Paul doubted it too. A school report might speak to Alex’s personality, but not to his friendships or enmities. He was just clutching at straws, and probably wasting his own time and hers. But Jess was relying on him. In the absence of anything useful to do, he was prepared to do futile things and take them to her as an offering.
But there was one other thing he’d promised to do, and he remembered it now. He’d said he would try to contact Brenda Hemington, Jess’s aunt. He’d called her once or twice but got no answer, which was no surprise since Jess had been doing the same thing with the same result. Maybe she was screening her calls. He decided to call round to her house after work and see if he could catch her in.
The house was in Effra Road in Brixton, only two or three miles from Paul’s flat in Clapham. He switched lines at Stockwell and made his way there. The light was starting to fade out of the sky when he arrived, but there were no lights on in the unremarkable Georgian semi. Paul stood on the doorstep and rang the bell about twelve times, noting how the paint was starting to peel on the lower panels of the door. A thick wodge of circulars was jammed into the letterbox. A glass panel to the right of the door showed him more junk mail piling up inside.
Screwing up his courage, he knocked on the door of the house to the left. Then, when nobody answered there, he went to the house on the right. An elderly man opened up on the third knock. His wispy hair was in wild disarray, so it was possible that Paul had woken him from a sleep.
“I’m really sorry to disturb you,” Paul said. “But I’m trying to get in touch with your neighbour, Mrs Hemington.”
“Miss,” the old man said with fragile dignity. “Miss Hemington. You won’t find her here, I’m afraid. They took her back in again.”
Paul’s thoughts were so Moulson-centric that he mistook the old man’s meaning. He was about to ask what the charges were when he realised that Moulson’s aunt had been taken into hospital rather than custody.
He’d come far enough now that he didn’t want to give up halfway. Jess would want to know how her aunt was doing. He followed the trail to ward 22 in Lambeth Hospital, where Brenda Hemington was currently recovering from a third round of spinal fusion surgery.
She looked like the wreck of a noble vessel: tall and solidly built, but with a waxy pallor to her skin and black rims around her eye sockets like make-up that she hadn’t managed to wipe away. She was weak and in a lot of pain, but conscious. Paul was impressed by her willpower. She was self-medicating via a morphine drip but she didn’t touch the clicker the whole time he was there: once he told her he was Jess’s emissary, she clearly wanted to stay awake and relatively sharp.
She’d received Jess’s letter on the day she was taken into hospital, and had been writing a reply when her back gave out. She’d had to crawl across the floor to the phone so she could call 999, and then she’d stayed there on her hands and knees for the thirty-odd minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive. She was scared to move because the pain was so great.
“I want…” she whispered to Paul. “I need to talk to her. Can I talk to her?”
“Do you have a mobile phone?” Paul asked. “If not, I can get you a disposable. She’ll have to call you, obviously. There’s no way for her to receive calls. In fact, she’s got to stand in line for—”
“I meant face to face,” Brenda muttered. “Can she come here? Compassionate leave, or something like that? Because I’m sick?”
“To be honest, I doubt it,” Paul admitted. “But we can ask.”
Brenda grimaced. “How long will it take?”
“Days. Weeks. It’s hard to tell.”
She nodded. “All right. The mobile, then. Thank you, Mr Levine. You’re very kind.”
“Only what I’d do for any client,” Paul said. Which was close enough to a flat lie that it made him blush.
Alice Munroe’s email was waiting in his inbox the next morning. He opened up the files and read through them with increasingly glazed eyes. They were as vapid as she’d hinted, full of generalised statements about core competences and personal targets. The kind of net that’s mostly made out of holes.
Paul read every last word of those reports and found nothing relevant or helpful there. Like all of the paper evidence, it was just a hydra-headed dead end. So what did that leave?
It left the CCTV footage, which might possibly show someone entering or leaving the block earlier in the day.
The film came from a council-owned camera about fifty yards down from Orchard Court, where Moulson had lived, set up to monitor a bus lane. The prosecution had entered the footage into evidence because it corroborated Street’s account of his and Moulson’s movements on the night of the fire. His leaving the flat at 6 p.m. His returning two hours later with the drugs he’d just scored from an acquaintance at the Hay Wain public house. The fire starting. The 999 call, which he made from the pavement outside the block. It was all there, and it told a simple enough story.
Paul watched the footage in a tiny window on his PC. Grainy black and white with a running time stamp at lower right. The resolution was terrible, but enlarging it just made the image break up into a jungle of edge noise. The first time signature that was relevant was 22:54:33, when the fire became visible in the window corresponding with Jess Moulson’s living room. Paul started there, but skipped backwards and forwards between the high points. The spectacular plume of flame that rose into the sky from the rear of the block when the bedroom windows blew out. John Street running out of the front door of the block (at 23:00:58), his upper arms pressed tight to the sides of his body but his forearms horizontal, pointing forward, chargrilled hands spread wide. Street trying to place an emergency call with his phone balanced in the crook of his elbow, stabbing at key after key in staccato desperation.
It was hypnotic. The fire in the windows above the injured man was such a bright white that dropouts of black appeared within it where the camera’s CCD had given up trying. It almost looked like faces pressed against the glass.
Paul watched the sequence four times, fascinated. But nobody apart from Street himself went into or out of the building in that time frame, so he started working backwards and forwards from it.
Still no arrivals or departures, but at some point as he was scrolling through the sequence almost at random, his attention was caught by a flare of light that seemed to come out of nowhere. The time signature was 22:47:13, and the duration was very short – less than half a second. It was in one of the windows on Moulson’s floor of the building, but not her living room. And both the kitchen and the bedroom windows were at the rear of the property. Paul measured by eye and realised that the window was directly above the building’s front door. It must open on to the stairwell.
So what was the flare? It was too early to be John Street running out of the flat. By his own evidence, he wasn’t even awake yet. Paul pondered for a moment or two. It was easy to magnify the image, but it was so grainy and pixelated that the closer in you got, the less you saw.
He tried it anyway, and saw… something. Something that confused the issue further. The anomalous flash of light wasn’t from Moulson’s side of the stairwell at all: it was from the other side. The flat there had been empty, according to the notes from the first trial. There was no reason for anyone to be there.