Charles Vernon was working to a plan, of a sort. He knew that he had left behind both a physical and an electronic trail when he flew from Heathrow to Blagnac airport at Toulouse in France, but that was, somewhat bizarrely, entirely intentional, as well as being completely unavoidable.
He knew that it was very difficult to disappear completely: the proliferation of surveillance cameras, mobile phone tracking and triangulation and the recording of banking and credit card transactions made that almost impossible in the modern world. Living off the grid was a privilege reserved, in the main, either for those people who had so much money that they could spend all their time in private jets and on private yachts or on private islands, all entirely out of reach of modern surveillance systems or, perhaps bizarrely, for those people who had nothing at all. The derelicts of society, living on the streets and sleeping in shop doorways and abandoned buildings; the people who flew beneath the radar, surviving on begging and handouts and soup kitchens and the occasional kindness of strangers, but who were neither registered nor recognised by the official systems in their country of residence. They were nothing more than permanently anonymous shapes on the images caught by the CCTV cameras that dotted the streets.
Charles Vernon fitted into neither category and, in any case, he had no intention of disappearing. He actually wanted to be found, but found on his terms, which is why he had left the country in the manner that he had. He wanted there to be confusion about his motive for leaving and for there to be clear ambiguity about the obvious core question he was sure was now being asked: had he defected or had he been abducted?
That was why he had withdrawn the cash from his bank accounts in Warminster and why he had changed the number plates on his car: he wanted the police or the security services to be aware from the start that something strange was going on. He’d also been very well aware that, probably sooner rather than later, the substitution of the number plates would have been detected and the images from the traffic cameras checked.
That was also why he had purchased by mail order an inflatable doll, a life-size sex toy with three usable orifices, none of which were of the slightest interest to Vernon, who was only concerned about the overall shape of the figure. Before he left Warminster, he’d used an air pump powered by his car’s cigarette lighter to inflate the doll, pushing the flaccid limbs into the sleeves of his old jacket and then, when it was almost fully inflated but still bendable, he’d wrapped a couple of scarves around the neck and lower part of the face to hide the figure’s plastic staring eyes and pouting, wide-open red rimmed mouth. An old battered cap forced onto the doll’s head helped to complete the illusion.
Anyone peering in the windows of the car would immediately see exactly what the figure jammed into the back seat of the old Ford actually was, but Vernon had hoped that all a traffic camera would register was the overall shape, and that anyone viewing the footage would come to the obvious conclusion that there was a second man in the car. Again, that would help to muddy the waters.
At Heathrow, he’d deflated the doll in the long-term car parking and just dumped it on the ground a few dozen yards from where he’d parked his car and put the jacket and the other items of clothing out of sight in the boot of his vehicle.
What Vernon had been trying to do was pose questions, not provide answers.