“Is there any useful footage around that time?”
He grinned. “Turn back a few pages and see for yourself.”
She flipped the pages until she came across a black-and-white picture of two men entering the main door of the building. One of them was plump and stocky, and his face was hidden underneath a hood. But the other one was clearly visible. She made a mental note of the man’s characteristics: late thirties to early forties, gangly, thin, with a wretched build like that of a marionette, big eyes that looked even bigger through steel-rimmed glasses, beard. The scruffy clothes and the inquisitive look made him seem like a journalist on the dole.
“Do we have an ID?”
“Guard at the Archive recognized him,” he said, looking at the picture. “His name is Alex Whitman. Of Los Angeles, California. But. Former Edinburgh resident.”
“Does he have a record?”
Johnson hesitated, then said, “I wouldn’t want to spoil the fun for you. I know how much you enjoy glowing over my neatly typed pages.” He winked, but she didn’t see it.
She skimmed through the man’s file. “So, he moved away from Edinburgh in…1990. What a surprise.”
“Clutching at straws. So did about a hundred other people.”
“So did our serial killer.”
Johnson chuckled. “All right, I’ll play along. Similarities?”
“The report from Amanda Pearson’s friend says she went to the south side of Ocean Terminal and saw Amanda’s handbag on the pavement.”
“Okay…” Johnson prompted, waiting for the connection.
“Sensing there was something wrong, she ran to the information point to report it. But when security accompanied her back to the scene, the handbag was missing.”
“It’s obvious the perp came back to pick up the bag,” Johnson said. “Or the girl was hallucinating. Or lying.”
“Just look at all these cases,” she said, holding the folder in front of him. “The victims are missing personal items. A balloon. A locket. A handbag. Our perp’s been keeping souvenirs.”
He nodded, flipping through the file, not bothering to read the details. He got to the victim’s photograph, took it out of the folder, and held it in his hands: revealing top, heavy eye shadow, too much lipstick for a girl that age. He finally shook his head. “The girl’s too old. Coincidence.” He put the photo down and slid it back to McBride. She took it and sat there looking at the picture of the last victim. It could tell her everything she needed to know.
“Child predators have a specific age group they target,” Johnson said. “A perp who targets six-year-olds might think a fourteen-year-old girl is too old. The same goes for a man attracted to teenagers—he’d probably be as disgusted as we are by the thought of molesting a girl that young.”
McBride felt her stomach clench. She tried to ignore it.
“So how do you explain the recent increase in missing girls in the past months?”
Johnson shrugged. “Copycat. The movies. MTV. Marilyn Manson.”
“Has anyone checked out the parents?” she asked. It was not a stereotype, merely statistics.
“Clean as a whistle. Solid alibis from work at the time of her disappearance. For both of them. We’ve also looked into close relatives: nothing suspicious.”
“Then it must be our guy,” she muttered.
“Don’t be daft,” he said. “Those girls went to different schools, had different friends, came from different backgrounds.” He counted each finger like a bullet point. “The girl at Covenant Close is one thing: that’s the only M.O. you have reminiscent of past incidents. Amanda Pearson, on the other hand, is a missing person, not a dead one. Let’s not forget that. Most importantly, the burnings from your serial killer stopped in 1990. I don’t know why, and I’m not interested in finding out. Maybe the guy died, or he skipped town.”
She tapped on the papers lying on the table. “For all we know he has found a hiding place to store the bodies. Just look at the records from the neighboring counties. Bizarre disappearances start exactly three months after the last girl disappeared.”
She looked at the papers, making the calculations in her mind. A series of disappearances and burnt bodies popping up in Edinburgh until April 1990. Then, nothing. Like the perp had vanished off the face of the earth. A close look in other jurisdictions, though, gave a different picture. August 1990: six-year-old girl goes missing in the Livingston area. November 1990: ten-year-old boy disappears in Dunbar. The list went on.
McBride looked into Johnson’s eyes; they were the honest, hard eyes of a real cop.
“A goin’ foot’s aye gettin’, McBride. The problem is girls will always disappear. They have done since the beginning of time, and they will do until long after we’re dead and buried. What if, say, we were to try the exact same comparison you just did with a geographically unrelated county—in the south of Wales, London, or, hell, I don’t know, Paris? It would show the same thing; kind of like staring at clouds in the sky expecting to find one shaped like an animal.”
McBride was silent.
She’d seen something.
A series of disappearances and burnt bodies from 1984 to 1990; then a series of disappearances, no bodies found. She saw the list of disappeared girls and one of the names…
That name. She’d seen it before.
Ellie Whitman.
She looked up. Johnson hadn’t noticed it; he had taken her silent concentration for protest over his argument.
“I think I’ll have that beer,” he said, reaching for the can of Tennent’s resting on the table.
He reached into his coat. “I want to show you something,” he said. He handed her a medallion lock.
“I carry this wherever I go.”
She frowned. “Your daughter’s?”
“Fife. Christmas Eve, 1976. One of my first cases on the job. A kid sees his father get beaten to death by a drug dealer on the High Street. The guy used a hammer, smashed in the father’s head because of a row with his girlfriend minutes before. A few months after, the case had been shelved. Perp had disappeared off the face of the earth. Every year, I call that kid—now an adult—to tell him I haven’t forgotten, that I’m still looking. He stopped answering my calls two years ago.”
He took another sip of the lager. “Some people just want to let sleeping dogs lie, McBride. Remember what Mareth always says: the brain is the most fragile of organs.”
McBride nodded. She disagreed, but she didn’t say anything, out of respect for Johnson’s willingness to share something so personal.
She looked up from the files, studying him for a few seconds. In her mind’s eye she could see him slamming back one whisky after another in a feeble attempt to get the taste of death out of his mouth.
“You want to grab a bite before you head back out?” she asked, squinting at the clock.
He said he really should be getting back. Then he hesitated, as if he was debating with himself whether to let her in on something.
“What is it?”
“You didn’t hear it from me. In a few hours there’s going to be a raid at Whitman’s house.” He smiled. “Pending the warrant, of course.”
She almost laughed. “Rub it in, Detective. You’re responsible for the fuckups now.”
“I’ll be back in the afternoon to get the files,” he said.
She nodded. “I won’t get you in trouble.”
He took another bottle from the table—some American beer—and popped it open using his lighter, then extended it to her. He got up from his seat and slowly headed for the door. He paused. “I don’t care about getting in trouble, McBride. I’m just worried about you.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, and smiled.
“Take care of yourself.”
On the radio, Etta James was ordering one for her baby and one for the road.
When Johnson left, she gazed out the window. Edinburgh breathed on as it had done for hundreds of years. The rain was beating hard against the cobb
led streets; the wind carried it around the rooftops, creating a curtain of liquid silver. Even in the rainy mist—especially then—the soul of the city strolled proudly through the streets and you could feel ghostly apparitions hovering above the towers and roofs, hear their footsteps echoing along the corridors and stone archways. They weren’t sinister, hostile ghosts, dragging something heavy across the cobbled alleys and spiral staircases; they were ghosts of absence and loss, and the glow that illuminated their form was merely borrowed, visible only as long as you could will it into visibility with your mind, like Dr. T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes. That was what made the residents of this city so lucky; and they didn’t even know it. The students laughing their way back to their digs, the punters bumming a fag, the ragged homeless man sitting at the foot of the Playfair Steps—none realized the treasure they had breathing next to them.
Her glance faltered back into the flat for a second. She eyed the folders, wondering if she could resist. A cigarette pack rested on the living room table.
Damn it, Guy. The one thing you shouldn’t leave in my flat.
She considered it: the prospect seemed irresistible. She picked up the folders, tried to focus; she kept sneaking peeks at the pack. Finally she grabbed a piece of paper and copied an address from the folders. She picked up the pack and headed downstairs.
Walking downhill from St. Andrew Square, she paused outside the entrance to Princes Street Gardens. The mist still lingered. A few people walked past Jenners and the shops. A brave couple was sitting on one of the benches, the man complaining to his wife that there were no pigeons or Canadian squirrels to feed crumbs to. Another person was reading the Thursday paper.
Who was this Whitman character, anyway? And how did he fit into all this?
The castle reared above everything, its flag flying briskly in the breeze. The Gothic tower of the Scott Monument pointed believers in the “right” direction. A family was trying to snap pictures of it; never mind what the monument stood for, as long as the picture was taken with an expensive camera. So much time spent milling around, only to miss the underlying essence. These days, there was more to the locale than tartan and shortbread, whisky and castles. Had they caught wind of the news on the missing girl? Could they surmise that a serial killer was on the loose? Even the CID hadn’t figured that one out.
She took the crumpled note out of her pocket, smoothed it out. Raindrops pattered on the piece of paper, leaving spots of liquid velvet. She glared at the address.
34 Thirlestane Road, Marchmont.
She would go and find this Alex Whitman. Today. Before the CID got to him.
23
Everything was there in the film, crying out to be seen. Sekuler had recorded it all so intricately, down to the tiniest of details.
“I can’t believe this works,” Charlie said. Before, he had been complaining about the smell of Whitman’s fridge leftovers. Now he seemed oblivious to it, transfixed in the moment. “I mean, the trick doesn’t really work, but…my God, it’s incredible.”
“It was supposed to work.”
“How’s that?”
“Film is made possible by the observer’s persistence of vision: many single frames, photographic images played one after the other, appear as if they’re moving. Before twenty-four frames per second became the de facto standard, frame rate was variable. The projector could catch on fire; the distributor might have to attach notes for the projectionist, giving them the speed the reels had to be played at.”
“Like Griffith’s instructions for Home Sweet Home,” Charlie said, “recommending different frame rates for each reel.”
“Eighteen frames per second is one-eighteenth of a second, or 55.55 milliseconds.”
“At 55.55 milliseconds, you still perceive it,” Charlie said.
“At twenty-four frames per second, the duration of each frame would be even shorter, but still within perceptual limits.”
Charlie stretched his shoulders and arms, looking away from the footage on the screen. Outside, the breeze was turning into a wind.
“I don’t get it. Doesn’t this mean that it’s impossible to present an image beyond a human’s perception in film?”
Charlie caught Whitman smiling that dry grin again and shaking his head.
“Look at what he did. In a fast visual, looking at two images, T1 and T2, occurring between two hundred and five hundred milliseconds of one another, you can’t see T2. Show T2 at below two hundred milliseconds or above five hundred milliseconds and you’ll see it.”
“So Sekuler placed four blank frames one after another,” Charlie said, playing with Whitman’s lighter on the corner of the desk, “totaling two-hundred-plus-something milliseconds.”
“And when he placed a single image directly after those frames, it remained…”
“Hidden,” Whitman said.
They were silent for a second, taking in the genius of the French inventor.
“But in the world of twenty-four frames per second, each frame is projected for 41.66 milliseconds.”
“Four frames would total something over 160 milliseconds, well within the perceptual window.”
“So it wouldn’t work; you wouldn’t be able to hide something in it. That’s the case here; the media player on this computer projects in standard NTSC video, twenty-four frames every second.”
With a stunned look in his eyes, Charlie turned to his friend.
“What?”
“Do you think there are more hidden images in there?”
Whitman had been so caught up in the idea of subliminal frames that he had not even considered what else might be there.
Another hour of tinkering with the footage followed; sixteen more images had been embedded. They printed every frame in the film, allowing them to have easy access to a hard copy of the material.
“The first film ever recorded and it’s filled with subliminal imagery. Amazing.” Charlie ran his hand through his beard. “What do you think it means?”
“It looks like some kind of trick, a ‘look what I can do’ type of thing. Victorian books, like Alice in Wonderland, contained little puzzles within the text, so maybe Augustin thought it would be innovative to incorporate that into his invention.”
Charlie pointed at the wooden board frames preceding every hidden image. “What about this? It’s weird. You think it’s of any significance? They look like domino pieces.”
Whitman took the pack of Old Holborn out of his pocket and fished for his rolling papers, his eyes never leaving the screen. The frame image looked like a series of hundreds of dominoes strewn next to one another. He shook his head. “Hardly seems so. It looks like some sort of Victorian clapperboard or bookmark.” His hand found the rolling papers, and, holding them, he made a slow karate-chop-like gesture culminating in midair. As in The hidden stuff starts here.
They needed coffee. There was a long road ahead of them. Valdano would have to wait.
Whitman headed for the kitchen, passing a nest of tables alongside the wall.
Some households are arranged so beautifully and with such precision that even changing the slightest of details will make it seem off. This was not the case with the Whitman household. Yet the nest of tables was different. Three round tables, each sporting a solid oak cross-frame with a chrome finish, were arranged in a nest. He and Kate had bought them from a department store in St. James mall in an attempt to soften the contemporary feel of the place. Kate always wanted them in a specific arrangement. She used to call them her “OCD tables.”
“So why do you think Sekuler hid all this in here?” Charlie asked.
Whitman didn’t reply. He could only stare at the tables, the way they were slightly angled out from the corner instead of lying flat against the wall as they usually were.
“Alex? Are you there?”
Whitman wouldn’t shift his eyes from the tables. “Something’s not right here. Did you move this?” Whitman asked, tapping the wooden frames and feeling the back compartments of the ta
bles. He found nothing suspicious.
“I don’t think so.”
Whitman looked around. The window was closed. He ran his finger along the frame of the bookcase and examined the thick dust on his finger, thinking, talking to himself.
“Someone’s been in here.”
Whitman was opening drawers, checking the furniture, even examining the ashtrays in case any cigarette brands other than his own had been stubbed in them.
He found nothing.
The kitchen seemed untouched, too. In his bedroom, all the projectors and film paraphernalia were stacked the way they had been for the past ten years. The picture of Mr. Pabst on the wall seemed angled right, the work desk undisturbed.
He opened the door to Ellie’s bedroom.
A man was lying on the bed. Whitman recognized him despite the modifications someone had inflicted on his face and body. The first thing he noticed was the lips: they had been left twisted into a grim smile, as if he was leering at Whitman. Then, the smell. The odor was mixed with something coming off his own body: fear.
He coughed, leaning over with a muffled sound, hoping to deter what wanted to come out of him.
Oblivious to the adjacent room’s new occupant, Charlie was still working on the film. Whitman limped to the table and poured himself a drink. His legs were shaky.
“Find anything?” Charlie asked, focused on his work.
Whitman downed the glass. “It’s funny you should mention that.” He finished swallowing and pointed to the bedroom. “There’s a dead body in there.”
“A dead body,” Charlie repeated, hypnotized by the sheer effort of cutting the frames in the right place.
“Yes. A dead body. In my daughter’s bedroom.”
“I don’t see what’s funny about that, Alex.”
Whitman motioned him to go see for himself.
Charlie stopped outside Ellie’s bedroom and peered in.
It was Nestor, the film restoration expert from the Archive.
He was on the bed, partially clothed, his shirt cut open like a robe, showing powdery white skin and a wisp of black hair leading down to what used to be his genitals. The feet were nearest the door, the head turned slightly to the right and pointing toward the room’s projector. The right leg was bent at the knee, splayed open, the left jutting at an angle. His eyes were in a wide stare. There was something protruding from his mouth; Charlie realized it was part of the man’s genitalia. Holding his hand over his mouth, he ran to the bathroom, barely making it in time.
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