The meanest Flood

waiter?’
    ‘Tell you the truth,’ the receptionist said, ‘she liked them rougher than that. I don’t usually talk ill of the dead, Saul will bear me out about that, but Katherine was the type who wouldn’t look twice at a decent man. Always went for the exotic.'
    ‘A dancer?’
    She shook her head. ‘No, Katherine had two left feet. She liked films and she bought CDs. Rock ’n’ roll. But she didn’t go dancing.’
    ‘What about a waiter?’
    ‘I don’t remember her talking about any waiter. She might have... someone who worked in a cafe, some kind of greasy spoon place. But if you’re thinking of a posh waiter in a proper restaurant, she probably wouldn’t.’
    ‘What I’m thinking of,’ Marie said, ‘is someone who wears trousers with braid down the seam of the leg.’
    ‘Oh, no, not Katherine. She’d never look twice at someone like that. What do you say, Saul?’
    Saul performed something approximating to a smile followed by a grunt which moved a body of viscous fluid from his lungs to his tonsils.
    Back at the car Marie tried to put a list together. Who wears braid on his trousers? If we dismiss the military there are people who wear it as part of the uniform for their job, like waiters or professional dancers. There are a whole group of other men who might have been to some kind of formal function, a wedding or a posh dinner party. And after that there are entertainers, singers perhaps, a compere at a cabaret, or someone in the theatre.
    Then there was the question of the trilby. Who wears a trilby? Sam Turner did sometimes, but not a lot of men, not these days. It was a kind of affectation.
    In itself a trilby would be something to think about, but in combination with dress trousers it was decidedly odd. With dress trousers you would expect a top hat, white gloves and a cane. And the overcoat was odd as well. With trousers like that it would be more fitting to wear a cape.
    Did the man who was in Katherine Turner’s garden that night have these other clothes? If so, what had he done with them? In the full rig he would have looked like a professional gambler or a vampire. A roue. Where had he been before checking out Katherine’s house?
    The other explanation, of course, was that he didn’t have the rest of the clothes. He’d bought the trousers at a second-hand or charity shop at the same time as he bought the trilby and the black overcoat. They were a working disguise, something to throw would-be pursuers off the scent. And to throw away once the deed was done.
    But Marie was not here to make guesses. Not in the age of the CCTV camera.
     
    The Riverside Student House was not on the side of the river. It was a quarter of a mile away from Katherine Turner’s house and constructed of redbrick with a black pantiled roof. A small plaque under the name of the house informed Marie that it was built in the year 1815, but some modernization had occurred since then, the double-glazing for example and the high-mounted camera that scanned the street outside.
    The manager of the house, Jurgen Grimes, was a technophile and only too happy to show off his system. ‘Do you know about digital imaging?’ he asked Marie.
    ‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘I know the quality’s good.’
    He sat her in front of a bank of screens in one of the upper rooms. ‘I’ve got eight cameras at this house,’ he said. ‘Another eight at Warwick House further along the street. There’s eight at Windermere, which is closer to the main campus, and there’s still room on the system for more when I need them.’
    Most of the screens, some of which were split, showed internal scenes, halls and stairways, but others showed front and rear views from the various houses and tracked images of people and vehicles approaching from either direction.
    ‘Do you keep archived material?’ she asked.
    ‘How far back?’
    Marie mentioned the date of Katherine Turner’s death.
    ‘That’s not archived,’ Jurgen said. ‘That’s still current. The system is set to compress stretches of time when nothing happens but any movement in the camera area is saved to the hard disk.’ He used the keyboard to enter the date. ‘What time of day?’
    ‘Night,’ Marie told him. ‘Try between midnight and around two in the morning.’
    Jurgen pointed to the monitor to her right and Marie watched it change from a four-part split screen to a fullscreen view of the street outside the house. The digital clock in the lower right-hand