‘It was in his sister’s eye, to be precise,’ Poe added.
‘People can hide files in images without specialist software?’ Nightingale said.
‘If you have a decent steganography tool, yes,’ Bradshaw said.
‘And what was in this folder?’
‘He’d been spying on his sister for years,’ Poe said. ‘There are thousands of photographs and videos of her.’
‘Naked?’
‘Not just naked. There are lots of her masturbating and a fair few of her with various men.’
‘Dirty bastard,’ the chief constable said. ‘Well, at least we can add voyeurism to his charge sheet. I’m assuming he’d hidden cameras in her bedroom and bathroom?’
Poe shook his head. ‘All the videos were handheld and almost certainly filmed on a mobile phone. He was standing outside her bedroom door when he recorded some of them.’
‘She left her door open when she was having sex?’
‘I’m fairly certain she knew she was being filmed and left it open deliberately, ma’am. In at least two of the videos she’s looking directly at the camera. In one of them she winks at it. She must have also known where Robert hid them on his laptop. It explains the cryptic message in her interview. When she said look in her eyes to see the truth, as Tilly worked out, she was being literal.’
‘She got off on it?’
Poe nodded. ‘Probably loved the power she held over him. It explains why he seems so conflicted over her. Obsessed with her but hates her too.’
‘That’s messed up,’ the chief constable said.
Poe agreed. Robert and Rhona Cowell certainly put Flynn’s rivalry with Jessica into perspective.
‘Sergeant Poe thinks this is what the Black Swan site administrator threatened to make public,’ Nightingale said.
‘Having that in the public domain would be a powerful motivator,’ the chief constable agreed. ‘I’m not seeing a problem, though. All this does is confirm what we thought: that he was being blackmailed into playing Black Swan. What haven’t I been told yet?’
‘Tilly?’ Poe said.
‘I’ve run every diagnostic tool I have and neither the phone he used to film Rhona Cowell nor the laptop itself have had their date and time stamp altered.’
‘So?’
Bradshaw reddened and brought up a video on the monitor.
‘This is one of two videos shot the same night. This is the first and it starts just before midnight.’
It was a still of two people having sex. A shaven headed man covered with black tribal tattoos lay on his back. Rhona Cowell straddled him.
Bradshaw pressed play then turned her head so she didn’t have to watch.
Rhona Cowell began to vigorously thrust her hips back and forth, her hands reaching behind her as she grasped the man’s thighs for support. After a minute, Rhona turned her head and looked directly at the camera. She held her gaze for a moment before smirking. She then shut her eyes, arched her back and climaxed. The video ended.
‘That’s really messed up,’ the chief constable said again.
Bradshaw right clicked the video file. A menu appeared. She scrolled down and clicked ‘Get Info’. A detailed page appeared on the monitor. It had information on the kind of file, its size, where it was located on the hard drive, and finally, at the bottom of the page, when the video had been created …
‘No,’ Poe said. ‘This is what’s messed up.’
He pointed at the date and time stamp.
‘Robert was filming his sister having sex on Christmas Eve. The video begins at 11.52 p.m. and ends forty-three minutes later at 12.35 a.m. Tilly has it being logged into the hidden folder at 2.16 a.m. The second video was filmed at 3.06 a.m. and lasts for thirty minutes. It was logged just before 4 a.m.’