Adrian Tuttle ignored me, clicking on a series of icons and drop-down menus. The screen split in two and he pulled down more menus.
The picture we had been looking at remained on the left-hand screen. On the right he had called up our own forensic photos that had been taken on the night of the kidnapping. Adrian hadn’t been responsible for those: he had been working on the woman found in the lock-up in King’s Cross.
He flicked through the images until he found a wide-angle shot that matched the one the police had taken. If it was a spot-the-difference competition I couldn’t have circled one, let alone ten.
He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the first picture. ‘See that?’
I shrugged. ‘Just the differences of light,’ I said. ‘Ours were taken later, remember, and they had their lights set up in different positions.’
Adrian shook his head. ‘It’s not a trick of the light.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s an object. It was here in this street when the police SOCO unit were there. And it wasn’t there an hour or so later when we took our photos.’
‘So what is it, then?’ I repeated.
‘I don’t know.’
Adrian clicked on the mouse again, dragging a dotted line around the small area and releasing it to blow up the image. The picture became pixelated, even more blurred.
‘Still none the wiser, Adrian,’ I said.
‘We can do something about that,’ he replied.
He typed on his keyboard and bounced the image across to Sci in the Los Angeles headquarters.
Within minutes, a message pinged back across the Atlantic and Adrian opened the attachment. Our American associate had run the image through a powerful image-enhancement system. The kind of technology that analyses space-telescope imagery of landscapes on Mars.
What we had was the corner and a fold or two of a blanket. Dark brown and red, in a chequered or tartan pattern. One edge of the blanket was folded across but there was part of a label visible, with the letters Q and U on it.
‘Doesn’t tell us much, I’m afraid, Dan,’ said Adrian apologetically.
See, Adrian was good with the detail. He hadn’t even taken the photograph and yet he remembered the smallest discrepancy between the two images. But me? I knew a goddamned clue when I saw one!