Private London - James Patterson [62]
Del Rio had taken Hannah back to her college rooms. She needed a shower and clean clothes. Suzy had gone with them.
I was sitting with Adrian Tuttle, working our way through the photographs that the SOCO team had collected. They were all digital, not as good as Adrian would have taken, and were displayed on his widescreen Apple monitor.
Doctor Wendy Lee, meanwhile, was looking at the other forensic reports. Sam was reading through the police interviews of the students and staff who had been in the bar, or near it, when the abduction had gone down.
On the screen Adrian Tuttle had yet another shot of the cobbled street. Close-ups of the blood which we already knew was Laura Skelton’s.
He clicked his mouse and moved onto a wide-angle shot of the street. Pretty much an exact version of the same pictures that we had taken when our people had got to the scene. Except that had been later and the police had gone by then.
I moved the mouse and clicked on the next photo.
Another wide-angle shot of the scene from another perspective. But Adrian muttered something and snatched the mouse from me, clicking back to the previous shot.
I looked at the picture, puzzled. He’d seen something I hadn’t. ‘What?’ I asked.
Chapter 77
ADRIAN TUTTLE IGNORED me, clicking on a series of icons and drop-down menus. The screen split in two and he pulled down more menus.
The picture we had been looking at remained on the left-hand screen. On the right he had called up our own forensic photos that had been taken on the night of the kidnapping. Adrian hadn’t been responsible for those: he had been working on the woman found in the lock-up in King’s Cross.
He flicked through the images until he found a wide-angle shot that matched the one the police had taken. If it was a spot-the-difference competition I couldn’t have circled one, let alone ten.
He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the first picture. ‘See that?’
I shrugged. ‘Just the differences of light,’ I said. ‘Ours were taken later, remember, and they had their lights set up in different positions.’
Adrian shook his head. ‘It’s not a trick of the light.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s an object. It was here in this street when the police SOCO unit were there. And it wasn’t there an hour or so later when we took our photos.’
‘So what is it, then?’ I repeated.
‘I don’t know.’
Adrian clicked on the mouse again, dragging a dotted line around the small area and releasing it to blow up the image. The picture became pixelated, even more blurred.
‘Still none the wiser, Adrian,’ I said.
‘We can do something about that,’ he replied.
He typed on his keyboard and bounced the image across to Sci in the Los Angeles headquarters.
Within minutes, a message pinged back across the Atlantic and Adrian opened the attachment. Our American associate had run the image through a powerful image-enhancement system. The kind of technology that analyses space-telescope imagery of landscapes on Mars.
What we had was the corner and a fold or two of a blanket. Dark brown and red, in a chequered or tartan pattern. One edge of the blanket was folded across but there was part of a label visible, with the letters Q and U on it.
‘Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid, Dan,’ said Adrian apologetically.
See, Adrian was good with the detail. He hadn’t even taken the photograph and yet he remembered the smallest discrepancy between the two images. But me? I knew a goddamned clue when I saw one!
Chapter 78
‘SHIT!’
DI Kirsty Webb kicked the tyre of her car. But it did little to ease her frustration.
She had thought she’d made a breakthrough in the case but now that she had arrived in Chesham it seemed extremely probable that she was looking at another dead end.
Literally.
The house she had come to had had a sizeable chunk blown out of it. Debris strewn all around. The windows smashed in the small station across the road from it.
She checked the address on the open page of her notebook as she walked up to