Page 36
Story: The Curator (Washington Poe)
Poe stared at his empty glass.
‘You see, this is why I drink beer. If something’s going to taste like piss then the least it can do is get me drunk.’
‘I’ve been thinking of competitive kite flying, Poe.’
‘Who hasn’t?’ he grumbled.
‘It’s a real thing,’ she continued. ‘They have leagues and everything. Some competitions are about precision flying where they have to demonstrate compulsory figures as laid down by the judging panel. Another discipline is a freestyle interpretation of a piece of music. This is called a kite ballet. Both disciplines can be individual, in pairs or in teams.’
‘That’s a weird thing to know a lot about,’ Poe said.
‘Jeremy, one of my—’
‘Mole People.’
‘—team,’ she said without missing a step, ‘has been flying kites since he was a child.’
‘I flew kites when I was a child as well,’ Poe said. ‘Thing is, I stopped when I wasn’t a child. You know, like adults are supposed to do.’
‘Anyway, Mr Cranky Pants, I called Jeremy earlier—’
‘Called or emailed?’
Bradshaw never spoke to people face-to-face if an electronic message would do.
‘OK, I emailed Jeremy earlier and he told me that the kite in the tree looks very much like a stunt kite. Quite expensive as these things go.’
Poe sat up straight. This was more like it. They might have started out talking about the specific gravity content of piss in bar snacks but they were now firmly back in police territory.
‘And did Jeremy say where you might buy such a thing?’
‘Too many to list. He did say that the kite’s logo was probably bespoke, though. Most serious enthusiasts have their own design, apparently. Because we don’t have a great view of it, and because we had to leave the kite in situ, I’ll have to run the photographs you took through an object-based image analysis program.’
‘What’s that do?’
‘It will break the photograph into pixels then group them into homogenous objects. Each object has statistics associated with them, like shape, geometry, context and texture, which can assist with its identification.’
‘Which means?’
‘We’ll get a report containing a number of composite images with likelihood expressed as percentage points.’
‘The program can predict what the logo is?’
‘With a percentage point indicating likelihood beside each one.’
‘That’s one clever program,’ Poe said. ‘Yours, I take it?’
Bradshaw shook her head. ‘No. This is an open-source one I’ve adapted.’
‘When we get your report we’ll need to speak to someone,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be some boring bastard out there who knows about this stuff.’
Bradshaw shook her head again.
‘So rude,’ she said.
Chapter 23
When Poe stepped out of Herdwick Croft the following morning, Shap Fell looked like someone had thrown a duvet over it. Snowflakes the size of bottle tops were still falling. They had softly covered the ground, changing the harsh ancient moorland into something altogether more welcoming.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36 (Reading here)
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130
- Page 131
- Page 132
- Page 133
- Page 134
- Page 135
- Page 136
- Page 137
- Page 138