Cold Blood by Jane Heafield (great books to read txt) 📕

the back, where they took uncarpeted stairs to the first floor, where one of the rooms had a foldaway bed and a table bearing the CCTV system. It was a clunky box with a joystick and various buttons, clearly old, and Bennet wasn’t optimistic it would provide a jackpot. He wasn’t even sure what he hoped to find.

‘You can probably figure out how to use this,’ Jonesy said. ‘Only look at Sunday, okay? Don’t be noseying at other days. Come down when you’re done. Don’t take ages.’

When Jonesy left, Liam sat at the desk. At the moment all four cameras were displayed in quad screen, and all were black and white. One picture was an obsidian square of nothing, one watched the beer garden, and the other two covered the lounge from front and back.

He worked out how to make one feed fill the screen and chose the interior camera above the entrance, which gave the best view of people standing at the bar. He then got his head around how to fast-forward, rewind, and to jump backwards in segments of ten, fifteen, thirty and sixty minutes. Some digital CCTV systems employed trick mode, which meant the playback in fast-forward included only certain frames, but this ancient analogue set-up didn’t. If that sounded like a benefit over modern equipment, it wasn’t: the synchronisation quality would be worse than the live feed. He took the recording back to Sunday gone, 6pm.

The lounge was empty except for a young woman behind the bar and an older male sitting before it. The low resolution made it hard to connect her face to the one displayed on the wall in the lounge, but a large blot of colour on her cheek, a birthmark, told him he was watching Barmaid Vicky.

And her sole customer? Unbelievably, it was Dog Man with his pooch under the chair, trusty cup and newspaper before him. In the sandwich shop, Dog Man had said the film crew came into the Red Lion, instead of went. Liam now understood why: Dog Man had watched the quartet enter the pub. A little detail he’d neglected to mention.

Bennet fast-forwarded until customers started to enter. Because the camera was above the door, Liam’s view was mostly of heads and shoulders. They filed in fast, zipping here and there like electrons as the lounge filled. An anomaly was Dog Man; as if by camera trick, he barely seemed to move. The effect was fractured only when he took a sip of his tea or turned a page in his book. As people came in, Dog Man didn’t even look – but he’d looked when Bennet came in, hadn’t he?

So Bennet focused on him, not the customers, and when the timestamp read 2051, Dog Man turned his head towards the door. Bingo. Bennet rewound a minute and pressed play, to watch in real time as the people who’d intrigued the old dog lover entered. Only Lopers could garner such scrutiny. He knew he’d found the film crew.

A woman entered first. Real time, the blonde girl floated up the screen as she walked away from the camera. She grew a body and arms and legs with the changing angle, and he made out double denim. He knew it was Lorraine, even without seeing her face.

Next came Betty Crute and John Crickmer. Bringing up the rear, in a suit and blue trench coat, was the man known as the director; then Donald Ducke, and now Francis Overeem.

They were a bizarre-looking group, like something out of a video game. Lopers were one thing, but this group stood out like a sore thumb. If they’d hoped to sneak around the village under the guise of tourists, secretly filming, they’d gone about it the wrong way.

As the director followed his colleagues to the bar, a young guy angled their way and bumped him, on purpose. The director raised a hand in apology, which the young thug didn’t care for. Liam saw no other black patrons and wondered if this was a race thing. Maybe these backwater bumpkins thought black people were invading extraterrestrials. Or the pair had had a run-in earlier.

The crew looked around, then sat at the bar. They seemed to be minding their own business, but local heads were watching, fingers occasionally pointing. Only Barmaid Vicky spoke to them. Just doing her job, perhaps, or, as an out-of-towner herself, maybe she was not so closed-minded to strangers. She stood right across the bar from the director, doing a good job of paying attention to him. The camera didn’t have the resolution to catch moving mouths, but Liam could tell they were talking.

Overeem looked around again, then back at Vicky. She tiptoed and moved her head, also scanning the room. She shook her head and said something and looked at her watch.

Intriguing.

When the crew moved to a table at the back of the lounge, Bennet switched to the other interior camera and got a much better view. The director was indeed about fifty, as hotelier Gemma had claimed, his wavy hair shiny black apart from a scattering of grey around the ears. Tattoo was no older than twenty-five, he guessed, with piercings in her nose, above her left eye, and a bunch in both ears. Grunge was a nerdy-looking guy despite his wild hair and heavy-metal outfit. Lorraine had her back to the camera, so he couldn’t see her face. But he wanted to.

The crew didn’t seem to be in the pub to interview, and nothing about their demeanour said they were ‘mouthy’. Others were. Bennet watched a young local approach, say something, get ignored, slip out of shot, and re-enter it with three mean-looking older cronies. Words were said. One kicked the table, spilling a drink. Lorraine got up, tugging at the director’s arm. He seemed willing to stand his ground, but she got him moving and his comrades followed. It was 2121. As the film-makers headed for the door, a bag of crisps entered stage left and hit