Love You Dead

26 Wednesday 25 February

It was a bright, sunny but chilly London morning, the kind when the city looked at its most beautiful. Forensic podiatrist Haydn Kelly had only recently arrived back from a long stint in humid Asia, and it looked even more beautiful than ever to him. He had always enjoyed the long walk along Harley Street with its sternly handsome red-brick Georgian properties, something he had done for many years before he went international; he was pleased to see Old Blighty again.

A sturdily built man in his forties, he had brown hair cropped short, and a tanned, amiable face. Conservatively but elegantly dressed in a fine black suit, light blue shirt and brushed silk black tie, he sat at his desk in his spacious consulting room with two floor-to-ceiling windows at one end, staring at the fifteen video files that had just arrived in his Dropbox folder from Detective Superintendent Roy Grace.

He had a clear diary for the morning. He had recently been elected as Dean of Podiatric Surgery — his ‘charity work’ as he referred to it, as it was not a paid position but still took up a big chunk of his time and the committee’s, too, in helping Podiatry advance. With over two decades in the profession which had been so good to him, he was pleased to give something back. He had kept the morning open in order to deal with the stack of emails that he knew would be waiting. He buzzed through to reception, asking them to hold his calls for the next couple of hours, then opened the first video, which was titled ‘Park Royale West, NY, Lobby, 22.12 p.m., February 18th’.

He saw the woman that the detective superintendent had described after some moments. She was in her mid-thirties, dressed in a smart black coat and knee-high tan suede boots. She exited from a lift and strode over to the front desk, where she appeared to be checking out. After that she went out through the revolving door.

He ran the video through his Forensic Gait Analysis software, and opened the next video file. It showed an arrivals area at Washington Dulles Airport. He picked up within a few minutes the same woman he had seen in the Park Royale West, pushing a luggage trolley, and began to work his way through the rest of the files. Each covered the domestic departure gates.

After over an hour of working his software, the image froze on the gate for a 13.05 Delta flight to Atlanta. A woman walking towards the gate, wearing a grey felt trilby, dark glasses and a cream-coloured trouser suit.

Kelly perked up and took a big gulp of his black, piping-hot Colombian-blend coffee, put the footage into slow motion mode and clicked to enlarge her. Then clicked again. And again. Her image became fuzzy, and it was impossible to tell if it was the same face as the woman at the Park Royale West, and in the other photographs he’d been sent. There was very little hair visible below the hat — either she had crammed it up inside or had cropped it short.

He ran his eye down the various stats his software had thrown up. The different points of a gait match. Since he had first created Forensic Gait Analysis — the identification of a person by their gait or by features of their gait, involving assessment of whole body movements from head to toe — he had provided many expert opinions and forensic reports and had helped others do so, too. In the five years since he had developed his most recent advance of the technology, the reliability had been established beyond any possible doubt. His textbook, the first ever on the subject, had recently been published.

Every human being walked in a different way and some people were more distinctive than others. Everyone’s gait was as unique as their DNA, but the quality of the footage was a factor in reducing the accuracy; or as Kelly described it when presented with very poor quality footage, quoting the old computer maxim, ‘garbage in, garbage out’.

It was only a matter of time before he and his team successfully built more technology into the system to take account of the cheap-skate companies that deployed low-grade CCTV, and never bothered updating it, and then expected law-enforcement agencies to work miracles with footage of such a lousy quality on occasion that it was impossible to decipher a tree from a lamp post, let alone one person from another. He sometimes wondered if they had ever even heard of digital. The added time and expense of companies not having up-to-date technology was costly in more ways than one.

Even from analysis of a single foot position, the software had the capacity to pick someone out in a crowd with reasonable accuracy. When good quality footage was provided of a person actually walking, certainty of identification could be very high. The technology could help determine whether a person was or was not present at a crime scene. It not only looked for similarity, it assessed for dissimilarity, too. It could be used to seek particular aspects of a person’s gait, and the process of exclusion was a vital one.

Fortunately the quality of these images was good. The woman he was looking at was, without doubt, the same woman who had checked out of the Park Royale West.

With a very satisfied smile on his face, he picked up his phone, sat back in his leather swivel chair and called Roy Grace’s mobile number.