Faraday 01 The Gigabyte Detective (14 page)

“I’m sorry my dear.” Emily shook her head. “I haven’t the least idea.”

“It was probably someone she knew in the past, who suddenly came back into her life,” said Charlotte. “How long have you worked for her altogether?”

“Thirty-two years,” said the old lady. “She took me on when they bought the place, just after they was married and before they went to South America. Stanley was already the gardener here when the place was owned by Lady Caroline. That’s how we met.”

Charlotte leaned forward. “Now this is something I want you to think very carefully about, Mrs Burrows. In fact, I don’t want you to give me an answer straight away. I want you to think about it for a few days. The question is, can you remember anyone who seemed to get on especially well with Mrs Adams in the past? - before Mr Adams died, I mean. I’d like you to think about it and write down the names and approximately how many years ago she knew them. It can be just anyone you remember who might have come here a lot in the past, any close friends that she or her husband had - anyone at all - men or women.” She smiled at the old lady. “Can you do that for me? - and I’ll come back in a few days to find out who you’ve remembered.”

The old lady nodded. “I’ll do my best, my dear. I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it was once upon a time. But perhaps our Stanley can help me.”

“That’ll be lovely.”

With that they left the Burrows to reminisce together.

* * * * * * * *

Charlotte finished entering the last of the data she had collected that morning onto the computer and arched her back to ease her aching shoulders. She got up, walked over to the window and casually looked down into the car park. She was just in time to see two cars pull in to a pair of the marked bays below. A young uniformed officer got out of the small one which was light blue and bore no police identification markings. From the other large, white car with the police stripes emblazoned down the side stepped Detective Chief Superintendent Lasham.

“Oh, hell,” she said softly, “the blighter’s come to check up on me already.” With a sigh she went back to the computer and started printing out a precis of the information collected to date.

Sure enough Lasham walked through her door five minutes later. “Afternoon Faraday. Your car’s parked downstairs at the back.” He tossed the ignition keys on to her desk and looked round. “What have you done with Paulson?” She noticed he had left the door open so that everyone in the general office could hear.

“I don’t need anyone to help me this afternoon, sir.” Charlotte stood up but couldn’t easily get round Lasham’s bulk to push the door closed. “Everybody else in the section is working on other cases today.”

“Solved the bloody thing already, have you?”

She managed a smile. “No, sir. I’ve just finished the preliminary stage of linking together all the data which has been collected so far. You can see that a summary is being printed out at the moment.” She paused and then decided to plunge on. “The computer will then highlight gaps in our data and likely sources for that information. It will also suggest the most fruitful future lines of enquiry so that we can concentrate our resources in the most productive way possible.”

“What a load of bunkum,” Lasham burst out. “Somebody up the top needs their head read. Fancy splashing out all this money and time doing what any bright copper could do on the back of an envelope.”

“With respect sir …” Charlotte began, but was cut off before she could get any further.

“Respect, my foot. Don’t try your London clap-trap on me, Faraday.” He pointed a finger at her. “Now listen to this and listen well. When Lord Harry gets some strange notion in his head it takes a bit to shift it. I don’t know what you’ve done to persuade him that you’re the best thing since sliced bread. But I’m afraid I’m not impressed by some fancy bird he’s picked up at the Chief Constables’ three-day bash.”

Charlotte was shocked into responding. “What on earth are you suggesting.”

“I’m suggesting that all this rubbish,” he indicated the computer and the peripherals with a sweep of his hand, “is a load of cods-wallop dreamed up by you, along with your short skirts, to advance your career in the Met. Well, I can tell you it won’t wash down here.”

“That is scandalous misrepresentation!”

The chief superintendent continued to wag his finger at her. “I will be keeping a very close eye on your progress over the next few weeks, Detective Chief Inspector bloody Faraday. I’ll be making it my job, in that time, to shoot you down in flames. If you don’t come up with the goods, I shall take great pleasure in running you and all this expensive trash off my patch in double quick time. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly sir.” Charlotte had recovered her composure now. She continued in cold fury. “It’s quite clear that you’re a bigoted, narrow-minded bully and that you wouldn’t understand a good idea if it hit you between the eyes. Fortunately I’ve only come across a very few people like that so far in my time in the force. They give a bad name to the police force and to themselves and I have nothing but contempt for them.”

“You seem to have forgotten that I outrank you, Faraday” spluttered Lasham.

“Furthermore,” she said, “I would not be in the least worried about playing the recording I have been taking of this conversation to anyone in authority in either the local force or in Scotland Yard.”

“What the -” roared the man.

“Since you have no interest in our progress on the Cynthia Adams case, I should be grateful if you would stop interrupting me,” said Charlotte, “and let me get on with the work in hand - sir.” She turned her back on him and sat down, shaking with fury.

“You haven’t heard the last of this, Faraday,” said Lasham in an ominously quiet voice. “If you don’t find this murderer in double-quick time, I’ll see that you’re finished.”

And with that, he left the office.

-
5. Thursday
-

Charlotte drove herself to the station next morning in the car which had been delivered for her the previous afternoon. She encountered Stafford Paulson on the stairs.

“I hear you had a visit from our revered Chief Superintendent yesterday afternoon,” he started.

Charlotte took a breath. “That man is impossible.”

“I warned you he could be difficult.”

“Difficult? He was plain bloody rude.”

“Still,” he grinned. “I hear you didn’t let him walk all over you. Apart from that, how are you getting on?”

She looked at him suspiciously, not sure if he was on her side or against her. “I’m getting there slowly. I finished putting the information on the computer at two-thirty this morning.”

“The important thing is this,” he said, “does it tell us anything we don’t know already?”

“It doesn’t quite work like that.” Charlotte decided to take a chance on him being interested. “Look. If you like, I’ll show you how the information is recorded and then what use the computer makes of it.”

Paulson shook his head doubtfully. “I told you that I’m not much good on computers. It’s about all I can do to fill in my daily log sheet. Young Prendergast is probably the only one who understands the things.”

“You don’t really need any particular skill to find the programme helpful. The real talent comes in knowing what questions to ask.”

“Are you telling me that anyone can use this programme of yours?”

“That’s right - as long as you go on a short training course. I think I’m starting to get an interested response from the top brass. Two county forces have booked me for demonstrations when I’ve finished here.”

That made Paulson halt in mid-stride. “Do you mean Cynthia Adams is holding up the adoption of this system elsewhere in the country?”

“I hope so.” She smiled sweetly at him.

“Blimey,” he said with feeling. “That’ll mean we’ll be even deeper in the shit if we don’t get a move on and sort the case out.” He hurried forward to open the door into the CID general office, as if imbued with a new sense of urgency.

Charlotte preceded him into their shared office. “Speed is the main thing the computer system gives you. That is because it can cope with so much information in a short time. I’ll show you how it works.” She paused and faced him. “Why don’t you bring the others in on it as well? Then they’ll understand the point of all the apparently silly questions I’m going to tell them to ask when they go out and do interviews.” She turned back to her desk and switched on the strange-looking computer without a keyboard which sat at the back. While it was booting up, she opened her two brief cases and took out her lap-top computer and the files.

Paulson came in with the other two CID officers. “Greg Mallinson hasn’t arrived yet.”

“Oh, he’ll have to ask the others if he’s got any questions.” She pushed the lap-top into the docking bay in the main computer and pressed a couple of keys.

The machine started whirring and clicking. She looked over her shoulder at the others. “Good morning,” she said. “I thought I’d just show you some of the things that this fearsome looking piece of equipment does, now that I’ve got enough information loaded for it to get its teeth into. At the moment the portable is just down-loading its data onto the main hard disk.”

“What capacity is the hard disk?” Obviously John Prendergast was interested in computers.

Charlotte looked up at him. “The lap top is three hundred and twenty gigabytes, the main computer has a stack of interacting hard discs. The total capacity is about eight terabytes.”

“Wow. That’s the biggest one I’ve ever come across.”

“How much is that?” asked Paulson, mystified.

“It’s enough space,” Charlotte said, “to contain about five million full-length novels. Or, put it another way, it would take the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica more than ten thousand times.”

“But why do you need so much space?”

“Well,” she explained, “the computer is capable of logging much more than just the information directly connected with the Cynthia Adams case. You may have noticed that yesterday afternoon I was using this high speed scanner,” (she indicated a piece of equipment which looked like a small photocopier) “to load a lot of photographs about the Torbay region. I’ve put in links to fit them to the maps of the area. I already have the appropriate extracts from the Ordnance Survey office loaded in digital form and all the street maps of the towns and villages throughout the country superimposed on that. That takes over thirty gigabytes of space just by itself. The photographs are another hundred and sixty gigabytes. Photos take up a lot of space but can be very valuable in deciding what course of action to take when things hot up. It now means the computer is able to react in spatial logic to any data which is logged from Exeter to Plymouth, including the majority of Dartmoor. That may become important later on.” She grinned briefly. “Of course, to handle all this data, the main computer needs quadruple ultra-fast processors.”

Prendergast let out a breath. “That is awesome,” he muttered. “Who designed this system?”

Charlotte sat down in a business-like way in front of the machine. “I did of course. That’s how I got my promotion.” She laughed. “Well, to be truthful, the concept and the detection logic was mine. The programming was done by two chaps at Cambridge who are now working for Microsoft.” She wrinkled her nose. “They got a much better deal out of it than I did.”

“Can anyone learn to use it?” asked the young man.

“I don’t see why not,” she said, “if you respond satisfactorily to the training course. The point is, in the hands of a fool, the system will be virtually useless. To get the best out of it, you have to develop your own detective logic. You have to understand what power the computer can hand you. Then one person is able to cover more ground in a day than a team of twenty can do in a year. But it only manipulates data and it is only as good as the data you put on to it.”

“How does it work exactly?”

“Well,” she said, “there are a number of formats for entering data. Look at this.” She pressed a few keys. “This is the format for entering data about a person which we can of course take straight from the interview data. You can call this man a suspect, if you like. You see that the front page just contains the basic data about the person - age, size, weight, contact address - all that sort of thing. This one happens to be Giles Adams, Cynthia’s son.” She gestured at the screen. “Now - if we go onto page two, it requires you to enter the data about the person’s relationship to all the other main people involved in the case in first detail, including spatial relationships at the time of the murder.”

“What are spatial relationships?” asked Paulson.

“Sorry.” Charlotte grinned at him. “That’s a bit of computer talk. It means the precise location of the person in relation to all the other people who are involved in this case.” She turned back to the screen. “Now, if we look at subsequent pages, it goes into all Giles’ previous personal relationships in much more detail.” She pressed a key. “You see, there it is highlighting information that it considers to be important to reach conclusions about the person. For instance, when I move the cursor to this item and click the right-hand button, it tells me it wants to know a lot more about the accounting business and the other property which was given to Giles Adams by his father. It has obviously decided that this information is important after the interview that Inspector Paulson and I had with Giles yesterday morning. If I now hit the print icon you’ll see that it prints out a detailed questionnaire for one of us to take along to him in the next few days so as to obtain all the relevant information from him.”