McBride desperately wondered if he had been unbelievably prophetic or was merely clutching at the first reasonable straw. He had predicted to Petra the answer to the riddle that was perplexing a large proportion of the country’s police force was probably ‘staring him in the face’. Less than a minute later, he had stared without seeing at a newspaper she had held light-heartedly in front of him. A newspaper that had looked ordinary but unusual at the same time. A newspaper that might have represented the first mistake a serial killer had made. Not for what it contained – for what it didn’t.
When he had gazed back at Petra as she jokingly peered at him through the aperture left by the words that had been cut away, he had been aware that something had disturbed him about the page facing him. But what? It was unremarkable. It carried news of road accidents, a fire, the most recent decisions of the town council. Nothing unusual. Except …
Long before he arrived back at the flat on the Esplanade, McBride was toying with a theory so far-fetched he could not contemplate sharing it with anyone. But he knew he would not rest until he played it out.
Once inside the apartment, he took time only to remove his jacket before opening his laptop and accessing Google. He tapped a person’s name into the search engine.
No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
He tried again, this time just the surname but with an occupation.
No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
He opened up a new window, the site of an organisation abroad, and repeated the process. Nil result. He keyed in a different set of queries. Interrogated every link. Nil. Nil. Nil. McBride sat hunched over the keyboard for more than two hours. If perseverance was all that was required, he would not have been defeated. But it wasn’t and he was.
Finally, with a string of oaths, he logged off. He repeated the words over and over with increasing frustration before slamming the lid of the laptop shut.
He stared at the inoffensive little box for ten minutes, willing it to answer back. Then a thought entered his head – one so obvious he could not understand why it had not occurred before. Calmness returned. McBride opened the laptop up again and quietly communicated once more with Google. This time the enquiry was simple. He requested the telephone number of a large newspaper in a major European city and received an immediate response. He closed down the computer, picked up his mobile and keyed in the number he’d been given. He asked for the news editor and, after identifying himself, was put straight through. The voice at the other end spoke perfect English.
They talked for several minutes and, at first, the conversation was almost exclusively one-sided. McBride asked a series of questions and received a series of answers, all of them negative. Then the news editor put another journalist on the line, someone older, a man with a longer memory. The responses became less dismissive, more encouraging. ‘What you are telling me is starting to sound familiar,’ he told McBride. ‘The details are sounding a bell, as you would say. But not the name. Give me time to do some research for you and I will call back.’
McBride paid him copious thanks, passed over his number and rang off with more expressions of gratitude. He sank deeper into his chair at the window, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He realised it was the first time his mind had felt relaxed in weeks.