I am not lonely [Mystrade]

CHAPTER 170 :Half a million CCTV

Greg pushed a door and looked at the stack of CDs pilled  up in a corner of the room. He couldn't repress a heavy sigh. Watching  countless hours of CCTV recording was a compulsory part of the work of a  police officer, but even when looking back at his entire career, he  doubted he ever had so many of it to watch for a single case.

"Can you remind me why we have no less than half a million CCTV camera in London exactly ?" he complained to his colleague.

"To lower crime rate ?" Sally retorted, looking as depressed as her friend.

"That didn't prevent someone from wandering around the place possibly with radioactive substances and of poisoning someone else." the detective remarked, sententious.

"I guess evil masterminds are not really caring about having their picture taken." the young woman suggested. "Well, what do we start with ?"

"Nevsky said he was meeting two chaps at Fortnum and Mason around four. I guess it could be a first start." Greg offered, taking off his jacket and sitting in one of the chairs facing the screen.

"Or we start at the beginning of the day and go down chronologicaly ?" Donovan proposed, showing him the first disc, a CCTV captured just meters away from Nevsky's front door.

The  policewoman had always been a Cartesian and ordered person, unlike her  ex-boss, and she was reluctant of taking things in the wrong order.  These strong values had helped her countless time in her career and if  it wasn't for it, she probably wouldn't have made it to the position she  was in today.

"I  know he thinks that the men he met are responsible for his poisoning  but it is also our duty to make sure it didn't happen before or after  that meeting." she scolded her colleague gently as the man made a sign to show that he was giving up. "Plus, he only exited his house at eleven in the morning, meaning we won't have that much video to watch."

The  inspector grumbled under his breath but accepted his ex-adjunct idea  and let her put the first disc in the player. A blurry image in colour  immediately appeared, showing a busy street of north London and, in the  distance, the navy blue door of Nevsky's house. The time code read 10:45  on the morning of the third of July.

Nine hours spent in the  watching room had brought the police officers some answers but even more  questions. Two men were indeed visible in some of the CCTV footage of around Fortum  and Mason's tea room but none of them were behaving peculiarly  strangely if you excepted a few visits to the toilets. But more  importantly neither Greg nor Sally had been able to see another moment  in Nevsky's day when the poisoning could have happened and that was, at  least, a first lead.

All the effort of Scotland Yard should now  be focused on finding what was the substance used to poison the Russian  dissident and who were the two men visible on the CCTV footage.

Lestrade  left Sally to inform the rest of the team of their new priorities  whilst he made his way to the third floor where Trident's offices were  situated. Since the event in Hyde Park more than a year ago, he had grew closer to DI Kenzel, the woman in charge of the anti-gang cell.

"Am I annoying you ?" he wondered as he knocked on the opened door of the policewoman's office.

"Not at all." she smiled, inviting him. "What can I do for you ?"

"Could you try to identify two men for me ?" the detective requested, giving her two full-page prints of the suspects' face.

"Any idea at all who they could be ?" Sandra question, having a glance at the portraits.

"No. Only that they may be associated with the Russian crime or be Russian themselves. But even that, I'm not sure of ..." the yarder denied, looking sorry. "I've been given two names that could be theirs but I suspect that's just a cover."