Knight & Culverhouse Box Set - Books 7-9

Chapter 9

9

Culverhouse’s head was pounding when he got back to the major incident room. He could hear the blood throbbing in his eardrums as he tried to stem the flow of thoughts that involved him kicking Martin Cummings’s head in.

‘Sir, I’ve just been checking the CCTV around the Middlebrook area,’ Ryan said. ‘The only thing we’ve been able to find is on the southbound entry sliproad at the motorway junction. Have a look.’

Culverhouse walked over to Ryan’s desk and squinted at the grainy footage on the screen in front of her.

‘Here’s the image from the sliproad. And… here’s the one from outside Gwen O’Connell’s house. Notice anything?’

‘Two white vans,’ Culverhouse said.

‘Yes and no. Look at the offside rear wheel. The hubcap’s missing. There’s a good chance this is the same van.’

‘What’s the make and model?’

‘Peugeot Expert. The index number seems to back that up, too.’

‘Great. Can we trace it?’

‘Already done. It’s registered to a Peter Bellamy, in Dumfries.’

‘Dumfries? That’s in Scotland.’

‘Yep. I put a call in to our colleagues north of the border. They’re going to go and speak to Mr Bellamy and bring him in if necessary.’

‘Right. And how far can the van be traced on ANPR?’

The Automatic Number Plate Recognition system automatically registered which vehicles passed which cameras, and enabled the police to quickly trace a vehicle’s route.

‘Last sighting is on the A2, just south of Rochester.’

‘Christ. That’s miles away. Why on earth would a van from Scotland come three hundred miles out of its way to drop two dead bodies off, then do another seventy-odd miles into Kent?’

‘Maybe it was a convenient stop-off on the way. Only thing is, there are no sightings of the van on CCTV before that, and nothing on ANPR for that index number south of the border at all. The van was up in Paisley at ten o’clock yesterday morning, and there wasn’t a single ANPR hit until we see it heading south from Middlebrook in the early hours of this morning. It can’t have been driven 300 miles from Scotland without hitting a single camera. It’s not possible.’

‘No. Something’s not right. Those plates will have been cloned or stolen. Find out if any Peugeot Expert vans have been reported stolen in the local area recently. And keep on top of our friends north of the border. I want to hear back the second they’ve spoken to this Peter Bellamy bloke. Anyone heard anything back from pathology yet?’

Culverhouse looked around at the shaking heads.

‘Right. There’s probably not a whole lot we can do until then. Ryan, keep expanding the search on the local CCTV. Keeping spreading out the radius until we’ve got something else to focus on. That van can’t have just landed in Middlebrook on its own. We need to find out how it got there.’

Culverhouse left the room, and headed off to make himself a cup of coffee. He just hoped for his job’s sake that Martin Cummings wouldn’t walk past while he had a mug of hot liquid in his hand.