‘What happened?’ Kate whispers. All she can remember is swimming out to the platform. Why has she got such a splitting headache?
‘I think you had a cramp attack, almost drowned,’ the girl says, glancing admiringly at a boy standing next to her. ‘Ned dived in, brought you onto the platform. He’s done a life-saving course.’
Good old Ned. Kate will thank him later, when she’s feeling stronger. Rob will kill her when he hears about this. And Bex. She’ll be here in a few hours, telling Kate she’s become a liability. She never used to be accident prone, but the stats aren’t looking good. Two in six months now. At least this was only cramp.
She turns her head towards the harbour, watching as the inshore lifeboat comes alongside the platform. She can’t help feeling she’s wasting good people’s time. She was too tired. Shouldn’t have gone for a swim. Stretch will be beside himself, wondering where she is.
As she feared, there are crowds of rubberneckers on the beach, observing the scene unfold. And a man on his own, up by the café, looking in her direction through a pair of binoculars.
16
Silas
‘This new facial-recognition software is officially shit, sir,’ says DC Strover, sitting back at her desk. ‘I assume it’s not going live anytime soon.’
‘That’s not like you,’ Silas says, glancing at his young colleague.
They are in the CID corner of the open-plan Parade Room at Gablecross. Strover is an expert when it comes to computers and a champion of all things digital, constantly berating Silas for not embracing social media.
‘And stop calling me “sir”, will you? “Guv” or “boss” but not “sir”. Makes me feel like a schoolteacher. And I hated school.’
Silas recruited Strover to work with him eighteen months ago. Apart from still calling him ‘sir’, she’s a quick learner, proving invaluable last year when they nailed a serial killer. He likes her sense of humour too, now that she’s grown confident enough in his company to speak her mind.
‘I’m a big fan of deep learning, don’t get me wrong – boss,’ Strover says, emphasising the last word in her strong Bristol accent. ‘I just don’t think computers will ever properly understand human faces.’
‘You’re in danger of sounding like me,’ Silas says. He’s never heard her badmouth technology before.
‘Airport scanners are one thing – nice, clean, head-on face shots, a constrained environment – but big unruly crowds…?’ she says. He nods, encouraging her surprising bout of heresy. ‘Forget it. Poor lighting, funny angles, grainy resolution, scarves, beards, you name it. The messy real world that the software has to work with is just too variable compared with the neat and tidy images it was trained on. I mean, take a look at this.’
She passes Silas a printout of a mugshot. ‘That’s meant to be a match for our barman in the Bluebell.’ She pauses, letting Silas study the image. ‘My cat’s arse looks more like him.’
Silas puts the mugshot down and sits back, smiling. She’s right about facial-recognition software, confirming his own worst Luddite fears. The system has tried and failed miserably to match the CCTV image of the barman with one of 21 million images of faces and distinguishing marks currently stored on the UK’s custody image database. And that’s after Strover narrowed the search first with the relevant metadata. He doesn’t know why they even bothered. When South Wales Police tested new facial-recognition software on crowds in Cardiff a couple of years back, 92 per cent of the matches were false. No wonder the Met, his old force, have abandoned using it at the Notting Hill Carnival.
‘I’ve been asking the boss for weeks if he’ll consider giving the super-recogniser unit another go,’ he says.
‘And?’
‘Not unless Kate comes back. And we know the answer to that.’
Twelve months earlier, Silas set up a small intelligence unit to help identity criminals from Swindon’s vast database of CCTV footage. The town has more than six hundred local-authority-run cameras, making it one of the most surveilled places in Britain outside London. But the unit wasn’t about new software. It was about people, half a dozen ‘super recognisers’ – a mix of local police officers and one civilian, Kate – all of whom had been selected for their preternatural powers of facial recognition.
Kate’s results during the screening process were ‘off the scale’, according to the professor of psychology who had overseen her assessment. He’d never come across anyone like her. And much to Silas’s delight, Kate proceeded to identify dozens of criminals in her first six months, working off grainy images and mugshots as she watched hundreds of hours of CCTV. She also operated out in the field, identifying troublemakers in large football crowds, pickpockets in shopping centres. In retrospect, Silas should have seen that she was exhausted, but everyone was blinded by her results.
‘Why don’t we go to Kate, instead of trying to get her to come to us?’ Strover says. ‘She might be more interested in helping, given that this involves her.’
The same thought has crossed Silas’s mind. Kate would spot a match if there was one. Unlike this new software, Centaur, the lucrative contract for which was signed off a month after his unit was closed down. To be fair, it’s a long way off going live.
‘Our problem is the boss,’ he says. ‘Much as I’d like to go to Cornwall, the nail bars of Swindon are calling.’
‘Kate was in hospital for six weeks,’ Strover says quietly, glancing at her own nails. Silas notices a touch of sparkle. ‘If it was deliberate…’
Silas considers again whether Kate could have been targeted. It’s been troubling him ever since his meeting with Jake at the café. After the accident, he gave Jake and Kate reassurances that no one could be arrested and charged on the basis of one super-recogniser’s word alone. But there’s no denying that a particularly violent organised crime gang are now behind bars as a result of Kate’s initial idents. And he now knows that on the night of the accident she visited a county lines pub that might have links to the same gang.
He studies the still from the CCTV footage again. ‘I’ll go over to the Bluebell this afternoon, talk to the barman,’ he says, glancing at Strover’s screen. ‘What have you come up with?’
‘Looks like Kate’s living outside a village on the Roseland peninsula,’ she says. ‘South of Truro.’
Silas knows she’s living in Cornwall, but he has never tried to find out where.
‘According to Companies House, all her new partner’s businesses are registered at the same address down there,’ Strover continues. ‘Nothing’s listed in London.’
Strover tilts her laptop so that Silas can see the various websites. She’s also called up a photo of the new man. At least she’s found love. Young love. And money, by the sounds of it.
‘We could go down there tomorrow morning,’ Strover suggests.
He glances across at her. Long queues on the A303, Cornish pasty for lunch. Not much of a weekend, but he’s got nothing else on and no commitments at home. An ex-wife who doesn’t want to see him and a twenty-one-year-old son, Conor, currently AWOL. He would like nothing better than to get Kate back on board, the super-recogniser unit up and running again. This time he would manage her properly. He also wants to ask her about the Bluebell, find out what she was doing there. But he knows his boss is never going to sanction a trip during office hours.