Maybe not.
‘But the system doesn’t record it when someone leaves the room, only when they arrive,’ Karen Wentworth said.
‘That’s right,’ Gary said. ‘It only registers when the keycard is used and you don’t need the card to leave the room — there’s a handle on the inside that opens the door without it.’
So, even though the system clearly showed that I hadn’t entered the room between 23.34 Tuesday and 09.21 Wednesday, it didn’t prove that I was in there all night. I could have left at any time, not just for breakfast.
I sighed.
‘Thanks, anyway,’ I said. I folded up the piece of paper. ‘Can I keep this?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Karen said. ‘Do you also want a DVD of the CCTV tapes? Gary can burn you one easily. He made the copy for the police on Monday.’
‘Gordon-Russell,’ Gary said slowly, the cogs in his memory obviously now turning. ‘Bloody hell...’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t kill my wife, and I’m trying to prove it.’
With the useless DVD and the inconclusive lock data in my pockets, I walked down the side of the building to the hotel car park, and specifically to the spot in the far corner next to the rear wire fence where I’d parked my car the previous week.
I stood and looked about me.
The car park backed on to the rear of a parade of local shops, with a service delivery road between them and the car-park fence. I went over to the fence for a closer look. I could see that one of the shops had a security camera pointing along the service road. Maybe the images would also show the hotel car park.
I walked back round the hotel to the shop. It was a local grocery store
Yes, the woman behind the counter told me, the camera made an on-going recording of the previous twenty-eight days, but why did I want to see it?
Rather than explain the real reason, I made up a story of having had my car vandalised while in the hotel car park and their camera might have caught who had done it.
‘Don’t know about that,’ she said unhelpfully. ‘It’s only there to cover our back door.’
‘Please could I see anyway?’ I asked patiently.
She looked around as if wanting some customers to make her too busy, but the shop was deserted.
‘I’ll have to get my husband,’ she said. ‘He deals with the CCTV. We had it put in last year after someone tried to rob us.’
She looked at me suspiciously as if I might have the same mission.
‘And where is your husband?’ I asked.
‘Having a rest. We open from seven in the morning until eleven at night, seven days a week. Every day but Christmas Day. It’s a lot of hours for just the two of us.’
‘It must be,’ I said in my most sympathetic tone. ‘But this is very important to me.’
She hesitated but then went over to the door to the rear, all the while keeping her eyes firmly on me — just in case I tried to pilfer something.
‘Faisal,’ she shouted through the door. ‘There’s a man here to see you.’
A bearded man appeared, rubbing his eyes as if he had been woken by the call.
‘What do you want?’ he asked gruffly.
I repeated my story about having had my car vandalised and asked if he could show me the recordings from the camera out the back. The man didn’t seem to be at all happy at being roused from his slumbers for such a paltry reason and he gave his wife a severe stare. She, meanwhile, patently ignored him.
‘This way,’ the man said reluctantly, and I followed him into a room behind the shop that was crammed full to the ceiling with boxes of spare stock.
He moved a case of Heinz tomato soup tins from a chair and then sat down at a desk.
‘What date did you say?’ he asked.
‘A week last Tuesday. Nine days ago.’
‘Time?’
‘About quarter to six in the afternoon.’
He entered some numbers into the CCTV recorder via a remote control and an image appeared on a screen above.
In the very top corner of the screen, I could see the car-park wire fence and a little way beyond it, but there was no car visible.
‘Can you fast-forward?’ I asked. ‘I arrived a little after that.’
The image shimmered a little as he did so and then, as if by magic, we could see the back end of my silver Jaguar appear as I reversed into the empty space. The number plate was clearly visible,
‘That’s my car,’ I said excitedly, placing my finger on the screen. ‘Can you wind it on a bit more? Until after it got dark.’
He did so and the colour drained from the image as the system switched from visible to infrared but, crucially, the back of my car was still visible, in ghostly grey.
‘Please wind it right on to the following morning,’ I said.
‘What time was it vandalised?’ the man asked.
‘I’m not sure. Sometime during the night.’
He pushed some more buttons on the remote and the image flickered as he fast-forwarded it, the time-recording in the top corner racing on from six in the evening to midnight and then beyond.
The colour returned to the image with the coming of daylight and still the car was unmoved. Only at 9.56 a.m. by the onscreen clock did the car finally disappear from the image, and that was when I drove it out of the car park to go to Warwick Racecourse.
‘I didn’t see any vandalism,’ the man said.
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘It must have been done further forward out of sight of the camera. But that is fabulous nevertheless. Can I please have a copy?’
‘But it didn’t show anything.’
‘I know, but it does at least prove my car was in that car park all night and I’ll need that for the insurance company.’ And for DS Dowdeswell, I thought.
I felt elated. I finally had the proof I needed.
19
‘You could have used some other form of transport,’ said the detective sergeant.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘What other form of transport do you think I had access to, a racehorse?’
I had gone direct from Edgbaston to Banbury by train and had walked with a jaunty step through the town to the police station, where I was now talking to DS Dowdeswell in the entrance lobby.
‘There’s always public transport,’ the DS said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Every bus and train has CCTV. If I’d come back from Birmingham by public transport I’d have been filmed. And how would I have then got from Banbury to Hanwell village? By taxi? Have you found the driver? And what did I do then? Ask him to wait outside on the road while I just nipped inside for five minutes to kill my wife?’
He said nothing.
I had laid the grocery-store CCTV evidence before him, together with the data from the hotel keycards.
‘I demand that you stop this nonsense and release me from this laughable investigation. You have no forensic evidence against me, nothing on my phone or computer, and now I have proof that I couldn’t have been in Hanwell when Amelia was murdered. I was “elsewhere”. That’s what alibi means in Latin. I am told by a QC that an alibi is an absolute defence. So it is high time you started looking for the real culprit. And that’s Joe Bradbury.’
‘You could have arranged for someone else to kill your wife when you knew that you could prove you weren’t present.’
‘Now you really are grasping at straws,’ I said. ‘And who is this mystery person? And how did I contact them, by telepathy?’
‘What about your wife’s life insurance policy? That’s a powerful motive.’
‘I explained all that,’ I said. ‘It’s not relevant.’