The One They All Avoid

THE COFFEE IS from a little sachet like a teabag and has grounds floating in it. But it’s dark and strong and exactly what Caffery needs at this time of day. He loads it with sugar and eats four biscuits in the over-bright, fluorescent-lit staffroom at Wickes. Lately he’s been having to remind himself to eat. When he forgets, he’ll catch sight of himself in a window and see a stranger’s face that his inbuilt pigeon-holer immediately categorizes as: Forty something. Stressful job. Not married.

Bolt, who clearly is married and anxious to get home, has done a till-receipt search but turned up nothing under the name Handel. Now he’s setting up a laptop linked to the CCTV’s external drive. Caffery hangs his jacket on the back of the chair, sets his coffee down, and fishes out his phone. He blows up the photograph of Handel that AJ messaged him earlier and props the phone against the monitor.

There are fifteen hundred hours of video footage loaded on the drive, but he can narrow those hours down. Handel was released only fifty-four hours ago. The goods must have been purchased between then and last night, when he was last seen at the hostel. That info alone cuts out a huge wad of data. Also the receipt for the iPod dock is time-and-date stamped for five p.m. Tuesday and, though it’s a gamble, Caffery’s willing to bet Handel didn’t come all the way here from the hostel twice. Either he bought the dock and then remembered something and went back into the shop, or vice versa. More likely vice versa, since you don’t ‘forget’ seven carrier bags of hardware.

He quickly skips to the Tuesday-evening section of the till-camera recording and, sure enough, there is Handel standing in the queue, waiting to be served. Caffery compares it to the photo on the phone. Stained sweatpants and the stripy orange-and-brown sweater AJ talked about. The haircut is seriously random too – a bit like a monk’s. He is staring intently at other customers, making everyone uneasy – standing too close to the woman ahead of him. She steals nervous glances at him over her shoulder.

No – there’s no way he’d be able to walk into a hotel and book a room.

He is holding several carrier bags. Bulging. In fact he has to put them on the floor as he pays for the docking station. As he does, the assistant glances anxiously past him a few times. Probably trying to catch the eye of the security guard in case something kicks off. But Handel just picks up his bags and then walks out of the shop. The waiting customers exchange relieved glances.

Caffery skips back through the footage – the hurried blurs of customers, staff zipping in and out, stopping for milliseconds to talk to cashiers, customers, then equally quickly vanishing. Then, just ten minutes ahead of his iPod-dock purchase, Handel appears in the cash queue. This time he has no carrier bags but a trolley loaded with goods.

Caffery freezes the picture. The boxes and reels and tins in the trolley are unidentifiable from the image. He unpauses the video and lets it run real time.

Handel is as unsettling this time as he is in the later footage. Small though he is, something in his face makes people around him uncomfortable. One or two other customers push trolleys to the end of the queue, but within seconds of being in Handel’s vicinity they change their minds and steer their trolleys to another counter. One begins to unload goods on to the conveyor belt then changes her mind. She actually packs things back into her trolley and heads off, trying to appear casual, as if she’s forgotten something.

Caffery watches closely as the cashier runs Handel’s items through the till. Again he freezes the picture. He has nothing to write on so he rolls up his shirtsleeve and jots down the time code on his arm. He gets up, goes to Kieran Bolt’s office door, and knocks.