Chapter 25
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Dr. Fisk worked in a basement, and the basement was cold on purpose.
It was beneath a dentist's surgery in a low brick building in the university quarter, down a flight of eleven concrete steps that smelled of mildew and mint. At the bottom a gray steel door bore no name. Behind it a long room hummed. There were racks of black equipment along both walls, each with its constellation of small green lights, and a pair of fans somewhere that never stopped, and the dry, faintly metallic, electric chill that exists only in places where machines are kept alive. A single trestle table ran down the middle, covered in monitors and cables and cups of tea in various stages of death. Dr. Fisk sat at the end of it, in a cardigan, with a blanket round his shoulders.
"You'll want a jumper," he said, without looking up. "I keep it at sixty degrees. The drives prefer it."
"I'm fine."
"You're not. Your lips are blue." He took off his glasses, with his unsteady hand, and polished them on the blanket. "It's a quarter to seven in the evening, Mr. Cole, and I've been asked to do a forensic examination of a video, on a Tuesday, in secret, by a man who doesn't want to tell me where it came from. I assume it's important."
"It's the most important thing I've ever shown you."
"Hm." He put the glasses on. "Then you had better give it to me."
I gave him the drive. He held it for a moment, small and black and bright in his palm, and I saw the tremor in his hand, and thought, absurdly, of the fragility of the whole business. A man in a basement. A twist of plastic. A woman's voice.
He slotted it into a machine.
He would not let me watch the video first. He said it would bias him. He sat with his back to me and his shoulders hunched, in the pale glow of a screen, and for forty minutes I heard nothing but the rapid, light, unceasing patter of keys, like a very small animal running on a wooden floor. I walked up and down the room. I read the labels on the racks. HD-17. HD-18. Archive, Dellmore, Jan. I stood in front of a monitor that showed, in a scrolling gray column, a thousand lines of text moving too fast to read.
At twenty past seven he said, "Come here."
I came.
"Do you know what a container is?"
"A shipping box."
"Not that kind." The ghost of a dry smile. "A media container. It's the file format. A video file isn't one thing. It's several things packed into a wrapper. There's the video stream, which is a long sequence of compressed pictures. There's an audio stream. And there's a block of descriptive data at the beginning, which is called the header. Metadata. It says what the file is. Who made it, and with what, and when. How long it ought to run." He tapped the screen. "The header can be altered. But it's very difficult to alter it so that it's consistent with everything else. Which is, if you'll forgive me, why I have a job."
"What did you find?"
He turned the monitor. On it was a window of white text on black, a long list of terms and numbers. Most of it meant nothing to me. He ran his finger down it, and stopped at a line, and underlined it with his nail.
Duration: 00:04:12.380.
"The header says four minutes and twelve seconds," said Dr. Fisk.
I stared at it.
"The file contains seventeen seconds." He moved the finger down. "That's the actual video stream. Seventeen point zero four. But the container says it should be two hundred and fifty-two seconds. The numbers don't agree." He took off his glasses. "I'm going to explain what that means. I want you to be very quiet and let me."
"Go on."
"When a phone records a video, it writes the header at the end, after the recording stops, with the true length. If somebody then edits that file, trims it, cuts it, exports a shorter piece, the editing software normally rewrites the header to match. A good one will. A poor one won't. And a quick one, a tool somebody used in a hurry, in a free program, to cut a long clip down to something shorter, will often leave a ghost." He tapped the line. "This is a ghost. A remnant of the original duration, left behind in a field that nobody thought to clean. It's like a hem that's been taken up and the old fold still shows."
"So it was longer."
"It was four minutes and twelve seconds long. At least, that is what the camera originally recorded." He put his glasses on, and for the first time in my experience he looked straight at me, steadily, with his light gray eyes. "Someone has taken the first seventeen seconds out of a four-minute recording, and thrown away the rest."
The fans hummed. In one of the racks, a green light blinked, and blinked, and held.
"The first seventeen," I said.
"Yes."
"Not the last."
"The first." He turned back to the screen. "And they have cut it, I should say, with great care. Do you see?" He pulled up a pair of waveforms, two long jagged green lines on a black ground, and set them side by side. "That's the audio. And this is the end of the clip. Look at the last tenth of a second."
I looked. The line ran along at a steady, irregular height, the ordinary noise of a room. And then, at the very right-hand edge, it stopped. It did not fade. It did not taper. It ended in a clean vertical cliff, as if a pair of shears had been laid across it.
"A clean cut," said Dr. Fisk. "At a point in the sound where a human being would not notice. The instant before the audio spikes. Look." He moved the cursor a fraction to the right, to the empty black beyond the end. "If I had the rest of the file, I would expect to see a very large transient here. A loud sound. An impact."
I did not say anything.
"The editor cut it one frame before," said Dr. Fisk, "so that you would not hear it."
He showed me the rest in the next hour. I will not describe all of it. A great deal of it I did not understand then and have been taught to understand since. There was a mark in the code, an encoder string, that identified the software which had last touched the file: a free video utility, widely used, with a green icon. There was a date of last modification, which he read to me slowly, in his dry monotone, from the screen. August twelfth. 23:41. Twenty-seven minutes to midnight. Three hours and twenty-seven minutes before the email was sent.
"Somebody did this," I said, "the night before."
"Somebody did this the night before. On a computer with the clock set correctly." He permitted himself a very small, very bitter smile. "I can say that with some confidence, having so recently had a refresher on the subject."
"Who?"
"That I cannot tell you from the file." He rubbed his eyes. "I can tell you what kind of computer. A laptop, a recent model. I can tell you that the person who cut it had full access to the original. Not a copy. The original, as the phone had written it, which means from the source. A cloud account. A backup. A phone." He glanced at me. "A person with the password."
"A person with her password."
"I'd have said so."
I walked to the end of the room and stood in front of a rack. In the black glass of a monitor, my face looked back at me, long, pale, unfamiliar. Clare, I thought. Julian. They were the only two. One had the legal authority to open every file that a dead woman had owned. The other had, by his own admission, six years' worth of keys to the Foundation's machines.
"There's a thing I haven't told you," said Dr. Fisk.
I turned.
He was sitting very still with his hands in his lap. The blanket had slipped from his shoulder. In the green light his face looked old, and shut, and strangely ashamed.
"What?"
"In the matter of the garage server." His voice was almost inaudible. "The clock. I testified that the synchronization service had been stopped by a shared administrative account. That it could not be attributed to a person."
"Yes."
"That was true. But it was not all that I found."
I felt the hair rise on my arms.
"When I took the images of the server, in February, I looked at the access logs. All of them. It's what I'm paid for." He drew a long, unsteady breath. "On the eighth of October, at 11:20 at night, the password on that administrative account was changed. By a person. Not an automated process. A human being, sitting at a terminal in the building, typing a new password. The terminal was on the thirty-first floor."
The fans hummed on.
"The thirty-first floor," I said.
"It was, I think, the chief executive's suite." He closed his eyes. "Or one of the adjoining offices. The log doesn't say. It merely records the terminal. I did not report it, Mr. Cole. I wasn't asked. You asked me what caused the service to stop, and I told you the truth, and I did not tell you what I'd found, because it seemed to me that it was a matter of attribution, and I had no way to attribute, and I thought, if I mention it, it will become the defense. It will become a conspiracy." His voice broke. "And I'd have had to explain why I hadn't been able to prove it."
"You hid it."
"I did not hide it. I omitted it." The words came out of him raw, like something dragged. "I've been testifying for twenty years. I know exactly where the line is. I've spent my entire working life telling lawyers that the line is a very bright one. And I stood in a witness box in March and walked up to it and stepped over, with my hands in my pockets, because I thought, it's only a little thing. And I wanted to be useful."
"Fisk—"
"You see now why I'm cold," said Dr. Fisk, in a quite ordinary voice. "It keeps me honest. I find I do better work." He opened his eyes. They were wet. "I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry. I thought I was helping you win."
I stayed until half past nine.
He made me tea. I drank it from a chipped mug with a picture of a lighthouse on it, sitting on a stool at the end of the trestle with the blanket round my shoulders, which he had insisted on, and which smelled of dust and mothballs. He showed me the rest of what he could find. It was not a great deal. A thumbnail, embedded in the header, a tiny image of the first frame, no more. A line of text from the phone: Apple iPhone 14. A date of capture: 14 October, 21:40:58.
And a single other thing, on the last line, which he read aloud in the flat gray voice of a man delivering a bill.
"The original is in there somewhere," he said. "Whoever cut this left no trace of what they did with the rest. But the phone wrote one last field when it closed the file, and the editor didn't think to remove it." He pointed. "The final timestamp. The moment the phone stopped recording. Four minutes and twelve seconds after it began."
21:45:10.
"Nine forty-five," I said.
"And ten seconds."
I did the arithmetic. I did it twice, in the humming cold, with the cup shaking in my hand. A recording that began at 9:40 and fifty-eight seconds. A hand on a heron at about 9:41, seventeen seconds in. An arm going up. And then the rest of it, three minutes and fifty-five seconds, running on to 9:45 and ten. Past the end of the part I had seen. Past the blow.
"It kept recording," I said.
"It kept recording."
"For almost four minutes after."
"At least. Until the file closed." He looked at the screen. "I'd have said, from the length, that someone had to turn it off. A phone doesn't normally stop on its own, unless the battery goes. Or it's lifted from the shelf. Or somebody takes it."
There was another thing, and I made myself say it aloud, because a fact that is only thought can be argued away. "The neighbor wrote down nine forty-eight," I said. "A silver car turning in at the gate. The man in this clip is already inside the study at nine forty-one."
Dr. Fisk looked at me over his glasses.
"Then either an old man's watch ran seven minutes slow," he said, "or there were two cars."
The phone's last ping was at 9:43.
The cold seemed to move into me. It was not the cold of the room. It was the thing beneath it, an old, dull, patient chill that I had begun to feel in the third week of October, standing in a dead woman's study, with a flashlight, looking at two small scuffs on a shelf. Somebody had taken it. Somebody had stood in that room, after, and lifted a phone from a bookshelf, and held it, and turned off a recording that had been running for four minutes and thirty seconds. And had then walked out with it. And had put it somewhere.
And a woman I had never met had set it there. She had put it on the shelf, among the books, with its little rubber feet, and angled the lens at the room, and pressed the button. In case, she had said. If it comes to my word against his. She had known. She had known, standing there, in the lamplight, with her heart beating, that someone was coming. And she had done the only thing that she could.
She had made a witness.
"Dr. Fisk," I said.
"Yes."
"Can you tell whether the man in the clip uses his left hand or his right?"
He blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"The hand that takes the heron. The hand that lifts it. In the clip."
"I'm not a forensic anthropologist."
"But you can look."
He looked. He was silent for a long time, at the screen, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and his face six inches from the glass. He ran the seventeen seconds back and forth, back and forth, a dozen times. I watched the hand come into the frame, and go out, and come in, in the pale electric light.
"The thumb," said Dr. Fisk, at last, slowly. "You see the angle. It's on the near side. The fingers wrap from the far side, round, toward the camera." He demonstrated, in the air, with his own right hand, and then, awkwardly, with his left. "That's a left hand. I'd say, with some confidence. It's the man's left hand that's holding the bird. And the left sleeve that comes into the frame. The right arm, the one with the, ah, the cuff, isn't visible. It's out of the shot."
I stood perfectly still.
A left hand.
Right-handed, I had written, in the margin of a legal pad, in March, in a gray courtroom, under the voice of a woman in half-moon glasses. Probably right-handed. Approximately eighty percent. And I had put a question mark. I had not known why.
I can't write a word with it, Victor had said, in a jail. I throw with it. I catch with it. If I'm not thinking.
And a tall man, standing at a high counter, with a pen in his left, had signed his name in three angry strokes on a visitors' log, and capped it, and handed it to a police officer, who thanked him.
"Is it certain?" I said.
"Nothing is certain." He gave me a faint, trembling, sorrowful smile. "But if you wished me to put it in an affidavit, I think I could say that the hand that lifted that sculpture was, in all likelihood, a left. And I should be very uneasy about saying more."
I thanked him. I put the drive into my breast pocket, and the blanket over the back of the stool, and went up the eleven concrete steps into the night. A warm wind was blowing. The street was empty. A single lamp burned over the dentist's door, and its light fell on the wet pavement in a long unsteady oblong, and across the road, far down the block, I saw that a gray sedan was parked at the curb.
It had its lights off.
I did not look at it. I walked to my car, slowly, with my hands at my sides, and got in, and sat there with both of them on the wheel, while the whole of the evening poured through me. Left. It was not an answer. It was worse. It fit two men. It fit the elder brother, who had been beaten by a ruler and had learned, with extraordinary discipline, to write with the wrong hand, and who threw a ball, when he was not thinking, with the right one. And it fit the younger, who had never been beaten at all.
It fit a man who had closed his eyes. It fit a man who had drunk to Eleanor with his glass shaking. It fit a pair of brothers who had stood at a rail in a courtroom, one with his arms about the other, and had not, either of them, been able to say what they had done.
I started the car. As I pulled out, the sedan's lights came on, two small yellow eyes at the end of a long dark street.
And for the first time since the night the rain stopped, I was not afraid of it. I drove slowly. I drove, in fact, with great care, up the long hill and round the curve of the bay, and I let it follow, and followed myself, in the mirror, the small steady light, mile after mile, all the way home.