Circumstantial Evidence – Ken Cooper

Sometimes I’m too nice for my own good. I start something out of the goodness of my heart, and as my mother would say “It’ll all end in tears!”

During a conversation about something else, my step daughter, Jenny, admitted that she had accidentally formatted the memory card on her digital camera. “There must have been hundreds of pictures on it”, she raged.  “Some of Jessica’s birth; some when I was pregnant with her; outings; tobogganing in the snow with Laura and Louise!” 

“Plus some video clips that the girls shot. It’s a disaster!”

The camera was a very generous present from her father. I knew it had been expensive because my friend Cathy had bought the same model and proudly demonstrated its extensive features when a group of us were on one of our long weekends away in Cornwall. Cathy lives in Bath and is not short of a denarius or two. She affirmed that she had undertaken thorough research into every digital camera available at the time, and the Canon Ixus ticked more boxes than any other. She proudly demonstrated the zoom, the video facility, and, setting the camera on a convenient ledge, the delay timer, slipping round to join us in a group shot.

The four gigabyte memory card in Jenny’s camera could hold several hundreds of pictures, and lots of video clips. I’ve been involved in computers since the sixties and I still marvel at the capacity of these tiny devices. The computer I programmed back then had a tiny one kilobyte of memory. It was as large as a church hall, and needed an outbuilding the size of a garage to house the cooling plant, necessary to keep the many hundreds of valves and transistors happy.

 I had an inkling that memory cards worked in the same way as computer disks, in that when you delete a picture, it doesn’t actually get wiped out. The tiny file management system simply indicates that the place occupied by the picture is now available for something else. Unless that slot is used by a new picture coming along, the original remains there, like a ghost waiting to be laid. By using some special software it’s possible to recover the ‘deleted’ picture, provided a newer one has not stomped over it in the meantime. Even a full scale reformat merely sets all the locations to ‘available’, so it’s possible to recover from such a seemingly disastrous mistake. 

A search on the Web offered many such recovery programs. Some declared “Free Download”, but I knew at some stage I’d have to cough up something. Sure enough the one I’d chosen found over six hundred pictures and sixty video clips, but actually to recover them would cost me $30 for an access key. A small price to pay I thought. I copied the recovered items onto a DVD and told Jenny that from now on she must ensure she transfers her precious pictures to her computer and then onto a CD or DVD for safe keeping.

Later it occurred to me that there may be others who had accidentally deleted prized pictures and who were similarly unaware that, provided you’ve not taken too many more photos, there’s a good chance of recovery. Since I’d paid my $30, I could offer the service to friends and work colleagues.

When next in the office I sent an ‘all users’ email around, saying that if anyone had a similar problem, I’d be happy to see what I could do.

Apart from the odd comment that “I didn’t know you could do that”, or “How can you possibly recover erased pictures”, nothing happened for a week or so. One day, however, Jacqui encountered me in the office kitchen. It was my birthday and I’d bought cakes for the office.

“Would you like a piece of cake?” I asked.

“With a figure like mine? Yes please!” she joked. “Big as the World, please.” I slid the knife under a cut segment and let it topple onto a serviette.

I liked Jacqui. I fancied her too. OK I’m over sixty and she’s in her late forties, but she had the kind of body that made me remember my youth. Not like the scrawny things you see on the TV these days – girls who could do with eating a rice pudding or two. Jacqui was married. She and her husband, Steve, were originally from London, which was also my neck of the woods. When she had first come to the office the cockney accent gave her origins away, and gave me a talking point. We could talk about locations we both knew – the Bridge House pub at Canning Town – now part of the gay scene, the Isle of Dogs, once at the heart of London’s shipping trade, now the heart of its financial sector. I’d fabricated all the little bits she had said about Steve into a mental picture of an East End gangster who’d moved to the West Country when things had got a bit too hot. Jacqui certainly didn’t need to work, judging by her clothes, the holidays she took, and the cars she turned up in. She used to joke that she worked to get away from Steve during the day. I helped her a lot with mail merge problems and when her spreadsheets got messed up. She was fun. You could flirt and make innuendoes that would have some tiresome women reaching for the political correctness manual. I really don’t know how young people manage to get it together these days.

This was Jacqui’s last week with us; she was moving to Kent, something about her mother getting Alzheimer’s.

“Pete, that thingy with the camera – I’ve got the memory card from one of my cameras, and I think I must have erased some pictures from my holiday. They don’t appear to be in the camera now, so either I deleted them accidentally, or one of my nephews did it. I did see him playing with the camera last time they were staying.” She unrolled her slender bronzed hand to reveal a camera card contained in a small plastic box.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll see what I can do.” I took the card and placed it in my shirt pocket.

“Do you need to look at the pictures, or can you just put them on a CD for me?” A trace of red had entered her neck and was vying with the studio tan for dominion over her face. She was looking straight into my eyes, almost pleading with me not to ask “Why?” I could see there was something delicate about the matter.

“No problem,” I said, “If there’s anything on there, I’ll put them on a DVD for you. I can’t guarantee that even the ones I get back won’t be corrupted in some way, but I’ll leave that to you.”

“Thanks, so much”, she said, turning on her heels smartly in an attempt to close the subject.

I was intrigued. What might be there that she wouldn’t want me to see? Something to do with husband Steve perhaps?

That evening I loaded the card into my camera, connected up to my laptop and ran the program.  It was a 2 Megabyte card, and the program chugged away for about fifteen minutes, eventually reporting just five current pictures and ten deleted images on which recovery could be attempted. I proceeded to the recovery stage.

I copied the restored files onto my laptop’s hard disk before I recorded them onto a DVD. I labelled the DVD and slipped it into a paper sleeve.

I know I should have deleted the temporary folder containing the recovered pictures, but I was still intrigued. Not so curious that I needed to take a look straight away, but maybe a bit later on I could see what was there. At least for the moment I could say that I’d kept my word.

The next day I passed Jacqui’s desk and without saying anything handed her the DVD with the card in its plastic container balanced on top.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“It found about ten deleted pictures, but I can’t say how well the recovery went. You’ll just have to take a look at them.”

“Thanks, very much, Pete,” she said with a smile, “Do I owe you anything, like for the DVD?”

“On the house.” I said.  Then there were a few moments of silence during which I got the impression she was studying my face for any trace of guilt arising from a betrayal of our arrangement. That crimson tide rose once more.

“Thanks,” she repeated, “I owe you one. Maybe I can buy you a pint at my leaving do on Friday lunchtime?”

“OK.” I said, thinking that I rarely drink more than a half at lunchtimes these days. More than that and I tend to fall asleep, especially on Fridays when I seem to be running solely on adrenaline. I left her stuffing the DVD and card into her bag.

Over the next few days I was out every evening at one event or another, and apart from occasionally checking emails I didn’t use the laptop. I didn’t get that drink with Jacqui. On the Thursday night Petra and I went out with some friends and I ate something that disagreed with me. I had a really bad night. I know it wasn’t the booze, because I was the designated driver and had stuck to J2O’s. It was probably the chicken and mushroom pie. Friday morning came and I was still feeling rotten, not helped by lack of sleep. I asked Petra to phone in for me. If I’m honest I didn’t even give Jacqui’s departure a single thought.

 It was Petra who found Jacqui’s pictures first. She was searching for some photos of the grandchildren she’d taken at Crealy Adventure Park. I was listening to The Archers on the radio and heard her scream from the room we call the office. “What the hell is all this?”

“What’s up?” I called, thinking that we’d received another batch of spam from Nigeria.

“What the hell is all this?”

Reluctantly I rose from the armchair and tetchily asked again. “What’s up?”

“These pictures!”

I looked over her shoulder and my blood ran cold. She had opened Jacqui’s folder and its contents were displayed as thumbnails – small images of each of the photos. There were a couple of landscapes, but several of what looked like a naked woman. Petra double clicked each image in turn. It was Jacqui - in what must have been her bedroom. I’m guessing she used a camera with a time delay. She was pictured topless, full frontal, or crouching like a big cat with a raised paw. Unfortunately the final picture was the killer! She was holding a large card, her nipples peeping over the top. On it she’d written “Happy Birthday, Pete. Thanks for everything!” And the word ‘everything’ was underlined with a ‘nudge-nudge, wink, wink’ sort of implication.