“Do your worst,” I said as I turned the laptop to face her. She spent a lot of time grinning and laughing out loud at the photos of me from childhood to the present day. Many of the older photos had been scanned by my parents, but most had been taken with a digital camera.

Having scrolled through the photos, she alighted on a picture of me dressed as Charlie Chaplin at a fancy dress party.

“When was this taken?” she asked. To be honest I could barely remember the event. I think I might have been helped home by my friends that night.

Underneath the photo was a button headed ‘more info’, and I pressed it. A new panel opened up and we could see that the photo had been taken on February 14th 2004. We could also see that it had been taken with a Canon Eos, for a 60th of a second at f16, and that the flash had fired.

Dee looked closely at the data before asking a question. “Do all digital cameras do this? I mean, do they all record this type of data?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Well, at least all of mine have. The information is stored on the memory card automatically.”

“In that case we’ve almost certainly been missing some crucial evidence linking Hickstead to the deaths and the blackmail attempts,” she stated.

I realised that she was right. The Peer had taken pictures of Lavender Fisher, myself, and Richard Wolsey Keen, and we had access to all of the emailed photos. If His Lordship had not removed the data before sending the pictures, we could hopefully extricate some valuable evidence from them.

I spun the laptop around and closed the open windows before clicking on My Photos and opening the two photos of me that had been sent by the blackmailer to my BlackBerry. I right clicked on the thumbnail of the photo that showed me with crosshairs on my head, and clicked ‘properties’.

There it was in front of me;

DSC100145

Saved by: Photopaint XII 10:08

Taken: 11/08/2010, 9:12

Nikon Coolpix P100

Autoflash on. Not used.

1/125th sec

F5.6

This was picture number 145 taken on the Nikon Coolpix on the day my first threat had been received. It had been manipulated using Corel Photopaint, image editing software.

Whilst I found out what I could about the camera on the internet, Dee called DS Fellowes. She was becoming closer to him than I would have liked.

“DS Fellowes is emailing the other photos to your email account now,” she said as she hung up.

It appeared that the Nikon Coolpix P100 was a new model which had only recently been released by the manufacturer, and that as it was a ‘bridge camera’, a camera that comes somewhere between a compact and a full sized Digital SLR camera, and as such it had a limited market. Nonetheless, I guessed that they had probably sold thousands of them.

A voice that sounded just like Joanna Lumley announced that I had email.

For the next ten minutes Dee and I looked at all of the photos, printed them with their details and assembled the print outs. We were both excited about our findings.

Each photo was numbered in chronological order. The first photo was of Lavender, numbered DSC100131, and the last was of Richard in the park and was numbered DSC100153. They had all been taken with a Nikon Coolpix P100 and most had been edited by Photopaint.

Dee summarised the value of the evidence we had uncovered, but I had already worked out for myself what it meant.

“If Hickstead owns a Coolpix P100, a quick look at it would tell us whether the camera numbering sequence matched the photos we have from the blackmailer. If he has a laptop loaded with Corel Photopaint XII, that would be even more convincing. And, with any luck, a forensic examination of the hard drive will confirm that those pictures have been on his computer.”

She paused and breathed in deeply. “Josh, we might have him.”

Chapter 40

City of London Police HQ, Wood St, London. Wednesday, Noon.

Inspector Boniface was grinning from ear to ear as he read from a note which had just been passed to him. He then pressed the intercom.

“You can send DS Fellowes in now.”

We had been so elated by our find that we immediately contacted the police and emailed them all of our data. They promised to act on it straight away, and asked us to call in for an update.

“You two are regular Miss Marples. I guess that someone would have come up with this information, given time, but you were there first. What’s more, I think our follow up research will cheer you up no end.”

DS Fellowes came in and shook our hands. Everyone in the room was smiling. It was contagious. The Detective Sergeant gave us a rundown of what he had discovered.

“Somehow, we need to link Lord Hickstead to these photos, and if we can’t do that, we need to be able to link him to the camera that took the photos. So, when you sent me the information on the Nikon Coolpix P100 my first thought was, who stocks them and have they sold many? The bad news is that they are stocked all over the UK in their thousands. Nevertheless, I called Nikon UK, who are based at Kingston on Thames, who confirmed that it could take months to check the retailers’ records. But then I got a call back ten minutes later.”

He paused for effect, and grinned even more widely than before. “Bad luck for Hickstead but good luck for us. Nikon are running a launch promotion that gives purchasers of the camera a second year’s full warranty free of charge if they register online or by phone. They estimate that around ninety five per cent of owners are taking advantage of this offer, but that is still over eleven hundred people so far. They couldn’t supply us with the details of everyone who registered. However, they said if I gave them a name they would be able to tell me whether that person had registered a Nikon Coolpix P100 with them. It turned out that Arthur Hickstead registered for the two year warranty on a Coolpix P100 in July this year. We know from his registration that he bought it at the camera shop in Heathrow Airport Terminal Four. I contacted the shop directly, and from their records they were able to confirm that he bought it using a credit card and, for duty free purposes, his boarding card. The boarding card was for a Johannesburg flight just before the World Cup.”

He beamed at all of us, and punched the air as if he had won the World Cup all by himself. Boniface brought us all back down to earth.

“Before we all get carried away, there are eleven hundred people with this type of camera. It isn’t quite a slam dunk yet, but we are getting close. Let me tell you about our plans for later today.”

Inspector Boniface then explained his strategy for Hickstead’s visit to the Netherlands.

If all went according to plan, His Lordship could be in custody by tonight.

Chapter 41

London City Airport, London. Wednesday, 4:30pm.

Lord Hickstead stood beside his carryon luggage and checked his travel documents. There wasn’t a seat to be had in the overcrowded lounge; even standing room was at a premium. He had travelled this route hundreds of times in the last decade and the lounge was busier each time. The success of the airport owners to attract new flights was commendable, but they needed to make some changes to the facilities to accommodate the growing number of passengers.

There was a garbled public announcement directing him to the gate ready for his flight to Rotterdam. As he walked through the narrow passageway he noticed two plain clothes customs officers taking people to one side. He looked straight ahead, making every effort to avoid being selected.

The woman two places ahead of him was stopped and taken to a cubicle. Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, too.

“I’m sorry about this, sir, but we have heightened security today and I have to select someone from each flight. You are the lucky one,” the officer said, in a clumsy attempt at humour. “We won’t keep you long, sir.”