Free Silvermeadow by Barry Maitland Page B

designed, with a twenty-four-hour memory, long enough to identify and recover the sort of incidents we meet. Archiving just isn’t part of our requirement. It’s not set up for the kind of situation you’re looking at.’
    ‘Seems a bit limited, Harry,’ Lowry said.
    ‘No, no. Look’—the security chief spread his hands as if to grapple with this slur—‘the vital thing when you’re designing one of these systems is to be as clear as possible about what your objectives really are. You’ve got to be ruthless about that, otherwise you just end up with tons of hardware, cameras all over the place, wide angle, infrared, pan tilt and zoom, and nothing integrating with anything else.’
    Jackson’s voice had taken on the cajoling tone of a devotee, convinced, proselytising. Kathy watched Lowry, trying to figure him out as he listened impassively to the older man. There was something rather patronizing about the way he was handling Jackson, who, playing the old father-figure copper, was making more of their relationship than Lowry seemed willing to acknowledge.
    ‘First you got to make your DIS analysis, right? That’s deterrent, investigation and supervision, the three strengths of your CCTV system. How will you deploy them? You got to remember what security is all about, Gavin: establishing the normal, and managing the exception. So we generate the exception list, right? Things like vandalism, store pilferage, pickpockets, ram raids, break-ins, armed hold-ups —the potential list is a long one, right?’
    Kathy stifled a yawn. She watched Speedy shove another stick of chewing gum in his mouth, and wondered what he’d done with the last lot. He turned away, ignoring the debate going on behind him, and stretched out his hands to work the buttons and joystick on the control panel on the table in front of him. Kathy watched the expert way he worked the panel without looking down, his eyes glued to the screens, like a kid absorbed in a video game. Perhaps it was this that had made her think him younger than he really was, for when he had turned towards them she had seen the creases of middle-aged skin, his cheek pitted with ancient acne scars.
    ‘So now we link the exception events to hot spots,’ Jackson was going on. ‘Like, the hot spot for a hold-up will be the cash counter or the ATM, so that’s where we need the camera. But now we discover that we’ve got far too many exception events and hot spots for our system to cover. The system has bottlenecks, see? Like one operator can only monitor six screens at max. And each screen can handle the output from sixteen cameras at max, so that’s a total of ninety-six cameras for a single operator system. That sounds a lot, but this is a very big place! So now we have to prioritise our list, and maybe go upstream for some of the items. That means, Gavin, like putting in those bollards against the ram raiders, so as to channel the risk and reduce the hot spots. You follow?’
    ‘I follow, Harry,’ Lowry said, sounding unimpressed. ‘And you’re saying abductions of minors weren’t on your exception list, is that it?’
    ‘Too many hot spots, Gavin!’ Jackson cried indignantly. ‘It could happen anywhere, see? You’d need your ninety-six cameras just to cover that one exception, not to mention the archiving system you’d need to establish a seven-day memory, say, or longer, before you realised that an abduction had in fact taken place. Because one thing you can be sure of, Mr Brock, is that no little girl was dragged kicking and screaming from this place without us knowing about it. If she went, she went willingly, and you’d never even know you’d got an exception on your hands till long after the event. You got me there?’
    ‘Yes, Harry, I understand,’ Brock said, weariness creeping into his voice. ‘What about your tenants? Banks, building societies, big stores . . . there must be dozens of CCTV systems in this place apart from yours?’
    ‘True, and