A & E reception desk, entrance hallway and sliding doors to the outside, roamed across the other screens in the bank of monitors, five screens wide, four high, twenty in all, each relaying a fragment of hospital turf, the top right-hand monitor blank, the camera feeding it presumably broken, searching for a good view of the service road outside Accident and Emergency. He couldn’t see one. ‘What about the camera outside, covering the service road?’

‘Vandalized last week,’ Workman said.

Ka-ching. One chance in twenty and he’d hit the jackpot. ‘Great. So this is it. This is all we have to go on.’

‘It’s not their priority, sir.’

‘No, don’t tell me. Failing to notice babies and telling middle-aged men who are beyond help to give up smoking is, though,’ he snapped, ignoring the sideways glance that the hospital security guard shot him.

Pulling his reading glasses from his pocket – a purchase he’d been forced to make last month when he’d found that his arms no longer extended far enough to hold his newspaper at a distance whereby he could read the text – Marilyn sat down and slid the chair, on its squeaky plastic wheels, closer to the screen.

‘Play that segment again, please,’ he said to the security guard.

‘The bit where the man comes in pushing the baby?’ the guard asked.

‘Yes.’

Fuzz on the screen while the segment was rewound. Then an empty A & E foyer, the sliding doors closed, dark outside their glass panes. Suddenly the doors slid open. A pram appeared on the screen and right behind, the man pushing it, visible only from mid-chest down.

‘He’s carrying an umbrella,’ Marilyn said.

‘Which makes sense, considering it was pouring,’ Workman murmured.

Marilyn nodded, focusing on the screen. ‘Dark jumper, dark trousers, dark coat, sensible shoes.’

‘Sensible shoes?’

‘Pause, please.’

The grainy image froze. Marilyn pressed his finger to the screen.

‘Clodhoppers.’

The shoes were thick-soled, the type of shoes that would be sold at Clarks as ‘built for walking’.

‘Malcolm Lawson was certainly the sensible-shoe type,’ Workman said.

‘He was that.’

‘It could be him,’ she said.

‘It could be me.’

‘You don’t wear sensible shoes, sir,’ Workman said, glancing down at his £300 Edward Hill pebble-grain leather brogues.

Fair point.

Marilyn turned to the guard. ‘Play it until the man leaves the hospital, disappears from view, but the sliding doors are still open. Pause with the doors open, please.’

The guard’s eyebrows rose in query.

‘The background. He could have driven to the door.’

‘Not allowed.’

‘Midnight? In the rain? Who’s out there objecting?’

They waited while the man dressed in dark clothing parked the pram, stooping to take one last long look at baby Harry before he straightened, turned and exited the building, walking right, diagonally across the service road, out of shot.

‘Now,’ Marilyn said.

The screen froze, sliding doors still open, revealing the service road beyond, the darkness illuminated by the circular misty disc of an overhead streetlamp. Marilyn pressed his finger to the far left-hand side of the screen.

‘This? What’s this?’

‘The front of an ambulance,’ the guard said. ‘The bumper, a bit of the grille and bonnet.’

‘You sure?’

‘Absolutely. I’ve worked here for twenty years. Seen enough of those in my time to recognize one from a square inch.’

‘OK,’ Marilyn said. ‘Fine.’ He could tell that the security guard was a pedant. A twenty-years-in-the-job pedant; good enough for him. ‘So that’s an ambulance.’

His gaze tracked right, across the bottom of the screen, up an inch, left, the CCTV equivalent of a fingertip search in mud. Double yellow lines, showing muted white on the black-and-white screen. Something bright white, inflated – a plastic bag? At the top of the screen, two wheels, separated by a pale, blotchy – most probably, dirty white – stripe of metal, a horizontal row of alternate dark and light-coloured blocks above.

‘The lower half of a police car, sir,’ Workman cut in.

Marilyn tilted forward, squinting through his glasses, picking out every detail. The vehicle was parked on the other side of the service road, half its wheels, a segment of chassis, the stripes and the blocks – navy blue and fluorescent yellow in real life – showing gunmetal grey and luminous white on the screen.

‘Yes, you’re right. It’s a police car.’

He glanced over at the security guard, who concurred.

One ambulance, one police car: nothing unusual in either of those being parked on a hospital service road. Nothing else visible. No leads. No breaks. No bloody luck.

Tugging off his glasses, sliding them back into his pocket before Workman had time to comment on his new-found old man accoutrements, he leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms above his head. Focusing so hard on the screen had left his eyes feeling as if someone had tugged them five centimetres from his face on their optic nerves and then pinged them back into their sockets.

‘So it could very possibly have been Malcolm Lawson who dropped the baby off,’ he said.

Workman and the security guard both nodded.

‘He was tender with Harry,’ Workman said. ‘He stopped to take a last look. A long look.’

Marilyn sighed. ‘He did. He did indeed.’

His mood hadn’t improved. He felt as if he’d spent the whole morning running in circles, chasing his tail. He had snuck out of the hospital a couple of times to join the unwashed throng outside for a sneaky cigarette, hoping, ridiculously, that Janet, that dumpy receptionist, wouldn’t catch him in the act. Lord knows why her opinion mattered to him, but for some reason he felt strongly that he needed to prove her wrong. Prove to her that he could take control of his health, even if he was delaying the attempt until tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes. Every traffic cop and patrol car in Surrey and Sussex had been told to keep an eye out as a priority, but as yet there had been no sighting of Malcolm Lawson’s car. DS Workman had already been telephoned three times by Granny Lawson for updates, even though she’d only left the hospital two hours ago, each call progressively more tearful. He hadn’t given the old biddy his mobile number, small mercies.

‘Get a copy of the original film to the tech boys, DS Workman, see if they can clean it up.’

‘That’ll take two or three days, sir.’

Pushing himself to his feet, he threw her a withering look. ‘Better get on with it then.’