A Dark Matter Episode 45

Craig looked across at her. “Any news about her flatmate?” Craig said. Jenny thought about those pictures. The police would have spoken to Longhorn by now. She thought about Xander and Bradley.

“She hasn’t shown up,” she said.

“It’s not just a student bender?” Jenny shook her head. “Kids don’t do that anymore, not like we did. They don’t go on drug-fuelled adventures for days, especially not young women.

“They can’t afford to, for a start, every day at uni costs hundreds of pounds. And the world is a more dangerous place now for women.”

“You think?”

“Definitely.”

The Scandi girls were checking Tinder profiles on their phones and giggling, swiping away the chancers one by one. If only it was that easy in real life. Craig looked at them laughing and Jenny was happy he’d finally acknowledged them.

When she and Craig were together he would have commented on them, something innocuous, to let her know he was a man who noticed pretty girls, but that they weren’t a threat to Jenny.

But that turned out to be another lie, of course. Once you know a man is capable of sleeping around, you just presume he is sleeping around. She wondered how Fiona dealt with that.

“Well,” Craig said. “I hope she turns up soon.”

“Me too.”

Craig’s pint glass was empty and his hands were flat on the table in front of him. Jenny leaned forwards and placed her hands on top of his. He didn’t flinch, looked up and gave her a quizzical look. “Thanks for being here,” she said. He shrugged like it was nothing.

She squeezed his hands then lifted her glass and finished her drink.

“And I’ll have another double, thanks,” she said.

Dorothy

She pushed her glasses on to the top of her head and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Her eyes ached from staring at the laptop screen so long and she was bored rigid from watching the mundanity of

Jacob Glassman’s contained life. She thanked whatever higher powers existed that she still had her health and mobility at the age of 70, and she worried that she would live to 90 and be housebound and dependent on help.

She and Hannah had gone to visit Jacob first thing that morning, swapping SD cards and batteries on all the cameras. Jacob seemed more vague about the whole business than he had been two days ago when they fitted the cameras, which made Dorothy worry.

He said that he hadn’t noticed anything odd around the house, or going missing, in the last 48 hours, which didn’t add to Dorothy’s confidence that anything was even happening in Hermitage Drive at all.

Back at home, Hannah had showed her how to access the files on the cards, which filename related to which camera at which time. There was a lot of material to go through. This surveillance stuff was the bread and butter of the investigation business, Jim had told her more than once, but it was long, boring work.

Suspicious

At least she didn’t have to sit in a car all day outside a home or office, waiting to catch sight of someone up to no good. But she still had to trawl through hours of this footage, even with motion-activated cameras.

She’d started checking the footage from the kitchen and study for the time periods Susan had been in the house, but there was nothing obviously suspicious. She then checked the living room camera and the upstairs ones for the same time period.

The downstairs cameras had a lot of footage for that time slot, but it was standard occupational therapy stuff, exercises and so on, as well as boring things like Susan putting the kettle on, Jacob flicking through an old book.

He had to go to the toilet often, and Dorothy would see him shuffling off screen with his walker, returning 10 minutes later, sometimes with his fly still down. She was glad there wasn’t a camera in the downstairs bathroom.

For the same time period, the upstairs cameras had nothing, so it looked as if no one had been up there. Dorothy thought about what Jacob said, that an old television had gone missing from an upstairs bedroom. She should have checked to see if there was a dust shadow where the TV had been when she was at the house, but maybe the cleaner had been in since. That’s if it was even stolen in the first place. Dorothy wondered about the cleaner.

She paused the screen and closed her eyes. Tried to centre herself and opened them again. She picked up the two sheets of paper Hannah had printed off for her earlier research on Susan Raymond.

There was her Linkedin profile, lots of praise and an apparently exemplary record as an occupational therapist since she graduated five years ago from Queen Margaret University and finished her training.

A pretty normal Facebook profile and no presence on Twitter or Instagram, according to Hannah. But then, Dorothy was learning that people who seemed simple and innocent on the surface could have all sorts of hidden secrets.

She made a mental note to ask Jacob when the cleaner would next be in. She still had to check each of these cameras for other times of day, and there would soon be more footage from the new SD cards.

She didn’t know how she was going to keep on top of it, as well as everything else.

There was a soft tap on the door to the office, and Archie was standing there. “Are you all right?” he said. Dorothy rubbed at her face and nodded. “What are you doing?” Archie said, nodding at the laptop screen. There was a frozen image of Jacob, book open on his lap, eyes closed.

“Just spying on an old man,” she said. “OK.” Archie straightened up in the doorway.

“I’m heading out on a pick-up and I could use the help. Do you want to come?”

Dorothy closed the laptop screen and threw the printouts on to the desk.

“Yes, I do.”

Surveillance was the bread and butter of the investigation business, Jim had told her, but it was long, boring work

More tomorrow.

A Dark Matter by Doug Johnstone is published by Orenda Books, as is Black Hearts, his latest in the same series. www.orendabooks.co.uk