Bridge had never been any good at crosswords. Luckily, Tenebrae_Z had done most of the hard work.
After listening to her recount events at the house, and her confirmation that Declan O’Riordan and Tenebrae_Z were one and the same, Giles had given her the rest of the day off. She didn’t know what he thought she’d do with that time, but Bridge had gone straight home and spent the rest of the day staring at the lines of ASCII art on her screen, trying to decipher their meaning.
She’d scoured the archives of france.misc.binaries-random as far back as she could, even peeking into private Usenet servers whose archives went back months further than regular public locations. Ten had said all the posts he’d found were no more than six months old, but he’d also found random pieces in other newsgroups. Who knew where else they might have been lurking, and for how long?
But she couldn’t find anything older than six months either, and he hadn’t told her in which other groups he’d found other examples, so it was a needle in a haystack. She’d turned instead to the five posts from f.m.b-r, going over them again and again. If only she had access to his computer, she could find his archive and see everything. But Andrea Thomson had been right. Not only was this so far still a purely domestic matter, but seeing a picture of Bridge on Ten’s cork board had been a genuine shock to both of them. Now Andrea probably thought she was lying about not knowing Ten in person, and might even suspect Bridge was somehow connected to his murder. Under the same circumstances, Bridge wouldn’t have let herself within typing distance of the Alienware either.
But knowing it wasn’t true — that they’d never met, and she didn’t know who Ten really was before today — made the photograph all the more unsettling. One consolation was that it had been just one among many pictures of uk.london.gothic-netizens members. It wasn’t pinned out separately, or framed, or, God forbid, built into some kind of creepy stalker shrine. Another consolation came when Andrea confirmed that Ten’s login password definitely wasn’t ‘ponty’. They didn’t know what it was yet, but they’d tried that without success, and Bridge had sighed with relief. It meant Andrea was taking her seriously, and was also further confirmation that Ten hadn’t been some kind of weird obsessive.
Well, that wasn’t true. He had been completely obsessed…just not with her.
She remembered the pictures she’d taken of the newspapers. Why collect newspapers, of all things? Ten was one of the most tech-savvy people she knew. But Declan O’Riordan was a middle-aged man, old enough to remember a time before home computers. The sheer weight of hardcopy stuff in his house was proof he was old-school enough to still enjoy owning physical things. Paper books, printed magazines, CDs, DVDs…and one of every newspaper he could find, but only from certain dates.
With the crosswords all partially completed.
Something stirred at the back of Bridge’s mind. She took out her iPhone and swiped through the photos. She hadn’t exactly been thorough, but from what she could see of the newspapers she’d photographed, there was enough here to support a theory. Several pictures showed not just the date, but the crosswords in question. She checked the June 18th papers, as those were the first where she’d made the date connection, and saw there were three pictures where the crossword was visible. She pinched to zoom, magnifying each of them as much as she could, and noted which clues had been answered.
They were all clustered around the same group. 14, 15, 16 across; 8, 9, 11 down.
As Bridge had come across each piece of ASCII art in the newsgroup, she’d made a text file copy and saved it, along with the date it was posted. She scrolled through the folder now, looking for a file around June 18th. And there it was, right on the dot.
She opened the file, and was confronted with a 78 x 78 grid of seemingly-random letters and numbers that, if you squinted, looked like a Volkswagen Beetle. Her eyes darted to the end, to the strange sequence of characters that made up the end of every image, in this case *0 6 188 D16A.
The last five characters. 8D. 16A. 8 Down, 16 Across?
That left four preceding, all numbers: 0 6 1 8.
She could have kicked herself. A date, in American format: 06-18. June 18th.
Bridge exhaled, only then realising she’d been holding her breath. She leaned back in her chair and clutched her head, trying to bring her racing mind under control. Ten had said the ASCII posts were a code, and here was the proof, or at least a part of it. He’d figured out the recurring characters were references to a date, and crossword puzzle clues. It was logical to assume they referred to a newspaper. But there was nothing to indicate which newspaper, so Ten had gone out and bought every single one. According to her copy of the newsgroup post, the June 18th ASCII art had gone live at 1500 GMT. Bridge smiled as she imagined Ten running around local newsagents, trying to find the last copies of every newspaper he could find. The locals must have thought he was mad.
Why not go online? All the newspapers put their crosswords up on their websites these days. And what had he found, anyway? The references made sense. She opened more text file copies she’d made of the Usenet posts and realised that yes, they all followed the same format. Only the spacing changed.
* 0 51 5 21A 5 D (May 15th, 21 Across, 5 Down)
* 0 428 18D1 3 A (April 28th, 18 Down, 13 Across)
* 042 2 2 0D3 A (April 22nd, 20 Down, 3 Across)
But what did it mean? Even in just the three photos Bridge had of June 18th crosswords, the answers for ‘8 Down and 16 Across’ were all very different.
The Times: ‘Recalcitrant’, ‘Fallujah’.
The Guardian: ‘Tankard’, ‘Epistemology’.
The Daily Express: ‘Hughes’, ‘Europe’.
Bridge’s stomach rumbled. It was 9 o’clock, and all she’d eaten since returning home that morning was a cereal bar. But she didn’t want to turn away from this, and Ten, now. She’d done that the night before, and now Ten was dead.
She scolded herself. That wasn’t fair, and deep down she knew it. If she hadn’t gone to dinner with Izzy, what would or could she have done? Sit on the chat server all night, waiting for an alert that never came? The only way she could have helped was if she’d gone with Ten to that meeting, and that had been out of the question. He didn’t give her any real details about the phone conversation.
The phone number. Ten had said he found it after decoding one of the ASCII pieces. But none of these crossword solutions were numbers. She quickly skimmed the text files she’d saved, but saw nothing resembling a string of digits that could be a phone number in them. Perhaps they were distributed somehow throughout the characters in the 78 x 78 grid? But then what would be the point of the crossword references, if the information was right there in the ASCII? It wouldn’t need ‘decoding’ in the first place.
Bridge shook her head. This wasn’t doing any good. “Valkyrie needs food, badly,” she mumbled to herself, and put her monitor to sleep.