Not Dead Yet

a taxi and gone home for the night.
    They were now scrolling through the images in the area around the Pavilion grounds from yesterday, fast-forwarding through the whole day on each of the different cameras in turn, in the hope of seeing her again. Kelly glanced at his watch, mindful that he needed to be back at Sussex House for the 6.30 p.m. briefing. It was almost 5 p.m. He already had more than enough for his purposes, and he was excited about what he had to report.
    Then something caught his eye. He frowned.
    ‘Jon, go back a few seconds!’
    The controller moved his joystick, and the image began reversing.
    ‘Stop!’ Kelly commanded. The time on the screen displayed as 1 p.m., yesterday, Tuesday.
    The image froze.
    ‘What street is this?’ Kelly asked.
    ‘New Road.’
    ‘Okay, zoom in on that guy, please.’
    The image of a balding man in a business suit filled the screen. He stepped out of the front door of an office building, hesitated, held a hand out as if to check if it was still raining.
    ‘Now, go slow forward, please.’
    Kelly watched, with growing excitement, as the man walked out of frame. Then he said, ‘Keep it running – you can fast forward. I think he’ll be back.’
    The forensic podiatrist was right. Ten minutes later the man returned, holding a small paper bag. He shot a glance at a bicycle chained to a lamp post, then went back into the office building.
    ‘I need a copy of that, please,’ he said to the controller.
    A few minutes later, when Pumfrey handed it to him, he loaded it straight into his laptop, then ran the software he had developed for gait analysis on it. After he had taken off the measurements and calculations, he made a comparison with the figures computed from the footage of Anna Galicia walking.
    And now he could barely contain his excitement.

109
    Norman Potting sat at his workstation in MIR-1, puzzled. He now had images emailed to him from all the hole-in-the-wall machines within a short walking distance of Café Conneckted. HSBC, Barclays, Halifax and Santander banks had responded quickly and efficiently.
    He scrolled through them, looking, in turn, at four female and sixteen male faces, and something was not making sense. All twenty people had made cash withdrawals from these machines, within his parameter of 8.15 and 9 p.m. Monday evening. Despite the poor image quality, one woman bore a reasonable resemblance to Anna Galicia. She had apparently attempted a transaction from an HSBC machine on Queen’s Road at 8.31 p.m. But there was no withdrawal showing under her name. One explanation, the bank had told him, was that her card had been declined. But they were still a bit mystified why no record showed up at all. Another suggestion was that she was using a card that had been stolen but not yet reported missing: a withdrawal was made one minute later, at 8.32 p.m. in a man’s name.
    The Detective Sergeant was on the verge of deciding he had drawn a blank with this particular line of enquiry, when for the second time this afternoon, the normal studious quiet of the Major Incident Room was broken. This time there was an exuberant whoop from Haydn Kelly, who entered with such speed and force that the door swung back and struck the wall behind it with a bang loud enough to make everyone look up with a start.
    ‘I’ve cracked it!’ he shouted across the room at Roy Grace, beaming like an exuberant kid and brandishing two CD cases in the air.
    ‘What? What have you cracked? Anna Galicia?’ Grace asked.
    The forensic podiatrist moved Grace’s keyboard aside and set his laptop down on the worktop. He flipped open the lid and tapped in his code. Moments later Grace was staring at a screen that wassplit vertically. On the left-hand side he saw what looked like CCTV footage of the woman he recognized from earlier, Anna Galicia, walking along a street in Brighton. On the right-hand side of the screen was a balding man in a business suit. Along the top were several columns of spinning numbers and algebraic symbols that seemed to be calibrating and re-calibrating as each person walked.
    Haydn Kelly pointed at the left screen. ‘See our mysterious Anna Galicia?’
    Grace nodded.
    ‘There’s a good reason why no one’s been able to find her.’
    ‘Which is?’
    Kelly pointed at the right-hand screen. At the balding man in the business suit. ‘Because that’s her .’
    Grace looked at the forensic podiatrist’s face for an instant, in case he was joking. But