It was the type of theft that had made the job unusual. On her way to take the initial report Kelly had been in two minds about whether it should have been reported as a theft at all, but Cathy had been insistent the keys hadn’t been lost.
‘I keep them in a separate compartment in my bag,’ she had told Kelly. ‘They couldn’t have fallen out.’ The pocket was on the outside of a rucksack-style handbag; a zip and a leather buckle stopping them from falling out. Both had been undone.
CCTV footage had showed Cathy entering the Underground at Shepherd’s Bush, the buckle on her rucksack pocket apparently securely fastened. By the time she left the station at Epping, the strap hung loose, the pocket gaping slightly open.
As jobs went, it was a straightforward one. Cathy was the perfect witness: she always took the same route home from work, even choosing the same carriage on the Central line and sitting – where possible – in the same seat. If only everyone was so predictable, Kelly remembered thinking, it would make her job so much easier. She had picked up Cathy on the CCTV footage within minutes of looking for her, but it wasn’t one of their core nominals moving in on her. The biggest offenders on the Underground right now were the Curtis kids, but they wanted wallets and iPhones, not keys.
Sure enough, when Kelly seized the footage from the train Cathy had been on at the time of the theft, she almost missed the culprit altogether.
Cathy had been asleep, leaning against the wall of the carriage with her legs crossed and her arms folded protectively around her bag. Kelly had been so busy scanning the carriage for lads in hoodies; for pairs of women with headscarves and babies in arms, that she had barely noticed the man standing close to Cathy’s legs. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of someone running with the usual pickpocketing crowd. Tall, and well dressed, with a grey scarf wound twice around his neck, then pulled up over his ears and the lower part of his face, as though he were still outdoors, battling the elements. He had his back to the camera; his face turned resolutely to the floor. In one swift movement he bent down, leaned towards Cathy Tanning, then stood up; his right hand disappearing into his pocket too fast for Kelly to see what was held in it.
Had he thought there might be a purse in that outer pocket? Or a phone? A lucky dip, turning to disappointment, when he realised all he had was a bunch of keys? Taking them anyway, because returning them was a pointless risk; dumping them in a bin on his way home.
Kelly had spent her last day on the Dip Squad trying to track Cathy’s thief through the Underground, obtaining a still of such low resolution there was no point even circulating it. He was Asian, that’s all she could be certain of, and around six feet tall. The CCTV cameras were colour, and the quality was impressive – you could almost imagine you were watching news footage of commuters on the Underground – but that didn’t guarantee a positive ID. The cameras needed to be pointing in the right direction; be positioned just right for a full frontal image capture. Too often – as in this case – the offence happened on the periphery of the camera range. Zooming in for a better view meant a gradual pixellation of the image, until the all-important details blurred into a homogenous figure you didn’t stand a hope in hell of getting an ident on.
‘Did you witness the theft?’ Kelly asked, pulling her attention back to Zoe Walker. Surely she would have come forward sooner if she’d actually seen the offence take place. It occurred to her perhaps Mrs Walker had found the missing keys; that they could send them for forensics.
‘I’ve got some information for you,’ Zoe Walker said. She spoke formally, in an abrupt tone that bordered on rudeness, but there was an uncertainty beneath it which suggested nerves.
Kelly spoke gently. ‘Go on.’
The sergeant appeared, tapping his watch. Kelly pointed to her phone; mouthed Give me a minute.
‘The victim. Cathy Tanning. Her photograph was in an advert in the classifieds section of the London Gazette, right before her keys were stolen.’
Whatever Kelly had expected from Zoe Walker, it wasn’t that.
She sat down. ‘What sort of advert?’
‘I’m not really sure. It’s on a page with other adverts, for things like chatlines and escorts. And on Friday I saw the same advert, except I think it had a photo of me.’
‘You think?’ Kelly couldn’t stop a note of scepticism creeping into her voice. She heard Zoe Walker hesitate.