again. Christ. There was a message from a sender called thethirdisaman, and the title was 'Something rotten in the state of Matt Wells.' The killer was back in touch. I opened the message and read:
Did you like it, Matt? The clue, I mean. Actually, there were any number of clues in the sentence I gave you, but you didn't get any of them. So, because I'm a gentle soul at heart, I'm giving you some help this time. Note the sender of this message. That means the next victim, my third, is a…have you got it yet? That's right, a man. Clever crime writer. Why should you trust me? Well, have I lied to you yet? Sandra Devonish- you knew her from those ego-boosting conferences you used to go to in the States, didn't you?-was lying in the shape of the cross. And why was that? Because I am Doctor Faustus and I have made a deal with the devil. If I gather souls for him, I can do anything I like- and, unlike Christopher Marlowe's Faustus, I don't have a time limit. I can continue for as long as I want, or until you catch me. There's been no evidence so far of you pulling that off. Oh, and just to be sure that you know I'm the real deal-I spitted the lovely Sandra with a single thrust to the heart, and I left the Grateful Dead playing 'Friend of the Devil.' Neat, eh?
I suppose I'd better give you the next clue now. Here we go: The river shrinks bears And the ice crows for a wife. The lean man's imperial heiress Is the thirsty draw of nothing. If you don't work that out, there's no hope for you, Matt. Or rather, there's no hope for the person whose name is hidden in that verse. As this clue's so easy, I'm not giving you more time. You've got until midnight tonight to answer. I'll be e-mailing you at 11:59. Don't be slow in replying…
In blood,
D.F. alone
(Flaminio's on a break)
'Fucking hell,' I said.
Rog came over and read the message. 'Oh, great,' he said. 'Now the cow's writing poems.'
'Sara never showed any interest in poetry when I knew her. Then again, this isn't exactly at Seamus Heaney's level.'
Rog looked at me as if he wasn't sure who that was, but he didn't have the nerve to admit it.
'Nobel literature prize winner,' I said. 'From Northern Ireland.'
'I knew that,' he replied indignantly, hitting Print. In a few seconds we were both poring over hard copies.
I looked at my watch. It was eleven-thirty. We had just over twelve hours. I went back online and forwarded the message to my mother. At least she'd have more time to work on it this time.
'Can you run it through your decryption programs, Dodger?'
He nodded. 'There's something going on here, but I can't put my finger on it.'
I looked at the clue. 'There's a truckload of things going on,' I said. 'Water, the cold, crows-the most intelligent of birds, but they're also linked with death, since they eat carrion.'
'Charming,' Rog said.
''Lean,'' I continued. 'That could be a reference to thin or starving, linking up with 'thirsty' in the last line. 'Imperial' suggests power, colonies-'
'Mints.'
I put my elbow in his ribs. 'Be serious. An heiress is a female child, one who stands to inherit something-a country, an empire?'
'Not if she's hungry and thirsty. She'll be dead-like the next victim.'
'Thanks a bunch, Dodger. Run your programs, will you?'
I let him get on with that. It didn't matter that he wasn't making any more transfers from Sara's accounts for the time being. He'd done enough to attract her attention. I thought about sending Karen the clue. That way I'd at least protect myself from criticism of the kind Jeremy Andrewes and Josh Hinkley had poured over me. But when it came out that I'd been in contact with the police, Sara or whoever was playing at Doctor Faustus would know I'd broken the rule. That might lead to even more innocent people being murdered, including my family and the guys. No, I had to keep the clue secret. That decision almost crushed me.
I struggled to my feet and went over to the bookcase. Rog's cousin had a decent dictionary and thesaurus, as well as a one-volume encyclopedia. I took them to the dining table, along with the hard copy of the message. Then I started checking every word for synonyms-I didn't bother with antonyms at this stage as there were no negatives in the poem. I also split up the lines into couplets, since each pair formed a sentence. I was working on the idea that each would give me a name. It was possible that every line did that, making four names, but I reckoned the existence of sentences was significant. If the first clue was anything to go by, there would be more than one definition of each name, and the writer had said that this clue was easier than the previous one. Two names, but they weren't necessarily in the right order.
I sat back in my chair. Was the third victim, supposedly a male, another crime writer? I'd made the mistake of not following up that angle the last time. I hadn't brought the Crime Writers' Society directory with me, but I could access the online version. Then again, that wouldn't have helped me with Sandra Devonish-foreign writers could join as overseas members, but most didn't. I considered going down the list of names, trying to fit each one to the clue, but that would have taken more hours than I had. There was no choice but to split the clue into its constituent parts-sentences, lines, words, syllables, even individual letters. I was sure there were puns and wordplay in action. I was useless at spotting those in cryptic crosswords, but my mother wasn't. I would check the ghost site for her input soon. In the meantime, I looked at the rest of the message. The tone was sardonic, just what I would have expected from Sara. But there were a couple of points that didn't ring true. By the time I knew her, I'd stopped going to crime-writing conferences as I couldn't afford them. How did the writer know that I'd met Sandra Devonish? She was only a passing acquaintance, someone I'd drunk with in a group a couple of times. I was sure I hadn't mentioned her to Sara, who'd never shown much interest in crime novelists anyway. Had she been talking to some other crime writer, who'd witnessed me and Sandra in the bar at the conference hotels? Who could that be? Josh Hinkley was a likely suspect, but hundreds of people attended those events, the majority of them fans and booksellers rather than writers. It would be a serious struggle to identify the source of information, and a waste of precious time.
The other thing that struck me as anomalous was the whole Doctor Faustus angle. Although Sara had been brought up by her foster parents as a Catholic, she'd never shown the slightest interest in religion-in fact, one of the things that I thought kept us together was a mutual impatience with all things divine or paranormal. I forced myself to see the Sara who had betrayed me as a devil- worshipper like Faustus, but that didn't ring true. For one thing, she was too conceited about her own abilities to make any kind of Faustian pact. Besides, she didn't need the devil's help. She'd already had plenty from her brother and she could hire as much as she wanted.
I went on with the lists of alternatives. Somehow it was easier to live with the idea of Sara as the writer of the messages. If there was another ruthless killer out there, my chances of surviving would be halved.
The aristocrat put down his coffee cup and got up from the long table. His ancestors had eaten from it for over two hundred years, and it would cost a small fortune to restore it; a small fortune he didn't have. The first earl had been ennobled by King George II for generously supporting the country's foreign wars. The origins of the family wealth had been in slaves, tobacco and the port wine trade-about as politically incorrect as you could get nowadays. But there was none of that left. The present earl had spent far too much on his private interests, not that he regretted a penny of it.
He strolled out onto the terrace that ran the length of the family seat. It was a fine spring morning, the dew burning off in clouds of steam in the light of the sun. The prize-winning herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle was grazing in the field to the left of the arrow-straight road that bisected the open panorama ahead. The site had been carefully chosen and landscaped to keep the Berkshire countryside below out of sight. On the right were the goats that produced overpriced and foul-tasting organic cheese. The earl never ate any cheese other than Stilton. Loyalty to the traditions of England was paramount.
He stepped briskly across the uneven flagstones, the steel caps of his brogues clicking loudly. The main facade of the castle, with its high, mullioned windows, dated from the 1750s, but at the western end it had been built onto the original medieval stronghold. The gray limestone bastion stood up to receive the sunlight, rooks circling above the red-and-black family flag-in its center was the coat of arms, a unicorn rampant on a silver background. The first earl had carried out his own researches into the supernatural.
His heir paused at the bottom of the great fifteenth- century wall of the fortress. It had never been taken in battle or siege. On one occasion, the defenders had been forced to eat the horses and then every other living thing
