Gray glanced around the office. Nobody was paying him the slightest attention. He called up the HOLMES2 database, typed in “Sunset, fire”. He clicked through the reports and interviews. Carslake had been involved in many of them. A coroner’s investigation recorded accidental death.
Mr Renishaw, it seemed, liked to tinker with motorbikes. The belief was he’d left flammable materials lying around in the garden and kitchen which had caught fire when someone threw a cigarette stub over the fence.
The data Gray reviewed appeared perfectly reasonable. Evidence and conclusion neatly followed each other. Gray sat back, starting to feel perhaps Hamson’s suspicions were correct, though there was only Natalie’s word that Noble had been in. A hand slapped him on the shoulder.
“Bloody hell, Sol, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!” said Fowler.
“You startled me, Mike.”
“Just wanted to check we were still on for tonight.”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Good, see you later.”
Gray made sure Fowler was at his desk before he accessed the shared folder where all the information on the Regan Armitage case was stored. He quickly found Fowler’s CCTV footage. There was one marked “Seagram’s” and dated the night Regan had gone missing.
He slowly worked his way through the footage, reviewing the external scenes first, then the internal ones. Fowler had been right: other than the time when the couple departed there was no clear image of the woman in the blue wig. When she appeared in the footage she kept her face away from the camera, like she knew it was watching.
Finally, Gray carried out a database search of reported assaults in connection with Seagram’s or Regan. There was nothing, not a single piece of documented evidence. So either Quigley was lying or Regan was simply a player.