Ten Down (1/3)

You won’t believe me but I was working on a crossword at the very moment Detective Doug Brown called me. That’s how much of an afficionado I am, though my kids have another name for it. I do four a day, usually. They say it keeps the mind young.

“Deborah,” he said, “I’d like a word.”

Ten minutes later he was sitting at my kitchen table behind a cup of strong tea. He looked that pale, I guessed it was something serious.

I should say here that I’ve known Doug for an age. His mother and I were at school together and he and his sister grew up with my kids. There was even a time he was even seeing my oldest daughter, though that didn’t last long—he was a little earnest for her taste. She’s sparkly and mad for the stage—a keen actress and she teaches acting classes in high schools. He has no imagination whatsoever and puts one in mind of an unusually shy and scruffy bear. In any case, the point is that he’s practically part of our family and from time to time he will drop in to pass the time of day with me.

He seemed to be having a hard time getting started so I nudged him along a bit.

“What brings you here, love?”

“There’s a—er—situation at work,” he said, “But we’re not sure of it. We don’t have evidence yet.” He was looking that uncomfortable and I was still none the wiser.

“Hold on a sec. What letter? What’s going on? Tell me from the start.”

Without a word, he handed me a crossword printed out on a piece of computer paper.

I put on my reading glasses and peered at it. Two words had been filled in already: one across was ‘ALBATROSS’ and one down was ‘ART GALLERY’. The clues, respectively were ‘Baudelaire’s birdie’ and ‘Viewing a mixed up rat’. I quickly read through the other clues and looked up at Doug, bemused.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked.  “Is it a professional job?”

“Oh no,” I said, pityingly. “It’s pretty amateurish.” I remembered he’d never had been much for words even as a schoolboy.

“Could you solve it?” he asked hopefully.

“I already have. It’s quite simple—if you’re used to crosswords,” I added hurriedly so as not to hurt his feelings. “All except for ten down: ‘The End’—two letters, first letter ‘d’…hmm. Apart from that, there’s clearly a local theme. The answers are all places about town here. Albatross for the albatross colony, I imagine. ‘Hot gleeman’ – that’s Robbie Burns, the statue. And the art gallery, well that’s self-explanatory. Oh!” I looked up sharply. “Art gallery? That’s where that poor young man was found yesterday. Is that connected to this?”

There’d been a fatal stabbing at the art gallery the day previous. No one had seen the killer and the surveillance cameras hadn’t caught anything—that particular hall had been darkened for effect the better to view some fluorescent sculptures. The paper said there’d been about twenty people in the whole gallery at the time and, seeing as the exhibition was free, there was no official record of who’d entered.

“We’re afraid there is a link, yes,” said Doug. He sighed and rubbed his head through his hair, which already looked as if it hadn’t been brushed for a month of Sundays. “I might as well tell you the whole story. A month ago today I opened an envelope on my desk and found this crossword inside, no letter attached. There was only one word filled in—'albatross.’ I had no idea what it meant and thought it was some sort of advertising gimmick.”

“Well, that’s what anyone would think,” I said sympathetically.

“I threw it in the bin and forgot about it. This morning I got another envelope. My secretary left it on my desk along with all the other mail. Again, there was no note with it, it was just the same crossword, this time with both ‘albatross’ and ‘art gallery’ filled in. Given yesterday’s stabbing, I had a horrible feeling. I called the albatross colony to ask if they’d had any mortalities there recently. Sure enough, there was a woman who’d fallen off a cliff—the very day before I got that first crossword.”

“I remember now,” I said. “There was a piece about the rescue operation. It was very sad. She was a teacher, name of Hill. Teresa Hill, that was it. And the poor widower has two teen boys to bring up.”

Doug nodded.

“And so now I’m worried about all the rest of these,” he gestured despairingly at the crossword clues. “Every one of them represents a future victim.”

“So what do you want me to do? I’ll help if I can,” I said.

“Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

“Me being a crossword fan, you mean?”

“Yeah. Is there a group or something you belong to?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a solitary habit and every second pensioner has a go at crosswords. I wouldn’t know where to start. As I said, this is not a particularly stellar effort. Anyone could have mocked it up using computer software.”

“I see,” he looked miserable.

“Well, not anyone. I mean, they’d have to be fairly computer savvy I suppose. And able to, you know, carry out a complicated plan. I mean, it’s someone of at least average intelligence. And fairly physically spry—it’s a real mission to get out to that field by the cliff.”

He sucked his moustache with his bottom lip.

“That still doesn’t narrow it down much, does it. God knows, I don’t want to send the whole city into a panic. But it looks like I’m going to have to publish an alert.”

“People are tougher than you’d think. My advice would be to get it out there in the open asap. It’s always good to have extra eyes and ears. Crowdsource it—that’s what my grandies say.”

So it was that the following day The Daily Otakou had a headline reading CROSSWORD KILLER AT LARGE: TWO BODIES AND COUNTING. I winced and felt guilty about having told him to publicize the thing. I should have known what the media would do. It really was a shame that Doug hadn’t hired a spin-doctor. What’s more, it seemed to me unfortunate that the crossword should be printed as it was—it would massage the murderer’s vanity. Phrases like ‘police at a loss’, ‘despite having all the clues at hand’ didn’t help his case. I was appalled by the sensationalist tone of the articles and dismayed by the way they portrayed Doug as a bumbling Keystone cop.

As predicted, there was a big reaction in town. Some people were excited by the drama. Others were afraid to leave their houses. A lot of parents kept their kids at home, even if there had been nothing about schools in the crossword. That said, there was a chilling clue “The boy who never grew up” (5,3) apparently referred to the statue of Peter Pan in the Botanic Gardens. I didn’t blame parents for being careful, of course, but the general atmosphere of fear was hard to take.

There were business owners who suffered too. One of the clues had been ‘George’s saucy eatery’, a clear allusion to ‘Tarts’, a bakery on George Street. Customers stayed away in droves so the managers decided to close up shop and to do deliveries instead, under the name ‘George Street Sweets’. Another clue had been ‘William’s haunted home is his… ’, a reference to  Howell Castle, reportedly haunted by the ghost of William Howell, who’d shot himself in 1832.  The Youngs, a couple who managed the castle, were particularly incensed that the crossword was made public. The picturesque castle and its grounds had been fully booked with weddings and events every weekend for three years. When the news got out that a killer had a spree booked in the same spot, 95% of them cancelled in a hurry. As a result, the Youngs picketed the police headquarters to demand Doug give up his job. Gradually, more and more people joined them in this protest and most days there was a crowd of nine or ten with pickets. His car was frequently egged.

On top of all this were the amateur sleuths—people who’d seen one too many mystery series on TV and were gripped by the idea that that their neighbor or colleague was wrong in the head. One of the ladies in my gentle-exercises class got it into her idiot head that the fact that I like to do crosswords meant that I was a mass murderer. She made a couple of insinuating remarks before I called her something she didn’t like. That was the end of my gentle-exercises class for the interim.

In short, the atmosphere was charged with suspicion, fear and hostility. Matters went on like this for two months: neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. And nothing really happened. I know Doug and his team were doing their best—following protocol, collecting evidence, sifting through mountains of suggestions trying to separate the chaff from the wheat. But for most of us, the waiting was unbearable. We made dark jokes about it. Eventually everyone put it all to the back of their mind. Kids started going back to school again. Things returned to something like normalcy.

“How’s it going?” I asked sympathetically when Doug came over for a Sunday cuppa one day. I tried to hide how shocked I was at his appearance—he seemed to have aged ten years in a few months. His hair was already becoming quite grey and him in his early thirties. He was beyond scruffy, he looked like a bear than had been caught in a trash compactor.

“We’re making some progress, Deb,” he said, but he looked depressed.

“But?” I said.

“But they’re calling for my head,” he looked at me with doleful eyes. “I need results.”

I patted his hand.

“Most of us appreciate what you’re doing. Look at it this way, there hasn’t been another murder since you got on the case. That’s a great result. It means whoever doing this is scared witless . Maybe they’ve even gone away. That’s huge.”

He groaned.

“That’s just it, Deb. There hasn’t been another murder. Do you know, yesterday I caught myself wishing that there would be another victim just so we’d have more evidence to go on? How twisted is that?”

“Pretty natural under the circumstances, I’d say,” I shrugged. “I think there are about 100,000 other people waiting for the other shoe to drop too.”

“We’ve done everything. Cameras, security guards, community watch, hundreds of interviews forensic analysis—the lot. And after all that there are only a few things to hold onto: A red sweater, a drama club and a piece of graffiti.”

“A drama club?”

“One of the only things that link the two victims is that they were both involved in a community theater group. Teresa Hill was the director and Craig Thorpe helped with the backdrops. He’s an art student at the university.”

“So they knew each other?”

“Yes. Teresa got the whole thing going last year. Craig joined just a few months before he died. But no one says that they were anything more than acquaintances.”

“And the red sweater?”

“One person was at the albatross colony the morning Teresa disappeared. He said it was a misty morning and he saw a woman in a bright red sweater in the distance, wandering along the cliff edge. He was worried that the person was getting too close the nests and yelled at her to ‘get out of it.’ She just wandered off, he said.”

“What did she look like?”

“The thing is, his eyesight’s not great, plus it was misty and she must have been about 300 meters away at least, so he couldn’t say. Couldn’t even tell me the color of her hair. But get this—there was a woman in the art gallery and she was wearing a bright red sweater too—and a hat, dark glasses and a facemask. They got her on camera and the guy from the albatross colony gave a positive ID—it was the same sweater, though he couldn’t swear to the woman.”

“So this woman is the suspect, right?”

“Well, no, not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s on camera at the art gallery on the right day, but by the time she appears walking through the entrance, Craig had already been dead for at least half an hour.”

“Even so…”

“Yeah, it’s more than a coincidence.”

“OK, so drama club, red sweater…what about the graffiti?”

Doug groaned.

“OK. So someone found this spraypainted on an underpass.”

He showed me a photo on his phone.

“Three down, 13/12.” I looked up at him. “Thirteenth of December. That’s tomorrow!”

(Part one of three)