Cherringham--The Vanishing Tourist Read Online Free Page B

amazed at how the quality had improved since the days back in NYPD when he’d had to sit through hours of grainy subway footage trying to identify a perp or look for pickpockets.
    Now he could fast forward through a day’s data in just minutes.
    The hardest thing was identifying Mary’s brother Patrick. He found an interior camera that looked directly onto the faces of the tourists as they climbed onto the coach — all 48 of them.
    But when he ran through the morning pickup at the hotel in London, he didn’t see the New Yorker.
    He rewound the footage and started again.
    The last man onto the coach was old, with white hair and a stoop.
    Jack saw his frail hand grab onto a rail as he pulled himself up the steps. It was only when he seemed to stare into the camera that Jack recognised him as the once-cheery father from the photo.
    Unbelievable.
    In fifteen years the man had aged thirty.
    Whatever had happened to him — illness, loss, grief — there was no doubt it was Patrick O’Connor.
    Jack looked over at the student who was catching up with his friends on Facebook.
    “Got a favour to ask …”
    “Sure.”
    “You see this guy I’ve got on the screen? Any chance you can print that for me?”
    The student got up and came over to Jack’s computer, then peered in.
    “Can do better than that,” he said. “Should be able to crop it, sharpen it.”
    “Terrific,” said Jack. “Maybe do me some extra copies?”
    “Like a missing person notice?”
    Smart kid indeed …
    “Something like that,” said Jack, turning back to the screen.
    Jack now raced through the footage, recognising landmarks in the Cotswolds that he himself had visited, until the tour reached Cherringham.
    He picked the exterior door camera — and watched the tourists emerge. Patrick appeared at the top of the steps and seemed to pause, to take in the village.
    Another of the tourists appeared behind him, took him by the arm, and helped him down the steps to join the crowd out on the pavement.
    Then a surprise — Jack saw a figure he recognised with the crowd: Will Goodchild, the local historian.
    Whaddya know, he thought. So Will makes a few quid as a tour guide.
    Will gathered up the crowd and they shuffled away.
    For two hours of real time all the camera showed was the empty bus, Babcock grabbing his thermos for a hot tea or coffee, outside, the occasional local passing by.
    Then the crowd returned and one by one filed back onto the coach.
    Jack noted Babcock chatting by the door. He certainly wasn’t counting his passengers — in spite of his insistence that he had.
    So Jack counted them aboard: Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven …
    Forty-seven.
    The door closed and the coach pulled away, out onto the high street, heading toward the highway.
    Babcock said he counted all forty-eight passengers.
    Just as his sister suspected, Patrick O’Connor had vanished in Cherringham.

6. The Way out of the Village
    “Oh gosh I feel dreadful!” said Will Goodchild. “It’s all my doing — you know. I lost him, didn’t I? The police will have to be involved, in fact I should probably turn myself in and face the music!"
    Sarah put a reassuring hand on Will’s shoulder.
    “Will, it’s not your fault.”
    “No? He just happened to go missing on my watch and it’s not my fault? Have you chaps not heard of in loco parentis ?”
    Sarah saw Jack emerge from behind the Remembrance Altar and walk over to the pew where she and Will were sitting. The stained glass window behind him glowed in the dying light of the sun.
    “Will, he was a grown man, not a child,” said Jack. “He was responsible for himself.”
    “I knew I should have said something to that dreadful driver.”
    “Counting them back on the bus wasn’t your job, Will,” said Sarah.
    But she knew he would never see it that way.
    From the moment she and Jack had contacted the historian and asked him to walk them through his tour itinerary — and despite their reassurances — he’d