“The premeditation of the murders suggests someone is aiming for a specific effect, but what it is escapes us.”
“This feels mathematically arranged, John, kind of a murderer’s Turing code.”
May assumed he was referring to Alan Turing’s celebrated solution to the wartime Enigma code. The logician had successfully cracked cryptographic messages created on a typewriter attached to a random print-wheel, and had suggested that computers would only be capable of human thought if a random element, such as a roulette wheel, was introduced. “Why would anyone go to the trouble of doing that?” he asked.
“Maybe he’s scoping victims according to occult significance. Bet you that’s what Bryant thinks.” He dunked the rest of his doughnut and dropped it, dripping, into his mouth. “I agree about the methodology, though. There’s logic at work. It’s like the victims have been demographically targeted. By what coordinates, though?” May could see ideas spinning through the boy’s brain, each examined and discarded in rapid turn.
“Four across a single week. No correspondence to a lunar cycle, no mutilation, no mess and no fuss. He’s not getting off on it. The double-header is easy to figure. He’s angry because he thought you’d work it out earlier, so he wants you to get closer, where he can confront you. It’s probably someone you’ve met, because this guy really hates you. He knows you, and it’s personal. Can I keep these?” Rufus folded up the pages.
“Just so long as you don’t show them around.”
“I’m only asking out of politeness. I already memorised them.” He looked over at the bulge in May’s jacket pocket. “You got a little something in there for me?”
“Just some prototype programs I’m taking home with me when I leave,” said May casually. “You haven’t given me any solid leads yet.”
“I told you, he’s not doing it for himself. He’s doing it to mess with your head. He’s more interested in being seen by the public than by his victims. Why? Because the victims can’t report back.”
“Rufus, this is serious.”
“Look, first murder.” The boy withdrew a chewed pencil stub from beneath his shirt and drew numbers on a napkin. “Publicity. Second murder: Feed the flame. You get a week on the front pages, no more, so it all has to be done fast. The third and fourth deaths are a catch-up meant to force you guys out – he wants you to do something stupid and risky, crash and burn in front of him.” Rufus thought for a moment. “Okay, here’s something. I noticed one corresponder.” He tapped the chart with his finger. “And you ain’t gonna like it because it don’t lead nowhere.”
“At this time of the morning it doesn’t matter if things don’t make sense,” said May with a sigh. “I’m feeling old and tired, and I’m going to be out of a job on Monday morning. Hit me.”
“Don’t ask me how I know this, ‘cause it’s the kind of crap I just carry around in my head the whole time, okay?”
“Okay.” May moved forward, listening carefully. The boy had given him strong leads in the past and deserved a hearing, no matter how strange his ideas seemed.
“The Horse Hospital. It’s a bar in the back of Clerkenwell where local artists drink. Saralla White got herself banned for throwing a punch at a photographer there. Apart from White, it was home to another celebrity drinker when it was still an inn called the Queen’s Head. It was where Dick Turpin stayed before heading north.”
“Rufus, what on earth am I supposed to do with information like this?” said May, dropping his head into his hands.
“Don’t you see? He selected his first victim because he’d already decided to behave like a highwayman. She got picked at random. All of the victims are just losers who’ve dropped onto the radar by accident. There’s no motive at all.”
“Rufus, there has to be a motive. Even serial killers have a motive.”
But the boy had risen and vanished back into the night before May could ask him anything else.
? Ten Second Staircase ?
39
Entrapment
Oskar Kasavian was seething. He slammed through the offices one after the other, searching for a scapegoat or something to hurl, knowing that he could blame no-one but himself, but it was dawn on Saturday morning, and the building was nearly empty. He had not expected the detectives to call his bluff by refusing receipt of the third cadaver, slyly returning the body to its resting place via a couple of taciturn orderlies at University College Hospital. This was going to be trickier than he thought. At least the gloves were off now. His ambition had been made clear, as had their intention to fight back. “Where the hell are they?” he shouted at his secretary in passing. “There’s no answer from the PCU. They can’t all be out on assignment. Don’t they realise this is their last weekend in full employment? What the bloody hell is going on?”
¦
“What else could I do?” asked May. “We’re running out of time.”
“I don’t need to remind you what happened before,” Longbright warned. She had returned to find a lead on the remaining constable who had registered as a witness on May’s ‘confession’, an e-mail from a colleague who remembered the officer’s married name. But time was running out fast.
“We were more foolhardy in those days. Besides, this was Janet Ramsey’s idea.”
“What makes her so sure he’s going to turn up?”
Before them lay the unfolded Saturday morning edition of
“I know she’s doing it to boost circulation, but she’s being very stupid.”
“We can’t stop her from doing it, so we’ll have to help control the event. Colin and Meera are going to stay with her the whole time. She’s due here any minute for a briefing session with us. I was going to ask you to sit in with me. I might miss something; I haven’t been to bed yet. Did you speak to the publican at the Horse Hospital?”
“He confirmed the old inn’s claim to fame as Dick Turpin’s rest stop, and he remembers the night White was banned. He doesn’t recall who else was in that night, but he promised to ask around.”
“Have you seen Arthur?”
“Is he not answering his mobile?”
“I tried calling him at home, but Alma hasn’t seen him either. Perhaps it’s best that he’s not around. He doesn’t approve of journalistic entrapment techniques.”
¦
Janet Ramsey looked like a housewife from a faded seventies sitcom, bulky and floral, with hair arranged in stiff red peaks, but her voice betrayed the late Thatcherite steel of determination without conscience. She fixed Longbright with a searching eye before accepting the sergeant’s offer of a seat and coffee, as though suspecting her of a trick. She also refused to say anything of consequence until a male entered the room, a habit Longbright deplored in other women.
“We think the Highwayman has some kind of link with Clerkenwell, and he certainly knows the area,” May explained. “The apartment we have for you is inside a converted watchmakers’ factory. It’s a monitored site with only one main entrance, right between the school and the estate where the Highwayman was sighted. We’ll block off the rear exit and roof access, and we can cover the windows front and back. If he turns up, he’ll have to use the front hall.”
Ramsey knew that the unit had never supervised such a sting operation before, and that she was forcing them to maintain a police presence at the site. “You’ve got me for the whole day,” she told him. “If he doesn’t show, I want to record an exclusive interview with you in the afternoon, for a Monday publication.”
