Not Dead Yet

some barely decipherable fancy lettering, was there no such thing as an ordinary cup of coffee any more? Why did everyone have to dress the menu up in an incomprehensible bloody arcane language of its own?
    Although he did eye the range of cupcakes greedily.
    ‘Can I help you?’ said a solidly built Goth woman behind the bar, wearing blue dungarees, tattoos running down both her arms, and so many rings through her nostrils he wondered how she managed to breathe or blow her nose. He noticed a tongue stud, too. And her forehead piercings which made him wince. Apart from the two of them, at a few minutes past 10 a.m. the place was deserted.
    Potting produced his warrant card.
    ‘Ah, yes, Zoe said to expect you.’
    He showed her a copy of the receipt found in Drayton Wheeler’s hotel room. ‘We are anxious to establish what time this person was here on Monday.’ Then he placed a blow-up of Wheeler’s passport photo in front of her. ‘Do you remember this man?’
    She studied it for a moment. ‘Yes, absolutely I do. He was, frankly, very rude, American, really quite unpleasant.’
    ‘Can you remember what time he was in here? Was it Monday evening?’
    She studied the photograph again. ‘No, I think it was lunchtime. I remember we were very busy, and he got angry because he washaving problems getting online – we had a server crash. He started shouting abuse at one of my staff. My husband gave him his money back and told him to leave.’
    ‘You’re certain?’
    ‘One hundred per cent.’
    ‘You have CCTV here?’
    She pointed up at the ceiling-mounted camera. ‘Yes, we installed it after we had a couple of terminals nicked.’
    ‘You get such a nice class of people in this city.’
    ‘You’re telling me.’
    ‘Would you be able to show me the footage between 8.30 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Monday?’
    ‘I’ll ask my husband – he knows how to operate it.’ She turned and shouted through the archway, ‘Craig! I need you!’
    Moments later a short, thin man appeared, with a shaven head, even more tattooed and pierced than his wife. Late at night, in a dark alley, he’d have scared the shit out of anyone, Potting thought. But here in daylight he looked surprisingly meek and spoke with a friendly, rather weedy, voice.
    Potting explained what he needed, and five minutes later was seated, with a trendily large tea cup with a clumsy handle, in a sparse office at the back of the café, staring up at a monitor. The time was displayed digitally in the top right-hand corner of the screen. The image quality wasn’t great, but clear enough for his purpose. He could see five of the ten terminals were occupied.
    Three were young men who looked like students. The fourth was an attractive girl, in her early twenties. The fifth was a middle-aged woman, wearing a leather baseball cap, a polo-neck sweater and a bomber jacket with the collar turned up.
    By 8.35 p.m. four of the occupants had left, leaving the woman in the leather baseball cap on her own. Shortly after 8.46 she rose and walked up towards the counter, out of shot. Then a couple of minutes later she came back into frame, leaving the premises.
    ‘Her!’ Potting said. ‘Do you remember her?’
    ‘Yes, I do,’ Craig said. ‘We get a lot of oddballs in here. She was definitely one of them.’
    ‘In what sense?’
    ‘Well, sort of just her manner, and she had a very husky voice, you know, like someone who’s a heavy smoker. Before she started her session she asked how much we charged and I told her two pounds for half an hour or three pounds for an hour. She said she needed to draw some cash out and asked if there was a hole-in-the-wall machine anywhere around. I remember telling her the nearest one was just up in Queen’s Road – an HSBC.’
    ‘She went to it?’
    He shrugged. ‘She went out and came back ten minutes later. I remember she paid with a brand new ten pound note, and I thought that must have come straight out of the machine.’
    ‘I need to borrow the disc,’ Potting said. ‘Do you have any objection?’
    The man hesitated.
    ‘I can get a warrant, if you insist.’
    Craig shook his head. ‘No, that’s fine.’
    Potting took the disc, then hurried up to the top of Trafalgar Street, walking through the archway beneath Brighton Station, then turned left into Queen’s Road. He saw the HSBC bank, with two cash machines, diagonally across to his left.

105
    Glenn Branson sat at his terminal in MIR-1 with a row of index cards laid out