Sometimes, if an alibi had been invented, being asked to repeat it helped expose it. The truth was much easier to remember than a lie.
Forty-Eight
Within fifteen minutes of the warrant landing, Penn was knocking on the door of the Images agency in Stourton. The person who answered wasn’t the woman the boss had described, but he could see her hovering in the background. Trying to block his way was a man in his mid-thirties, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and a confrontational expression.
Penn held up his ID and introduced himself.
‘Just you?’ the man asked, looking beyond him.
‘I wasn’t expecting any issue. I can call for uniform if you’d feel?—’
‘Show me the warrant,’ the man said.
‘And you are?’
‘Toby Judd.’
Penn bit back the smile that rose to his lips, wondering how many times the man had been mistaken for an ornament. He handed him the piece of paper, and Toby perused it as though he knew what he was looking for.
He gave it back and nodded to the woman behind him before moving aside.
The camera on the desk behind him told Penn exactly who this was: the photographer who collected the visual evidence for their sting operations.
Penn wasn’t sure how he felt about the business. On the one hand. he had little sympathy for men who were attempting to be unfaithful. It was the same way he felt about CCTV: if you weren’t doing anything wrong, you had nothing to worry about. Same with honey trappers – you could only catch the guilty ones. Yet there was a seediness about it that bothered him. Using attractive ladies for the purpose of entrapment.
He knew little about Nadine Cowley except that she used her physical attributes for attention. Was she educated? Had this been her ambition? Had this been all she’d wanted for herself? He’d never know, but he could imagine the news headlines that would eventually scream from the internet. And to most people, that’s all she would ever be.
‘You caught him yet?’ Toby asked as Penn passed by to give the warrant to Suzanne Compton.
‘Folks slowing us down doesn’t help,’ he said as the man’s boss reached for the official document.
Once it was in her hand, he turned back to the photographer. ‘You were there with her, weren’t you?’
‘Yeah, yeah, but I was long gone before she left. That’s how we work. Once I’ve got what I need, I leave, and that’s her sign that we’re done.’
‘And what is she supposed to do after that?’ Penn asked.
‘Wrap it up and leave without incident.’
Penn wondered how that could happen without incident.
‘What, after the confrontation?’
Suzanne and Toby looked at each other.
‘There’s no confrontation,’ Suzanne said. ‘That’s not the remit. They get the evidence and get out without revealing who or what they are. We’re not stupid, Officer. We take the safety of our girls very seriously. No way would that be a part of the process.’
‘Then Nadine went off script,’ Penn said. ‘There was a heated exchange between her and her victim, and it was he that stormed out of the pub.’
‘Shiiit,’ Toby said, rubbing at his forehead.
Penn couldn’t believe the stupidity of there not being a contingency plan in case of a glitch in the matrix. ‘There’s no safety measure in place like you waiting outside until she leaves?’ he asked.
‘There’s no danger,’ Suzanne protested. ‘Nadine knew that. She’d been doing this a while. She’d never confronted anyone before. She got the recording and brought it here, and I did the rest.’
‘Then there must have been something about this guy that made her want to confront him,’ Penn said, thinking about the man’s hand disappearing beneath the table.
Suzanne was shaking her head in disbelief but recovered quickly as her business brain took over. ‘Where is the recording?’ she asked. ‘I still have to produce a report for my client.’
