Page 114 of 56 Days
“Once was enough. Pause there and let’s watch it at normal speed.”
When they watch the events in chronological order, Laura Mannix goes down the corridor toward apartment one and doesn’t return for nearly fifteen minutes. She doesn’t appear to be holding anything, but she has a little clutch bag on a chain slung diagonally across her chest, as if she’s on her way somewhere.
Like before, when she moves out of shot, it’s not to go out of the front doors or head into the courtyard, but to move back toward the lift that will take her upstairs to her side of the building.
“So that’s what,” Lee asks, “Monday morning? Ten or so?”
“Ninefifty-two, to be exact. When she returns to the lobby. Our friend was definitely dead by then, right?”
“Is there another angle? Where we can see the door for number one?”
Karl presses a few keys and traces a forefinger across the trackpad.
“Here we go. Fire exit at the end of the hall.”
The camera this time is positioned in the corner of the ceiling above the fire exit that leads outside, and only a few feet from apartment one. The door itself is hidden from view below the camera’s line of sight, but anyone coming or going from the apartment would be clearly visible.
“Shame about the seven days,” Lee says. “When we’ve such a good shot of it.”
“There she is.”
They both watch as Laura Mannix goes to the door of apartment one, hesitates for a moment or two and then slips inside.
“That lying little bitch,” Karl says.
Lee sighs heavily. She’s starting to feel the strain of the day—and this case—even if she’s only a few hours into each of them.
“She didn’t kill him, though,” she says. “He was already dead by then.”
“How do you know this wasn’t her second visit? Don’t serial killers always go back to the scene of crime?”
“How many serial killer cases have you worked, Karly? They must have been on my days off.”
“Zero-point-zero-zero,” he says, tapping his temple, “because they never get to the serial bit with me.”
Lee snorts.
“I don’t think Laura Mannix is a serial killer,” she says then. “And did you see how she just pushed open the door? Like I said, unless she took something... we don’t even have her on burglary. I doubt that’s enough time for her to wipe down surfaces, either—and she’s nothing with her that could do that. And if she did that on a previous visit, why go back and risk leaving some trace now?”
“And why put the envelope in the letterbox if she’s just seen his dead body in there?”
Lee turns to Karl, eyebrows raised. “Yes,” she says. “Excellentquestion, Karl.”
“I’m choosing to ignore your tone of surprise.”
“Whydidshe do that?”
“Well,” he says, “she told us that what’s inside is a love letter about how she’s not going to do anything bad, she won’t name him, yada, yada, yada—but what if she had left previous letters that weren’t so nice? He doesn’t respond, she goes to check the apartment, she finds him dead, she’s like,Uh-oh, I’ve fucked up here, so she writes a nice letter she knows he’ll never get, but that we’ll find, and we’ll rule her out then as being a source of any angst in his life because, hey, her message to him was so nice.”
When he finishes, he turns up his palms with a flourish.
“Proud of yourself, Karl?”
“Indeed I am,” he says. “Very.”
“You know, I think you could be right.”
They watch the remainder of the CCTV, but find nothing else of interest. Aside from Laura Mannix, no one seemed to enter or leave apartment one at any time throughout the previous seven days.
