indispensable? ‘
‘Clearly,’ Carol said, her voice sharp. ‘Stacey, run the checks. Paula, talk to Northern Division, see where they’re up to, if they want any help from us. See if you can get them to send us any interview product. And by the way, Sam, I think you’re wrong. If this was a black kid from an estate with a single parent who took his disappearance seriously, so would we. I don’t know why you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about this, but lose it, would you?’
Sam blew out his cheeks in a sigh, but he nodded. ‘Whatever you say, guv.’
Carol put the pages to one side for later and looked round the table. ‘Anything else new?’
Stacey cleared her throat. There was a faint lift at the corners of her mouth. Carol thought it translated as the equivalent on anyone else of a shit-eating grin. ‘I’ve got something, ‘ she said.
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘The computer Sam brought in from the old Barnes house,’ Stacey said, pushing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I’ve been working it pretty hard for the past week. It’s been very instructive.’ She tapped a couple of keys on the laptop in front of her. ‘People are amazingly stupid.’
Sam leaned forward, accentuating the planes and angles of his smooth-skinned face. ‘What did you find? Come on, Stacey, show us.’
She clicked a remote pointer and the whiteboard on the wall behind her sprang into life. It showed a fragmentary list, with missing letters and words. Another click and the gaps filled with highlighted text. ‘This program predicts what’s not there,’ she said. ‘As you can see, it’s a list of steps for murdering Danuta Barnes. From smothering her to wrapping her in clingfilm to weighting her down to dumping her body in deep water.’
Paula whistled. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’re right. Amazingly stupid.’
‘That’s very lovely,’ Carol said. ‘But any decent lawyer’s going to point out that it’s circumstantial at best. That it could be a fantasy. Or the outline of a short story.’
‘It’s only circumstantial till we find Danuta Barnes’s body and compare the cause of death with what we’ve got here,’ Sam said, reluctant to let go of the possibilities of his discovery.
‘Sam’s right,’ Stacey said over the chatter that his words provoked. ‘That’s why this other file is so interesting.’ She clicked the remote again and a map of the Lake District appeared. The next click revealed a chart of Wastwater that clearly showed the relative depths of the lake.
‘You think she’s in Wastwater.’ Carol stood up and walked over to the screen.
‘I think it’s worth taking a look,’ Stacey said. ‘According to his list, he was planning on somewhere he could drive to but somewhere that was also quite remote. Wastwater fits the bill. At least, looking at the map, it looks like there’s not many houses round there.’
‘No kidding. I’ve been there,’ Paula said. ‘A bunch of us went up for a weekend break a few years ago. I don’t think we saw another living soul apart from the woman that ran the B&B. I’m all for a bit of peace and quiet, but that was bloody ridiculous.’
‘He had a kayak,’ Sam said. ‘I remember that from the original file. He could have draped her across the kayak and paddled out.’
‘Good work, Stacey,’ Carol said. ‘Sam, get on to the underwater unit up in Cumbria. Ask them to set up a search.’
Stacey raised a hand. ‘It might be worth asking the geography department at the university if they’ve got any access to ETM+.’
‘What’s that?’ Carol asked.
‘Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus. It’s a global archive of satellite photos managed by NASA and the US Geological Survey,’ Stacey said. ‘It might be helpful.’
‘They can spot a body from space?’ Paula said. ‘I thought being able to watch my home TV in another country was about as far out as it gets. But you’re telling me the geography department at Bradfield Uni can see underwater from a satellite? That’s too much, Stace. Just too much.’
Stacey rolled her eyes. ‘No, Paula. They can’t necessarily see a body. But they can zoom in so far these days you can get a lot of detail. They might be able to narrow down where we should be looking by eliminating where there definitely isn’t anything.’
‘That’s wild,’ Paula said.
‘That’s technology. There’s a geography faculty in the USA that reckons they’ve pinpointed where Osama bin Laden’s hiding by narrowing down possibilities from satellite photography, ‘ Stacey said.
‘You’re kidding,’ Paula said.
‘No, I’m not. It was a team at UCLA. First they applied geographic principles developed to predict the distribution of wildlife - distance-decay theory and island biogeographic theory—’
‘What?’ Kevin chipped in.
‘Distance-decay theory . . . OK, you start with a known place that fulfils the criteria this organism needs for survival. Like the Tora Bora caves. You draw a series of concentric circles out from there, and the further you get from the centre, the less likely you are to find those identical conditions. In other words, the further he goes from his heartlands, the more likely he is to be among people who are not sympathetic to his goals and the harder it is to hide. Island biogeographic theory is about choosing somewhere that has resources. So, if you were going to be stuck on an island, you’d rather it was the Isle of Wight than Rockall.’
‘I don’t understand where the satellites come in,’ Paula said, frowning.
‘They figured out the likely zone where Bin Laden might be, then they factored in what they know about him. His height, the fact that he needs regular dialysis so he has to be somewhere with electricity, his need for protection. And then they looked at the most detailed satellite imagery they could find and narrowed it down to three buildings in a particular town,’ Stacey said patiently.
‘So how come they’ve not found him yet?’ Kevin pointed out, not unreasonably.
