The wiry DC, Darrell Smith, had a naturally furtive face, with permanently half-closed eyes, giving him the deceptive appearance of dozing. Removing the bottle from his lips, he replied in a slow, pedantic voice that belied his sharp brain, ‘It’s a new skill I’ve learned — I can drink and listen at the same time.’
‘And this from a bloke who six months ago couldn’t suck mints and walk at the same time!’ quipped ‘Long Tom’ Thompson, who was a shade over five foot seven.
Taylor, smiling, looked back at the display. ‘The house ringed is the Paternosters’. Niall Paternoster, the subject, is about to appear.’ He pressed a button in the remote, starting the recording again, and a skip truck passed. A moment later, a muscular man with tousled hair and bulging arms, wearing a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops and carrying two seemingly weighty carrier bags, stepped into view, hurrying across the road and making for one of the brick-faced houses.
Taylor froze the image, then zoomed in close so that Paternoster and the bags he was carrying were in clear focus. Then he looked inquisitively at his team. ‘Anyone tell me what you can figure out from this image?’
‘That he’s ugly with bad hair?’ said a shaven-headed man, nicknamed Hulk.
‘I’m looking for something a little more worthy of your detective brains,’ Taylor said, acknowledging Hulk with a faint grin.
‘The shopping bags, sir?’ suggested Lucy Arndale, nicknamed Frog Girl after once spending almost two days and nights semi-submerged in reeds at the edge of a river, waiting for a drugs drop.
‘Go on,’ Taylor encouraged her.
The slight woman in her late twenties, with shoulder-length brown hair and thin lips, said, ‘Those are Waitrose carrier bags, sir.’
‘Good shout,’ Taylor said. ‘And your point is?’
‘Waitrose has a reputation for quality, but also as being one of the most expensive grocery store chains in the UK. So, I’m immediately wondering, if Niall Paternoster is struggling for money, what’s he doing shopping in Waitrose?’
Smithy shot up his hand. ‘Boss, could it not simply be that this store is the closest to his home? So he went there for convenience and hang the cost?’
‘I’d buy the convenience angle,’ Taylor responded. ‘But he could have jumped into his car and, for the minimal expense of his petrol, made big savings from buying at Tesco or Sainsbury or Lidl or Iceland. So for a man so short of money, doesn’t Waitrose seem a little extravagant?’
‘Perhaps he’s celebrating the end of his austerity, sir,’ Lucy Arndale posited. ‘He thinks, in his small mind, that he’s successfully murdered his wife, with nothing to connect him to her killing, and now the house and whatever cash she has are going to be his to enjoy — with his girlfriend, perhaps the lady he’s suspected of meeting at the Devil’s Dyke car park last Sunday evening?’
The DS nodded. But before he could reply, a string of low-level beeps came from his phone, alerting him to a radio comms. He put the phone to his ear and pressed the ‘listen’ button. It was Gummy, his voice urgent.
‘Boss, subject’s on the move. He’s out of the house, getting in the Fiesta.’
Taylor immediately switched the video from playback to live feed. They all watched.
Niall Paternoster, looking spruced up now, in a pale-blue shirt and white chinos, walked round the rear of the Fiesta and zapped the door lock.
‘Too bad we don’t have the tracker already in place,’ Taylor said.
‘If he leaves the car out all night,’ Smithy said, ‘it’ll be a doddle.’
‘Unless he’s going to dismantle it and lug it in through the front door, he probably will leave it out all night, Smithy — since the house doesn’t have a garage,’ retorted Long Tom.
Smithy looked at Thompson. His voice sounding even more pedantic than ever, he said, ‘How does it go, Tommy? “When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me”? He could have a lock-up round the corner somewhere, couldn’t he?’
Thompson nodded. ‘Fair point.’
But all the team’s focus was now on the Fiesta trying to reverse into the stream of traffic. An old red van eventually stopped to let it out. Then the Fiesta accelerated away, heading north.
It was 5.10 p.m.
76
As Niall drove Eden’s BMW into the car park of the Tesco superstore, three miles to the west of their home in Brighton, he was immediately annoyed by the queue of cars in front of them. ‘Look at this — shit, baby — this is going to take ages,’ he said.
‘Just stop the car and I’ll jump out and run in while you park. Then I’ll come and find you,’ she replied.
‘That stuff’s heavy — are you sure?’
She gave him a sideways look. ‘When did you last actually get any?’
‘Um — I don’t remember.’
‘So how do you think it appears in the house? By magic? Does the Tooth Fairy bring it?’
‘OK, OK, muscle woman — look, I’ll pull in over there.’ He swung into an empty bay, some distance from the store.
Grabbing her handbag, Eden jumped out, blew him a kiss, slammed the door and hurried off through the maze of vehicles.
When she was confident she was out of sight of his rear-view mirror, she stopped. Thank God the store was so busy and she’d had an excuse to jump out far from the entrance. From her previous reconnaissance of this place, she knew they were well beyond the range of the store’s external CCTV cameras. She’d deliberately picked a Sunday because she’d hoped it would be rammed with people doing their shop for the week — and she’d been right. Checking that the parked cars around her were all empty, with no one to see her, she knelt, removed a loose-fitting long-sleeved top and lightweight, equally loose trousers from her handbag, and donned them. Next, she pulled a grey hijab from her bag, wound it around her head and low over her brow, then put her large sunglasses back on.
Keeping crouched low, she edged her way along the bays on the outer perimeter of the car park until she reached the little dark-blue Nissan Micra, which had been left for her earlier this afternoon in the agreed spot. Still crouched, she pulled the spare key out of her handbag, unlocked the driver’s door and slipped in.
Briefly checking in the mirror that the hijab and glasses were masking enough of her face, she opened the glovebox and pulled out her secret phone. She sent a brief text.
Plan A is a go! See you sooner than soon XXX
She started the car, drove to the exit and then out onto the road. Yessssss! she thought, exhilaration surging through her. So far so good. The plan, starting with the row she’d engineered on Thursday night, so their neighbours would hear, was working a treat! She looked at the car clock and then at her watch: 3.23 p.m.
Amid the ridiculous number of apps Niall had accumulated on his phone, he had never noticed the one she had added a week ago, ExifTool. It enabled you to change the date on any photograph you took. So simple. She’d used it to good effect in the BMW a short time ago, while Niall was driving, then deleted the app. He would never have noticed.
By her reckoning, and her knowledge of Niall, he would wait in the car for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, before his patience ran out and he went to look for her. He’d search Tesco, then maybe Marks & Spencer, all of which would take at least another quarter of an hour. Quite possibly longer, but she wasn’t going to allow herself the luxury of any margin. From her dress rehearsal, she could do everything she needed to do and be away within twenty minutes.
As she drove east, towards the city of Brighton and Hove, for the first time in a long while she was happy, her life filled with a new purpose.