The Blue Rose

feeding her.’ He stared out of the window, listening to the caller. ‘Okay, so eleven thirty it is. Right, British Airways. Don’t worry, I’ll be there. I’ll call to check that your flight’s on time.’ Another short pause. ‘Sheppard? No – he hasn’t. Nothing unusual, except that professor guy has been staying with him. Billy’s keeping an eye on them, don’t worry.’ Marcus yawned. ‘Sure, I will. Okay. See you soon. Yes, I’ll tell him.’

He turned the phone off and walked to the small TV set. He switched it on manually – they’d not been able to find a remote. Billy figured the set was so old it never had one in the first place. Marcus settled into the large upholstered armchair, put his feet on the coffee table, and stared blankly at a programme on polar bears.

Billy looked up from his paperback. ‘Wolff’s finally coming over, then,’ he said, in a Texas drawl.

Marcus got up and walked toward the door. ‘Yes, he’s on his way. I’m going pick him up at Heathrow tomorrow morning. Now that the agreement’s signed, Ira wants to see the rose.’

‘I thought Ira told you Sheppard don’t know where the rose is.’

‘He did. But Ira’s convinced that Sheppard’s playing “find the lady”. That it was really him who took it to another hiding place.’

‘What if Sheppard’s not lying?’

‘Damned if I know. Let Ira worry about that. He tells me he’s finished playing footsie with him – now it’s hardball time. He’s sure that Sheppard’s gonna crack any day now. Meantime, Ira wants us to keep up the surveillance on Sheppard and the house. He thinks that sooner or later Sheppard’ll get careless and lead us to the rose.’

‘You know Marcus, this is turning out to be a full-time job. I’d figured it for ten days at the most. I’m dying of boredom in this stinking place. The shitty weather. When are we going get the hell out of here?’

‘Jesus, Billy. You ask the dumbest questions. You couldn’t have heard a goddamned word I’ve been saying. How do I know, for Chrissakes! Ask Wolff tomorrow. Ask him yourself!’

‘All right. All right.’

‘Oh, by the way, Ira said to thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘Doing a clean job of snatching the Sheppards’ file. Made things a lot easier, he said. Filled in a lot of blanks.’

‘Weren’t exactly what I would call challenging,’ Billy drawled. ‘Any punk kid could have walked in there and stole the file.’

Kingston was up again at dawn. Since Kate’s kidnapping he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep and it was beginning to take its toll. He let Asp out into the garden through the back door, then went to retrieve the morning newspaper from the front porch. Back in the house, he made a pot of tea.

He yawned and placed the folded newspaper and his favourite retractable pencil – the one with the pink eraser on the end of it – on the table beside him. He always used a pencil when tackling the Times crossword puzzle. Corrections were all too frequent. Exactly when he had first started doing them – when he first got hooked – he couldn’t say. Spending the start of the day with a cup of tea and the puzzle was a ritual. Rarely, very rarely, was the pattern broken. But for the last several days it had been. And he was becoming increasingly worried. He simply could no longer concentrate.

Every hour of every day he was alone was spent thinking of the suffering that the blue rose had inflicted on so many lives. And the harder he tried to make sense of it all, the more unfathomable the riddles became. In his now frequent dreams they twisted and writhed like slippery serpents, one minute almost in his grasp, the next, morphing into new forms, coiling into grotesque shapes, always disappearing through closed doors.

With Alex’s refusal to involve the police – and he could well understand Alex’s fear of doing so – the burden now fell squarely on him to find a way to secure Kate’s release and put her kidnappers behind bars. Unless he found the rose, none of this would happen. Worse, what would Wolff do to Kate if he didn’t? He’d rather not think about that eventuality.

He glanced up at the kitchen clock. Six forty-five. In a few hours the forty-eight hour deadline would be up and they could expect another call from Wolff ’s accomplice. God knows what horrors that would bring.

He reached for the folded Times and, without thinking, opened it to the crossword section, placing the rest of the paper aside. He stared at the tiny grid of black and white squares, pondering the thousands of them that had challenged his sense of logic and reasoning over so many years.

With a cryptic crossword, unlike a conventional crossword, one’s bank of general knowledge is of little help; the solver must wrestle with construing the clues correctly to extract literal meaning from clever camouflage. What makes them so challenging and often frustrating, is that all the clues are couched in varying forms of disguised anagrams, cryptograms, phonetic puzzles, and cunning plays on words. Teasing out the answers is a job for an analytical, not a fact-filled mind.

He stared at the puzzle. Not reading but just staring. He thought back to the day he first saw the rose. How beautiful it was, how seductive. And now, in such a short time, what havoc it had wrought. A twisted trail of heartache and tragedy.

After all this time, after the hours of sifting through notes, creating timelines, analysing, reconstructing conversations, they were still no nearer to finding answers. He must have overlooked something – a subtle clue, a misspoken word. Or was he simply trying too hard, overlooking the obvious? Think of the enigma of the blue rose in the same way you would a cryptic clue. No, that would be absurd, he said to himself. But his mind was already in motion, stimulated and challenged by the very idea of it.

Methodically, he started with the ‘players’. He got a notepad and wrote down their names – one at the top of each successive page. This, in part, was similar to the exercise he and Alex had exhausted yesterday but he was determined to try again and keep trying, if needs be. There were nine names in all: himself, Kate and Alex, Vicky, Tanaka, Adell, Mrs Cooke, Graham and Wolff. Had he overlooked anybody? Not that he could think of. The police, perhaps? No, they were too busy looking for a killer to be interested in a stolen rose. Besides, they weren’t even aware that Kate was missing.

Starting from the day of Kate’s first phone call, he matched each so-called player with incidents linking them to the rose. These he wrote underneath each name. It took him nearly an hour to write everything down. When the list was complete, he went over each page, retracing every incident, cross-referencing every encounter and reviewing every known conversation. It took him the best part of another hour before he had gone through all nine pages. When he crossed off the last name, he was no wiser than he was when he started. ‘Damn!’ he muttered.

Engrossed in the task, he had completely forgotten about Alex. Where in hell was he? He would give him another ten minutes, then go and hammer on his bedroom door.

He got up and went to the sink, filling the kettle to make a fresh pot of tea. Back at the table he skimmed through his notes one more time, finally putting them aside. He got up and climbed the stairs to wake Alex.

Ten minutes later they faced each other across the kitchen table as Alex nursed a cup of coffee.

‘Sleep at all?’ asked Kingston.

‘Not much, no.’

‘We’ll see about getting you some sleeping pills today.’

‘What’s all this bumf, then?’ Alex asked, rubbing his eyes and picking up one of the torn-off pages of Kingston’s scribblings.

‘That “bumf” is the result of a good two hours’ worth of intense brainstorming, conceptualizing and deductive reasoning, I’ll have you know.’

‘Did you come up with anything?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Kingston replied with a feeble shake of the head.

Alex regarded Kingston with bloodshot eyes cushioned with dark puffy bags. His skin was the colour and texture of putty. Even his usually shiny hair was lacklustre and straggly. ‘We’ve probably got until noon. And that’s it,’ Alex said, with the despair of a condemned prisoner praying for an eleventh-hour reprieve from the Home Office. Absently he turned over the front section of the newspaper, pushing it, aimlessly, from side to side.

Kingston watched, not quite knowing what to say. He caught a glimpse of the newspaper headline: Brighton Nursing Home Scandal Widens.

‘Brighton.’

‘What?’ said Kingston confused by Alex’s odd comment.