Capital Offence

Chapter 25

Monday 10th June

16 days left

“Bollocks...”

The engineer with the mousy ponytail muttered as he spotted a familiar face gesturing to him through the circular glass window in the heavy cubicle door. For a moment he thought of switching on the red light and pretending that there was a live junction coming up, but Forbes Macferry was already giving him a grin and a wave through the glass. As the door opened, the engineer realised that this time the journalist wasn’t alone. Pushing through the double soundproof doors behind him was a dapper little man in a grey suit. The man beamed at him and gave him a thumbs up.

“This is a friend of mine come to see that tape again,” said Macferry, handing him the VHS they had studied a few days before.

“I don’t have any new machinery since the last time,” muttered the engineer.

Macferry looked puzzled.

“To get sound out of a silent movie...”

“Nae borra!” exclaimed Macferry. “That’s where Mr Simpson here comes in.”

The wee man nodded enthusiastically, and gave another thumbs up.

The engineer looked harassed, but Macferry pressed on regardless. “Just you wait. Lace it up again, and do that thing you did to make the picture bigger.”

The engineer sighed and turned round to the AVID edit machine. He parked the tape at the point where the man walked across the football pitch, and hit play. Then he entered capture mode on the edit computer and started to digitise - to load the moving images into the computer’s memory. Every ten seconds or so the picture changed to a different view of the same scene. Whenever that happened the image rolled for a second or so before it locked on once more to the video signal.

“There’s bugger all I can do about that. It’ll probably throw the AVID all to cock. There’s no time code on a VHS so there’s nothing for the machine to sync on to.”

Macferry’s upper lip wrinkled at this profoundly uninteresting technicality.

Undeterred, the engineer went on. “I once had to sort another surveillance camera. It was just shooting three frames per second, so the sync was totally up the spout. Had to take it in one frame at a time by running it in bits. It was mental. I’ll show you in a minute how you...”

Macferry thought of the man’s imperviousness to the subtle cues of other people’s expressions and body language. Must be how he still wears his hear like that, he thought, looking at the man’s greasy domed forehead and wispy greying strands at the back, fastened in a wee girl’s elastic hair tie. Looks like his hair’s died. That’ll be why it’s sliding off the back of his head. Ho ho.

“...end up saving each frame as a ten second media file, which is a pain, ‘cos...”

“Fine, fine,” interrupted Macferry. “If that’s it all in, can you do that blow-up thing again?”

The wee man was leaning forward intently, watching the screen, as the view on the monitor was blown up to a grainy enlargement of the centre portion of the image, the figures pixellated as the individual dots making up the picture were enlarged to distinct squares. Too large and the figures became less recognisable - more abstract. But without magnification, the two men were tiny figures in the patchy grey waste of the prison football pitch.

“Right. That’ll do.  Now run it through for Duncan here.”

The engineer clicked the arrow cursor on his computer screen on a little black triangle, and the clip started to play. Macferry looked eagerly back and forward between the screen and his companion’s face. The man frowned in concentration. Occasionally his fingers fluttered unconsciously as he watched. The conversation on screen lasted for barely four minutes. The two grey figures approached, talked. At one point the prisoner laid his hand on the Prime Minister’s arm. At the end, the two men embraced briefly, but apart from that, there was more tension than movement in the body language. When it finished, Simpson stuck out his lower lip slightly and nodded reflectively.