I See You (7 page)

‘Melissa’s Three?’ I ask now. She laughs.

‘And four, and five … the sky’s the limit!’

I’m not due into work until lunchtime, but when I arrive at eleven Graham makes a show of looking at his watch.

‘Good of you to come in today, Zoe.’ As always, he’s wearing a three-piece suit, with an actual pocket watch tucked into his waistcoat. ‘Professionalism breeds confidence,’ he explained to me once, perhaps in an attempt to encourage me out of my M&S trousers and into something similarly old-fashioned.

I don’t rise to it. My two hours’ leave was authorised and signed off by Graham himself before I left on Friday. ‘Would you like me to make you a coffee?’ I say, having learned a long
time ago that the best way to extinguish Graham is by being unfailingly polite.

‘That would be most welcome, thank you. Did you have a good weekend?’

‘Not bad.’ I don’t offer any detail, and he doesn’t ask. I keep my personal life to myself, nowadays. When Simon and I first got together, Graham dared to suggest it was inappropriate for me to date someone I’d met through work, even though it had been months since he’d come into the office, enquiring about commercial rental rates for a piece he was writing.

‘But it wouldn’t have been inappropriate for me to date my boss?’ I responded, folding my arms and looking him straight in the eye. Because six weeks after I’d found out about Matt’s affair, when I was a quivering mess and didn’t know which way was up, Graham Hallow had asked me out, and I’d said no.

‘I felt sorry for you,’ he said, when I challenged him all those years later. ‘I thought you needed cheering up.’

‘Right. Thanks.’

‘Maybe that’s what this new bloke thinks, too.’

I didn’t take the bait. I knew Simon didn’t feel sorry for me. He adored me. He bought me flowers, took me to nice restaurants, and kissed me in a way that made my knees buckle. We’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks, but I knew. I just knew. Maybe Graham had felt sorry for me, but he never quite forgave me for turning him down. No more letting me leave early if the kids were unwell, or cutting me some slack if the trains were late. From that moment he played by the book, and I needed the job too much to risk breaking the rules.

Graham drinks his coffee, then puts on his coat and disappears. There’s nothing in the diary, but he mutters something about seeing a man about a dog, and frankly I’m just glad to be on my own. The office is unusually quiet for a Monday, so I start
a long overdue spring clean, feeding papers through the shredder and moving ancient spider plants to dust behind them.

My phone beeps, and I pick up a text from Matt.

He shortens everyone’s names like that. Katie is
KT
, Justin
Jus
, and I’m only ever Zoe when we’re arguing.

I suppose Simon would be
Si
, if they had that sort of relationship.

I think for a second. Optimistic, I put.

I register the kiss and ignore it. I leave the conversation hanging, carrying on with my dusting, and a few minutes later he phones.

‘You did it again, didn’t you?’

‘Did what?’ I say, knowing full well what he means.

‘You put a downer on her audition.’ His consonants are muffled and I know it’s because he’s put a cigarette between his lips. Sure enough, I hear the metallic snap of a lighter, and he takes a long drag. It’s been almost twenty years since I smoked, but I feel a physical pull as he inhales.

‘I didn’t,’ I start, but Matt knows me too well. ‘I didn’t mean to, anyway.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I just mentioned that secretarial course I told you about.’

‘Zo …’

‘What?
You said yourself it would be perfect for her.’ I hear the sound of traffic in the background, and know that Matt is parked at a rank, leaning against the cab.

‘You’ve got to go gentle with her. Push her too hard in one direction and she’ll only run faster the other way.’

‘Acting isn’t a proper job,’ I say, because disagreeing with Matt is a habit that’s hard to break. ‘She needs something to fall back on.’

‘She’ll find that out herself soon enough. And when she does, we’ll be there.’

I finish dusting the main room, and move on to Graham’s office. His desk is twice the size of mine, but almost as neat. It’s one of the few things we have in common. A calendar sits parallel to the edge of the desk, today’s motivational quote urging me to do something today my future self will thank me for. On the opposite side of the desk are three in-trays, stacked on top of each other and labelled
incoming; pending; post.
In front of them is a stack of newspapers. Today’s
London Gazette
is on top.

Nothing unusual in that. You’d be hard pressed to find an office in London without a copy of the
Gazette
knocking about. I pick up the first issue, telling myself I’m still tidying, and see the paper beneath it is the
London Gazette
, too. As is the one beneath that; and the one beneath that. A dozen or more copies, neatly stacked. I glance at the door then sit down in Graham’s leather chair and pick up the top copy. I scan the first couple of pages, but I can’t stop myself from turning to the classifieds.

And then I feel a tightening around my chest, and the palms of my hands grow damp. Because on the last page of the newspaper in my hand – a newspaper dated several days previously is a woman I’ve seen before.

We
are all creatures of habit.

Even you.

You reach for the same coat each day; leave home at the same time every morning. You have a favourite seat on the bus or the train; you know precisely which escalator moves the fastest, which ticket barrier to use, which kiosk has the shortest queue.

You know these things: and I know them, too.

I know you buy the same paper from the same shop; your milk at the same time each week. I know the way you walk the children to school; the shortcut you take on your way home from Zumba class. I know the street where you part ways with your friends, after a Friday night in the pub; and I know that you walk the rest of the way home alone. I know the 5 km circuit you run on a Sunday morning, and the precise place you stop to stretch.

I know all these things, because it’s never occurred to you that anyone is watching you.

Routine is comforting to you. It’s familiar, reassuring.

Routine makes you feel safe.

Routine will kill you.

Kelly
was leaving the briefing room when her job phone rang.
Number withheld
meant it was almost certainly the control room, and she held the phone between her ear and her right shoulder as she zipped up her stab vest.

‘Kelly Swift.’

‘Can you take a call from a Mrs Zoe Walker?’ came the voice. Kelly heard the buzz of voices in the background; a dozen other operators taking calls and resourcing jobs. ‘She wants to speak to you about a theft on the Circle line – something taken from a bag?’

‘You’ll need to put her through to Dip Squad. I finished my attachment there a few days ago; I’m back on the Neighbourhood Policing Team now.’

‘I did try that, but no one’s picking up. Your name’s still attached to the crime report, so …’ the operator trailed off, and Kelly sighed. The name Zoe Walker didn’t ring a bell, but in her three months with the Dip Squad she had dealt with more victims of stolen wallets than she could possibly remember.

‘Put her through.’

‘Thank you.’ The operator sounded relieved, and not for the first time Kelly was glad she was at the sharp end of policing, not stuck in a windowless room, fielding calls from irate members of the public. She heard a faint click.

‘Hello? Hello?’ Another voice came on the line; this one female, and impatient.

‘Hello, this is PC Swift. Can I help you?’

‘Finally!
Anyone would think I was trying to phone MI5.’

‘Not nearly that exciting, I’m afraid. I understand you wanted to talk to me about a theft on the Underground. What was it you had stolen?’

‘Not me,’ the caller said, as though Kelly was failing to keep up. ‘Cathy Tanning.’

Calls like this were a regular occurrence whenever a police officer was quoted in the paper. Contact from members of the public; often with no relation whatsoever to the article itself, as though possession of your name and shoulder number alone made you fair game.

‘She had her keys taken from her bag when she fell asleep on her way home,’ Mrs Walker went on. ‘Nothing else, only her keys.’

It was the type of theft that had made the job unusual. On her way to take the initial report Kelly had been in two minds about whether it should have been reported as a theft at all, but Cathy had been insistent the keys hadn’t been lost.

‘I keep them in a separate compartment in my bag,’ she had told Kelly. ‘They couldn’t have fallen out.’ The pocket was on the outside of a rucksack-style handbag; a zip and a leather buckle stopping them from falling out. Both had been undone.

CCTV footage had showed Cathy entering the Underground at Shepherd’s Bush, the buckle on her rucksack pocket apparently securely fastened. By the time she left the station at Epping, the strap hung loose, the pocket gaping slightly open.

As jobs went, it was a straightforward one. Cathy was the perfect witness: she always took the same route home from work, even choosing the same carriage on the Central line and sitting – where possible – in the same seat. If only everyone was so predictable, Kelly remembered thinking, it would make her job so much easier. She had picked up Cathy on the CCTV footage within minutes of looking for her, but it wasn’t one of their core nominals moving in on her. The biggest offenders on
the Underground right now were the Curtis kids, but they wanted wallets and iPhones, not keys.

Sure enough, when Kelly seized the footage from the train Cathy had been on at the time of the theft, she almost missed the culprit altogether.

Cathy had been asleep, leaning against the wall of the carriage with her legs crossed and her arms folded protectively around her bag. Kelly had been so busy scanning the carriage for lads in hoodies; for pairs of women with headscarves and babies in arms, that she had barely noticed the man standing close to Cathy’s legs. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of someone running with the usual pickpocketing crowd. Tall, and well dressed, with a grey scarf wound twice around his neck, then pulled up over his ears and the lower part of his face, as though he were still outdoors, battling the elements. He had his back to the camera; his face turned resolutely to the floor. In one swift movement he bent down, leaned towards Cathy Tanning, then stood up; his right hand disappearing into his pocket too fast for Kelly to see what was held in it.

Had he thought there might be a purse in that outer pocket? Or a phone? A lucky dip, turning to disappointment, when he realised all he had was a bunch of keys? Taking them anyway, because returning them was a pointless risk; dumping them in a bin on his way home.

Kelly had spent her last day on the Dip Squad trying to track Cathy’s thief through the Underground, obtaining a still of such low resolution there was no point even circulating it. He was Asian, that’s all she could be certain of, and around six feet tall. The CCTV cameras were colour, and the quality was impressive – you could almost imagine you were watching news footage of commuters on the Underground – but that didn’t guarantee a positive ID. The cameras needed to be pointing in the right direction; be positioned just right for a full frontal image capture. Too often – as in this case – the offence happened on the
periphery of the camera range. Zooming in for a better view meant a gradual pixellation of the image, until the all-important details blurred into a homogenous figure you didn’t stand a hope in hell of getting an ident on.

‘Did you witness the theft?’ Kelly asked, pulling her attention back to Zoe Walker. Surely she would have come forward sooner if she’d actually seen the offence take place. It occurred to her perhaps Mrs Walker had found the missing keys; that they could send them for forensics.

‘I’ve got some information for you,’ Zoe Walker said. She spoke formally, in an abrupt tone that bordered on rudeness, but there was an uncertainty beneath it which suggested nerves.

Kelly spoke gently. ‘Go on.’

The sergeant appeared, tapping his watch. Kelly pointed to her phone; mouthed
Give me a minute.

‘The victim. Cathy Tanning. Her photograph was in an advert in the classifieds section of the
London Gazette
, right before her keys were stolen.’

Whatever Kelly had expected from Zoe Walker, it wasn’t that.

She sat down. ‘What sort of advert?’

‘I’m not really sure. It’s on a page with other adverts, for things like chatlines and escorts. And on Friday I saw the same advert, except I think it had a photo of me.’

‘You think?’ Kelly couldn’t stop a note of scepticism creeping into her voice. She heard Zoe Walker hesitate.

‘Well, it looked like me. Only without glasses. Although I do sometimes wear contacts – I use those daily disposable ones, you know?’ She sighed. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You think I’m some crackpot.’

It was so close to what Kelly had been thinking that she felt a stab of guilt. ‘Not at all. I’m just trying to establish the facts. Can you give me the dates of the adverts you saw?’ She waited while Zoe Walker checked the calendar, then scribbled down
the two dates she gave her; Tuesday 3 November for Cathy Tanning’s photograph, and Friday 13 November for Zoe’s own. ‘I’ll look into it,’ she promised, although when she’d find the time, she wasn’t sure. ‘Leave it with me.’

‘No.’ Paul Powell was unyielding. ‘You had your three months swanning about in plain clothes, while the rest of us were picking up the work; now it’s time to do some real policing.’