Woodley and I take another walk to the scrapyard, where a vehicle hoists clawfuls of twisted metal high against the blue sky and swivels to drop them onto a growing pile. Every time they land, it sounds like something shattering. A plane passes overhead and its vapor trails expand and dissipate in its wake, as if in response.
We stand by the gates to the yard. I take hold of a big padlock that’s attached to a heavy-duty metal bolt.
“It’s not adding up to me that there’s no CCTV when this is the extent of the physical security,” I say.
Woodley surveys the scene like a builder, hands on hips, squinting a little. “They told me they don’t leave anything in the cabins overnight.”
“But this stuff’s got to be worth something to somebody. Why fence it in so securely otherwise?” I know he’s already been here and made inquiries about how they protect their business, but the answers he got don’t feel right to me. “Shall we have a word?”
The yard foreman who let us in is overseeing the unloading of the scrap.
“Is this all the security you have?” I ask him.
“Yep.”
“Nothing else at all?”
“No.” The machine begins to reverse, and the beeping means Woodley has to shout to make himself heard.
“Anything else in the area?”
“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask Ian.”
“Ian?”
“Ian Shawcross. He owns all the units around here.”
I remember a man in a crisp white shirt and an elaborate belt buckle: Janet Pritchard’s partner.
“Do you have a number for him?”
“Not on me. They might down the garage. That’s Ian’s place, too.”
Woodley and I leave the yard and walk past the row of lockups behind it where Janet Pritchard’s unit is located. At the end of the lane there’s a repair shop where two men are working on the bodywork of a Volkswagen Scirocco that’s had its plates removed.
That’s when I spot it: On the corner of the one-story building that contains the body shop office there’s a small circular patch of paintwork lighter than the rest, and three empty holes where some screws and a cable might have been. If a camera had been there, it would have had a sight line down past the lockups and might have caught the scrapyard gate.
A bell attached to the office door rings when we enter. The customer welcome area consists of a pair of seats that have been ripped out of the back of a vehicle and set down facing a desk. Behind the desk sits a lad who looks barely old enough to be out of school. He’s manning the landline and a large appointment book in which the heavily marked pages are swollen with ink and indentations, doubtless made by a ballpoint pen like the one he’s scratching his acne with.
The radio’s broadcasting the weather forecast at top volume: “Winter temperatures have gone, but April showers have arrived a week early. We expect it to be wet overnight but clearing by the morning, and spring temperatures are on their way later this week.”
“All right?” says the lad.
“Do you have a phone number for Ian Shawcross? We need to talk to him.”
“Who’s asking?”
He sits up straighter when we show him our badges. “My aunty has his number,” he says. “She’s popped out for a minute.”
Woodley and I take a seat on the makeshift sofa. It tilts us so far back that the seats can only have come out of a sports vehicle. I get up as soon as I’ve sat down.
“Do you have CCTV on the premises?” I ask the lad.
“No.”
“I heard you had it taken down.” I’m working on a hunch.
“Yeah, we did.”
“That would be this week, would it? Yesterday, or the day before?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did it come down, then?”
“Broken. We had to get rid of the whole system.”
“You wouldn’t have kept the latest footage from it, would you?”
He’s chewing gum and he masticates stickily as he thinks about this. “Don’t think so. They burnt it all.”
“Is the CCTV the only security you had?” Woodley asks.
“No, we’ve Ian’s brother-in-law. He does a patrol at night.”
“Do you know what his name is?”
“Jason Wright.”
A woman appears in the doorway. “Can I help you?” she says.
“Police. Asking after Ian,” the boy tells her. “You have his number, don’t you?”
Her seen-it-all face and the way she looks at her nephew makes me think that we wouldn’t have got any answers if she’d been at the desk when we arrived.
“I haven’t got his number on me,” she says.
“Not to worry,” I say. “I can ask Janet.”
She holds eye contact pretty steadily when I say that, but there’s a muscle twitching on her face that tells me she’s aware of whatever’s being covered up.
“Your nephew’s been very helpful,” I tell her. “Very helpful indeed.”
We walk back to HQ quickly, and I ask Woodley to get hold of an address and number for Jason Wright. We need to pay him a visit.
I don’t tell Woodley he’s an idiot for missing the trace of the CCTV camera while we’re in the incident room.
I wait until we’re in the car on the way to see the security guard to do that.
It’s not the first time Ed Sadler’s been slapped by a woman, but it’s the first time his wife has raised a hand to him.
He doesn’t slap her back, though there’s a fleeting moment when he sorely wants to, when his grief over Noah creates a violent impulse.
He backs away from her, and the sting on his cheek brings back the memory of the last time it happened: in a hotel room, beside a half-opened shutter, by a woman who’d only just stopped being a girl, a sheet wrapped around her. The discovery that he was married loaded the blow with more force than he’d have thought she could muster.
Fiona doesn’t just slap him; she flies at him. Her fists pound his chest and his upper arms until he catches her by the wrists.
“What the hell?” he says.
“You took that photograph of Noah and sent it to a journalist?”
“Every time he’s in hospital I take a photograph, you know that. We agreed we wanted to document his journey.”
Fiona once started a blog about Noah’s illness. It was at the beginning when people advised her it might help her if she shared their story, but Noah was ill for so long that she ran out of steam to update it. She’d noticed that people were visiting and commenting on her posts in fewer numbers as time passed. It felt to Fiona that nobody had the stamina for Noah’s cancer except her and Noah.
“This is different. You can’t compare this to my blog.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, come on, Ed!”
They’ve separated, and stand apart. He’s angry now, too.
“Tell me why this is different,” he says.
“Because you got the photograph published in the newspaper.”
“I get all my photographs published. That’s what pays our bills.”
“This was our son! In a paper that our friends read.”
“How is that different?”
“Stop asking me that when the answer is bloody obvious!”
“Then explain it to me. Explain how my documentary process is a worthy thing when it’s other people’s children I photograph, but it’s cheap when it’s our own?”