the full CSI treatment.’
Eddie sat back. ‘Buggeration. I’m fucked, then. The only way I can prove it was self-defence is showing people that gun.’
‘I’m sorry.’ They sat in glum silence – until a question occurred to Nina. ‘Where did the gun come from? You and Kit were fighting over that rifle, so presumably he didn’t have one of his own.’
‘No, it was Stikes’s gun. I made him and Sophia chuck theirs over the edge. It must have landed in the . . .’ He jerked upright. ‘It landed in the pipes! Wind it back to when I went up the ladder.’
His sudden hope was infectious. ‘What are we looking for?’ Nina asked as she scrolled back through the recording.
‘I climbed up the ladder – Sophia and Stikes were talking, and they didn’t see me coming.’ On the laptop, past-Eddie acted out his current self’s narration. ‘Sophia had a bodyguard who pulled a gun, so I took him down –’ muzzle flash from off-screen – ‘and then, and then . . .’ He tried to remember the precise sequence of events. ‘Stikes dissed Mac, so I shot him—’
‘You shot him?’ exclaimed Nina, pausing the playback. ‘He seemed pretty spry in Tokyo for a dead man!’
‘I only clipped him. Gave him a nice scar to remember me by.’ Eddie tapped his forehead in the same spot as Stikes’s wound. ‘Kind of wishing I’d just blown his fucking head off now. Anyway, after that I told him and Sophia to get rid of their guns. Stikes lobbed his over the side, past me . . .’ He pointed at the shadowed pipes on the screen. ‘It had to end up where Kit could reach it. Play it.’
Nina tapped the trackpad. ‘How long was this after you climbed on to the catwalk?’
‘Not long – a minute, maybe less.’
She glanced at the timecode. Twenty seconds passed, thirty. Her attention went back to the pipes. Any moment now . . .
A video glitch rippled across that part of the screen for a fraction of a second. Nina’s heart sank – anything the video might have revealed was lost in the distortion – but Eddie’s shout was one of triumph. ‘There! You see it?’
‘No, I only saw the—’
‘It’s there, it’s there,’ he said excitedly. ‘Take it back and play it frame by frame.’ He indicated a specific spot. ‘Right there, keep watching.’
Nina replayed the video in extreme slow motion, eyes fixed on the pipes. Each frame chugged past, the only movement the shimmer and crawl of analogue video. Then—
Eddie stabbed at the trackpad to pause the recording. ‘That’s it!’
Nina stared at the screen. It was at the very edge of the picture, blurred by its motion and just barely catching one of the pumping station’s lights, a silvery shape amongst the shadows.
But that shape was instantly recognisable. A gun.
‘My God,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s there, I can see it.’
‘Told you, didn’t I?’ He advanced to the next frame – and the falling gun was consumed by the bolt of static. It only lasted for another three frames, less than an eighth of a second, but by the time the image cleared the gun had vanished into the darkness between the pipes. ‘That’s why nobody saw it. One frame’s not long enough for your brain to pick it up consciously, so the only thing anyone registered was that glitch.’
‘You saw it, though.’
‘I knew it was there.’
Nina looked at him, a smile spreading across her face. ‘Eddie, this proves your story. We’ve got to tell Beauchamp, let Interpol know what we’ve found. This’ll get you off the hook!’
‘You mean you let Interpol know. Until this is all sorted out, I’d better keep a low profile.’
‘The main thing is, we’ve got proof.’ She took the recording back to the frame showing the gun. ‘All we have to do is give Beauchamp that timecode, and you’re in the clear!’
Lola came back into the room. ‘What happened? Did you find something?’
‘We found something,’ Nina told her happily. ‘We definitely found something.’
16
It wasn’t enough.
Eddie stood silently listening as Nina held an increasingly dismayed phone conversation with Renée Beauchamp at Interpol. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You’ve watched the video, you’ve seen the gun at the exact timecode I gave you – you just told me you saw it! Kit grabbed it, so Eddie was clearly acting in self-defence. Why doesn’t that clear him?’
‘Because it still does not establish any motive for Kit to do what Eddie accused him of,’ the French officer replied.
‘But