This sparked a murmur of interest. Speedy turned from his consoles, and Kathy caught a glimpse of a pale face, jaw working on chewing gum, the screens reflecting in his large eyes.
‘We would be interested in any recent sightings of the girl. She had a casual job in the food court, at Snow White’s Pancake Parlour, and we shall be distributing photographs and a description of her shortly. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, was slight of build, and when she left home was carrying a distinctive backpack in the form of a bright green frog. Does this ring a bell with anyone?’
People shook their heads. There were so many people going through the mall.
‘Your video tapes should help us, Harry,’ Brock went on. ‘It may take a bit of a search…’
‘Ah, that would be something. But I’m afraid not.’ Jackson shook his head regretfully.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because the tapes are reused almost as soon as they’re run through, Mr Brock. Right, Speedy?’ Speedy nodded. ‘Six-hour tapes, rotated in threes or fours. That’s the way the system’s designed, with a twenty-four-hour memory, long enough to identify and recover the sort of incidents we meet. Archiving just isn’t part of our requirement. It’s not set up for the kind of situation you’re looking at.’
‘Seems a bit limited, Harry,’ Lowry said.
‘No, no. Look’-the security chief spread his hands as if to grapple with this slur-‘the vital thing when you’re designing one of these systems is to be as clear as possible about what your objectives really are. You’ve got to be ruthless about that, otherwise you just end up with tons of hardware, cameras all over the place, wide angle, infrared, pan tilt and zoom, and nothing integrating with anything else.’
Jackson’s voice had taken on the cajoling tone of a devotee, convinced, proselytising. Kathy watched Lowry, trying to figure him out as he listened impassively to the older man. There was something rather patronizing about the way he was handling Jackson, who, playing the old father-figure copper, was making more of their relationship than Lowry seemed willing to acknowledge.
‘First you got to make your DIS analysis, right? That’s deterrent, investigation and supervision, the three strengths of your CCTV system. How will you deploy them? You got to remember what security is all about, Gavin: establishing the normal, and managing the exception. So we generate the exception list, right? Things like vandalism, store pilferage, pickpockets, ram raids, break-ins, armed hold-ups -the potential list is a long one, right?’
Kathy stifled a yawn. She watched Speedy shove another stick of chewing gum in his mouth, and wondered what he’d done with the last lot. He turned away, ignoring the debate going on behind him, and stretched out his hands to work the buttons and joystick on the control panel on the table in front of him. Kathy watched the expert way he worked the panel without looking down, his eyes glued to the screens, like a kid absorbed in a video game. Perhaps it was this that had made her think him younger than he really was, for when he had turned towards them she had seen the creases of middle-aged skin, his cheek pitted with ancient acne scars.
‘So now we link the exception events to hot spots,’ Jackson was going on. ‘Like, the hot spot for a hold-up will be the cash counter or the ATM, so that’s where we need the camera. But now we discover that we’ve got far too many exception events and hot spots for our system to cover. The system has bottlenecks, see? Like one operator can only monitor six screens at max. And each screen can handle the output from sixteen cameras at max, so that’s a total of ninety-six cameras for a single operator system. That sounds a lot, but this is a very big place! So now we have to prioritise our list, and maybe go upstream for some of the items. That means, Gavin, like putting in those bollards against the ram raiders, so as to channel the risk and reduce the hot spots. You follow?’
‘I follow, Harry,’ Lowry said, sounding unimpressed. ‘And you’re saying abductions of minors weren’t on your exception list, is that it?’
‘Too many hot spots, Gavin!’ Jackson cried indignantly. ‘It could happen anywhere, see? You’d need your ninety-six cameras just to cover that one exception, not to mention the archiving system you’d need to establish a seven-day memory, say, or longer, before you realised that an abduction had in fact taken place. Because one thing you can be sure of, Mr Brock, is that no little girl was dragged kicking and screaming from this place without us knowing about it. If she went, she went willingly, and you’d never even know you’d got an exception on your hands till long after the event. You got me there?’
‘Yes, Harry, I understand,’ Brock said, weariness creeping into his voice. ‘What about your tenants? Banks, building societies, big stores… there must be dozens of CCTV systems in this place apart from yours?’
‘True, and all different. But I think you’d be lucky to find anyone now with a tape going back to Monday. But we will certainly help you find out. One thing you will discover, I can assure you, is that my team will be behind you all the way.’
‘Many thanks, Harry. As a first step, we’d like to take all your surveillance tapes away for analysis.’
‘But Mr Brock, I just explained. They’ll only go back to first thing this morning, last night at most. I thought-’
‘All the same, Harry, we’d better check them all, just to be on the safe side. Is that a problem?’
Jackson shrugged. ‘No, no problem. We’ve got plenty of new tapes we can use. That right, Speedy?’
Speedy gave a brief nod, and Jackson gave instructions to a couple of his staff to gather up the tapes in boxes.
It was only as they were leaving that Kathy noticed that Speedy’s chair had wheels. She said nothing until they were outside in the underground service road, then she asked Jackson, ‘Speedy’s handicapped, is he?’
‘Paralysed from the waist down, Kathy. Motorbike accident, about five years ago. Hence his name. I’d known him long before then. He’d been a bit of a tearaway in the old days, and when I was at West Ham he was a snout of mine for a while. I fixed him up with this job. Speedy Reynolds is living proof that our company’s disability action plan is more than just pious words.’
Kathy wondered if he was being sarcastic, but the expression on his face was all sincerity. Harry Jackson was that sort of a bloke, it seemed.
‘Hell of a job he’s got,’ Lowry murmured.
‘But it’s as if he was born to it, Gavin,’ Jackson replied. ‘They all take turns at the consoles but he’s the best camera control operator I’ve ever come across. He never loses interest or concentration. I don’t know how he does it, frankly. It would drive me barmy.’
As he took them back along the service road, Brock striding ahead, Kathy heard him say quietly to Lowry, ‘Here’s the number of my mobile, Gavin. Give me a ring direct anytime you think I might be able to help. You don’t need to go through the boss upstairs. Especially if you think you’ve spotted any little problems with the security here, know what I mean?’
Lowry nodded. ‘Rough with you, is she, Harry?’
‘She’s tougher than she looks. Often the way with the ladies these days, eh?’ Harry said, and seeing that Kathy was listening to their conversation, he chanced a wink in her direction. ‘This way, Mr Brock,’ he called out, and led them into a side service corridor, staying this time at the lower level, so that when they finally emerged through a security door into the sudden noise and bustle of the mall they found that they were close to the food court surrounding the tropical forest grove. The thinness of the barrier between the bare concrete and block service areas and the exotic glitter of the public areas was disconcerting, as if to confirm that what passed for reality here was no thicker than a skin of chrome or paint.
It was just after ten and the crowds were now thin, dispersing towards the exits and the wet night beyond. The waitresses at Snow White’s Pancake Parlour, identically dressed in laced-front Snow White costumes and incongruously perched on roller skates, were drooping with fatigue beneath their rosy-cheeked, scarlet-lipped make-up as they cleared and wiped down the tables. The manageress confirmed that Kerri Vlasich had a regular shift on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and had worked both the previous weekend, but, like the girls, could add little more.