Single Handed (Gareth Dawson Series Book 3)

by Nathan Burrows

  “No, I guess not.”

  “But if you did want to speak to someone a bit more neutral, just let me know. I can put you in touch with some people I’ve used in the past.” The two men shook hands and Gareth watched as Malcolm made his way back through the barriers and into the police station. What Gareth had said earlier to Laura was true, he realised. Malcolm was a good bloke.

  For a copper.

  70

  Malcolm looked at his own pixelated image on the screen. He ran his fingers through his hair self-consciously. In the seat beside him was Kate. As they watched, a window appeared with the face of his friend, Jon Brandon.

  “Hey, Jon,” Malcolm said. “How are you doing?”

  “Yep, all good down here,” Jon replied. “How’s things in the country?”

  “Nothing but blue skies up this way, mate, and plenty of them.”

  Pleasantries dispensed with, they soon got to the meat of the call. It took Malcolm about twenty minutes to fill Jon in on what had developed over the last few days.

  “Have you heard back from the CPS yet?” Jon asked when Malcolm had finished.

  “They want to wait until McGuire’s legal team have finished with the footage and then move to charge.”

  On the screen in front of him, Malcolm could see Jon fiddling with his phone.

  “I’m just seeing if one of my colleagues is free to join us, give me a second.” A moment later, another window popped up on the screen, and Malcolm saw a ruddy-faced man appear. As he moved, his image broke up into small blocks a couple of times.

  “Sorry, shit connection,” the new arrival said.

  “Alex, thanks for joining us,” Jon replied. “Can I introduce Detective Superintendent Malcolm Griffiths and Detective Constable Kate Hunter?”

  “Afternoon,” Alex said, raising a hand in greeting. “Alex Newcombe, I’m the NCA’s ILO for Indonesia.”

  “International Liaison Officer,” Malcolm whispered to Kate.

  Malcolm effectively had to start again with the explanations, but this time he got it down to around ten minutes. They’d been on the call for half an hour already and got virtually nothing done.

  “So, Alex,” Jon said when Malcolm had finished. “What are your thoughts?”

  “I’ve got some contacts in the area who are usually pretty happy to share without needing an ILOR.” Malcolm frowned. That one, he didn’t know. Alex must have seen the confusion on his face. “Sorry, Malcolm. International Letter of Request. They’re a nightmare to get hold of and take bloody ages.”

  “Right,” Malcolm said. “Okay.”

  “There’s no mutual legal assistance treaty between us and Indonesia either, which complicates things.” On the screen, Alex’s face broke up again for a few seconds. “But let me speak to them, see what I can tee up. I’m sure they’ll be interested in one of theirs blackmailing one of ours, and if there’re paedophiles involved, so much the better.”

  “How d’you mean, Alex?” Jon asked.

  “There’s a big operation they’ve got going on at the moment looking at international paedophile rings. If we can join the dots between this McGuire woman and a ring over there, that would be very good all round.”

  “What do you suggest?” Malcolm said.

  “I’ll have to speak to my contacts. Have you got the bank details of the account over there?”

  “Yep, they’re in the file.”

  “If the Indonesians play ball, what we might be able to do is set up a sting at the bank.”

  “What, track the account?”

  “Kind of. We can get it flagged so that when it’s accessed, it rings a bell at their end. They might even put some people on the bank if we’re really lucky.”

  “Okay, that sounds good. I’ll need to speak to the ACC to authorise the payment, though.”

  “You do that, and I’ll speak to my contacts over there. Shall we chat again in a few hours’ time?”

  Malcolm looked at his watch. It was coming up for half-past one.

  “Half three?”

  “Perfect. It’s the evening over there now, so nothing can happen at the bank until tomorrow, anyway. I might need to get one of our grown-ups to talk to one of their grown-ups as well, just to smooth the wheels, but I can get that done now.”

  “Excellent, thanks Alex,” Malcolm said.

  “Talk to you later.”

  Malcolm disconnected the call after saying goodbye to Jon and turned to Kate.

  “What do you think?” he asked, seeing the broad smile on her face.

  “I think that sounds like a great plan,” she said. “Do you think the ACC will go for it?”

  “What, wiring ten grand of taxpayer’s money to a random bank account on the other side of the world?” Her smile faltered slightly at his reply. “I might have to word it a bit differently, but if I dangle busting an international paedophile ring into the conversation, I think he’ll go for it.”

  71

  Laura looked around the inside of the technical support laboratory, surprised to see such a modern-looking workspace. The lab occupied a corner of the building, so was well lit from two sides. It was filled with desks, all of which had enormous monitors on them. Technicians were working on computers, and there was a hush to the room that made her want to whisper.

  “So,” Elizabeth said, “welcome to technical support.” She started explaining what each of the various sections in the room did with obvious pride, but Laura was soon lost when Elizabeth started getting more and more technical. They walked over to a large rack of computer towers that sat in one corner of the room, and Elizabeth began listing the specifications over the whir of the fans. She might as well have been speaking Dutch for all Laura understood, but as Elizabeth spoke, she saw Dave’s eyes get wider and wider.

  Eventually, having shown off her small empire to them both, Elizabeth led them back out of the lab and into a small room just down the corridor. A large monitor on the wall dominated it, with leads and wires feeding through the wall. There was a small table with a wireless keyboard and a trackpad with a ball on the top. The walls were decorated with eggshell foam, and when Laura realised that this was to soundproof the room, her mouth went dry.

  “Okay, you sit yourselves down there,” Elizabeth said, pointing at two chairs, “and I’ll go and tee the video up for you. I will have to stay in here with you, I’m afraid.”

  “Could I maybe grab a drink of water?” Laura asked.

  “Of course, my dear. I’ve got some bottles of mineral water in the fridge. I’ll grab them on my way back.” Elizabeth wrinkled her face in a smile at Laura and breezed out of the room.

  “She’s not like I imagined the head of technical services to look like,” Dave said with a wry smile. “I was thinking more of a man with a dome shaped bald head and a white coat.”

  “That’s a bit sexist, Dave,” Laura said, returning his smile. As she watched, his faded away. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so,” he replied.

  “I’m really nervous, to be honest.”

  “Yeah, me too. I never imagined I’d be doing something like this.”

  “Me neither.”

  Elizabeth returned a moment later and handed them both ice cold bottles of water. She sat down on a chair in the corner of the room and placed her hands on her lap.

  “Now, I’ve made up a section of the video that only shows the suspect’s face. We’ll start with that, and then if you need to, you can watch the whole clip. I must stress that we can stop at any time and if you need to leave, just go. The bathrooms are just opposite.” Elizabeth looked at them, and Laura saw the brightness in her face from earlier had disappeared. “I’ve also taken out the sound in the first section. You don’t need to hear it.”

  “Okay, thank you,” Laura replied. “But I think we will need to watch the whole video. With sound.”

  “Absolutely, if you need to, you can. Dave, I loaded your software onto our mainframe.”

  Laura glanced at Dave, r
ealising that he and Elizabeth must have discussed this at some point. Probably while she had zoned out when they started talking about how many terabytes each of the computers held.

  “Thanks, Elizabeth,” Dave replied.

  “And you have my word that every one and nought will be removed afterwards.” Elizabeth smiled at him, and when Laura saw him smiling back, she realised that whatever Elizabeth had just said had gone straight over her head. “Have you used one of those before?” Elizabeth asked him, gesturing at the track pad on the table.

  “Yes, I’ve got one just like it.” He ran his fingers over the ball appreciatively. “Not quite as nice as this one, though.”

  Elizabeth stood and crossed to the monitor, flicking the switch and turning it on. When it hummed into life, Laura could see Philip McGuire’s face on the screen. She tried not to look at the child on his lap, but couldn’t help her eyes being drawn to the poor thing.

  When Dave started the video playing, Laura took several small sips of her drink. As it progressed, to her relief, it wasn’t as bad as she had feared even though she knew what was happening just out of view of the camera. Laura couldn’t imagine what it would have been like with the sound on.

  A few seconds into the video, the camera panned to the side and Laura saw Annette standing to the side of the bed that Philip was sitting on the edge of. He said something to her, and she laughed in response, pointing at the camera with the Celtic cross on her wrist clearly visible.

  The sequence took just under ten minutes to play through. Laura watched with tears forming in her eyes as Annette spoke, giggled, laughed, and cajoled her way through it. This was a woman who, up until a day or so ago, she had considered as a friend. Wordlessly, Elizabeth handed Laura a tissue when the video stopped.

  “It’s quite compressed, isn’t it?” Dave said to Elizabeth.

  “Yes, it’s not the best quality.”

  “And what have you run it through so far?”

  “The usual suspects.”

  “Including Xception net?”

  “Of course. That was the first one we tried.”

  “Okay, can I run it through my software now?”

  Elizabeth got to her feet and walked over to the keyboard. She tapped a couple of keys and Laura saw the video replaying frame by frame, now cropped in on Annette’s face.

  “What’s it doing?” Elizabeth asked Dave.

  “It uses a pre-trained ResNet 18 model on ImageNet, but I’ve unfrozen the weights to be fine-tuned.”

  “Wow,” Elizabeth replied. Whatever Dave had just said had obviously impressed her. “So, no convolutional layers on the typical sets?”

  “Nope,” Dave said. “That’s the beauty of the algorithm.”

  Laura raised the bottle to her lip again, watching as the video inched its way forward frame by frame. When Dave jumped in his chair, she dropped the bottle on the floor.

  “There, there!” he shouted, fiddling with the trackpad. “Did you see that? Hang on.” Laura was trying to mop up the spilt water with the tissues that Elizabeth had given her, but when she realised that neither Elizabeth nor Dave had noticed her drop it, she stopped. “Can you enhance that frame, Elizabeth? Maybe drop the contrast a bit?”

  Laura wasn’t sure what was going on as Elizabeth’s fingers flew across the keyboard.

  “Bloody hell, Dave,” Elizabeth said, her eyes flicking between the keyboard and the screen. “That is absolutely genius. Can you see that, Laura?”

  Laura peered at the screen, which was now showing a closeup of Annette’s face.

  “Can I see what?”

  When Elizabeth explained what they were looking at on the screen, Laura almost dropped her bottle again.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered as she stared at the screen.

  72

  Ronnie looked at the screen and raised his hand with his fist clenched.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” He punctuated each ‘yes’ by pumping his arm in the air, not caring about the looks that the other customers in the Internet cafe gave him.

  He was looking at his bank balance which had, in the last few moments, increased by ten thousand pounds. The bitch had come through, after all. Ronnie closed the window down and got to his feet even though he still had over an hour left on the terminal.

  Ronnie walked out into the balmy night, looking around him as he did so. He decided to walk back to his apartment even though it would take him over an hour to get there. He wanted to make the most of his last night in Bali.

  First thing in the morning, he would go to the bank to get his hard-earned cash. Then he would visit the little snake of a policeman and, once he had paid him off, he was going to get a taxi to the airport and get on the next flight to the Philippines.

  Before he had checked his balance, Ronnie had looked at his Protonmail account. He had one e-mail—a threatening message from a chap in Chester who wanted to know who the fuck Ronnie thought he was. Ronnie chuckled as he imagined the man—a middle-aged headmaster of all people—opening his e-mails to find a photograph of himself and one of his pupils. He liked it when his marks went on the offensive so early on in the negotiations as it usually meant a better pay-out in the end.

  Ronnie wandered through the streets of Bali, soaking up the atmosphere as he did so. This time tomorrow, all being well, he would either be at his destination or well on his way to it. As he walked, he thought about the photographs of the Philippines that he had been looking at earlier on. Ronnie had been thinking about settling in Manila, but after he’d posted a few questions about the area on one of the forums he visited, he’d decided on a place called Cebu City instead. Looking at real estate agent websites, he would be able to rent a small apartment there for a couple of hundred pounds a month. Most importantly, the area was a hot spot for people like Ronnie with plenty of entertainment available. It also wasn’t particularly well policed which, given what had happened to him in Bali, was very important. Once bitten, twice shy.

  When he got back to his apartment, Ronnie whistled to himself as he packed his suitcase. He didn’t have much to pack into it, so it didn’t take him too long. He lifted it up to check the weight, hoping that he might be able to shave a few pounds off the airfare the next day by not having to put it in the hold.

  Deciding that he could probably get away with it, Ronnie got undressed, carefully folding his clothes to wear them again in the morning. He showered and then, after one last look around his apartment to make sure he’d got everything, he lay down on the bed and tried to sleep.

  73

  “What the hell,” Gareth said, looking at Dave and Laura’s excited faces, “is a ‘deep fake’?”

  “You’ll have to Google it, boss,” Dave replied. “Just put in ‘Daisy Ridley deep fake’ and see what comes up.” Gareth did as instructed and whistled.

  “Oh, my word,” he said. “Is that really her?”

  “No,” Dave replied. “That’s the whole point. A deep fake is where someone’s face is digitally put over the top of someone else’s.”

  “But it looks so real,” Gareth said, peering at his phone.

  “It’s ridiculously real. You need a monstrous computer to be able to do it, but there’s an entire industry based on it.” Dave glanced at Laura for a second. “Mostly for porn.”

  “So the video of Annette?”

  “Isn’t Annette. Just her face superimposed on someone else. They even added the tattoo on her wrist.”

  “Bloody hell, I had no idea you could do that,” Gareth was still watching the video on his phone, “and make it so realistic.”

  “When it’s done well, it’s almost impossible to detect. Indistinguishable to the naked eye, and even to computers. But I’ve written some software that helps.”

  “I’d never heard of it either, Gareth,” Laura said, peering at his phone over his shoulder. “Turn that off, you pervert.”

  Gareth did as instructed and turned to Dave.

  “This software of yours, it discredits the video o
f Annette?”

  “Completely.”

  “You can actually see the edges of the original images,” Laura said, laughing. “Once Dave’s software did its thing. On Annette’s face and the tattoo.”

  “And Philip?”

  “No,” Laura replied, her smile vanishing in a split-second. “That’s definitely him.”

  “I did run that to be on the safe side, boss,” Dave said. “Just in case.”

  Gareth looked up when he heard his name being called to see Malcolm coming down the steps of the police station. He was grinning broadly as he walked over, and he slapped Dave on the back as he reached them.

  “Well, Dave,” Malcolm said, “I think the very least your boss can do for you is give you a bonus at the end of the month.”

  “I think that’ll be the least of Gareth’s problems, Malcolm,” Laura said, laughing. “His biggest one is going to be stopping Elizabeth from recruiting Dave.”

  “Yes, she’s quite excited, isn’t she?” Malcolm said. “Dave, in all seriousness, you need to have a chat with her about that software you’ve written at some point.”

  “Did you write that on my time, Dave?” Gareth asked. “Because if you did, it belongs to the company, not to you.”

  “I’ll have to speak to my legal advisor about that, Gareth,” Dave said, grinning at Laura, “but I think she’ll be a tough nut to crack.”

  “So, what’s happening with Annette?” Gareth asked Malcolm. “Are you releasing her?”

  “I’m just waiting for the nod from the CPS. They’ve got their tech team looking at Dave’s version of the video section. As soon as they’ve confirmed that it’s one of these deep fake neural things, then we’ve got nothing on her.”

  “I knew it,” Gareth said, more to himself than anyone else. “I bloody knew it.”

  “It’ll probably be a few hours, Gareth,” Malcolm said. “I’ll run her home when we’ve released her if you want?”