It turned out the old guy was a former cop after all. Mid-Anglia Constabulary, 1970–1973. Turned down for detective status, and seemed sour about it. It was as if he was trying to show his skills, proving his worth as a detective, at seventy years of age.

His home was overloaded but neat, as if he were both a hoarder and a clean freak at the same time. A billion vinyl records were set against the wall, so the detectives had to move in single file into the living room. The TV was an old CRT with built-in VHS player on a stand beneath a shelf bearing three ancient rugby trophies and an old black-and-white photo of a woman. Seeing the shelf, and the photo, Mick started to relax a little as a plan formed.

‘Can I have a glass of water?’ he asked.

He directed his men to take the sofa in front of the TV, even though they wanted to stand. When his water arrived, he placed it on the shelf, and then he sat between his colleagues, their knees touching.

Mick checked the time. Shit. He was due at the church in just forty minutes. He couldn’t be late. This thing needed speeding up.

‘What you’re about to see,’ the old chap said as he fiddled with a remote control for the TV, ‘is video footage from two different times. I will start the video at 6.44 p.m. yesterday evening.’ They let him talk because he wanted to. He probably didn’t get many big moments in his life.

The footage was bad, which was good. Shadows were too deep, blacks too black, white parts from the setting sun too bright. But all three detectives, experienced in watching bullshit CCTV footage, barely noticed. Nobody expected a hi-def close-up of a perpetrator’s face.

And they also knew they wouldn’t get it. The camera was at one end of the row of lock-ups, and the garage was at the other. At 6.44, a car entered the scene from the direction of the main road, its lights off. Too dark to make out, but from the shape it looked like a small hatchback.

‘Renault Clio,’ Cooper said. ‘Curve to the back of rear side window.’

The car stopped, sideways on to the camera, at the end of the path, just past the garages. Both right side doors opened.

‘No way. Look, four doors. And that window frame is flat at the bottom. Volkswagen Golf.’

The car was stopped, but nobody got out.

‘Headlights are too small,’ Mick said. ‘Mazda 3.’

He didn’t even know why he said it. It was, of course, a Mazda 3. Dave, the car buff, had stolen it a few days before. He cursed himself inwardly.

‘Three men,’ Gondal said. ‘Makes sense.’

The driver was short, slim, and black. They got that from his neck, because all three wore ski masks and gloves. The other passenger and the guy who’d sat behind the driver were taller, both white, one of them with thick shoulders. Dark clothing for all three, nothing distinctive.

‘Jesus. This looks promising,’ Cooper said.

‘Mid-sized guy could be Smithfield,’ Gondal said.

It was.

The three men walked past the first garage, coming towards the camera. The black one went down into a squat, and seemed to pick something up off the ground.

‘What’s he doing?’ Gondal asked. All three detectives were leaning forward.

Cooper said: ‘Looks like he’s fou—’

‘—nd a penny.’

‘Stop messing about,’ Mick said. He grabbed the garage door and lifted. Slowly, because it creaked.

‘Find a penny, pick it up,’ Dave said, ‘and all day you’ll have good luck. Don’t you reckon we’ll need it?’

‘Get professional and you don’t need luck,’ Mick replied. The up-and-over metal door got halfway, then jammed. He couldn’t budge it. The door was bent a little across the middle and he understood why: it threatened to bend again now as he pulled, same way he deadlifted at the gym. He shook the door, which was loud, but it came free and screeched its way fully open.

The Volvo lurked within, facing outwards. Untouched for a few days, as they’d expected because none of the garages was used. The three men slipped alongside it, to the back. Dave opened the rear door. Mick nodded at the tools and weapons inside. He hadn’t expected Dave to be able to get exactly what he’d asked for, but here it was, right before him. This was going to work, he realised. Revenge, so long in anticipation, was finally taking flesh.

‘Well done, Dave,’ he said. ‘You certainly know what you’re do—’

‘—ing in there?’ Cooper said, looking at Gondal.

‘How am I supposed to know what they're doing?’

‘Fast forward,’ Mick said. Onscreen, the three men had been inside the garage for over a minute. He was on the clock and didn’t have six minutes to waste watching a motionless screen. Because he remembered that they had spent seven minutes in the garage, checking the weapons.

Cooper and Gondal yelled at the old guy to rewind the tape when, in double-speed, a car shot out of the garage.

‘That’s our stolen Volvo,’ Cooper said. ‘So this is them.’

The killers. Cooper and Gondal got excited, and Mick had to pretend to do the same. But he was far from happy. He glanced at his water, up there on the shelf.

The Volvo turned towards the camera, and the excited detectives leaned forward again, hoping for a close-up of the driver as he passed it. But then the Volvo stopped, and reversed past the parked Mazda, onto a patch of grass made to look like an inkblot by the video quality and high trees that blocked the setting sun.

‘All three already inside,’ Cooper said as the black guy got out of the Volvo and into the Mazda. He turned right, towards the camera, and then left, into the garage. Fast, neat. Clearly knew how to handle a vehicle.

‘I’ll see if Smithfield has any friends who resemble this guy,’ Gondal said.

The black guy exited the garage and turned to close the door. Got it halfway, but then it moved no more. He tried rocking it, but didn’t have the power.

Cooper said, ‘Looks like it’s jam—’

‘—med again.’

Mick got out and approached. ‘Get back in the car, you little wimp,’ he said, joking. He was not unhappy right now. Not when things were progressing so well. He put his arms on the edge of the door, locked straight, and used all his weight and a rocking motion to try to free the stuck mechanism. He sensed Dave nearby, just watching.

‘Dave, piss off into the car.’

Dave started walking back to the Volvo. ‘Got some oil. Might need to lubri—’

‘—cate the old throat,’ Mick said, and stood, and walked towards the TV. He grabbed his drink from the shelf, and took a big gulp. He picked up the photo.

‘Your wife died?’ he asked.

‘Eight years ago,’ the old guy replied. ‘How did you know?’

The photo. A woman in her prime, probably round about the time the old guy met her, when they were both young, when love was fresh. ‘Hunch. Mine died three years ago, although she was my ex-wife by then. Split a year. The job, you see. Clichéd old thing, but the job really was my mistress and it wore her down. But it was amicable, and we still saw each other a lot because of our son. He stayed with me, and I got the house. So, I still sort of miss her some days. I’m sorry for your loss.’

He could almost feel his colleagues’ discomfort at this rare show of emotion from their boss. He’d never talked about family since the accident, had banned his social life from being brought up at work. But they said nothing as he replaced the photo and the drink, and slowly walked backwards to his seat.

On the screen, the big guy had stepped back from the garage door. He jumped forward with a powerful kick which freed the jam and shut the door. He stomped back to the Volvo. He got in. The Volvo’s headlights blazed on, whitewashing the screen. It turned right, onto the dirt road, and vanished. All told, nine minutes.

‘And so we move onto 21.41,’ the old guy said. The detectives weren’t listening, though. They chatted among themselves about what they had just seen, stopping only when the fast-forwarding video slowed again.

Mick’s mind raced. This time he was absent, so had no clue what Dave and Brad had got up to. If one of them had done something that would fuck up everything, well, he was going to find out when it was too late to do anything about it.

But everything was fine. The Volvo returned. It parked while the black guy opened the garage, with no major jamming problem this time. He drove the Mazda out, and the other guy drove the Volvo inside. The black guy entered, and neither returned for eight minutes, which, again, Mick instructed the old guy to fast forward through.

‘Must be when they’re spraying the chemical around,’ Gondal said.

The two walked out, shut the garage door, and got into the Mazda. They vanished. The old guy shut off the video with a claim that he’d watched footage from the rest of the night but the men didn’t return.

‘You check up on other stolen cars around the same time,’ Mick said to Cooper as all three detectives stood. ‘I’ll take the tape to the station and get it copied for everyone, see if anyone else can spot something we missed.’

He ordered Gondal and Cooper to remain at the garage and oversee the evidence gathering, and then he got the hell out of there.

---

En route to the meeting with Seabury, he broke the cassette in half, screwed up the tape and found a trash bin to dump it in. That had been a close call. If the detectives had seen the piece of footage Mick had blocked when he stood before the TV to drink the old guy’s foul water and spout some shit about his wife, what might they have made of it?

The video showed Mick’s hands slip from the garage door as he pushed down hard. Elastic energy in the bending sheet of metal forced it upwards, back into position. The gravitational energy in Mick’s thick frame dragged his head downwards. He managed to turn his head, but the thundering connection mashed his ear. He had danced around for two seconds, cursing, clutching his ear, and then angrily kicked shut the garage door. And not so much from pain as embarrassment.

Maybe the detectives wouldn’t have thought anything suspicious of Mick’s ear and the injury of the masked man on the screen. But it wasn’t worth the risk, and it was moot now anyway.

So, he pushed it aside and cast his mind forward to the upcoming meeting.