‘What?’
‘Compare your photograph to the real thing.’
Cooper located the position that Nield had been standing by an oddly shaped outcrop of rock nearby. To the left of it on the bank was a stand of trees, and one of the ancient stumps with coins hammered into its cut surface. A money tree.
Then he held up the photo. The oddly shaped rock was there, just to the left of Nield. But the money tree wasn’t there. Behind Sean Deacon was a background of grassy bank, slightly blurred in the print. In fact, the closer he looked, the more blurred the grass seemed, as if it had melted.
He looked at Robert Nield, remembering his son’s digitally enhanced photographs, the face superimposed on the limestone cliff. It would be perfectly possible for Alex to merge two images and tinker with the background to make them look like one. It was a trick performed all the time by the professionals.
And Alex had three days to come up with this. If he’d shown Cooper the image on his computer screen in higher definition, the line between the two halves might have been more obvious. But the low-quality print-out had been enough to fool him. He had only focused on the people, not the background — just as Alex had expected him to. He knew that Cooper would fail to see the pattern of the landscape.
‘I suppose you’ve guessed where I got this from, Mr Nield,’ said Cooper.
‘Yes. My son is very talented. I did tell you that.’
‘Yes, you did. But why would he deliberately try to get you into trouble?’
Robert Nield shrugged and raised his hands, as if appealing to the river and the spires of the Twelve Apostles.
‘Who knows why teenage boys do these things? Their minds are a mystery to me.’
‘Why are you still pursuing this, Ben?’ asked DI Hitchens when Cooper reported to him at West Street.
‘I’m convinced there was someone else there,’ said Cooper.
‘Someone nearby when Emily Nield drowned. Possibly Sean Deacon.’
‘The photograph was just a prank by the teenage son, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there’s no other evidence?’
‘None of the witnesses is specific about it, but if you read between the lines in their statements…’
As soon as he said that, he knew it was a mistake. The CPS didn’t read between the lines of a statement. Nor did a judge and jury. They only read what was there, the words that had actually been said by a witness. No one read between the lines, except a police officer who’d become obsessed and was trying too hard to make a case out of nothing.
‘All right, you don’t need to tell me, sir,’ he said.
Hitchens looked relieved. ‘Thank God, Ben. I’m glad you see sense. We can’t have you going off the rails, can we? Not right now.’
‘No, sir. Not right now.’
Cooper tried a smile, and Hitchens rubbed his hands together, a sure sign that he thought the conversation was at an end.
‘Let it be then, eh? Leave the Nields in peace.’
In the CID room, Cooper tried to concentrate on something else. He’d remembered an old acquaintance who had been serving with the RAF Police until recently. Carol Parry was a local woman, who had often talked about applying to Derbyshire Constabulary for a job when she finished her time in the RAF. Derbyshire would have welcomed her with open arms — officers with her experience were vital to balance the number of new recruits who were filtering into the ranks.
But, in the end, Parry had met a man from Coventry and had applied to join West Midlands Police instead, so they could be together. She was a loss to Derbyshire. But she might still remember him.
He called her and chatted to her for a while before explaining what he wanted.
‘Okay, Ben, I’ll do some asking around. Details will be a bit hard to come by, you know — but I might get a general idea of what’s going on.’
‘That’s brilliant, Carol. I owe you one. Thanks a lot.’
Then Cooper turned his attention to the transcripts of the interviews with Michael Lowndes and his associate from the Devonshire Estate, who were now both under arrest.
Luke Irvine and Becky Hurst had done a good job with the interviews. But reading over the transcripts again, Cooper could see that there were some questions which had been leading. Irvine had almost put the answers into Lowndes’ mouth, so that he knew what he was expected to say. Awareness of that tendency in yourself came with experience.
For a moment, Cooper thought about the statements from witnesses in Dovedale. He realized that many of those individuals had been asked questions that could have influenced their subsequent memories. ‘Where were you when the girl fell into the water?’ ‘Did you see her bang her head on the stone?’ Anyone who’d been asked those questions would have no doubt that the girl had fallen, would believe that they’d actually seen the stone on which she hit her head. Careless phrasing during the interviews could have planted the images in their minds. It was called ‘verbal overshadowing’. It was a mistake to underestimate the power words had to affect the mind.
Cooper could still remember what it was like when he was a new, wet-behind-the-ears detective constable just learning the ropes. It didn’t seem all that long ago, really. But the years had passed quickly, and DC Luke Irvine was from a different generation.
His family were from West Yorkshire, some village between Huddersfield and Barns ley. Denby Dale? Wasn’t that the place they had giant pies? Irvine had once confided that his father used to work in the mining-equipment industry, but his job went when all the pits closed down. So he got a job at Rolls-Royce in Derby, and the family moved down to Derbyshire. He was only five at the time, so he didn’t remember much about Denby Dale, except for visits to his grandma. It sounded odd to Cooper. So many people seemed to be displaced. Was it all that unusual now to stay in the area where you grew up?
And Irvine had another quality that might come in useful. He was a bit of a computer geek in his spare time.
‘Well, you might call it geek language,’ said Irvine when Cooper showed him Alex Nield’s profile. ‘But some of this stuff is leetspeak.’
‘What?’
‘Leetspeak.’
‘Luke, I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘You don’t know what leetspeak is?’
‘Not a clue. And I bet the Nields haven’t either.’
‘It’s a kind of cipher that you only come across on the internet. Originally, it began with users of the old bulletin board systems in the 1980s. If you had “elite” status, you could access special chat rooms, things like that. Elite became “leet”, you see.’
‘Right.’
‘They used these mis-spellings and ASCII characters to get round text filters, so they could discuss forbidden topics. They became a sort of code. Now, young kids use it to show off how knowledgeable they are. Everyone wants to be thought of as “leet”.’
‘So it would be used to show off, and to stop outsiders understanding what you’re saying?’
‘Yeah. And to mock newbies, of course.’
‘Noobs.’
‘That’s it.’
Irvine looked at the profile again.
‘Some of it is just text language, though. Like using “u” instead of “you”, or “n” instead of “and”.’
‘Those are the parts I can get,’ said Cooper.
He scrolled down to the sentence that had disturbed him most. u were born wrong n u must die!!!!!
‘I’ve seen a lot worse than that,’ said Irvine. ‘They can get pretty nasty, these kids. The general rule is, the nastier they talk, the younger they are. How old is this kid?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘About right.’