“Go ahead,” I say. “I charged it up. Think it’s probably older than you are, though.”
He flicks it open, his face a picture of concentration.
“Wow.” He holds down the power button, a small smile as the screen lights up. “This thing isancient.”
“Not much on it, unfortunately.”
“What about the people who lived there before you?” He says it without looking up at me, still pressing buttons on the old mobile. “They couldn’t tell you anything about this stuff?”
“The dad’s in a care home and the son lives abroad. The estate agent’s passed on my number to the son, but he’s being a bit elusive.”
I pull up the picture of Shaun on my phone but neither of them recognize him. Charlie glances up from the Motorola only long enough to shake his head, before he resumes clicking through the phone’s menus.
“So if he wasn’t the grandson, who was he?”
“No idea.”
“Nothing flagged on a reverse image search?”
“A reverse what?”
He raises an eyebrow.
“You havedonethat, right?”
“Not… sure I know what one of those is.”
He looks at me the way my eldest daughter sometimes does—a mixture of disbelief, pity, and amusement. He’s a few years older than Leah, but the generational gap still feels like a chasm.
“Really?” he says.
“Really.”
“Well, basically you just upload an image,” he says matter-of-factly, “and it looks for matches. You can do it on Google or thereare a ton of different apps that do the same thing. Works better with specific images of things and places but it’s still worth a go with a head-and-shoulders shot. The comparison algorithms are getting better and better all the time with AI.”
Before I can ask him to explain further, he holds the little flip phone out to me.
“Speaking of pictures, what’s this?”
The tiny screen shows the picture that Jess had found on the flip phone on Sunday night, the image so blurry and indistinct it might have been a hand, or a thumb, or a face, or nothing at all—probably the photo equivalent of a pocket dial.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I say. “Impossible to tell on a screen so tiny.”
“There might besomethingthere though, if you have a play with the contrast, the saturation, the colors.”
“Yes, but I assumed there was no way of extracting it.” I point at the phone’s rudimentary connection ports. “The phone’s not on a network anymore so you can’t send it, and there’s no USB, no modern connector for a cable, no Bluetooth.”
He gives me that look again.
“There’s always a way, Adam, if you know how.” He snaps the phone shut. “Do you mind if I borrow this for a few days?”
“Sure,” I say. “Let me know what you find.”
While we’ve been talking, Maxine has been snapping pictures of all the items laid out on the table in front of us.
“I’ve got old photo albums at home,” she says. “From back in the day. Thought I’d go through them and double-check, in case any of these things appear in an old picture somewhere.”
I turn back to her. “Has anything come back to you? Something ringing a bell?”
