Free Incinerator by Niall Leonard Page B

that was all he could afford. I dug through the rest of the papers in the box file. About a dozen witness statements, so dense and closely typed my eyes ached just glancing at them. What had Nicky been trying to do—drown the prosecution case under loads of bumpf?
    Under that bundle was a single printout of a photo that seemed to have been blown up from a website mugshot, of a heavily built bloke in a cheap suit with jowls that bulged over his collar. A copper, I knew almost immediately, probably from the way his narrowed suspicious eyes seemed ready to follow me around the room. He wore a shallow grin thatsuggested that while the picture was being taken the Met’s PR department was holding a gun to his kidneys.
    “Who’s the filth?” I said.
    “Officer in charge of the case, I think.”
    I flipped the photo over. On the reverse was Nicky’s handwriting:
DS Ian
something.
    “Can you read Nicky’s handwriting?” I asked, as casually as I could.
    Susan glanced at it. “DS Ian Lovegrove,” she read out. “North Met Traffic division. There’s a phone number too, but no email … What do you suppose this is?” She held up a black square of plastic—a memory card. It must have been lying loose in the box file when Vora stuffed the copies into it.
    “Let’s stick it in the PC and have a look,” I said.
    My old Dell laptop wheezed and clanked into action, and after an age of waiting presented us with a desktop. I clicked on the icon for the SD slot, and we waited another hour or two for the window to open. I wished I’d bought a machine that wasn’t powered by elastic bands while I’d still been able to afford it.
    The memory card held only one file, a digitalvideo. I double-clicked on it, aware of Susan hovering at my shoulder. She used the same scented soap as Nicky, I noticed, and deep down I felt a stab of desire.
    The video was grainy black and white. The camera was mounted behind a windscreen, recording a journey along an anonymous stretch of night-time motorway. White numbers flickered in the corner—the time and date, I supposed. The viewpoint seemed quite high, which suggested the vehicle was either a coach or a truck, travelling in the middle lane, overtaking vans and caravans on one side and being overtaken on the other by speeding saloons and big four-by-fours. These days a lot of trucks had cameras in the cab, I knew, to act like black-box flight recorders, providing footage that could be used in the case of an accident. The figure in the corner of the picture flickered between 64 and 65—presumably the speed of the truck the camera was mounted in. I kept my eye on the overtaking lane to the right, waiting to see this demon vicar come tearing past, when in the middle of the screen a shifting constellation of brake lights deadahead burst into life, flashing, weaving, and swerving from side to side.
    Zeto’s tinny little hatchback wasn’t overtaking the truck—it was coming straight towards it at top speed down the wrong side of the motorway, in the middle lane. I’d heard God moved in mysterious ways, but how he’d managed to keep Zeto from killing himself and twenty other drivers was sure as hell a mystery to me. The truck with the camera mounted in its cab jammed on its brakes while cars ahead of it lurched and rear-ended and side-swiped each other to get out of Zeto’s way. Finally one white box-van with nowhere to go slammed into Zeto’s car, not quite head-on, piling it into the central barrier and leaving it perched there with one wheel hanging off, while the box-van rocked and wobbled to a halt behind a crowd of dented, crumpled vehicles. The camera truck too had slewed to a halt, and the video showed dazed drivers climbing groggily out their cars before the image froze, crumpled and cut to white noise.
    “Jesus,” I said. “This could make us a fortune on YouTube.”
    “Finn, this is evidence in a court case,” said Susan. “We shouldn’t even be watching it.”
    “Relax,”