The Pinocchio Brief

by Silver Abi

  “Yes please. White no sugar,” Judith answered, tapping her hand on the table in her irritation at his suggestion that there could have possibly been anything in the film which she had missed first time around.

  But there was no point falling out before she had the lowdown on his studies. And there had been a lot to take in; scientific background, oblique references to “research” and the quirky “volunteers” like the bearded Peter. It was possible she had been distracted by trivia and failed to notice some of the weightier points.

  As it turned out, Greg was right. Once Judith became more familiar with the contents of the film, she could really focus on the faces and features of the people on screen and examine their movements. She watched Peter’s performance twice before the coffee arrived and, when Greg entered, he found her, chin on hands, mouth slightly open, eyes narrow, gazing at the screen. She reached out to grab the steaming mug without averting her gaze, and took a large gulp.

  “Hmm. Wow. That’s good coffee.” She left off scrutinising the screen momentarily and turned her attention to Greg. A cheap Swatch adorned his left wrist, his hands were calloused and red, his nails were clean but cracked and broken; Martin’s were always perfectly manicured and he was never without one of his three Rolex watches. “I am very fussy about my coffee. You might have anticipated that, but this is just perfect,” she cooed. “Mm! Were you a barista in another life?” She set the mug down reluctantly and returned her attention to the screen. “How do I slow him down, our friend Peter, that is? How do I watch him in slooooow motion?”

  Greg deposited his own coffee on the window seat and leaned forward, indicating which controls would move Peter from normal time into Pinocchio detection mode. He remained behind Judith as the film played super-slow, Peter’s words impossibly distorted now they were elongated to many times their normal length. He knew the script well enough to interpret which answers were which, but marvelled at how quickly Judith appeared to pick things up. Throughout the performance she made sporadic notes, periodically stopping and re-starting the film, but she seemed to have almost perfect recall of Peter’s answers. When it was finished she leaned back, rubbed her eyes and checked her watch.

  “Look Greg, tell me, did Pinocchio definitely analyse all Peter’s answers correctly?”

  “You think I lied at my lecture?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just need to understand more.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “And the others? How many people were interviewed in this way?”

  “About 100,” he said. Greg stood up and took a couple of steps back, knowing this was not an impressive figure but accepting that he should be candid if he wanted to enlist Judith’s help. Judith rolled her eyes once and allowed her mouth to open and close once before continuing.

  “All correct too?”

  Greg nodded solemnly.

  “And did you ever instruct the volunteers to try to lie to every question?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “I’m not sure. I suppose I’m interested in the viability of the study.”

  “The Manchester team conducted the research with Peter and the others, not me. He was the most willing, so, apparently, they did ask him and a couple of others, in later tests, to do their best to lie to all the answers.”

  “And?”

  “They couldn’t do it. The best results were around 70%, I am told. And that was with volunteers who repeatedly worked on the project.”

  “And how did you become involved?”

  “The Manchester team ran out of money and then there was a bust-up between the owners about where to go next. So, well, that’s when I bought them out.”

  “I see. What precisely did you buy?”

  “The patent is mine and all rights to it. There are issues about the name but I’m working on those and all the background info is mine. I had it all documented by lawyers.”

  “And how much did you pay?”

  Greg stood up straight.

  “That’s my business,” he replied stiffly.

  Judith nodded slowly. “Yes, you are right, of course, to pull me up. Forgive me. If unchallenged, I do tend to convert every conversation into the Spanish Inquisition. Force of habit, I am sorry.”

  She returned to her notepad and hastily ran her pen over her notes. “It’s just that without a much larger testing ground I don’t see how any of this can have any weight. You need to find a way of sampling a larger group without it taking years or costing millions of pounds. Let’s think how that might be done. What about a studio audience – that might work?”

  Greg retreated to the window seat and collected his coffee again. It had not taken much to interest Judith, he noted. However, whilst enlisting her help had been his intention before she arrived, now she was delivering instructions he was less certain of the wisdom of any collaboration. Couldn’t she just get on with things and ask all her questions later?

  “How do you mean?” he asked pensively.

  “Well, you have to eliminate the possibility that Pinocchio is inaccurate. In order to do so, you need a huge sample of people whose faces it has analysed correctly. In a studio audience there might be a hundred or more people at any one time, so it’s much quicker than individual interviews... Ah, but it won’t work.”

  “Why not?” Greg was not usually a details man but he suddenly found Judith’s stream of consciousness intriguing.

  “Well, first of all, you would need a camera focussed on each of them and then you would need to hear each one of them answering the questions.”

  Greg allowed his gaze to stray to the garden where a blackbird was tussling with a long and resistant worm still embedded in the grass. Of course, Judith was right. One hundred volunteers within a limited age range was a completely inadequate sample, even though he knew Pinocchio would work on everyone.

  “I was thinking less quantity and more quality,” he replied with a deliberate air of absent-mindedness. Judith swivelled around to face him.

  “Explain please,” she snapped.

  Greg winced at the harshness of her tone, but when he frowned he saw that she did not require chastising. She swallowed once and blinked heavily.

  “Forgive me, again. That came out rather harshly. Short on sleep this week, big on cross-examination.” She gave a weak smile. Greg nodded his understanding.

  “Judith, you’re right that it would take years to expand the studies and I don’t have the resources even with the new money I’ve been given. So, instead, I’ve begun to locate footage of criminals, known criminals.” He paused. What would she make of this? he wondered.

  “I see,” was Judith’s clipped response, cryptic enough to allow him to hope this time his idea may find more favour with her.

  “I’ve had to get most of it from America because they’ve been televising trials there for years. Here it’s much more difficult, although the BBC has some material in crime documentaries and, of course, we have the Marc Hunter interview, which is one of my personal favourites.”

  Greg smiled proudly. Judith understood what he meant but, even so, she could only feel revulsion at the name of the Nottingham murderer, and disinclination to spend much time in his company, even if virtually.

  “So, your plan is what precisely?”

  “I find lots of interviews of criminals, murderers, people convicted of serious offences, on the internet or maybe on various targeted websites. I play them through Pinocchio and check the results. Assuming they’re good – and they will be – I go to one of the reality TV shows, probably Big Brother, and I persuade them to use Pinocchio on their next series.”

  Judith lay down her pen. Greg was still directing his energies towards the exposure of domestic tall stories, but if the technology worked in those circumstances then, eventually, it would be available to everyone, including the police and the courts. This, of course, was her real interest.

  “I haven’t worked out all the details yet,” Greg continued soberly, “but something
like, when they get the contestants in that room where they give them challenges, they can use it there; ask some embarrassing personal question, and Pinocchio will say if they’re being truthful or not. Perhaps the public can vote on whether they think the person is telling the truth – that will be another earner for them, telephone or online voting, or we could even develop an app – and then Pinocchio will ‘reveal’ the results. What do you think?”

  Judith took another mouthful of coffee and allowed it to roll around in her mouth before swallowing.

  “This isn’t something you do in your ‘spare’ time, is it?” she asked softly.

  “No,” he laughed. “It’s pretty full on. Does that surprise you? Look, I had to take out a second mortgage on this place to buy the rights. But that’s the way all the best businesses start out, isn’t it? You have to have vision and then follow through whatever it costs.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Trust me. I’ve done this before, more than once, unfortunately, without much success. So, yes, this is what I do, at the moment, apart from the odd lecture. But, I could always use some help. I wouldn’t be able to pay you much or certainly not anything like what you are used to, but I might be able to agree to something, you know, once I sell the product. So, what do you think?”

  Greg allowed the question to hang for a moment before he continued, ensuring he was looking at the floor when he spoke. “And I can’t promise you a state of the art place to work but I’ll make the coffee and you would be here at the coal face?”

  Judith faltered at his final words. She had been carried along at waist height up until that point. But his working-class mining analogy did not appeal; what could she find in common with this flimsy, big-handed, necklace-wearing man, to allow any form of collaboration? Even his name belonged in some mediocre soap opera.

  But then, as Greg said, if his technology was going to go somewhere, and there was a small possibility it would, she would be the one, the only one, who had been there “at the cutting edge”; that was a phrase she preferred – it conjured up images of gleaming diamonds, their true value and beauty about to be revealed to the world, not black, rugged clumps of rock – although now she reflected on it, of course, they were both carbon, just in different forms. She shouldn’t underestimate the impact that might have.

  And if she stuck with Greg, then she would not only know the ins and outs of Pinocchio, but she may even be able to help shape its development. Martin often said that she was “wasted on the law” and should turn her attention to business; perhaps this was an opportunity to combine the two.

  “I don’t want money – at least, not now – and I don’t want my name associated with it,” she snapped, “and, I have to warn you that I may have to ‘dip in and out’, as they say, according to my caseload, so you really mustn’t rely on me.”

  “That’s fine. I am happy to keep all the glory for myself,” Greg replied. “And I am sure Pinocchio and I can fit in with your work schedule.”

  Ah! Judith wished he was not grinning now, feeling so pleased with himself. She allowed her fingers to hover over the keyboard and then over Peter’s mouth extended across the screen. She snatched a further cursory look at her watch.

  “Greg, I do need to go. But in terms of a modus operandi, I will collect some material along the lines you have suggested and help analyse it. Let’s begin like that and see how we go.”

  Greg continued to smile broadly.

  “But, you should be clear on this from the outset: I will need a lot of convincing that this product works. In my time, I have witnessed great whopping lies going unnoticed by a judge and jury but even so, I still believe that humans and not computers are the best evaluators of whether someone is telling the truth.”

  “That’s fine,” Greg replied glibly. “I didn’t expect to convert you on your first visit. I can wait till your second.”

  16

  JUDITH ALLOWED a week to elapse before she visited Greg again. The reality was that, even without her desire to achieve a competitive advantage over her peers, she was intrigued by Pinocchio and keen to trawl through the footage he had mentioned, to see if the software really worked, not simply for the most obvious cases but also for the more obscure.

  And she was not concerned with presentations to TV producers or reality TV. Her interest, naturally, was directed towards whether it would work for those accused of any and all offences, be they the high-level psychopath or the more low-brow career criminal. Eventually, she cleared an afternoon and evening in her diary, blocking it out as “personal” (her message to her clerks that nothing was to be inserted into that space), and messaged Greg to check he would be at home.

  Greg opened the door promptly this time, and although he was now sporting a crumpled, black T-shirt emblazoned with a logo she didn’t recognise, he was still wearing the same offensive trousers as before. Judith, in contrast, having spent the morning arguing a novel point of law in the Supreme Court, was meticulously turned out in her trademark black and white, her toes beginning to pinch after remaining upright for so long on a hard, unsprung, wooden floor.

  “Hello Judith. Do come in. Nice to see you again.”

  Judith felt this bland welcome did not require a response and stepped inside briskly with only a brief nod. Now that she was here, she was keen to crack on rather than exchange pleasantries. She had reapplied her make up on the train a little heavily, and hovered for a moment, a gaudy parrot in the neutral hallway.

  “I was planning to spend three or four hours reviewing footage,” she pronounced as they marched through the house, “and then, perhaps later this evening, you would kindly give it the Pinocchio treatment.”

  In the conservatory, Greg waved her into the same seat as before. The room was unchanged from her previous visit, sparsely furnished and functional but not uncomfortable, and the garden remained as lovely as last time. In fact, someone had clearly been working out there recently; a spade and fork were standing upright in the nearest bed, beside a newly excavated hole.

  “Yes. Whatever suits you,” he replied graciously. “I won’t disturb you if you want to get on by yourself. And I’m planning to go for a run a bit later so please just help yourself to anything you need when I’m out and then call me when you’re ready.”

  Judith unfastened her jacket and sat down.

  “Ah, but I would really appreciate some of your superlative coffee now if you have the time,” she drawled, “just to ease the process.”

  “Sure,” Greg replied over his shoulder as he ambled out of the room, his delight that he had stimulated Judith’s interest sufficiently for her to return colouring his every move.

  Judith kicked off her shoes with a groan and stretched back in her chair. She contemplated removing her tights also and allowing the sun’s warmth unfettered access to her legs but that seemed a step too far in this still-unfamiliar environment.

  It was 7.30 before she had processed sufficient material to seek Greg out, and rather than shout for him, which seemed impertinent, she decided to venture out of the conservatory in the direction he had left some hours before.

  She lingered in the kitchen and took in her surroundings. The cream wall units bore a high-gloss finish, the worktops were black granite with flecks of silver and green and the floor was tiled in a highly polished slate. A half-eaten cheese sandwich sat on top of the bar, the grater visible in the sink together with a discarded butter knife. Otherwise the kitchen was uncluttered. Greg or his wife clearly ran a very tight ship; she had considered her own kitchen tidy but this was order of the nth degree.

  Judith cast around to decide where to go next. To the right led back into the hallway and the front of the house, but as she peered in that direction she could not see any sign of Greg. Further ahead and to her left brought her to a door with steps leading down onto the garden, which was now in darkness. With no evidence of Greg’s whereabouts, she tiptoed into the lounge and stood there, hesitating, wondering what to do next.


  This room was more cosy than the kitchen, with two leather sofas facing each other either side of the fireplace. Judith allowed her hands to run across the top of the nearest; she remained unsure whether it was real leather or plastic. So many good imitations were available today. And the imposing bay window had been artfully screened by some slatted wooden shutters at ground level, to provide privacy without compromising too much on light.

  A large mirror hung on the wall above the hearth, reflecting the glare of the newly-lit streetlights back against the opposite wall. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelf, to one side, was packed tightly with books and magazines. One large hardback overhung the lowest shelf and Judith extracted it, running her fingers lightly over the cover and flicking through the pages. How to Be the World’s Best Speaker was its title, with the words “50 Tips on how to connect” written in smaller letters underneath.

  As Judith was about to replace the book, she noticed a postcard tucked inside the back cover. It showed a bird’s eye view of the Sydney Opera House. Listening out for Greg’s step all the time, she extracted the card and turned it over. It was postmarked January and written in a shaky hand. “Greg. We’re sending you this to remind you of your last visit. It was good to see you after all these years. Your mum misses you. Come again. Dad.”

  She flipped it back over and examined it carefully for any further message, but there was none. Pursing her lips, she returned it to its former position, fussing and fiddling until she was certain it was positioned exactly as she had found it, shoving the book back onto the shelf.

  As she vacillated over her next move, she became aware of the sound of water running somewhere upstairs. She stood, one hand resting on the mantelpiece, her head tilted to one side, marvelling at how difficult it was proving to achieve her objective, and then she heard loud singing emanating from above. Greg – she had to assume it was Greg – had a surprisingly true tenor voice as he belted out Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, replete with electric guitar interludes. Judith perched herself on the arm of the furthest sofa this time, with her back to the window. She closed her eyes and listened, joining in sporadically in her head; popular music had not featured hugely in her upbringing but some songs, like this one, were so prevalent that she had picked bits up, despite herself.