But even so, it was impossible to protect someone totally against a lone fanatic. He was still mindful of the chilling words of the IRA after they blew up The Grand Hotel back in 1984 in a failed attempt to murder the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They sent a message saying, ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’
He was not going to let Gaia be lucky. Luck was damned well not going to come into this equation. Quality police work, that was all. And everyone was briefed.
108
Much of the central area of the city was under constant CCTV surveillance, with cameras capable of zooming in to a tight close-up from a distance of several hundred yards.
The nerve centre of the operation was the CCTV room on the fifth floor of Brighton’s John Street Police Station. It was a large space, with blue carpet and dark blue chairs. There were three separate workstations, each comprising a bank of monitors, keyboards, computer terminals and telephones.
Civilian controllers sat behind two of the workstations. One of them, wearing a headset, was busily engaged in a police operation, tracking a drug dealer’s movements, but the other, Jon Pumfrey, a fresh-faced man in his late thirties, with neat brown hair, wearing a lightweight black jacket, was occupied with helping Haydn Kelly navigate through the system in his search for sightings of Anna Galicia.
The forensic podiatrist, cradling a tepid Starbucks coffee, had cramp in his right thigh. He had been seated at this console since shortly before midday, with the exception of one quick break to grab a sandwich and this coffee. It was now coming up to 5 p.m. A kaleidoscope of images of parts of the city of Brighton and Hove, and other Sussex locations, changed constantly on the multiple screens. People walking. Buses moving. A sudden zoom shot on to a man standing by a wheelie bin.
Kelly had spotted Anna Galicia on six different cameras so far, during Monday evening. In the first she was seen walking in the direction of Café Conneckted. In the second she was heading towards the location of the HSBC cash machines in Queen’s Road. In the third, fourth and fifth images she was walking around the outside of the Pavilion grounds, threading her way through the crowds of onlookers. In the sixth, she was walking towards the Old Steine, at 11.24 p.m. Although there was extensive camera coverage around that area, she did not reappear. Jon Pumfrey told Kelly that her disappearance from vision indicated she had probably taken a bus or jumped into a taxi and gone home for the night.
They were now scrolling through the images in the area around the Pavilion grounds from yesterday, fast-forwarding through the whole day on each of the different cameras in turn, in the hope of seeing her again. Kelly glanced at his watch, mindful that he needed to be back at Sussex House for the 6.30 p.m. briefing. It was almost 5 p.m. He already had more than enough for his purposes, and he was excited about what he had to report.
Then something caught his eye. He frowned.
‘Jon, go back a few seconds!’
The controller moved his joystick, and the image began reversing.
‘Stop!’ Kelly commanded. The time on the screen displayed as 1 p.m., yesterday, Tuesday.
The image froze.
‘What street is this?’ Kelly asked.
‘New Road.’
‘Okay, zoom in on that guy, please.’
The image of a balding man in a business suit filled the screen. He stepped out of the front door of an office building, hesitated, held a hand out as if to check if it was still raining.
‘Now, go slow forward, please.’
Kelly watched, with growing excitement, as the man walked out of frame. Then he said, ‘Keep it running – you can fast forward. I think he’ll be back.’
The forensic podiatrist was right. Ten minutes later the man returned, holding a small paper bag. He shot a glance at a bicycle chained to a lamp post, then went back into the office building.
‘I need a copy of that, please,’ he said to the controller.
A few minutes later, when Pumfrey handed it to him, he loaded it straight into his laptop, then ran the software he had developed for gait analysis on it. After he had taken off the measurements and calculations, he made a comparison with the figures computed from the footage of Anna Galicia walking.
And now he could barely contain his excitement.
109
Norman Potting sat at his workstation in MIR-1, puzzled. He now had images emailed to him from all the hole-in-the-wall machines within a short walking distance of Café Conneckted. HSBC, Barclays, Halifax and Santander banks had responded quickly and efficiently.
He scrolled through them, looking, in turn, at four female and sixteen male faces, and something was not making sense. All twenty people had made cash withdrawals from these machines, within his parameter of 8.15 and 9 p.m. Monday evening. Despite the poor image quality, one woman bore a reasonable resemblance to Anna Galicia. She had apparently attempted a transaction from an HSBC machine on Queen’s Road at 8.31 p.m. But there was no withdrawal showing under her name. One explanation, the bank had told him, was that her card had been declined. But they were still a bit mystified why no record showed up at all. Another suggestion was that she was using a card that had been stolen but not yet reported missing: a withdrawal was made one minute later, at 8.32 p.m. in a man’s name.
The Detective Sergeant was on the verge of deciding he had drawn a blank with this particular line of enquiry, when for the second time this afternoon, the normal studious quiet of the Major Incident Room was broken. This time there was an exuberant whoop from Haydn Kelly, who entered with such speed and force that the door swung back and struck the wall behind it with a bang loud enough to make everyone look up with a start.
‘I’ve cracked it!’ he shouted across the room at Roy Grace, beaming like an exuberant kid and brandishing two CD cases in the air.
‘What? What have you cracked? Anna Galicia?’ Grace asked.
The forensic podiatrist moved Grace’s keyboard aside and set his laptop down on the worktop. He flipped open the lid and tapped in his code. Moments later Grace was staring at a screen that was split vertically. On the left-hand side he saw what looked like CCTV footage of the woman he recognized from earlier, Anna Galicia, walking along a street in Brighton. On the right-hand side of the screen was a balding man in a business suit. Along the top were several columns of spinning numbers and algebraic symbols that seemed to be calibrating and re-calibrating as each person walked.
Haydn Kelly pointed at the left screen. ‘See our mysterious Anna Galicia?’
Grace nodded.
‘There’s a good reason why no one’s been able to find her.’
‘Which is?’
Kelly pointed at the right-hand screen. At the balding man in the business suit. ‘Because that’s her.’
Grace looked at the forensic podiatrist’s face for an instant, in case he was joking. But he appeared deadly serious. ‘How the hell do you know?’
‘Gait analysis. See all those computations on the screen? I can do the analysis visually, to a pretty high degree of accuracy because I’ve done it for so long, but those calculations done by the algorithm I developed add certainty. There is a very minor variation because the woman is on high heels and the man is wearing conventional male shoes. But they’re the same person. No question.’
‘Beyond doubt?’
‘I’d bet my life on it.’
110
Roy Grace stared at the screen, his eyes switching from the woman to the man to the woman again, feeling a sudden chill deep in the pit of his stomach. ‘Glenn,’ he said. ‘Come and see this.’
Branson stepped over, looked at the screen and exclaimed, ‘That looks like our friend Eric Whiteley!’