‘Where’s this?’ Erika asked, her heart leaping in her chest.
‘It’s the bus stop footage you asked me to pull at the north end of Morrison Road, about two hundred yards from Honeycomb Court,’ said McGorry. Erika looked back at the images. The first was very clear. Vicky was looking up at the camera, wearing a baseball cap. The next two images had been taken moments later; in the second, Vicky was looking down, her face now obscured by the peak of the baseball cap. The white Adidas logo was clear on the front. In the third image, Vicky had her head down and was moving away to the right. She had on a pair of blue jeans, a thin blue coat, and was carrying a black backpack.
‘When were these taken?’ asked Erika, peering at the time stamp and the very small writing on top of each image. ‘My eyesight is crap.’
‘The camera on that bus stop takes an image every two seconds,’ said McGorry. ‘The time stamp is 4.06pm. Monday. The same day you found Sophia’s body in her flat.’
‘How did you manage to get this so fast?’ said Erika.
‘I’ve got a contact at the TfL CCTV control room, and McGorry flirted with her on the phone,’ said Crane. ‘And it helped having a specific time frame and date.’
‘Good work!’ Erika looked back at the images of Vicky. ‘Why would she be looking up at the camera? I presume with the baseball cap, she’s trying to hide?’
‘On the newer bus stops in London, people don’t often see that there’s a CCTV camera next to the real-time departures board,’ said McGorry.
‘Okay. She could have been looking at bus times,’ said Erika. ‘So, what do we think, she found the body in her flat, ran, and didn’t have a plan… She was working out if she could take a bus somewhere?’
‘Unless she killed Sophia,’ said McGorry.
‘Really?’ said Erika, looking up at him.
McGorry opened his mouth and closed it again.
‘We shouldn’t rule it out.’
There was a silence as they mulled that over for a moment, coupled with the inconclusive CCTV images of Charles Wakefield.
‘I wonder if Vicky realised that there was a CCTV camera on the bus stop awning,’ said Erika, studying the photos. ‘Have you been able to find anything else?’
‘She didn’t take the bus, or at least a bus from that stop,’ said Crane. ‘We’re working on the basis that she wanted to travel to a larger transport hub, so we’ve just put in another request for CCTV footage in the same time frame from Blackheath train station. As we know from Charles’s potential journey, it’s only a five-minute walk from that bus stop. Trains from there go south towards Gravesend and Kent and into Central London.’
‘Yes,’ said Erika. ‘And her being on Morrison Road just after four puts her in the time of death range for Sophia.’
‘McGorry found something else, too,’ said Crane.
‘There’s more?’ asked Erika.
‘Oh yeah,’ said McGorry. ‘We also found an image of Shawn Macavity, taken at the same bus stop.’
‘When?’
McGorry handed her another CCTV image printout, this time of Shawn. He was standing in the same place as Vicky and looking up at the camera.
‘He looks like he’s seen a ghost,’ said Erika, peering in at the haunted look on his grey face. His long hair hung limply around his shoulders and he was wearing denim jeans and a thin denim jacket. ‘What time was this taken?’
‘The time stamp is 4.25pm,’ said McGorry. Erika looked back at the other printouts.
‘That’s half an hour after Vicky was in the same spot,’ she said. ‘If they were both heading towards the station, they must have met. Does he get on the bus?’
‘No, but hopefully the train station CCTV, when it arrives, will tell us more,’ said Crane.
‘Where do trains from Blackheath station go? Apart from London Bridge?’
‘All over the place: Beckenham, Crystal Palace, Bexley Heath, Stratford, Trafalgar Square, Erith in Kent.’
‘And presumably if she travelled down to Kent, then Vicky could have accessed the Channel Tunnel trains. Have we checked her passport data?’ asked Erika.
‘Yes, she hasn’t left the country using her passport,’ said McGorry.
‘If we don’t see her or Shawn at Blackheath train station, I’ll need to request more eyes on a wider pool of CCTV footage,’ said Crane.
Erika nodded. ‘Of course. And guys, this is really good work. Bloody fast work. Well done.’