When I'm away, I use that facility as often as I can, from my laptop, or from internet cafes or hotels, or just from whatever's available, for the sheer pleasure of seeing Susie's face and hearing her voice. I had tried to get my Dad to set himself up with the same facility, but he had always resolutely claimed computer illiteracy. All his appointment books and practice records are kept as they've always been, manually.
I switched my PC on and waited for it to boot up: it didn't take long.
"Let's see your disk," I said as we waited. Morrow handed it over, in its clear plastic case, just as Ricky Ross joined us.
"I told you he'd have all this gear, Ron. He's a boy for his toys, is our Oz."
"This is no toy, sunshine," I told him. I sat down at my keyboard, opened an internet search engine and keyed in three words: "Richard Ross Security." Inside five seconds a list of websites flashed up on screen, the first in a list of several hundred thousand. Ricky's consultancy firm was at the top of the list. Next, I keyed in my own name; there were just over thirty thousand hits, my own website, set up in the US by Roscoe Brown, at the top of the list.
"Happily," I said, 'you can also watch movies on it. Let's look at some of mine."
I took Morrow's disk from its container, reached down and slipped it into the drive of my computer tower, in the foot well of the desk. A window opened up, showing a list of files and a folder called 'stills'.
I clicked on it and a second list appeared, files with the suffix 'jpeg'. I hit the first one on the list and it opened, a photograph filling half of the screen.
This was not a reaction shot. Whoever the photographer was, he had hit his motor drive and been lucky; the paint was in mid-air, heading for Jay and me, as I put myself in Susie's way, and my minder put himself in mine. I looked at the crowd; there was a glimpse of an outstretched arm emerging from a throng of people, some of whose mouths were beginning to drop open as they realised what was happening.
"That one's no use," said Ronnie. "This is the only really clear one."
He reached over, took my mouse and clicked on an icon half-way down the list; a new image formed on screen in an instant. This time a face could be seen behind the outstretched arm, but the photograph seemed to have been blown up so much that it was grainy and unrecognisable.
I peered at it, but it told me only one thing. "It's a woman, isn't it?"
"Correct," Detective Sergeant Morrow concurred. "Any ideas?"
I looked back at him, over my shoulder. "You must be joking. That could be my sister and I still wouldn't recognise her from that. Can't we look at it from a shorter perspective?"
"That's the best we can do with it. It was taken on a telephoto lens."
He moved the mouse again. "Let's look at the video clips."
We had to wait for a few more seconds for the Windows Media Player software to open and load up. "This is BBC," Ronnie murmured, as the clip began to run. A ribbon at the foot of the screen within my screen told me that it was twenty seconds' worth. I looked and there we were, Susie and Oz, she sparkling in her designer dress, he smiling and waving to the crowd. We moved sedately along the red carpet, Jay Yuille a pace behind, and then it happened. I saw myself react as the paint was chucked, turning instinctively to cover Susie. I saw Jay do his job by putting himself in the way of the threat. I had the feeling that if it had been a bullet, or flying acid, he would have done exactly the same thing.
I was so busy looking at myself that I didn't pay any attention to the crowd. So I stopped the clip, reset it, and started again. This time I did as I was supposed to; this time I was staring intently at the people lined behind the barrier as the paint began to fly. As it did, I clicked on the pause sign and froze the image. The camera angle gave me a good view of the spectators, I looked at their faces one by one, but saw only shock begin to register in their expressions as they began to realise what was happening. Then I saw the arm again, outstretched as it had been in the still shot. I looked for the face behind it, but it was hidden from my sight by those in front. I hit the play button again and let the clip run on to its conclusion. The arm had been withdrawing. It disappeared into the throng, there was movement and then the clip ended.
I went to the ribbon and scrolled back, letting it run again, but looking at the timer and stopping it once more, a couple of seconds earlier this time. The view was different: this time the paint was still in the can. The chucker had it held to her shoulder like a shot putter about to release. She was leaning forward and her face was in shot; it was indistinct, but I could see her. I went into the Media Player menu and found zoom, then blew the image up to double size. That still wasn't definitive, so I went to full screen and rolled the clip again, starting from scratch and pausing at the exact moment I wanted. This time the shot was as big as I could make it, but that was big enough. I could see the face clearly in the crowd, eyes wide and angry as she steadied herself to throw. On the keyboard, I hit Control and "P' simultaneously. The high-speed, high-definition colour printer that Susie and I share made its usual preliminary clicks and hums on its table by the side of the desk, then buzzed as it set to work. Inside half a minute, a photo-quality version of the image on screen was complete.
I picked it up from the tray and handed it to Morrow. "There you are,"
I said. "That's as good as you're going to get."
"And?" he exclaimed, impatiently.
"And I can't identify her. Sorry."
The young sergeant's face fell. "Bugger," he muttered.
"Life is real and life is earnest, Ronnie," I told him. "It's very rare that we get a ride for free."
"I know," he conceded, with a nod to my homespun philosophy. "I was just hoping this would be one of those times. Looks like we'll have to do it the hard way after all."
"What for?" I asked.
"What do you mean?" Ricky Ross shot back, sharply.
"You know what I mean. Unless Ron here gets very lucky and gets a print match off the tin…" Morrow shook his head, dolefully '… or that face turns out to be well known to the police…" The detective looked at the printout and shook his head once again,"… tracing her is going to be bloody difficult, and costly in terms of manpower and everything else. Is it worth it?"
My friend gave me a strange look. "Are you telling me this was a stunt?" he asked.
"Of course I'm bloody not! If it was, then I didn't know about it. Do you fancy asking Miles if he set it up just to make sure that we got on the front pages of the tabloids?" Ricky didn't need to answer that one. "No. So all that I'm saying is this. If you decide to drop it, Ronnie, Susie and I will understand."
The young DS shrugged his shoulders. "Fair enough. I'll tell my boss that when I report back. It may well go that way."
I ejected his disk from the computer and handed it back to him. In doing so I glanced at my watch; it was just after midday. "Would you guys like some lunch before you head back?" I asked. "It's no bother.
It's my turn to make it today. Lucky for you, for one thing they did not teach Jay in the army was how to cook."
Ricky grinned. "Next time I'll fix you up with someone from the Catering Corps. Thanks for the offer, Oz, but I said I'd get the boy here back for two o'clock. I'm impressed, though. You still actually do your own cooking?"
"Sure we do. We food-shop on-line at Tesco, but we fix it up ourselves. It gives us the illusion that we're still real people."