WE'RE GOING TO NEED A BIGGER VOLVO

That’s how we ended up with Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber on the team, albeit temporarily.

They would have both loved to be programmers, to sling some code with the big boys, but they just didn’t have the creativity.

I’m sure they have real names, but they were so far below us that we didn’t bother learning them. We could tell that they were data-workers as soon as we saw them.

Almost identical in height and girth, Dumb had a wispy beard which should have filled out in his twenties; those days were now a long-distant memory, but somehow the wispiness remained.

Dumber possessed more defined facial hair – if I looked closely I could almost see the shape of the moustache it was to become, but I avoided that because skin complaints just weren’t my thing

We could easily tell them apart from their modes of dress. Both wore trainers which had seen better days, and jeans which were still avoiding the wash basket, but there the similarity ended. Dumb always wore t-shirts with the name of obscure and ancient bands without irony. Dumber’s t-shirts were imbued with the logo or images of aged video games.

Lank hair, glasses thick enough for the transit of light to be measured with a wristwatch and a likelihood of still living with their mums completed the picture.

They were perfect.

I was pretty sure that we would be guaranteed their undivided attention during the discovery phase of this particular operation, and no way would they be showing up for work with a hangover.

What we really needed from the dynamic duo was data targets. We had very little to go on, but it was personal and if there was any way we were going to find Charles’ person of interest, we needed to narrow our searching.

“What do we have to go on?” Ginny asked

“Not much” I replied

“And by that, you mean?”

“Well, nothing really. A couple of grainy photographs, and a very rough location”

“Where?” One of the data twins asked

“Leeds” I replied

“That’s a start” He replied

“Not much of one though, is it?”

“You wouldn’t have thought so, but it isn’t a bad point at which to start – it’s easier to find a face in a city than it is in a country”. Surprisingly, this data twin was very well spoken and had, for a geek, a reasonable vocabulary outside of games and pizza toppings

“In the country?” I asked

“Well, that too, but I was actually thinking of ‘in a country’ as in the whole of the UK”

“I can see how the location helps, but what do you mean that it’s easier in a city?” asked Ginny

The vocal twin wandered to the window and beckoned us to follow

“Look outside, what do you see?” he asked

“Looks like rain” Ginny answered

“It does” He agreed “but what else do you see, something that’s always there regardless of the weather?”

“Roads, trees, dogs, people, cars”

“I like how you put people after dogs, but look again – look at the data gathering taking place right outside our window”

I thought that the twin was getting a little too excited at this point and was about to say so when Ginny answered

“Cameras!”

“Excellent - well spotted! There’s lots of cameras out there, in fact we in the UK are one of the most camera-heavy countries in the world”

“So, how does that help?”

“Well, there’s a rumour on conspiracy-theory websites that in a city in the UK, you’re never more than two minutes away from having your image captured”. I was unsurprised at the data-botherer’s knowledge of conspiracy websites, they almost breathe that stuff.

“I thought that was rats?” asked Ginny.

“Who wants to take pictures of rats?” I asked.

I had the feeling that I may have been losing the thread somewhat, but I wasn’t really surprised about the direction the conversation was taking – less than three minutes in and we were delving into the darkest recesses of the publicly available web.

“What?” Ginny asked.

“Rats. Who wants to photograph them?”

“Nobody, what are you blithering on about?” Ginny berated me

I decided to keep quiet

“As I was saying” Chatty twin continued “Before I was so rudely interrupted. Cameras, there are hundreds of thousands of them out there and we can access every single one”

“You can?” I asked

“Well, no, not actually access them, but everything they see gets turned into pure data, we think we know where the data lives and I’m pretty sure that you can get access to it for us”

“That may be awkward, but if you let me know what you need, I’ll get onto it”

“Thank you”

He was polite, I had to give him that, there was still a concern, however

“But I still don’t understand how that will help”

“We can find your man, and narrow his location down just by the amount of times he is spotted in certain streets or whatever”

I could see the flaw in the plan, and I thought it might be a good idea to mention it

“I think I can see a flaw in your plan”

“There’s a flaw?” asked the more verbal twin. His rotund geeky counterpart looked shocked, as if this had never happened before

“How many cameras did you say there were?”

“Hundreds of thousands”

“OK, so how many in Leeds, roughly?”

There was a brief flurry of thumbs as a smartphone was called upon to search for the information.

“The council has around 300, there are another 1000 used by an organisation called Leedswatch, and the Police don’t give us details, but allow around a thousand for them too, round it up to about 2500”

“What did we do before the internet?” I asked

“Personally, I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t born”

“Smartass”

“Thank you”

“That wasn’t a compliment”

Tweedle-nerd gave me a look which argued against my point

“How are you planning to search through all of the footage recorded on all of those cameras in the last day, let alone the last week or month?”

“That, Mr Coder, is what we have you for. I’ll give you access to the data, you can find a way of making sense of it all”