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Jody picked Beth up from the airport but only answered her questions in monosyllables during the drive back. She knew he was furious with her for putting herself and the baby at risk. She slept part of the way.
When she walked into his place, it actually felt like home. It was early morning and she felt completely spaced, but Beth made an appointment with her midwife for the following afternoon. During her medical examination, immediately after the incident at West Glacier, the US doctor had confirmed that, despite the ordeal, her child was still very much healthy. But she didn’t want to take any chances.
Then she sat down with Jody and a pot of decaf and told him everything she hadn’t via the phone calls she’d made to him during questioning.
While she’d been in the States, he’d reassured her time and time again that she was safe and that the gunman wouldn’t come knocking on her door. The police hadn’t recovered the body but had said the currents would make it very unlikely that he would ever be found. Beth knew she wouldn’t rest easy until he was; even now she was back home.
She took a long shower. Standing in Jody’s heavy towelling dressing gown afterwards, she felt the exhaustion she’d kept at bay filtering through, and surveyed her defects in the toothpaste-dappled mirror. With heavy lids, she examined the scars around her mouth from the car accident and her shrunken right ear and burnt shoulder from the fire. The dressing had been removed before her flight, and she’d been given cream to apply, as well as a course of analgesics. Beth touched the top of her ear where the skin was dead. Much longer in the flaming lodge, and it would have withered to nothing.
Her hair had grown considerably and her brown spikes had softened into a boyish cut. Was this her new face? The person who had got into the car with Luc felt almost fictional, the chasm between her life and the harrowing experiences of the new Beth so vast that it was hard to believe she’d ever enjoyed a life of reassuring mundanity. Did she ever want to return to being that woman?
Beth ran her fingers over her stomach. Her touch was blunted because of the dead layer on the tips, but she’d been reassured the skin there would regenerate. She looked at the smooth pads. Would her prints, her identity, ever re-establish?
Having gone to bed at midday, she awoke just after three feeling fully awake and elected to get up for a few hours. She headed to the lounge in her nightshirt to find Jody but heard activity from his recording studio. Beth put her head around the door but recognised the sounds before she did.
“What’s this?”
He clicked his mouse and the sound of the roadside ceased. “If they’re having problems locating the recordings, I thought the FBI would be interested in these...”
Beth stood behind him and examined the two monitors on his desk. On the right hand screen one of the clips was paused. “But this has all been removed.”
“I recorded them from YouTube.”
“How?”
“Off the screen with my iPhone.” He sounded coy. “It’s why they’re not great quality. Then I ripped them into my FleetSuite editing software.”
“You stitched them together?”
“Minus the one that had been removed before I could record it...’
Beth bit her lip.
“You did ask me to.”
“I should call them straight away about this.”
“By using the people moving through the frame I’ve been able to put together a rough timeline. There are gaps but they’re only a matter seconds.”
“Show me it,” she said, after a few moments consideration.
“You sure?”
She reached down, used the mouse to drag the slider back to the start of the clip and played it.
A phone camera panned from the front of the stationary ambulance at the right hand side of the screen to the crash site. The gendarmes were securing the road. Suddenly the angle, lighting and quality of the clip changed.
“What happened there?”
“The clip jumped because they stopped recording for a few seconds and picked up further along the road. This is a different clip cut into the same timeline.”
“How do you know for sure?”
“Watch the police.” Jody dragged the slider back so the clip reversed slightly.
Beth watched the officers as they moved about the roadside. When the screen quality changed, their progress didn’t alter.
“I was able to assemble the clips in the right order by navigating via the movement of the emergency personnel. And when the cameras aren’t focused on them, I used the other ghouls in the foreground. Like this guy...” Jody pulled the slider along to reveal the clip with Cigarillo Man/Ferrand Paquet in his lemon shirt. “Remember him? He’s actually turned out to be an invaluable marker during the edit.”
“How long did this take you to put together?”
Jody shrugged his shoulders. “I had to occupy myself with something while you were putting your life in jeopardy.”
Beth ignored his rebuke. “How many times have you watched it?”
“So many times, I don’t see it anymore. The patchwork is just over nine minutes long. It does give you a bigger perspective watching it. There’s a lot of overlap. I used the clearest clips, but you can click in the bar at the bottom to switch between the alternate footage.” He rose from the chair to allow her to sit there.
Beth felt cold pins and needles across the top of her shoulders. “I don’t know if I can watch it just now.”
Jody paused it. “I’m sorry. I’m a dick. This has just been a project for me...”
“I do appreciate this, Jody.”
“It didn’t take me that long.”
“I don’t mean just this...’
Jody looked uncomfortable and glanced at the door. “I’m going to hunt out something to eat. What do you fancy for dinner?”
“I’m good, thanks. Can you zip this edit and email it to me?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll forward it to Agent Morales. I think it’ll save them a lot of time.”
“You’ve seen it enough, but it’s there when you feel ready. If you ever want to look at it again.”
Beth didn’t, but when Jody headed to the kitchen, she seated herself, inhaled slowly and viewed Jody’s assembly of the crash site footage from start to finish.
