Silas shakes his head. They’re sitting in the canteen at Gablecross, where he is debriefing Strover about a twenty-minute roasting from his boss. He called Silas in after his email request late last night to assist Devon and Cornwall with a murder inquiry.
‘Told me to leave it to Major Crime,’ Silas says, nursing a plastic cup of cold coffee. ‘Reckons the man was in Cornwall trying to sell drugs to the locals. Extend the Swindon county lines network.’
‘So who does he think killed him?’ Strover asks.
‘Looks like a rival north London network supplying drugs into Truro from Tottenham. Apparently the bloke had been under surveillance in Swindon for several weeks – until he gave the Proactive Team the slip and headed west.’
‘What about Kate?’ Strover asks. ‘Her accident? Nearly drowning?’
‘The boss is not buying any of it. Too circumstantial.’
‘The man tried to bloody run us over,’ Strover protests. ‘Did you show him the footage from the pub?’ she asks, glancing around the canteen.
‘Not interested.’ Silas takes another sip of coffee. ‘It’s back to the nail bars for us.’
He doesn’t even bother to smile. It’s not funny. For six wonderful months after Silas cracked his last case, he basked in his boss’s praise. Couldn’t put a foot wrong. But then normal service resumed. Silas was a good detective, but he must learn to be more of a team player. Play the corporate game. Which means not meddling in another force’s business. Liaise, by all means, but don’t try to run the show.
In half an hour, Silas will be interviewing some poor woman from Latvia who thought she was coming to the UK for a new life and now finds herself doing acrylic overlays for eighteen hours a day. He glances around the canteen. A group of uniforms has lined up and are joking with the woman behind the food counter. He misses his own days in Response in the Met.
‘Last night I looked back at some of the interviews Kate gave to the media,’ Strover says. ‘Just to see what she actually said.’
‘And?’
There’s no need for Strover to feel guilty too. It was his idea to push Kate into the spotlight. Silas waits for her to speak, but she’s not confident enough to openly criticise her boss.
‘It was a mistake,’ he reminds her. ‘My mistake.’
‘The OCG would have found Kate eventually, if they were committed to harming her,’ Strover says. ‘With or without publicity.’
‘You think so?’
Neither of them seems convinced.
‘I came across something else, too, when I was searching to see if any other super recognisers had given interviews,’ Strover continues.
‘The Met unit did – told anyone who would listen about their success at the London riots,’ Silas says.
One poxy criminal was identified by recognition software in the aftermath of the 2011 disturbances, even though the Met had gathered 200,000 hours of CCTV footage. When the footage was passed over to the spotters, a single super recogniser made 190 IDs. Interestingly, the Met gave no interviews when the unit identified the two Russian GRU officers who had travelled to Salisbury to poison Sergei Skripal with the nerve agent novichok.
‘And the Australians,’ says Strover. ‘And the Germans. They’ve all been talking about their successes.’
‘You were busy last night.’
‘Couldn’t sleep.’
Strover retrieves a sheet of paper from her jacket pocket. A printout of an article.
‘Not sure it’s relevant now, but I thought you might want to see this,’ she says.
Silas takes it and starts to read. The article is about an Irish super-recogniser unit that was set up in Dublin at the same time as Wiltshire’s. But it’s the photo staring back at him that has his attention.
‘She’s still missing,’ Strover says, but Silas is not listening. ‘Their star recogniser, two years younger than Kate. Disappeared a month ago.’
Silas tears through the words. The female officer vanished late one night on her drive back from work. As with Kate, she possessed exceptional powers of facial recognition and was responsible for the arrest of a number of petty criminals. Nothing major, apart from one suspect who was caught after she’d spotted him at a football match at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. He was subsequently charged with murder.
‘You need to widen your search,’ Silas says, a new urgency in his voice. ‘See if any other super recognisers have disappeared. Dublin’s not alone.’
He tells her about the call last night from the detective in Nottingham. She’s shocked, but her eyes light up. Two small dots have been joined. It’s the bit of his job that Silas likes the most, watching the bigger picture emerge.
‘Search the UK first, then Europe,’ he continues. ‘Check with Europol too – see if they’re aware of any missing recognisers.’
As far as Silas can tell, most forces in Europe either have their own units already up and running or are in the process of establishing them. No surprise, given the continuing fallibility of facial-recognition software. In the past two weeks alone, colleagues from two cities in Germany have been in touch, asking Silas for advice.
He knows that there might not be any connection between the Dublin and Nottingham mispers and Kate. Each one might have been targeted independently by aggrieved local criminals. But the fact that all three are super recognisers – and the best performers in their unit – is hard to ignore. And Silas can’t shake off the feeling that the disappearances could be more coordinated, part of a pattern. A bigger picture.
‘Are you going to tell the boss?’ Strover asks.
‘Not yet. Ask your friend to search the Dark Web too. There might be some chatter around. And get onto forensics about that pub CCTV footage. We still don’t know who got hold of it or how. Or why they sent it to Jake.’
52
Kate
‘No, I can’t be certain,’ Kate says, walking down from the station towards the canal. ‘But it looked like him. Same eyes.’
It’s odd talking to DI Hart again about a ‘spot’ in the field. It used to part of her daily work. Only this time it’s personal, a possible sighting of Conor, Hart’s missing son. And if she’s right, it’s further evidence that her powers of recognition are returning. Technically it was also a ‘dirty spot’ – partial view, bad light. The hardest type.
‘And he was on the westbound platform, you say?’ Hart says.
‘In the waiting room on the opposite side from me – I was going to London.’
She’s already told him that she’s stopped off at the village because she needs to talk to Jake. He struggled to hide his surprise, didn’t buy into her casual tone, her acting as if the whole thing was planned. She’s surprised too.
‘Did he look depressed?’ Hart asks. ‘Suicidal?’
Oh God, it never crossed her mind. She hadn’t realised Conor was in such a bad way. ‘I couldn’t see,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. He wasn’t near the edge or anything like that.’
‘I’ll take a look at the station cameras.’
‘Any news on the body?’ she asks.