The Book of Extraordinary Amateur Sleuth and Private Eye Stories

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “You mean adding stuff that wasn’t in the original image?”

  “That’s right. But it’s data that would have been there if the equipment had been able to capture it. You can see so much more in this photo now. You can see her. Katie.”

  Malik sat back in her plastic chair. “So let me get this straight. You’ve come here with a not-very-good photograph of a scene where a girl might have been abducted fifteen years ago, with information added to the photo by experimental software–”

  “It’s not experimental. It’s commercially available.”

  “It’s still making shit up.”

  Danny opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself. Her tone had been sharp, like a slap. He wasn’t sure how much he could take of this. Her. The police station. The interview room. It was opening up too many damaging memories…

  “It’s her,” he said softly, and Malik looked at him as if she’d realized something had changed. The air of defeat about him, the slump of his shoulders. “I thought it might help,” he said. “It shows she was there.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Reeves.” Kindness in her voice, almost as damaging as the sharp tone of moments before. “I know you’re trying to help. But this is an old case, and it’s not clear what your… enhanced image adds. May I keep it, though? Thanks. I’ll look at the case file, talk to a couple of people. But now…”

  “I know. I didn’t think…”

  “Here’s my card. My number. In case anything else comes up.”

  He took the card, but he didn’t believe she meant it. She was just going through the motions and hoping he wasn’t a crank who would call her ten times a day from this point on.

  Later, standing outside in the sun. The weather was unseasonably warm, much like that day fifteen years ago.

  He was in the park, only a few minutes’ walk from the promenade where he’d taken that photo.

  He didn’t know how he’d got here.

  So much of the day was a blur. Absences and blanks.

  The girl, Katie Sellers. He’d referred to her as the missing girl, but everyone knew she must be dead. No trace of her in fifteen years. Until now. His photograph. Surely that must tell them something new?

  He’d felt close to exploding in there. Cracking up.

  He’d never been good with pressure.

  Not since that week, fifteen years ago. The series of events that had shaped his life ever since.

  He found himself wandering along the promenade, finding the precise spot where he’d stood to take that picture. He remembered being pleased with the composition, believing he’d captured something insightful in the arrangement of the young couple against the seaside backdrop. And being disappointed when the slides had come back from the lab, the focus just a little bit off.

  Nowadays, when everything was digital and autofocus, results were instant, and any mistakes like that could be rectified on the spot, but fifteen years ago the old technology had still been central to any photography student’s work.

  He went home. He wouldn’t gain anything by standing out here like a madman.

  ***

  That evening he sat reading in the living room that doubled as his work space, one end of the room taken over by desk and computer, and storage for all his gear.

  A heavy, repeated thumping on the door of his ground-floor flat made him jump, his heart racing, his breath catching in his throat.

  Before he’d even reached the door, he heard her shouting. DS Malik.

  “Daniel Reeves? It’s DS Malik. Please open the door.”

  He did so, and immediately she had a foot inside before she said, “Mind if we come in?”

  He had to step back. He had no choice, or she’d have barreled into him. The DS was followed into the flat by two uniformed officers.

  “What… What’s happening? What have you found?”

  Malik turned, fixing him with a stare that would have intimidated the most hardened criminal. “You,” she said. “We’ve found you.” And then she turned and walked through into the living room where Danny had been sitting quietly moments before.

  “Mind if we look around?” she asked.

  They already were. While Malik flicked through the papers and prints spread across Danny’s desk, one of the uniformed men was opening cupboards.

  “Please be careful,” said Danny. “That kit’s expensive.” Then: “What do you mean, you’ve found me?”

  Malik fixed him with that look again, and he felt himself shrinking inside. Too many bad memories being stirred.

  “I did a little digging,” she said. “I was curious. When I saw you earlier I didn’t realize how close you’d been to the original investigation.”

  Why had he done this? Opened it all up again.

  “You were a witness at the scene where Katie Sellers was last seen, although your statement said you didn’t actually see anything. You came forward with photographs that didn’t help. You hassled the parents for pictures and interviews until Katie’s father lodged a complaint with us. You started hanging around the station and press briefings, asking questions, wasting police time.”

  “I was a…a photography student with an interest in photojournalism.” He was starting to stutter. He hated himself at times like this. “I was looking for a story, a…a break.”

  “There’s a well-known pattern,” Malik told him. “It’s where the guilty party inserts himself into the investigation—claims to be a witness, or helps with searches, or whatever. They get off on it. It’s part of the thrill. It’s all there in the case file: you were an almost textbook example of someone inserting himself into a police investigation.”

  “I was young and pushy,” said Danny. “I wanted to make a name for myself.” The only thing he’d been guilty of, though, was crass insensitivity, shoving his lens in the faces of the police and traumatized relatives of the missing girl.

  Then he paused, his brain finally starting to catch up. “But…but why are you here? What’s going on?”

  “I’m curious,” said Malik. How had she come to be standing so close to him, squaring up to him like this? “You did this fifteen years ago. You badgered DI Carver with your photos and your questions, to the extent that we have more notes in the file about you than we do about anyone else outside the family. But why now? Why did you march into the station this afternoon and start it up all over again? What are you trying to stir up? Or, worse, what else might you have done that we’re not yet aware of? A cynic might think this is your way of taunting us with something, maybe something we don’t yet know about.”

  He’d only been trying to help. He’d seen the girl. They should have wanted to know something like that.

  He said nothing. He didn’t trust his stuttering voice. And he knew he would only make things worse. Just as he had fifteen years ago.

  He couldn’t even remember the point back then when he’d realized he’d gone from witness to suspect. But he remembered very clearly the day he’d been waiting outside the station and two uniformed men had seized him and half-dragged him inside. He remembered what had seemed like hours of intensive questioning, and the night at the station. The humiliation and fear.

  And the walk down the steps the next day, released without charge. The looks, the chattering clicks of camera shutters. And the interminable limbo as the case dragged on, as Katie failed to be found, the cloud of suspicion hanging over him.

  These things shape you. They change who you are and what you might become.

  They make you into what Danny Reeves had become.

  “Are you going to arrest me?” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “And if so, on what grounds?”

  “Just give me something,” said Malik. “Anything. Consider this a calling card. One that’s a little more substantial than the one I gave you earlier. I’m aware of you now, Reeves. I know who you are.
And I’ll be watching.”

  Moments later they were gone.

  Danny looked around the flat—for a sign, for anything that would confirm this had all just happened and he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Then he rushed through to the bathroom to be sick.

  ***

  He tried to get on with normal life, whatever that was.

  The next day he showed up for his shift at college, despite the anxiety bubbling away beneath the surface of everything he did. He had a part-time job behind the scenes, helping run the Art Department’s photo labs and maintain the equipment. He could have got away with calling in sick, but he knew that hiding from the world never did any good. That was why he still lived in this town, fifteen years on, despite the whispers and slander of that time.

  That evening, he called up the scans of the old slides in Adobe Lightroom and studied them again. He zoomed in on the enhanced features of the little girl. She was the spitting image of the pictures the police had released of Katie Sellers. How could DS Malik not see that?

  Methodically, he dragged the magnified view across every face in the picture, as if he might suddenly see something in an expression that he had missed before.

  He had other scans from that day, but only three that showed the girl, and none that showed her as clearly as this one.

  He lost track of time, and it was midnight before he realized how much his eyes and head ached, and he forced himself to stop.

  The next morning he’d planned a sunrise shoot at the beach, but when his alarm went off the weather apps didn’t look promising, so he allowed himself to sleep in.

  When he eventually rose, the headache had shifted, and he decided to head down to Rose’s Cafe for a full English breakfast, and when he opened his front door, it was just as DS Malik had her fist raised to knock.

  Both of them jumped back, startled.

  “I–”

  “Sorry, I…” Malik smiled awkwardly, then started again. “I was just about to knock.”

  She really did like to state the obvious. Danny said nothing.

  What could she want now? Was she hoping to intimidate him into something? He struggled to work out his feelings, lying somewhere between anger and abject fear.

  “Sorry,” she said again. There was something different about her manner today. “Mr. Reeves,” she said. Polite. Cautious. “Do you have a minute?”

  Was she doing some bizarre kind of good-cop-bad-cop thing all on her own?

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Yes.” Again, something in her tone made him pause.

  “What is it?” he asked. Then he stepped back to let her in.

  She stopped in the cramped hallway. “I spoke to my DI yesterday. Stephen Welham. He worked on the Sellers case. He remembers you. He asked me to go over the case notes again and see if I can come up with anything.”

  “A cold case.”

  Malik nodded. “I’ve never worked on anything this old before. I don’t know what he expects. There’s really nothing to go on, not even any evidence of a crime.”

  “The girl went missing.”

  “I know. But we don’t know how, or why. It could have been a tragic accident, her body washed out to sea. I’ve been looking to see if there might be any ties with other cases from over the years, but with so little to go on…”

  “Why are you telling me this?” It was weird, the abrupt shift from hostility to this.

  “DI Welham asked if you might be able to help.”

  “Help with your inquiries?” He wasn’t able to keep the sneer from his voice.

  “Not like that. I told him what you’d done with the photograph. He was interested. There are other photos in the case file. He wondered if you might be able to do the same with them. Enhance them, whatever it is you do.”

  A short time later, they sat at Danny’s big work table, a wide area where he could spread out prints and equipment as needed. Now they had two mugs of steaming tea, and Malik had spread out the contents of a folder across the surface.

  Danny positioned a bright work lamp and leaned over the images. Some of them were pictures he was sure he’d seen from the newspapers—the parents at a press conference with the police officers working the case. He recognized the heavily mustached features of DI Carver, sitting next to the parents at the press conference, and there were other photos from that gathering. He remembered it well, the anguished atmosphere as the estranged parents took turns to plead for their daughter’s safety. He’d taken some powerful images that day, which he could add to this selection for analysis.

  There was also a photofit composite image and an artist’s impression of a suspect. “Who’s this?” Danny asked. “Why did they do a photofit of this man?”

  “I can’t disclose the details,” said Malik. “Sorry. But you don’t need to know any of that; we just want you to do your magic with the photos and see if anything useful is revealed.”

  Danny sensed that Malik was treading a very careful path. She clearly didn’t like disclosing even this much to someone who could cause her all kinds of problems if he chose to. Unprofessional conduct. Inappropriate disclosure of confidential details of a case.

  It still broke his heart that people didn’t trust him.

  The other pictures were ones he hadn’t seen before. Mostly six-by-fours of the same beach scene he’d photographed that day.

  “There was an appeal,” Malik explained, as if Danny would have forgotten. “Anyone who’d taken photographs at the beach that day.”

  He spread those photos out more evenly, checking each in turn. Smiling faces. Innocent fun. Kids in swimsuits. Grandparents with cones from Mr. Whippy.

  Then one that stopped him in his tracks. He recognized this one. A pixelated picture of mother and daughter. Mrs. Sellers and Katie. This one had been in the newspapers. The last picture together.

  “Who took this?” He knew Rachel Sellers had been alone with her daughter that day at the beach.

  Malik hesitated, as if weighing up how much to disclose, then said, “Just a passing stranger.” She prodded at the photofit. “This guy. DI Welham wondered if he might show up in any of the other pictures once you’d enhanced them. See if he shows up anywhere—at the beach, or even at the press conference.”

  “Inserting himself into the investigation.” That came out far more sarcastically than he’d intended.

  “It happens,” said Malik. “That press event was open to the public, a general appeal for information. The guilty party—if there actually was one—might easily have attended, either for thrills or just to keep up to speed with the investigation.”

  Danny looked again at the array of pictures. So many people, most of them indistinct in the background. Now he understood Malik’s request. If he could make those figures recognizable, maybe they could be matched to the photofit or to any other known suspects.

  And it wasn’t just the suspect, it was Katie, too. If the little girl had shown up in his photograph, then maybe she would show up in others, and if she did, maybe she would not be alone.

  “Can you do anything with these?”

  Danny didn’t answer, too preoccupied. He’d already picked up the mother and daughter photograph and was studying the blurry people in the background under a magnifier. Was one of these the culprit, just lurking, waiting for his chance? Danny turned to his flatbed scanner, put the picture in face down and closed the lid.

  “It’s a slow process,” he said. “I’m not saying that to get rid of you. You can stay as long as you like. The scanning’s quick, but the processing takes forever, even on a fast computer like this. The software runs millions of operations on every scanned pixel and its relationship with the pixels around it. It’s not exactly magic, but with the right image it can recover a hell of a lot of obscured information.”

  “I appreciate this,” said Malik. She looked a
way, then back at him. “Particularly after… well…”

  Danny shrugged. He understood that she might feel awkward, but this was normal for him. Suspicion was a constant in his life.

  “I only ever wanted to help,” he said.

  Malik said nothing, just watched as Danny set the first scan going and the preview appeared on one of the wide screens on the side desk.

  “Is it okay if I leave those with you?” She indicated the array of pictures on the viewing table. “Will you keep them safe? This isn’t exactly conventional.”

  “You must use outside consultants all the time.”

  “I guess.”

  “But usually ones you trust.”

  At least she had the decency to look awkward at that.

  ***

  Danny worked through the night. It wasn’t deliberate, he just got caught up in what he was doing. Scanning the prints one by one. Loading them into Lightroom for cropping, and for basic exposure and color balance tweaks. Then putting the scans through the Topaz AI image-processing software, the stage that took the longest as every element of the image was analyzed, assessed, refined.

  He did the mother and daughter picture first, then studied it closely as he set the next one processing.

  The refined image on screen was so much clearer than the print before him. So much more poignant because of that: he could see the expressions more clearly, the carefree laugh of the small girl, the tired, perhaps a little wary, smile of the mother.

  He knew the focus of Malik’s interest was the man who’d taken that picture, although Danny suspected he was just another innocent caught up in the tragedy—an act of kindness, an offer to take a photo of mother and daughter at the seaside, and now that unwitting stranger was unknowingly the focus of a police investigation.

  Danny studied the people in the background. So much sharper now. Several of them must certainly be identifiable to anyone who knew them. On his second screen, he called up his own enhanced photo of the beach that day, comparing figures, faces, but he couldn’t be sure that anyone other than Katie appeared in both images.