THE THESEUS PARADOX: The stunning breakthrough thriller based on real events, from the Scotland Yard detective turned author.

by David Videcette

  Helen sighed. She could see his point.

  ‘I’ll get the MIR to send you the data. Get those bloody actions done too, Jake.’

  50

  Tuesday

  9 August 2005

  0840 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Jake had told his team to be in for 0830 hours. He’d made tea for each crew member, but began the meeting with two unclaimed cups slowly going cold. They were sat on pieces of paper adjacent to empty chairs. He’d written on the paper: ‘I must not be late for meetings.’

  The entire team were slipping into laziness. They didn’t understand what the MIR was trying to get at. They took statement after statement that had little or no evidence in it. It was just background noise as a result. There had been some sloppy work over the past few weeks as they’d all plodded through the pointless MIR actions. Putting your brain into ‘neutral’ wasn’t what good detectives did. They worked better at identifying problems – why they were not moving forward – and then did something about it. Major investigation or not, you worked the same way.

  Jake couldn’t stand it any longer – he intended on making sure the team turned up on time and worked hard.

  ‘Right. We’ll make a start without Martin and Alex – and on that point: we work hard. We play hard, but we fucking turn up for work on time with our brains engaged on the job. Anyone who does not do this from now on will go back to London. There are plenty of spaces on the disclosure team going. Is that understood?’

  The seven of Jake’s team present nodded. No right-minded detective ever wanted to work on the disclosure team in a big case like this. It basically meant life as a librarian, indexing the items that they’d already investigated so that evidence could be accessed quickly and more efficiently. To Jake’s team this spelled never leaving their computer screens, never leaving the office, never interviewing a real witness and never seeing sunlight for years. If they thought they were hard done to in West Yorkshire, this was far more tedious work. People didn’t want to be stuck in the office, alone. The disclosure team was where bad detectives went to die.

  Jake continued, having got their attention, ‘I will be issuing you new actions as of today. You will refer the MIR back to me should they call you direct. You will not tell them what you are doing, under any circumstances. You will report everything to me.

  ‘I’ve read all the statements and looked at every exhibit. I’m certain that we do not have the full picture. This is because we cannot necessarily trust anything we are being told by those we are interviewing. Whether or not they had some suspicion that something was going to happen, there may well be those who want to protect their friends, colleagues, neighbours or loved ones. Treat everything in those statements as very suspicious. The exhibits we are looking at have been left for us to find. It’s the picture that they and others want us to see. I’m not happy with that. I want the whole picture. The true picture.

  ‘I have the phone data. This includes data from the bombers’ personal handsets. That is what we’ll be working on – that’s where we’ll find our leads. I am convinced that we are looking for at least one more bomb factory. I think Victoria Park is staged. Yes they manufactured something there, but they wanted us to find it, and all the things in it. Our primary objective at this stage is to find other premises that may have been used for storage or manufacture of explosives. I’m convinced that we already have the information but haven’t realised its significance. They’ll have contacted the supplier of those premises at some stage by phone. We talk to everyone they spoke to. We assess every single person with the same question in mind: ‘What was the reason this person was in contact with the bombers?’

  Jake dismissed the meeting.

  51

  Tuesday

  9 August 2005

  1012 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  He’d sorted out his team, but it still wasn’t enough. He needed to build a magnet strong enough to find the needle in the haystack. Jake needed his own analyst. One he could work alongside. One who knew their stuff inside and out. One who had an investigative police background.

  Big Simon.

  Big Simon had joined the Police Cadet corps back in January 1980, aged just seventeen. He’d said it was like being paid a full-time wage just to play football down the park. Jake had met him in the Organised Crime Group when Simon worked on the Intel unit and graded the intelligence reports before they were put on the system.

  Big Simon loved data. He was addicted to data and addicted to food. Jake knew that he could be kept fully focussed as long as he was provided with a double helping of Olympic breakfast at the local Happy Eater every morning and kept entertained with some puzzles to solve.

  Jake loved Big Simon because he was the one person guaranteed to laugh at all his jokes.

  Big Simon had been what was known as a lid once, a bobby on the beat. He’d pounded the streets of London years before Jake. Then he’d become an analyst in the days before they’d ‘civilianised the jobs’ as Jake termed it. Back in the old days, only ex-coppers became analysts, not fresh-faced university graduates. Simon had been so good and so sought after on major cases that he’d been working all hours, but he’d got fed up of the constant pace. Now twenty-two stone, he was getting on and he missed his family. He wanted stability, so he’d taken a job as a lecturer in the police training school at Hendon – until he’d been dragged into the ever-expanding clutches of Operation Theseus.

  Jake and Big Simon shared a love of malt whisky and had formed an unlikely drinking alliance when they’d worked together on organised crime. Jake knew who he needed on his team. He needed Simon to help him to sift the data, like panning for gold.

  Currently, however, Simon wasn’t even being used for his analytical skills. He was working on the witness-statement team, not with Jake’s lot, who were mainly involved in analysing the inventory items coming out of the bomb factory.

  Jake wanted to motivate Simon.

  He needed to dangle the carrot in front of him – the puzzle that was yet to be solved.

  52

  Tuesday

  9 August 2005

  1537 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Jake and Simon headed to Dot’s Café and Sandwich Bar, handily located opposite their building. Jake’s promise of a latte and mention of something top secret had been just enough to entice Simon across the road.

  Dot was a sprightly West Yorkshire lass with a dirty trucker’s laugh. She was in her sixties, but still looked pretty good for her age. She wore a striped blue pinny over her jeans and jumper, was an outrageous flirt and Jake liked her a lot. The café was tiny – room for just four tables – but the food was excellent.

  It was time to fill Simon full of frothy coffee and let him know what needed to be done.

  The blue gingham tablecloths and Dot’s cheery face, lifted their spirits as they sat down for a conspiratorial chat.

  Lattes to hand, Jake took the plunge. ‘So I’ve got an idea, but I need to get someone to help me, because I don’t know whether it’s actually possible with the software we have.’

  Jake was feeding Simon the bait. Simon’s eyes lit up.

  ‘What exactly do you want to do?’ asked Big Simon curiously.

  ‘I’ve got to be honest. What’s been going on in London is laughable. The analysts are not detectives. I’ve become frustrated with what’s going on. I want control of the phone data. That’s the only clean data we have. It’s not tainted by time or by perceptions. It’s real. It’s the only thing we have that says where those bombers were and what they were doing in the run-up to the attacks.’

  ‘Why do you need me?’

  ‘Basically there are sixty thousand lines and there might be ten pieces of information on each line.
I need to analyse six hundred thousand pieces of data and give some meaning to it. I want to make that data useable to the investigation to drive things forward. We’ve now got at least five telephone numbers for each bomber because they each had numerous personal and operational handsets. I don’t believe that the analysts down in London know where to start. They’re overwhelmed with it. They’re not being tasked properly and don’t have a clue about how to solve it themselves.’

  ‘That’s a lot of data, Jake. I can’t think of any job I’ve ever worked on that’s been even a quarter of that size! What software are they using to look at it?’ Simon sounded excited.

  ‘They’re using Excel.’

  ‘Excel? You are joking! Nothing else?’ Simon’s excitement had turned to abject horror.

  ‘Exactly,’ nodded Jake in agreement. ‘It’s not working, Si. They’re swamped. We need something to mine the data, to match it up with other parts of the investigation quickly; to get rid of the rubbish and shine a light on the important parts…’ Jake was hoping to see a spark in Simon’s eyes.

  If it was even possible, Big Simon was the man to do it. A big challenge like this was a seductive premise to an IT geek like him.

  ‘It’s certainly a challenge. The biggest I’ve ever seen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very up for it and you know I love working with you, Jake, but…’ Simon trailed off.

  ‘What?’ Jake’s mind was searching for what Simon could possibly say.

  ‘You realise, it’s highly embarrassing for me, from a personal point of view?’ said Simon, cleaning his glasses with a serviette.

  ‘Why?’ asked Jake.

  ‘Because I trained the analyst team leader in London,’ he sighed. ‘He was shit then, and he’s still a bit shit now.’

  ‘Then think of this as a chance to right some wrongs,’ smiled Jake, ‘both yours and mine. I need to know what software is available to do the job properly.’

  Simon’s ears pricked up. He was looking enthusiastic at the prospect of a puzzle coming his way. ‘To get a handle on the data, we’ll need i2.’

  Jake was aware of i2. The Met used it as a mapping tool to connect up who was in contact with whom. It was mainly used as a graphics program by them but had originally been designed for BT and was capable of manipulating massive amounts of data so that it made more sense.

  ‘I’ve never actually used it to do telephones,’ continued Simon, ‘but technically it is possible to throw a load of phone data in there and see who has been talking to whom.’

  They drank their lattes and returned over the road to the police station.

  Big Simon grabbed his laptop and Jake transferred some of the phone data onto a memory stick he’d bought especially.

  He gave it to Simon to upload, but Simon looked wholly unimpressed when he opened the files.

  ‘It’s all in Excel, on one spreadsheet, but it needs sorting. The raw data needs converting into some sort of format that the i2 system will accept.’

  Jake was none the wiser. ‘So what does that mean in layman’s terms, Si?’

  ‘Hmmmm… I’m going to need two days to tart up all the formats and kick it into shape.’

  ‘Will it be difficult?’ asked Jake.

  ‘You’re talking to one of the police’s leading i2 experts. I eat, speak and shit i2. And I teach this stuff for a living.’ He smirked. ‘If you buy me another coffee and a muffin… and a packet of crisps, it shouldn’t be a problem.’

  53

  Thursday

  11 August 2005

  1731 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Jake walked into the office, juggling a couple of tea-stained mugs full of steaming brew. ‘Any joy yet?’ he asked.

  Big Simon was sat in front of his laptop with a particularly frustrated look on his face.

  ‘I’ve sorted out the data and uploaded it to i2, but the fucking software has crashed again on my laptop! I’ve not got the right cables with me today, but we can retry it tomorrow on the office computers. They process HOLMES so they’re quite beefy. They should give us more power.’

  Friday

  12 August 2005

  1511 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  ‘Any luck, Si?’

  Jake had watched Big Simon upload the i2 software onto the West Yorkshire Police computer system from a special dongle that very morning. He’d been pacing the office ever since, wearing a hole in the carpet. Every time he’d walked past and spied the screen, the bloody egg timer had been permanently stuck on show.

  Jake didn’t like the signals he was getting. It was just like being back down in London at the Met with their diabolical computer problems. Their hardware and software would often crash and be out of use for weeks, awaiting repair. West Yorkshire had middle-of-the-road but ageing hardware. The stuff worked, in the main, but took up huge areas of the office. Cumbersome CPU towers hogged every available piece of work space and fat, unwieldy CRT monitors crowded the desks.

  The traditional police theory was that you had to choose between nice cars or good computers. It seemed to Jake that most forces went for the decent motors.

  At least West Yorkshire didn’t have a closed IT system, he thought. He’d once wasted a whole afternoon driving round Doncaster trying to print off a witness statement, only to discover that South Yorkshire Police didn’t possess a single USB port or allow external uploads. A friendly manager at the local Tesco Supermarket had come to the rescue, letting him share their systems. He’d almost pulled his hair out that day. Now he was getting déjà vu.

  ‘Oh no! Not AGAIN!’ shouted Big Simon as he banged the desk with his fist. ‘It just keeps freezing!’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ asked Jake.

  ‘The sheer amount of data in there keeps crashing the whole system. I’ve cut it down to the bare minimum but it still won’t work.’

  ‘Is there any way of getting round that?’

  ‘We could do it in chunks, analyse some data at a time, but you’ll miss the linkages between people if we do it that way.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Let me call up the software company.’

  Big Simon disappeared into a meeting room for some time.

  Jake sat for a while at his desk, staring into his cup of cooling tea, wondering dejectedly to himself if this whole idea was just a hopeless case.

  On his return, Simon looked brighter. ‘They say we need more processing power.’

  ‘And how do we get that?’ demanded Jake.

  ‘They reckon we need a new, specialist mainframe PC…’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘…with as much processing power as NASA!’

  Jake took in a big gasp of breath. ‘Jesus! Really?’ he asked, shocked.

  54

  Friday

  12 August 2005

  1722 hours

  Dudley Hill police station, Bradford, West Yorkshire

  Simon giggled. ‘Nah… I’m pulling your leg, Jake. But, look, it’s not going to be straightforward. It appears that the tinpot machines we have here are just not up to the job. I’ve spoken to several people and they all say pretty much the same thing. We have a single purpose and that’s sorting and mining a hell of a lot of data, therefore we need a machine that is superfast and efficient…’

  Jake started to yawn and look blankly at Big Simon. He couldn’t really get to grips with this techy stuff.

  Simon realised that he was losing Jake here. He changed his approach. ‘Let me rephrase it for you, Jake. What do you do if you want to make a road car go fast?’

  Computers were really not Jake’s bag, but cars and bikes – they were his babies. He brightened at this analogy. ‘To make a road car fast – you cut down on its weight, strip out all the fat, get rid of the lardy lu
xuries.’

  ‘Yes! That’s right. You get rid of the radio, the back seat, the passenger seat, the spare wheel, the electric windows, the central locking.’

  ‘We have to do all that?’ asked Jake.

  ‘We have to do all that,’ replied Big Simon. ‘It all has to go. What we need is a leaner machine. I reckon it can be done but we need a customised one – top spec, mind. But we’ll end up with a machine that is built to race.’

  ‘No good for taking the missus down the shops then,’ chuckled Jake. ‘Where do we start?’

  ‘Well, we could get one done by Amersham computers. They’re based down the road from the Bradford offices. I’ll get onto them.’

  Big Simon spent some time making several calls. Jake couldn’t catch all of the information. He reasoned that he wouldn’t have understood any of it anyway, but he was sure it was all technologically brilliant stuff. He trusted Big Simon.

  ‘What’s the damage then?’ asked Jake, as he passed Simon’s desk.

  ‘Well, we’ll need to strip out all of the things we don’t need off their top-of-the-range computer. We need the fastest, biggest processor and we’ll have to pay for them to put in the top graphics card money can buy. It will need to be designed just to process our stuff and to have nothing else running on it. No other police software at all. And I’ve asked them to put a fingerprint recognition system on it for security purposes too.’