9th September
‘How’s the review of the camera footage going?’ said Angela to Elliot, looking over his shoulder at the computer screen.
‘I’m viewing a section where a car pulls up outside the house, someone enters the property, remains for five minutes and then leaves,’ Elliot replied. ‘The clock on the film shows a time within the period during which Rodriguez was killed.’
‘Why wasn’t that picked up by the police?’ asked Angela.
Elliot glanced up at Angela. ‘It was, but it didn’t lead anywhere. The quality of these images is dreadful. It makes you wonder why they have CCTV cameras on their houses if no information can be gathered from them. I can see that the car is a Ford C-Max, but I can’t get the plate or see any useful detail about the person who went into the house. I can’t even see if it was a man or a woman.’
‘Useless then,’ Angela concluded.
‘Not entirely,’ Elliot answered. ‘As the subject got out of the car, a dog walker came past. Paul’s seen that part of the video and is spending the morning in the area trying to find someone that looks a bit like her.’
‘Didn’t the police find that witness when they did house to house enquiries?’ Angela asked.
‘Apparently not,’ Elliot replied.
~*~*~*~*~
‘Thank you Ma’am,’ said Paul after his twentieth fruitless conversation with a dog walker in the vicinity of the house in which Rodriguez had died.
Paul had been walking the streets within a mile of the house for nearly three hours and was just thinking about abandoning the effort.
Suddenly, ahead of him, a woman with a small dog on a lead appeared from a side turning to his right. She crossed the road and continued along a road to the left, quickly going out of Paul’s sight.
Despite the indistinctness of the CCTV footage, there was something about her that seemed familiar from those shots. The dog was the right size, and there was something very similar in the way the woman walked.
Robin quickened his step, took the turning to the left and followed her. He was about fifty metres behind and slowly gaining on her when she turned left again at the next junction.
When Robin reached that turning and looked along the road, the woman had vanished.
Robin reasoned that she must have gone into one of the five or six houses that could have been reached in the time it had taken him to arrive at the corner. He walked along, looking at each, hoping to catch a glimpse of the woman or her dog.
As her reached the third house, he saw the same woman through a window. He walked up the drive and knocked at her door.
Robin showed the woman an official warrant card, provided by the White House. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘my name’s Paul Maple. I’m working with the police to investigate a death that occurred a few streets away. I expect you heard about it. I wondered if you’d seen anything of interest near twenty-seven Franklin when you were walking your dog on the seventh of July.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Maple,’ the woman replied. ‘I’ve already told the police that I saw nothing unusual on that day.’
‘It’s just that,’ continued Robin, ‘someone looking very much like you, and with a dog very much like yours, walked past at the time when a person of interest got out of a car outside that house.’
Paul noted a small change in the woman’s manner.
‘I’m very busy,’ she said abruptly, ‘and there is nothing I can tell you.’ She closed the door.
Paul thought for a moment, he then turned and walked back down the drive, passing a Chevrolet Spark. He glanced at the windscreen and then stopped to look at it in more detail. The car had a Pentagon parking permit. Before walking away, he mentally noted the permit reference and the registration.
As Paul reached the pavement, he glanced back at the house to see the woman looking at him through the front window.