LITMIR.BIZ

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on the assumption that we hadn’t solved it, as we weren’t here to stop this crime. But I think you’re probably right — he’s going to try and make every one different to show me up for the incompetent fool that he always claimed I was.”

      “Besides,” added Creswell, a little unnecessarily in my view, “you didn’t solve the last one, did you?”

      “Don’t blame me for that. I gave you the name ‘Andy’, but you couldn’t find him.”

      “I wasn’t meaning that. What about the pixies? You haven’t made sense of that yet.”

      “You mean a goblin and an elf, not pixies. I’m still looking at that. Email the photograph to me and I’ll get started on this one. I’ll work from home and see if I can come up with anything.” I was not in the best of moods as I left.

      *

      I had calmed down by the time I returned to work the next day. I understood why the DI was acting that way, as he was under intense scrutiny. The press were having a field day at how our incompetence had freed the serial killer, with some of the more right-wing nationals demanding the return of the death penalty; it wasn’t totally clear whether this just meant for people like Gregory, or if it was intended to include those it deemed responsible for his being at large.

      We could deny any responsibility for his escape until the end of the world, but it wouldn’t make the slightest difference in those people’s minds. We — the department — had been judged and convicted without having an opportunity to protest our innocence. Consequently, I had sympathy for Creswell, as he was the face of the department in this crisis. I wasn’t, therefore, particularly looking forward to seeing him, as the news I had to convey wasn’t great.

      As I walked into the station, the desk sergeant called me over. “Can you have a word with those two?” he asked, pointing towards the waiting area. “It’s the victim’s parents, Mr and Mrs O’Reilly.”

      I looked and saw an elderly couple, probably in their late seventies, obviously trying — and failing — to come to terms with their grief. As I approached them the woman said, “Promise you’ll find whoever did this to our Beatrix, won’t you? She was a good girl. Everything she did was for her children. She didn’t deserve that. Nobody deserves that.”

      “I promise I’ll find him, Mrs O’Reilly,” I said. Mr O’Reilly didn’t speak, he just nodded. I imagined that these people were of the generation that believed that the police could always be trusted to get their man. I didn’t want to disillusion them, but I expected that they would never have a satisfactory answer as to why their daughter was targeted.

      I couldn’t think of anything more to say, so I asked the sergeant to take them for a cup of tea and then send a WPC to sit with them; I knew it sounded sexist, but, in my opinion, the gentler touch was what was needed at this time.

      It was the people like this, the collateral damage as somebody once said, who really got to you. Even though the victim herself might not have been greatly missed by society, you tended to forget that she was still somebody’s much-loved daughter. And, as I had just learnt, somebody’s mother.

      Creswell was in his office, holding a file. “Is that the lab report?” I asked. When he nodded, I added, “Does it tell us anything new?”

      “Some things. There are a lot of similarities to the first case. More DNA this time, as the garage has probably been used by a lot of people like the victim.” He didn’t go into details, but I understood what he meant by ‘used’. “The report says she died from gas inhalation, not from the scourging, although she would possibly have died from her wounds eventually.”

      “Oh? What sort of gas?”

      “Helium.”

      “Isn’t that what people use to make their voices sound funny at parties? How can that kill anybody?”

      Creswell took another look at the report. “Yes, that’s right, it’s obviously a party trick gone wrong,” he said, perhaps thinking I was being facetious. “It certainly can kill somebody. I asked the same question when the report came in. The lab says the squeaky-voice part is something to do with the speed of sound being much faster in helium than in air. ‘It causes,’” he read, “‘an increase in the resonant frequency of the vocal tract and that produces the duck-like timbre.’ It is a party trick, but a dangerous one. Helium displaces the oxygen needed for respiration, and if you breathe pure helium continuously, you die of asphyxiation within minutes.”

      I whistled. “You learn something new every day.” Then I thought. “So what does that tell us? Gregory seems to be killing his victims more than once. He’s using a variety of ways, some which kill instantly, and others which would eventually kill them. Why?”

      “There has to be a reason, Watson. If we can find the pattern, then we might be able to get inside his mind and then we could get ahead of him for the first time.”

      I hesitated before replying, as I knew he wasn’t going to like what I said. “Boss, he’s playing with us. I don’t think we can hope to understand the pattern after only two murders. If there is one, as you suspect, then I think it will be several more along the way before we have enough information to understand it.”

      Creswell looked at me, an unreadable expression on his face. “Then you’d better pray to whatever God you believe in that the murders end now and we never get to understand that pattern.”

      There was a short period of reflective silence before Creswell asked, “How are you getting on with that code?”

      “I’ve decoded it, boss. That’s what I came in for. But you aren’t going to like it.”

      “Whatever it said, I didn’t think it would be good news. Go on then, reveal.”

      “He’s used a similar coding method to last time, but this one is a forward shift rather than a backwards one. And, to make it slightly different, its forward by two letters, not one, so ‘a’ would be represented by ‘c’. Here, take a look.”

      Once again, I’d written the two alphabets under each other for ease of comparison:

      ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

      CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZAB

       Pqv xgta engxgt pqy, ncrfqi, ctg aqw? Aqw fkfp’v uqnxg vjg hktuv enwg, uq cpqvjgt qpg fkgu. Ocmg uwtg aqw gplqa Ejtkuvocu, dgecwug aqw’nn dg hct vqq dwua vq egngdtcvg Pgy Agct.

      “So ‘dg’ is actually ‘be’. I don’t know why he did it this way — perhaps he used two letters as it’s the second murder?”

      “I don’t care what the reasons were,” spat Creswell. “What is the message?”

      “Sorry, boss. I latched onto it when I saw ‘aqw’nn’. It’s a good job that this guy uses punctuation. A double letter after an apostrophe made me think of common contractions, like ‘she’ll’ or ‘you’ll’. If the ‘nn’ represents ‘ll’, then that would make it two letters on from the actual letter, making the ‘aqw’ part ‘you’. It was straightforward then to reverse engineer the code.” I could see that the DI wasn’t interested in how I had cracked the code, so I decided to go straight to the end. “It says: ‘Not very clever now, lapdog, are you? You didn’t solve the first clue, so another one dies. Make sure you enjoy Christmas, because you’ll be far too busy to celebrate New Year.’”

      “I told you, didn’t I?” spluttered Creswell. “He’s going to kill at the end of every month.”

      “That isn’t exactly what he said, is it? It could be any time—”

      “Nonsense. We all know Gregory is a man with an obsessive nature. He has to do things in a precise way. He’s shown us the pattern and he’ll stick to it.”

      “Boss,” I said, trying hard to think how to phrase my request. “You know we’re really under strain here. In the circumstances,

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