The Camera Man: A DC Smith Investigation by Peter Grainger

Author:Peter Grainger [Grainger, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2023-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

He had parked in one of his old places, reversing close to the rear wall. For half a minute the Transit was visible beyond the entrance, facing down Windsor Road – the driver had decided he would not follow the Volvo into somewhere like that – and then the lights must have changed again and it was gone. Smith wondered whether the young man – Smith was somehow sure it was a young man behind the wheel – was already on his mobile, calling Mrs Fitch. Hopefully, if he was, some consternation had been caused; she might be wondering what she’d said or not said which had sent that irritating man to Lake Central police station. Was he really from the insurance company, or something worse?

More to the point as far as Smith was concerned, why had she sent the Transit man out of her house – and almost certainly out of her bedroom – so promptly? Why did she want to know more about the man who was investigating her husband’s disappearance? What, in other words, was she worried about? It was almost as if she had something to hide.

He decided to wait a few minutes and then re-join the traffic in Windsor Road rather than use the other entrance; that way he would be safely behind the van, and there was nowhere on the one-way system it could have waited for him to reappear. The time was almost five o’clock. He could see the rear entrance to the station and the doors he must have walked through ten thousand times – if I sit here much longer, he thought, I’ll probably see someone I recognise if they’re on the day shift. And if they see me, I might have a bit of explaining to do.

Inevitably, he fell to remembering some of those times: running out of those doors a few years ago when he’d realised why no one could get an answer from Ralph Greenwood in his room at Rosemary House; Waters escorting him back inside when he’d slightly overdone the painkillers to get through the annual physical check-up and gym tests; the time when he had arrested and taken through those doors the head of the Franciscan community at Abbeyfields. Andretti himself had been manhandled through those same doors. And many, many more. It had not been an uninteresting life, and on balance he’d probably done more good than harm. One cannot ask for more than that, perhaps.

The doors opened at last, and a woman appeared. Small, neatly but casually dressed in jeans and short-sleeved T shirt, carrying a briefcase – he didn’t recognise her immediately but it was DCI Cara Freeman. Of all the car parks in all the world… Still, she worked here and he didn’t anymore, so this was hardly unexpected. Their relationship had been a complicated one from the beginning for reasons too many to explain, but he thought there had always been a degree of mutual respect; he presumed she was still a rising star with an exceptional clear-up rate, too.

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