A man who Chatham didn’t even recognize came in carrying a heavy binder, at least 200 pages long. He handed it to the inspector with a kind of ceremonial reverence.
“What the devil is this?” Chatham demanded.
The owlish man peered through round eyeglasses and explained succinctly, “It’s your personal copy of the Commissioner’s new policymanual. It explains everything we all need to know. New information security procedures, parental leave, and a greatly expanded statement on sexual harassment that—”
“Balderdash!” Chatham bellowed. He got up, threw the brick of a manual straight into the trash can, then stomped on it for good measure. The clerk from the upper floor looked stunned.
“Out with you!” Chatham said, his voice booming. “Out!”
The bewildered clerk bid a hasty retreat and shot a look of warning to the next victim, who was now standing in the doorway. Ian Dark held back his snicker until the poor man was out of earshot.
“Sexual harassment indeed,” Chatham fussed. “More worried about being kind and gentle to one another than catching killers. That’s what’s wrong with this place nowadays.”
Dark’s tone was conciliatory, “You might have been a bit hard on him, sir. He’s a new lad on the upper floor.”
Chatham’s terseness eased and he began to fidget, putting his hands in his back pockets. “Yes,” he muttered, “perhaps. Well, we’ll make it right then, won’t we?”
“I’ll go up later and ask for a new manual, maybe have a word with the fellow.”
“Yes,” Chatham fudged, “that’s the ticket. So, what have you found?”
Dark held up a file and a videotape. “First of all, I just got off the phone with ballistics. From what they’ve seen so far, there were at least four shooters — three Israeli security men and the assailant. The Israelis surrendered their weapons for evidence. The attacker dropped one of his weapons on the way out.”
“One of them, you say? Good Lord, how many did he have?”
“The one he dropped was a Mauser, one round fired. Rough tests show it’s probably the one that killed Varkal. The rest of his work was with a 9mm, maybe a Berretta. We’ll have it all worked out soon. Are the Is-raelis cooperating?”
Chatham had spent a good part of his morning at the embassy. “Things are rather chaotic there, as you might expect. The media have made the connection between yesterday’s events and those in Penzance. There’s a phalanx of reporters standing watch outside the embassy. Unfortunately, the woman I eventually spoke with wasn’t giving anything up. In fact, she was downright evasive.”
“I imagine that’s how it will be until Tel Aviv decides otherwise.”
Chatham strolled to a tray of sandwiches that had been put on his desk sometime last night. Blindly grabbing a sample, he took a bite and his mouth puckered. “Ugh! Bloody awful!”
“I’ll send for something fresh.”
Chatham found a carafe of water and reconstituted his fouled palate. “And so,” he said, “the question then becomes, why? Is this fellow a threat to the Israelis? Has he done them harm? Does he know something important, perhaps embarrassing? Find the answer to that, then we’re on the way to his identity, and eventually his location.” Chatham paced the room, wringing his hands behind his back. “What about this American woman? Any sign of her yet?”
“No,” Dark responded, “she hasn’t been seen since he hauled her off two days ago. I shouldn’t give odds on her still being alive. Whoever this fellow is, he manages to leave a steady trail of bodies in his wake.”
“What have you found out about her?”
“Nothing extraordinary. She’s a doctor, well liked. No radical friends or fringe politics. Everything we’ve found points to a nice young woman caught up in bad circumstances. Maybe he took her from the motel as a hostage.”
“Kidnapped her? The same person in the wrong place, again?” Chatham stopped pacing, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his long nose.
“Bad luck, perhaps?” Dark offered weakly.
Chatham shrugged, “We’ll come back to it. What’s that?” he asked, gesturing to the videotape Dark held.
“Ah, a stroke of luck, or at least I thought it was. Remember yesterday, you told me to look into Yosef Meier’s death? Well, I found a jewelry shop about 100 feet away from the accident scene that had a security camera set up. It doesn’t show the actual point of the incident, but it gives a view out the front of the shop, toward the street. You can see the people on the sidewalk clearly. I went over it earlier, covered the ten minutes before and after the event.”
“And?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid.”
“Let’s have a look then.” Chatham eyed the seldom used TV and VCR that sat on a cart in the corner of his office. He dug around on his desk and found a remote control for the TV under some papers in the out box. He managed to turn the device on, but then quickly transformed the picture into a mesmerizing array of blue and green lines. Realizing this wasn’t right, he kept jabbing buttons, next commanding the set to auto-program ninety-nine channels of static.
“It’s the devil’s own work, it is,” Chatham grumbled. He handed the control over to his subordinate. “You wrestle the beastly thing.”
Ian Dark fixed the picture, then ejected a movie that had been left in the tape player. Chatham frowned when he saw it was a Swedish porn film. Someone had been using the equipment while they were out. Dark tucked it discreetly among a stack of Metropolitan Police training videos.
“The accident occurred at quarter past eleven in the morning,” Dark said, “but I’ll cue it to start ten minutes before. I did impound all the tapes for that day. The owner of the store keeps seven days of tapes on file. Apparently in the jewelry business it’s easy to overlook one or two small things that might be missing, something the smart thief knows. This fellow inventories once a week and keeps enough tapes on record to cover it.”
“Hmm, yes,” Chatham mumbled, concentrating on the video.
The image was black and white, but good quality, and the time and date in one corner made it easy to get to the right spot. People on the street were clearly visible, though not for long. Only those few who stopped to gawk in the store’s windows were captured for more than a few seconds. The tape ran to the time of the accident, which Dark noted, then continued. Roughly ninety seconds after the accident would have occurred, Chatham waved his hand.
“Stop! There—”
Dark paused the tape. On the screen were an elderly woman with a shopping bag, who held a vague resemblance to the Queen Mum, and a couple of teenagers wandering aimlessly.
“Inspector, the lads look harmless, and the little old woman—”
“No, not the people,” Chatham snapped impatiently. He waved his hand in circles. “Go back, back a few seconds.”
Dark obliged, rewinding frame by frame until Chatham stopped him.
“There it is!” Chatham got up and tapped on the glass screen. “This car!”
Dark studied the vehicle. “I can’t see the driver with that camera angle. The top half of the car is cut off. But one thing’s for sure, it’s a BMW. Do you think it could be the same one we found in Penzance? There’s a lot of those running around London, you know.”
“Not like this one,” Chatham said. “Look at the license plate.”
Dark squinted, “I can’t read the numbers, the angle is impossible. But it looks vaguely familiar. There’s something different in the border.”