The Bell Ringers

by Henry Porter

  ‘Good. I’ll call first thing,’ said Kilmartin and hung up.

  Now she saw a flashing blue light. A few seconds later three police cars plunged into Eyam’s drive, pulled up and disgorged several uniformed police officers. Then came two unmarked cars and three men in civilian clothes got out. One of them was Newsome. The uniformed police ran to the front door and opened it without ringing. Then through the sitting room windows she saw them seize hold of Sean Nock. There was some shouting and a tussle in which Nock threw two of the officers across the room. Without thinking, she switched off the Kilmartin phone and placed it into one of the flower pots stacked at the corner of Eyam’s vegetable patch and placed another pot on top. Then she summoned the call register on her own phone, worked her finger across the screen until she picked ‘Received Calls’ from the menu and kept pressing the screen until the number of the last call received was ringing.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said when her mother answered. ‘I need some help. Can you call Sam Calvert at Calvert-Mayne in New York, and explain that I need the best defence lawyer in England. He’ll know who that is. I think I’m about to be taken to High Castle police station. Got that?’

  ‘Yes, I’m writing it down, darling. High Castle . . . police station.’ For once Kate was grateful for her mother’s composure. ‘Will Mr Calvert be readily available?’

  ‘He has an assistant called Amy Stovall. Tell her who you are and explain it’s urgent. Look, I must go now. Thanks, Ma.’

  ‘Got it. Good luck. Call me if you can.’

  She waited in the dark watching the police race through the house, searching for her. She dialled her message service and went back to delete the voicemail from Eyam, then turned off the phone, dropped it in her pocket and walked towards the front door. Newsome turned at the sound of her crossing the gravel. ‘Kate Lockhart, I am arresting you in connection with the murder of Hugh Arthur Russell on March 13th. You will come with us.’ A woman officer took hold of her and led her to the unmarked car. Sean Nock, by now bound with blue wrist ties and sporting a gash to his eyebrow, was taken to the back of a police van.

  15

  The Edit Point

  Kilmartin arrived at the Isambard Hotel on Edgware Road at nine thirty p.m. and went to a room reserved by a New Zealand national named Owen Kennedy, having paid for it with a credit card and shown a passport in the same name. Murray Link followed him a few minutes later, having received a text with the room number. He set up a laptop on the desk while Kilmartin withdrew a couple of miniatures from the fridge and sat down on a chair beside Link.

  ‘Christ, what’s that you’re wearing, Murray?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The aftershave.’

  ‘My wife gave it to me. I’m trying it out.’

  ‘God, I’ve met yak herders who smell better,’ said Kilmartin and tipped the whisky and vodka miniatures into two glasses.

  ‘Do you want to see this, or not?’ said Link testily.

  ‘Yes, please go ahead.’

  ‘OK, so this is a right dog’s dinner,’ he said gleefully as his fingers scurried across the keyboard. ‘What do you know about camcorders, Peter?’

  ‘Very little.’

  ‘Right, well, the camcorder that made this film was a pretty sophisticated model that records not onto discs but straight onto a hard drive that can store about five hours of footage. It contains a number of interesting features that are rarely appreciated by the average punter. It stamps the film with metadata known as EXIF – Exchange Image File Format, to give its full name – hidden information which allows you to know the make and model number of the camera, the time and date the film was made, even the camera settings. This particular model is also fitted with a GPS device that tells you where the camera was when the film was made.’

  ‘Good Lord! You mean you can tell all that from a DVD that is maybe a third-generation copy?’

  ‘Absolutely, but you have got to know what you are doing.’ He clicked on an icon. ‘Now this is the part of the footage that wasn’t played at the inquest. It shows the party of tourists in the port area of Cartagena and also visiting some kind of memorial by the sea. You can see the city in the background and by the way the GPS code indicates that they were in that spot when the images were shot.’

  They watched the trio of tourists walking in the port, then standing in front of a large stone slab carved in the shape of a book. On the cover were written the words ‘Gabriel García Márquez – Relato de un Náufrago.’ The camera focused on the rest of the inscription. Kilmartin translated the whole with little difficulty. ‘Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. Who was stranded for ten days in a raft without food or water. Who was proclaimed a national hero. Kissed by beauty queens and made rich by publicity and later hated by the government and forgotten for ever.’

  ‘How can he be forgotten for ever if they set up a bloody memorial to him?’ asked Link.

  Kilmartin smiled absently and made a note in a small red book. ‘I wonder why this wasn’t shown at the inquest.’

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ said Link. ‘OK, so now we get to the main action,’ said Link. ‘I want you to notice a couple of things. The tourists are all wearing the same clothes, but there are one or two minor differences. The blonde woman with the red spotted shirt has a large plaster on her knee which does not appear in the first part of the film.’

  ‘So what? She probably hurt herself sometime later that day, before they got to the cafe where Eyam was killed.’

  Link shook his head and brought up a still of the group by the memorial and magnified a section around the woman’s left knee. Instead of a plaster, a graze could be seen, surrounded by an area of untanned skin. ‘So this sequence in the port, which was thought to have come from the morning of the bomb, was in fact shot much later – maybe two or three days later. Notice that the man is wearing different-coloured running socks with his trainers – blue not white – and the group as a whole is much more tanned than in the bomb footage.’

  ‘You’re right. What about the hidden data in the film of the cafe and the bomb going off?’

  ‘That’s the odd part. The EXIF metadata is kosher in the port and the memorial scenes – it says the filming took place on the morning of January 12th in Cartagena in conditions of extremely bright sunlight. When we come to the scene at the cafe the data has been tampered with, which is possible with a special programme, although you’ve got to know your onions. In some parts there’s no data and in others another date pops up – January 19th.’

  ‘So what’s that mean?’

  ‘Someone was screwing around, trying to remove the information about date, time and location in the film, but did a crap job. For instance, parts of the film are geo-coded for a position that is outside the city of Cartagena, by about twenty miles. I’ve checked. But that’s not everything. There’s a jump in the film, a bloody great chasm, which is obvious when you play it through. I can’t understand why no one noticed. You’ll see what I mean.’

  He ran the footage from the moment when the camera dodged from a bell tower to a balcony to settle on the three tourists drinking beer. Eyam and Detective Bautista were in the background. The whole sequence was much faster than Kilmartin remembered, but then he recollected that the coroner’s clerk had kept on starting and stopping the film. The edit point, as Link put it, came after Eyam’s exchange with the policeman and his phone call. He paid for his drink and walked across the street into the alleyway. There was a moment of stillness and then a jolt, indicating that the camera angle had been slightly altered, or the camera had dropped fractionally on its stand. Kilmartin thought that the clerk must have stopped the film at that moment, otherwise he would have seen it. The position of the detective lounging in the chair remained the same, but the people in the foreground had shifted slightly.

  ‘So this is where they cut a whole slice of time out of the film,’ said Link. ‘How long is anyone’s guess. I did some work on the watch that the man in the foreground
is wearing – I’d say we’re looking at ninety seconds to two minutes. There is no other internal evidence to give an exact time and all the hidden data is missing from this section.’

  ‘So Eyam potentially had time to get clear of the gas bomb?’

  ‘Exactly – only it wasn’t a gas bomb. If you place footage of this bomb alongside a video recording of a bomb from Iraq seven or eight years ago, the two just don’t compare. A bomb using pressurised gas containers with gas leaking into a large area set off by a core of explosive is a powerful weapon, which would have killed everyone in that street, a little like the fuel-air bombs used by the American military. The blast wave is spectacular. But this explosion was something much less devastating.’ He pulled up a still of the white van as it entered the alley and activated a graphic that lifted the van and spun it around. ‘The main explosive pod was probably laid in the middle of the back of the van in plastic bags. Around this would be a mixture of petrol, viscous oil and diesel, probably contained in drums. The petrol causes a spectacular fireball, which is followed by clouds of black smoke created by the oil and diesel. I’d guess that small charges were rigged to the doors, to the right-hand side of the chassis to flip the vehicle over and maybe even to the engine block.’ A grubby finger touched the screen at different points. ‘These were the pyrotechnics of an action movie, Peter. In fact I think the whole thing is a kind of movie set up. It looks real because most people’s experience of explosions is limited to Hollywood pyrotechnics. They don’t have access to footage of real explosions.’ He showed Kilmartin a clip of an experiment involving a pick-up vehicle and an improvised fuel-air explosion performed by the US military, in which the shock wave could be seen moving out over a very large area. There was no comparison between the two explosions.

  Kilmartin moved his chair back and stared at the wall.

  ‘David Eyam wasn’t killed in Colombia that day,’ said Link.

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure we can go that far,’ said Kilmartin.

  ‘We can,’ said Link. ‘He wasn’t trying to disappear for ever. There are too many inconsistencies in the metadata. If someone knows enough to alter the EXIF, they do it properly, but here they’ve made a complete Horlicks of it. I guess this fellow was trying to tell anyone who looked at the film properly that it was all phoney. Maybe he knew you would be that person.’

  Kilmartin shrugged. ‘Too risky – our former employers were just as likely to get hold of the film and run the tests you did.’

  ‘Not if DNA evidence established that Mr Eyam’s remains were found at the scene of this explosion. I looked up the inquest reports. DNA samples underpinned the coroner’s verdict. No one had any reason to doubt that your man had died. With DNA everyone rolls over and suspends their critical faculties.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘I’ll tell you one thing – this had to be an inside job. Someone in the coroner’s investigation fixed that DNA evidence. That’s the only way all this could have worked.’

  ‘You’re running ahead of yourself, Murray.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ He turned back to the computer and clicked on another icon. ‘I was looking at the metadata in the final seconds of the film and this is what I found in the very last image.’ The letters EYAMALIVE appeared on the screen. ‘Eyam Alive, or I am alive. Take your pick, but either way it means the same.’

  At that moment the cell phone rang in Kilmartin’s pocket. Without surprise he answered to Kate Lockhart’s voice. As he agreed to a meeting in the country the following day, he wondered how much she knew. But now his problem was the man sitting beside him. Link wasn’t stupid: he would realise he was in possession of information with a very high market value. Kilmartin regretted asking him if he or any of his colleagues had heard of SPINDRIFT because that told Link why Eyam’s faked death would matter so much to the government, or to anyone else he might try to sell it to – Eden White’s intelligence outfit, for example. His request about SPINDRIFT might contextualise what was discovered in the film and although Murray Link might not yet have reached the point in his own mind when he’d be willing to sell Kilmartin out, sooner or later he would.

  ‘And the other thing you mentioned – SPINDRIFT?’

  ‘Oh, I think we’ll leave that for now. It isn’t relevant to this and I think I’ve had enough excitement for one night,’ said Kilmartin and handed Link the outstanding part of his fee. ‘This is on the understanding that I have not only bought your technological genius, Murray, but your silence. I do not want this getting out. Do you hear?’

  Link nodded.

  ‘I mean it, Murray. I don’t want any cause to feel angry with you.’

  ‘Understood. You’re the guv’nor. You paid for all this.’

  16

  Interrogation

  Kate submitted to it all: to the media, which had been tipped off about the arrests and was waiting as the convoy of cars slowed at the rear entrance of High Castle police station, allowing cameras to be pressed to the window of the car she was in; to the humiliation of ‘the Cage’, where suspects were held; to being searched and having her clothes removed for forensic examination; to the replacement white forensic suit and black canvas shoes; the incompetence and woeful gaze of the custody officer who informed her of her rights but then did not seem to know how to fill in the computerised custody form; the universal cheerlessness of the place with its unforgiving light and the minatory tone of the notices addressed to suspects; to the wilting heat and airlessness; to the whistling of constables in distant corridors; and to the astonishing fact that she was arrested and deprived of her liberty and was for a period of one and a half hours locked in a cell with a brushed steel lavatory that smelled of urine: to all this she submitted with a cold, silent fury.

  It was in the early hours before the police doctor determined she was fit in body and mind to be interviewed and legal representation was assigned from the duty calls centre – Jim Wreston, a fresh-faced man in his late twenties with a loosened tie knot and scuffed shoes, who seemed hopelessly in awe of the police. She was taken to the interview room where Newsome was waiting with the officer she had seen overseeing the security operation in the square on the day of the funeral. His name was Tom Shap and he was a superintendent. Newsome recited a legal caution and for the tape recorder’s benefit gave their names and that of an officer of unspecified rank, referred to simply as Mr Halliday, who sat tipping the back of his chair against the wall.

  They began with her relationship with Eyam. She told Newsome again how she learned of his death, about her attendance at the inquest and the funeral, the intervening weekend and being approached by Hugh Russell in the Green Parrot cafe. She described her astonishment at his news about the will and then went on to say how Russell had told her on the following day about the theft of documents and the attack on him. Her account was clear and poised, even though her mind was still racing with the possibility that Eyam might still be alive. She worried that this vast, unconfirmed secret would communicate itself as guilt, and the one thing she needed now was for the police to let her go. But it was clear Newsome and Shap were laying the foundations for a long interrogation. Wreston sat mute beside her, occasionally glancing in her direction as if he understood the drift of the police questions, which she knew he didn’t.

  Shap, whose manner had not improved since her first encounter with him, asked about ‘the lost hours’ between Russell’s departure from Dove Cottage and the discovery of the car with his body inside at the end of the track. She was getting to know the property, she replied, thinking about what she would do with all Eyam’s possessions. She recalled phoning the office in New York and then she mentioned using the computer, which she instantly regretted.

  ‘I’ll to come to that later,’ said Shap.

  ‘In the meantime,’ said Newsome, ‘perhaps you would explain these.’ He drew some still photographs from an envelope but held them towards his chest.

  ‘You haven’t disclosed this material,’ said Wreston.

  ‘I am doing so now,’ s
aid Newsome.

  ‘Let’s get on with it. I have no objections,’ Kate said.

  He handed the photographs to Wreston.

  ‘You told us,’ said Shap, ‘that Hugh Russell informed you of the break-in at his office and the attack he suffered and that all the time you had been in the hotel.’ He laid down the four CCTV images of her standing outside Russell’s office and one of her pushing the door open. Newsome described the images for the tape recorder.

  ‘These place you at the scene of at least one crime,’ said Shap. ‘We conclude that Mr Russell didn’t see who hit him because he was struck from behind. We know you were in the building at the time of the attack, though you omitted this important fact from your story and this leads us to believe that having failed to kill him on that occasion you lured him to the cottage where your accomplice, Sean Nock, finished off the job for you.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said.

  ‘Then how do you explain your behaviour over the weekend and on the evening of the attack? One resident whose garden backs onto the alleyway known as the Cut recently installed CCTV to deal with the problem of burglars. He has film of you making your way along that alley once over the weekend and then early on Tuesday evening.’

  ‘I did go to see Mr Russell at his request,’ she said after a while.

  ‘At last we’re getting somewhere,’ said Shap unpleasantly. ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘Mr Russell asked me to take delivery of the documents.’

  ‘Why didn’t he mention this to the investigating officers when they took his statement?

  ‘Because I asked him not to.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he said the documents were sensitive. He came to Mr Eyam’s wake at the Bailey Hotel. He was flustered and said he wanted to give them to me immediately. I didn’t know what was in them of course, but I thought I should take delivery as discreetly as possible. When I got to the offices the door was open and after a few minutes I went upstairs. I was halfway up when two men attacked me. I saw very little because of the light. I was hit several times and fought back. When they left the building I continued upstairs and found Mr Russell unconscious. The safe was open. When he came round he confirmed that the documents were missing.’