One of the tech team talks Woodley and me through their findings.
“We obviously don’t know for certain which of the boys used this computer on Monday night, because it’s not password protected, so it could have been anybody in the house,” he says. “But we can have a good guess from the results. There’s a little bit of Internet activity from earlier in the day on Monday. It’s fairly typical of all the other days that we looked at in the week preceding, so I think it’s safe to assume that this usage is Noah Sadler’s. On Monday afternoon he looked up images of Pero’s Bridge, and Google Maps of Bristol city center, and then he looked up the film Alien on IMDb, which he’d done before, and followed the links to some of the cast and articles about it. That activity ceases at five P.M., and the next time somebody uses the computer to go online is at eleven thirty that night. At that time somebody logs on to Abdi Mahad’s personal email account and downloads a photograph.”
“So we think it was Abdi?”
“Unless Noah Sadler knew how to log on to his account.”
“Do we have access to those emails?”
“Not yet. We’re working on the password. But we can see that Abdi or somebody else accessed them, downloaded this picture, and sent it to print. He logged off after that.”
“There was a printer in Noah’s room,” Woodley says, “but nothing in it.”
“The computer’s linked to two printers,” the tech officer says, “so it could have gone to another location. A home office, maybe?”
“Do you know what the photograph was of?” I ask.
“Here.”
The tech officer extracts an A4-sized image from a document folder and hands it to me. The photograph is of a group of men and boys gathered around a television watching a football match. They look African. It’s got to be the photograph that Abdi was asking Ed Sadler about in the audio recording.
I hand it to Woodley.
“What else does this person look at online?”
“They look at Ed Sadler’s website: every page and every photograph. It’s very thorough.”
“Is that photograph on the site?”
“No. And it looks to be a photograph of a photograph, as if it was taken with a phone.”
“Abdi might have snapped it at the exhibition,” Woodley says.
That’s what I’m thinking, but I’m trying to be cautious and methodical, too. “If we assume it was Abdi who downloaded it, that is.”
“It’s got to be. Why would Noah Sadler be looking at his dad’s website or going on Abdi’s personal email?”
Woodley sounds frustrated with me, and I might feel the same, if I were him, but I don’t want to make assumptions that might blind us to a different version of events.
Even so, I’m getting a feeling that’s part excitement and part unease. We’re finally starting to put together pieces. The only problem is that so far they seem to be for the wrong puzzle, because I can’t yet see how any of this relates to the boys’ movements on Monday night.
“Anything else?”
“He searched for ‘facial reconstruction,’” the tech officer says, “and that throws up all sorts of links, some of which he follows. Then he refines it to ‘cleft palate surgery’ and also ‘cleft palate surgery Somalia.’”
“So he could be looking for a way this man might have corrected his appearance?”
“Exactly.”
“There’s one more thing. He also looks up a football website, a history of the Champions League.”
Woodley looks at the printed-out photograph. He taps it with two fingers.
“Because that’s a Champions League game,” he says. “He was trying to find out about the game the men are watching in the picture.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. To find out which game it was? He’s a proper little Google sleuth, isn’t he?”
“But what the hell takes him from a bit of cozy Internet searching all the way across the city to the scrapyard just a couple of hours later?”
Woodley shrugs. “I don’t know, boss.”
“That’s everything,” the tech officer says. “There’s no activity after 11:37.”
I phone Sofia Mahad while the tech officer takes Woodley through the Internet activity one more time. I want to talk to her about the photograph that Abdi discussed with Ed Sadler in the recording.
“I went to look at that photograph,” she says. “In the gallery. I wanted to see it for myself.”
“Did you recognize any of the men in it? In particular, the man with the cleft palate, in the middle of the picture?”
“I don’t recognize him, but this is the man Abdi was interested in. Abdi was looking for a man with a scar on his lip at the Welcome Center. He thought the man upset my mother. I was going to phone you this morning and tell you.”
“Have your parents seen the photograph?”
“Not yet. I’ll show them.”
“Please can you ask them if they recognize that man?”
“Of course.”
I don’t give her any details about the Internet searches we’ve uncovered. I want to keep it on a need-to-know basis for now, but everything she’s telling me is adding up with what we’ve discovered.
When I hang up, I relay everything to Woodley.
Woodley says, “We should show the photograph to Kirsty Harris. She’s the liaison officer for the Somali community. She might have come across this man if he’s been in Bristol for a while, or know someone in the community we could talk to. But I was thinking maybe we should send it to Jamie Silva, too.”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s a PC. He was tapped last year by a brand-new unit in London called the super-recognizers. They asked him to join them.”
“Super-recognizers?” It’s a new one to me.
“It’s a really small unit, only six or seven officers, and they all have exceptional abilities to remember faces and recognize suspects. They wanted Jamie to join them, but he said no because he didn’t want to leave Bristol.”
“Because it’s the best city in the UK,” says the tech officer, who’s listening as he packs up his laptop.
“You think he can recognize this man?”
“He can if we have a picture of this guy on a database already. Jamie will probably remember seeing him before, and if he doesn’t, he’ll search through them.”
“What makes him a better bet for that than one of our DCs?”
“Super-recognizers are the opposite of people who have face blindness. Face-blind people can’t remember faces. It affects more people than you might think. In contrast, the officers in the Super-Recognizer Unit have almost total recall of every face they’ve ever seen.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Jamie’s a mate. We joined the force at the same time. He was bragging about it after he got tapped. And if you go out for a drink with him, he’ll happily wreck your evening by identifying every criminal in the room. There’s no such thing as off-duty for him.”
“Okay. Definitely worth a try. Send it over to him now.”