The London Project (Portal Book 1) Page 4

  Louisa picked up one of the girl’s hands. The fingernails were clean and neatly manicured. Her feet, on the other hand, were in a sorry state. The soles were filthy and flecked with dried blood. Spreading out the skin with her thumb Louisa could make out some tiny cuts.

  ‘Looks like she walked quite a distance in her bare feet,’ Louisa said. ‘Are there any signs of sexual assault?’

  ‘The bruising is too extensive to make that determination yet based on an external examination. Why, do you think she was on the game?’

  ‘I don’t know. The cotton shift is unusual I admit, but if you take away the bruises and lacerations she looks like a normal teenage girl.’

  ‘There’s one more thing.’ Bill picked up her left arm and twisted it round to show the wrist. ‘Do you see the gap in the scarring pattern around the wrists? She may have been restrained during the period she sustained the other injuries. There are matching areas on her ankles.’

  ‘You’re saying she was tied down while someone did this to her?’

  ‘It’s a definite possibility.’

  ‘When can you make a start on the PM?’

  ‘We’re pretty much finished here so I should have the preliminary results later today.’

  ‘Good.’ Louisa stood. ‘I’ll catch up with you when you’re done.’

  Outside the tent she took off the gloves and overalls. She connected to the MET Subnet on her terminal and checked the girl’s case file. Some of the forensics scans were already coming through. Louisa noted the victim hadn’t been identified yet. That was unusual; forensics had taken fingerprints and retinal scans so the case file’s automated processes should have already matched them to the victim’s Portal profile. Louisa was just about to query the case file’s audit trail when raised voices came from the other side of the tent. She walked around and saw the sergeant prodding one of the children in the chest.

  ‘Listen, you little shit,’ the sergeant said, ‘either you tell us how you got in here or the only wall you’ll have a chance to deface in the immediate future will be the one inside your juvenile detention cell.’

  ‘All right, Sergeant,’ Louisa said. ‘I’ll take it from here, thank you.’

  The sergeant shook his head. ‘Good luck.’ He stalked off and the female officer trailed after him.

  The two kids stood against the hedge. At their feet spray cans of varying colours peeked out from a supermarket carrier bag. The larger boy was staring at the retreating sergeant with a hostile expression. Thirteen and tough as nails. But the smaller one looked like he could burst into tears at any moment. It occurred to her they could be brothers. They certainly had similar enough features.

  Louisa checked the witness statements. The boys’ profiles were listed there. Sam and James Wheeler. They were brothers all right, with Sam the elder.

  She stood beside them and spent a few silent minutes studying the graffiti on the fence across the tracks. One large piece portrayed a police squad kitted out in full riot gear with raised batons charging a group of youths. The police helmets were missing visors and the squads’ twisted faces were emaciated and skeletal. One of the officers carried a white flag with Portal’s ‘open door’ logo emblazoned across it in red. The anti-police and Portal message aside, the skill of the artist was undeniable.

  So the kids had this backdrop to look at while the sergeant had been giving them a hard time? She probably would have kept her mouth shut as well in their position.

  By this stage the boys were wondering what she was doing. They were giving each other questioning looks.

  ‘I like that one the most.’ Louisa pointed at a comic-strip style scene. In the first panel, three children were playing with a football in the street. In the next scene, another child was showing them a device that looked a lot like a terminal. In the third panel, their eyes were solid white as they stared at the screens, lending them a ghoulish appearance. Above their heads a swarm of bank notes fluttered skywards. It was then Louisa noticed the tag in the corner of the piece - ’S/J’. Sam and James? She gave the boys an appraising look. ‘Did you two paint that?’

  No response.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it’s far too good for kids as young as you. Maybe that one is more your level.’ She pointed out a crude tag scrawled further on up the fence.

  James’ face twisted in disgust. ‘No way. That one’s shit.’

  Sam glowered at him. ‘Shut it! Don’t tell them anything.’

  No matter how tough they acted they were still only kids. They both put on a brave face but they must have been scared out of their wits. ‘I’m a detective. Do you know what that means?’

  Sam sniggered. ‘You can’t afford a uniform?’ James laughed along.

  Louisa smiled. ‘Not exactly. It means I don’t give a crap about the graffiti or even about the scan you shared. I want to find out what happened to the girl.’ She turned to face them. ‘How about I let you in on a secret. Do you want to know how the sergeant managed to catch you guys so quickly after you found the girl?’

  That definitely piqued their interest. Sam nodded.

  ‘This whole area is lined with sense strips. At the minute you’re being scanned and uploaded to the MET Subnet.’ She was bluffing, or course. For all she knew the tracks were a dead zone but the boys wouldn’t know either way. They looked around, wide-eyed, then up at the sky.

  ‘The only thing is,’ Louisa continued, ‘it’s going to take me ages to look through the footage to find out what I want to know. So let’s make a deal: if you answer a couple of my questions I’ll handle the sergeant for you and let you go. What do you think?’

  Sam regarded her suspiciously. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘First of all, did you touch the girl or pick up anything beside her or along the tracks?’ Louisa held up her hands. ‘I’ll not be annoyed if you tell me the truth.’

  They shook their heads. She studied their faces. They seemed sincere enough. ‘All right, so how did you manage to get in here?’

  ‘Under the hedge,’ James said. ‘There’s a gap over there.’ He pointed further up the tracks away from the tent.

  ‘Can you show me?’

  Sam nodded. He picked up the bag of cans and they headed down the path. The ‘gap’ turned out to be a shallow depression under the hedge that looked barely deep enough for Louisa to fit her arm under, let alone for the boys to squeeze through. But then she noticed how grubby the two were. Their knees, hands and elbows were covered in dirt.

  ‘Okay, I tell you what,’ Louisa said. ‘I bet you a fiver you didn’t get in under the hedge. Care to prove me wrong?’

  The boys looked at each other for a moment and then James dived for the hole. He got the top half of his body in almost immediately and then slowed as he wriggled the rest of the way through. Twigs snapped and leaves fell from the hedge as it shook with his passage. Eventually his feet were the only part of him showing, then he disappeared entirely as he hauled himself out the other side. Sam threw down the cans and followed his brother. He made it through with only slightly more effort.

  Well I’ll be damned.

  A hand appeared in the gap, grabbed hold of the carrier bag full of cans and pulled it through.

  ‘Hey, lady.’ Louisa heard Sam’s voice. ‘What about our fiver?’

  Louisa took out her terminal. A deal is a deal. She activated her wallet extension and flicked across five pounds. She heard an answering ping from the other side of the hedge.

  ‘Thanks!’ Sam called out. The boys took off down the street, their trainers flapping against the concrete pavement.

  Louisa continued along the path. The thick hedge was eventually replaced by a high wire-mesh fence. She kept an eye out for anywhere where a child could squeeze through or under—especially now she knew how small a gap was required—but she saw nothing. She eventually came to the opening of a tunnel and stopped at the entrance, peering inside. There was space to walk; a thin concrete path was raised above the track to one sid
e, but it was unlikely the girl had walked its length. The tunnel next surfaced in Dagenham, almost twenty miles away. She turned and headed back.

  The sergeant scowled when he saw she had returned without the children. ‘Did they do a runner?’

  ‘No, I cut them loose.’

  ‘Huh.’ He didn’t look overly pleased. ‘Did they say where they got in?’

  Louisa nodded.

  ‘Well, at least we know now how the girl got here.’

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t, Sergeant.’ The girl’s knees and elbows were clean and she had no dirt under her fingernails. Her shift was pristine white. She hadn’t been crawling around in the dirt. ‘I’ll need one of your officers to perform a circuit around the perimeter, from St Pancras to the tunnel.’

  ‘Now listen,’ the sergeant said, his face reddening, ‘I’ve already told you how short-staffed we are. Once the body is removed we plan on clearing out and getting the trains running again.’

  ‘And what happens if I decide forensics need to preserve the scene for another twenty-four hours? Do you think the rail operators will be impressed?’

  The sergeant glared at her, his eyes narrowing in what Louisa supposed was an attempt to intimidate her. She stared right back at him, unblinking. She’d faced down two DIs hours earlier. A jumped-up BTP sergeant wasn’t going to faze her.

  ‘Fine,’ the sergeant said eventually, through gritted teeth. ‘Just get the body out of here.’

  ‘Sure thing, Sergeant.’ Louisa smiled sweetly. ‘And remember, upload your report to the case file. I expect to see detailed scans of the entire perimeter.’

  It was time to head back to the station. When she ran the case file it would tell far more than she could learn here in person. Being out in the field had dusted the cobwebs off her old academy training, but it also highlighted the advantages of fully utilising the tools made available to detectives via the MET Subnet. Out here she was wasting time.

  Back at the gate, the gathering had tripled in size and now included three newscast reporters. She recognised their companies’ logos emblazoned on vans parked down the street. She stood for a moment before the crowd as they pressed forward, their shouted questions washing over her, first excitable, then agitated, and finally demanding as she ignored them. The blonde who had been chatting up the constable was amongst them, her terminal thrust forward and her irises flashing red.

  The DI would want her to make a statement, to ‘fly the MET flag’, as it were. But she had nothing concrete to offer. If she trotted out the standard spiel it would be shared as a meaningless sound byte or else ignored while the media reported their own conclusions on the girl’s death. Any detailed police statement following it would be swept away by whatever new piece of garbage or gossip was peaking on the news feeds.

  To hell with them. And to hell with the DI. She stepped forward and started to push her way through the throng, ignoring their affronted protestations. The official police statement could wait until she knew how the victim died. Whoever the girl is, she deserves that much at least.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Do you ever watch SIU?’ Rick asked.

  Louisa turned from the wall screen. ‘The screencast? Sometimes. Jess and Charlie like it.’

  They were in a MIT (Murder Investigation Team) incident room in Scotland Yard. The room was small, with just enough space for the large curved wall screen and two Portal consoles. Rick was slouched in his chair at a console, leaning on one elbow. His screen was set to minimum transparency so he was mostly hidden from view behind it. Like all Portal screens the transparency could be adjusted, but the feature was little more than a flashy gimmick used to show off the screen’s capabilities. If you tried reading anything on a screen that allowed even a little of the background to show through, you ended up with blurred vision within half an hour, and if you persisted, a throbbing headache.

  ‘The wife is a fan,’ Rick said. ‘When I come home after a tough day, do you know what she says?’

  Louisa shook her head.

  Rick adopted a high-pitched voice. ‘Your job can’t be that hard. Portal does all the work for you.’

  Rick's offhand mockery grated, Sarah certainly didn't deserve it, but he looked so outraged Louisa had to smile. SIU, or Special Investigations Unit, followed the exploits of a specialist task force within the MET charged with solving homicides in Greater London. The show’s writers really went to town on the plots of each episode, developing fiendishly convoluted crimes for the beautiful model-type investigators to solve. It was one of the first shows Portal had produced themselves and marked a move away from their role as media content consumers, relaying shows created by the big TV studios, to content producers instead.

  ‘Don’t you tell her that the story-lines are complete rubbish?’ Louisa asked. ‘That the real SIU are desk-bound techies stuck in our basement?’

  ‘I do, but she looks at the sense strips and Portal and thinks we can find out everything about everyone.’

  It was a common misconception. On the show, the investigators had full access to any Portal profile they wished. Finding the culprits was simply a matter of wading through the data. If it wasn’t for the car chases and violence it would have made for a terminally boring show.

  Louisa jokingly assumed an indignant expression. 'She doesn't know the ins and outs of the CSCA then, after all the money the council spent on feeds to educate the public?'

  Rick laughed. ‘Who does? Apart from SIU and lawyers.’

  When Portal originally pitched the London Project concept to the Home Secretary, he decided to gauge public opinion by leaking the proposal. Once the scale of the plan became apparent it led to furious exchanges in both houses of Parliament. Pro-privacy action groups sprang up, horrified by the sheer comprehensiveness of the data Portal wanted to store on London’s citizens. They demanded the government disregard the proposal. Instead the government came up with the CSCA, or Centralised Services and Communications Act. It enshrined in legislature the rights of individuals with regard to the privacy of their personal data.

  The MET couldn’t access the profiles of Londoners, but detectives could generate a history graph of the Portal services they accessed. Geo-location, the Traffic Subnet, and, since no-one used cash any more, even purchases in the local corner shop, they’d all be listed in the history graph. It skirted the restrictions in the Act to such a fine degree, however, that the first test cases brought by the CPS where a history graph had been obtained against the accused established certain ground rules the MET had to follow. A history graph could only be run against a suspect in a criminal investigation, or against someone who had died. And the lead detective in the case needed to make damn sure they had corroborating evidence the suspect was responsible for the crime in question before the history graph was obtained, or the case could be thrown out of court as a privacy breach, no matter how damning the evidence the graph produced.

  Louisa turned back to study the screen again. At least we’re free to ID anyone we want. Claire Harris stared down at Louisa from a school photo. It had taken CADET seven minutes to identify the girl. An age by Portal standards. The Case file Automated Evidence Tool had been created by SIU to work on any evidence uploaded to a case file. For Claire, it had started by attempting to locate a Portal profile for her using biometrics uploaded from the crime scene. That step was unsuccessful, which was unusual in itself. Even visitors to London normally handed over their biometrics when they registered for a temporary profile to cover the duration of their stay. CADET then trawled through every national police computer system Portal had access to. A facial recognition match was finally found in the Greater Manchester Police’s mainframe. A missing person’s report for a girl called Claire Harris had been filed by her parents.

  The face in the photo was of a happy, smiling, thirteen year old child. It was an old photo. She was fifteen when she died. Bill had been a few years off with his estimate but his mistake was understandable. The girl he examined could easily
have been four years older than the child in the picture. Whatever trauma Claire had suffered in those two intervening years had aged her terribly.

  Claire’s case file was open and spread out across the wall screen. It contained the forensics data from the crime scene, the witness statements from Sam and James, individual reports from the attending officers and the location of the body.

  ‘Claire Harris went missing eighteen months ago,’ Louisa said. ‘Do Manchester have anything more on file CADET missed?’

  Rick stifled a yawn. ‘No. I checked with the lead investigator on her missing persons case. They carried out a local neighbourhood search at the time but it didn’t yield anything. In the end they put her down as a runaway.’

  ‘This can’t be everything we have on the girl. We store seven days worth of biometrics on the MET Subnet for any unknowns picked up on the sense grid. Why don’t we have a match for her from the sense footage?’

  Rick shrugged.

  ‘Let’s see what SIU think.’ Louisa put a call request through to Ed Cooley, one of the basement-residing SIU officers so misrepresented by the screencast. He was their SIU resource assigned to the case.

  Ed’s pudgy, bespectacled face appeared in a window at the top right of the wall screen. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Ed, why don’t we have a biometric match for Claire within Portal?’

  ‘Because her biometrics aren’t in Portal,’ Ed replied.

  ‘Yes, I know, Ed,’ Louisa said. ‘You’re telling me CADET didn’t pick up one solid facial recognition match during the last week across the entire sense grid?’

  ‘There wasn’t a definite match. I tried lowering the thresholds to ninety-five percent accuracy which threw up over five hundred potential matches. I’ve gone through all of those, by hand, and she wasn’t in any of them.’

  Louisa turned to Rick. ‘What about speech pattern matching? Did her parents provide us with an audio clip of her?’