Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [7]
‘What are you planning to do?’
‘I’m going to hack HOLMES to see if my ghost was right,’ I said.
*
Every police station in the country has at least one HOLMES suite. This is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, which allows computer-illiterate coppers to join the late twentieth century. Getting them to join the twenty-first century would be too much to ask for.
Everything related to a major investigation is kept on the system, allowing detectives to cross-reference data and avoid the kind of cock-up that made the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper such an exemplary operation. The replacement to the old system was due to be called SHERLOCK, but nobody could find the words to make the acronym work so they called it HOLMES 2.
Theoretically you can access HOLMES 2 from a laptop, but the Metropolitan Police likes to keep its personnel tied to fixed terminals – which can’t be left in trains or sold to pawn shops. When a major investigation occurs, the terminals can be transferred from the suite to incident rooms elsewhere in the station. Lesley and I could have sneaked into the HOLMES suite and risked being caught, but I preferred to plug my laptop into a LAN socket in one of the empty incident rooms and work in safety and comfort.
I’d been sent on a HOLMES 2 familiarisation course three months earlier. At the time I’d been excited because I thought they might be preparing me for a role in major investigations, but now I realise they were grooming me for data entry work. It took me less than half an hour to find the Covent Garden investigation. People are often negligent about passwords, and Inspector Neblett had used his youngest daughter’s name and year of birth, which is just criminal. It also got me read-only access to the files we wanted.
The old system couldn’t handle big data files, but because HOLMES 2 was only ten years behind the state of the art, detectives could now attach evidence photographs, document scans and even CCTV footage directly to what’s called a ‘nominal record’ file. It’s like YouTube for cops.
The Murder Team assigned to the William Skirmish murder had wasted no time grabbing the CCTV footage and seeing if they could get a look at the murderer. It was a big fat file and I went straight for it.
According to the report, the camera was mounted on the corner of James Street, looking west. It was low-quality, low-light footage updated at one frame per second. But despite the poor light it clearly showed William Skirmish walking from under the camera towards Henrietta Street.
‘There’s our suspect,’ said Lesley, pointing.
The screen showed another figure – the best you could say was probably male, probably in jeans and a leather jacket – walk past William Skirmish and vanish below the screen. According to the notes, this figure was being designated WITNESS A.
A third figure appeared, going away from the camera. I hit pause.
‘Doesn’t look like the same guy,’ said Lesley.
Definitely not. This man was wearing what looked like a Smurf hat and what l recognised as an Edwardian smoking jacket – don’t ask me why I know what an Edwardian smoking jacket looks like: let’s just say it has something to do with Doctor Who and leave it at that. Nicholas had said it was red, but the CCTV image was in black and white. I clicked back a couple of frames and then forward again. The first figure, WITNESS A, dropped out of shot one, two frames before the man in the smurf hat stepped into view.
‘That’s two seconds to get changed,’ said Lesley. ‘That’s not humanly possible.’
I clicked forward. The man in the smurf hat produced his bat and stepped smartly up behind William Skirmish. The wind-up was between frames but the hit was clear. In the next frame Skirmish’s body was halfway to the ground and a little dark blob, which we decided must be the head, was just visible by the portico.
‘My God. He really did knock his head clean off,’ said Lesley.
Just as Nicholas had said he had.
‘Now that,’ I said, ‘is not humanly possible.’
‘You’ve seen a head