Broken Homes

futilely flicked through the channels for five minutes before deciding I might as well process that afternoon’s CCTV footage.
    I started with the stuff from the shop. Judging from the angle, the camera was mounted above the counter looking down the long narrow shop to the front door. I cued up and ran it from the moment our man stepped inside, clutching his black bag of swag, and briskly approached the counter.
    He was white, pale faced, thin nosed, in his midforties I guessed, dark hair going grey, bags under dark blue eyes. He was dressed in a tan zip-up jacket over a light-coloured shirt and khaki chinos.
    I watched the transaction going the way Headley had described, and the moment when the thief realised he’d made a mistake was well obvious. He glanced involuntarily up at the CCTV camera, realised what he’d done and was out the door less than a minute later.
    Thirty-six seconds precisely in fact – by the time-code in the corner of the screen.
    The CCTV from the shop was the latest kit. I rolled it back and got a capture of his face when he looked at the camera. It blew up nicely just using Paint Shop Pro – I printed a couple of copies for use later. Despite the poor angle I was pretty sure that the book thief turned right when he exited the shop – going towards St Martin’s Lane – but just to be on the safe side I checked the footage I had from the Barclays’ branch on Charing Cross Road. Banks in central London have top of the line CCTV and one of the branch’s fifteen cameras just clipped the entrance to Cecil Court. I scanned twenty minutes either side of the time of his departure and confirmed that he definitely hadn’t come out on to Charing Cross Road.
    There had been a couple of good camera positions in Cecil Court itself, but the footage hadn’t been kept. So the best I had for the St Martin’s Lane side was from the Angel and Crown who hadn’t figured how to delete yet – thank god. Still, it was a low-spec system that recorded ten frames a second, and had more ghosting than a camera operating in daylight should have. Despite that, he was easy to spot, tan zip-up jumper and khaki slacks, emerging onto St Martin’s Lane, turning left and climbing into an off-white Mondeo estate – Mark 2 from what I could see.
    This got my hopes up. If it was his own car, then it was just a simple matter of getting another IIP check which would include the DVLA database and I’d have his name, DOB and the registered address courtesy of the National Insurance Database. Proving that Big Brother does have his uses after all.
    Shit – I couldn’t see the index. Even when it pulled out, the Mondeo was at too oblique an angle, and the image too low quality for me to identify the number plate. I ran it back and forth a couple of times but it didn’t get any clearer. I was going to have to persuade Westminster Council to release some of their traffic cam footage and see if I could pick up the Mondeo when it turned into Charing Cross Road.
    And I wasn’t going to get that this side of six o’clock, because another problem with the so-called surveillance state is that it mostly works office hours.
    I had another Red Stripe and went to bed.
    After breakfast and Toby walking duty it was back to the tech cave and my continuing search for a clear shot of the book thief’s car number plate. I was just about to take a deep breath and start wading through the swampy hinterland of Westminster Council’s bureaucratic interface when it suddenly occurred to me to that I’d overlooked an easier option. Pulling up the footage from St Martin’s Lane, I clicked it back to watch the Mondeo being parked in the first place. My book thief wasn’t a brilliant parker and the second time he adjusted his angle I got a good view of his plate.
    One IIP query later and I had his name – Patrick Mulkern. His face matched the CCTV and his police record matched the profile of a professional safe-cracker. A good and careful one too, judging by the lack of convictions in the later half his career. Tons of interest, as in ‘person of interest’ and a few arrests, but no convictions. According to the appended intelligence notes Mulkern was a specialist hired by individuals or crews to crack any troublesome safes they might come across in the course their work. He even had a legitimate locksmith business, Bromley address I noted, which made doing him for ‘going equipped’ a bit tricky since he used the same tools for both