The shock and relief had made Fiona lose control of her body for a brief moment. She snapped up her phone and put it to her ear.
“Fiona? Are you still there?” barked DI Fincher.
“Yes, yes. Please go on.”
“Firstly, this means you are off the Osman warning list. Officially, your life is not under threat. Unofficially, the killer is still out there. Exercise caution and be vigilant. Do not take any unnecessary risks, stay in public places and do not open the door to anyone you’re not expecting. Secondly, it means Sophie Haverford could not have committed the crime because she was with us.”
Partial Sue, who’d been eavesdropping, wanted to know more. “Ask her about the murdered Fiona Sharp.”
“It’s okay, I heard that,” DI Fincher said. “I cannot give any exact details at this point about the deceased.”
“Please.” Partial Sue leaned in closer. “It would really help us.”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“You don’t have any suspects yet,” Partial Sue replied. “What harm could it do?”
The irritation in DI Fincher’s voice turned up a notch. “No, we don’t. Not after the last suspect we questioned for six hours.”
Fiona apologised. “We thought we were doing the right thing by passing that footage on to you. Okay, the killer isn’t Sophie, but how do you know it’s not the killer in the footage trying to frame her? The killer seems to be making a habit of setting up different people. Sophie, Malorie and June. I’d say they’ve got a grudge. You can’t say that’s nothing.”
The line went quiet. DI Fincher cleared her throat. “Okay, but this is all I’m giving you. The latest victim was a divorcée called Fiona Sharp who lived alone. She was killed in the same way — stab wound in the back. However, she didn’t fit the pattern of the previous murders of being older and offline. She was in her early fifties, had broadband and worked part-time. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Was a domino left behind?” Daisy asked.
The line went quiet again. “A domino was found in her hand with the name Barry Taylor scratched into it. The number on the domino was the same as the victim before: a one on its own with a blank at the other end. Remember, what I’ve told you is all strictly between us. Now Fiona, you can go back to your house, but stay vigilant, okay?”
“Okay, thank you.”
“You can keep your GPS alarm for the next couple of weeks, just to be on the safe side. Take it with you everywhere.”
“I will.”
The call ended.
“I can’t believe another person is dead,” Daisy said. “This is terrible. I thought the killer might have lost interest. That poor woman.”
Fiona felt the floor drop away from her. Relief flooded her body, but the guilt crushed heavy as a planet. She’d been spared but another Fiona Sharp had died. Tears pricked at her eyes.
As if reading her mind, Partial Sue said, “We should be thankful it wasn’t our Fiona they killed. You’re safe.” She gave Fiona a reassuring shoulder squeeze.
Fiona returned a weak smile. She didn’t feel safe. Shocked would be more accurate. The bullet had been dodged, sidestepped, but it had hit someone else.
“Are you okay?” Daisy asked.
No, she wasn’t okay. Perched at the top of the helter-skelter, she needed distraction to stop her from plunging down the spiral, or she might never claw her way back up. Her mind needed occupying.
“I’m fine,” she lied. “Let’s carry on investigating. It’s clear the killer is showing no signs of stopping. We have to catch him, or people will keep dying, like this next guy. Barry Taylor.”
“So much for the countdown code,” muttered Partial Sue. “Another number one has been added to the sequence: 3,2,1,1 — what does that mean?”
“Countdown is on pause,” Daisy ventured. “Or if we use the simple ‘one equals A, two equals B’ code, we’ve now got ‘baaaaa’. Just a longer sheep sound than we had before. Maybe it’s something to do with noisy sheep?”
Fiona frowned. No point in them speculating. She contacted her nephew, texting to tell him that the new domino in the sequence was another number one and a blank, to see if it might help him to extract any hidden codes or patterns. She jumped when he phoned her straight back.
“Hello, Dan.” She put the call on speakerphone.
“That’s the Fibonacci sequence,” he said triumphantly. “Well, it’s the Fibonacci sequence backwards, to be precise.”
“I’ve heard of the Fibonacci sequence,” Partial Sue said. “It’s famous, isn’t it? You add two numbers to get the next number or something.”
“That’s right,” Dan replied. “Basically, each number is the sum of the two before it. So it goes 0,1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. The combined value of each of your individual dominoes are a part of that sequence, but backwards: 3, 2, 1, 1.”
Fiona’s mind raced. “What does the Fibonacci sequence mean?”
“Well, the numbers grow bigger exponentially. Best example is an ammonite shell. As the shell grows out in a spiral, that spiral continually increases in size and proportion. It’s a perfect real-world representation of Fibonacci.”
“So it’s all about dinosaur shells?” Daisy asked. Technically ammonites weren’t dinosaurs, but everyone knew what she meant.
“Oh, no,” Dan said. “That’s just one example. The Fibonacci sequence is a repeating pattern in everything and anything — nature, science, computer programming, genetics, art, architecture, engineering — you name it, the Fibonacci sequence will be in there somewhere.”
After Fiona had hung up, the three ladies threw themselves into Google, delving into the subject, hoping to find a connection that would link the murder victims with the famous mathematical series. Rather like the sequence itself, the deeper they delved, the more their results grew, to overwhelming proportions. With thousands of pages of hits, the Fibonacci sequence seemed to touch every aspect of life, was part of the DNA of the entire world.
“There’s too much information here. Can’t we narrow it down?” Daisy put her phone on the table, taking a break from the screen. “How about this? Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician. Pizza is Italian. Dominoes is a make of pizza. There, cracked it.”
The other two ladies laughed at Daisy’s thin-crust logic.
“Oh, if only it were that easy,” Fiona remarked.
Partial Sue jerked upright after being hunched over her own phone. “Maybe it is. Maybe it’s a pizza delivery guy. People open their doors to pizza delivery drivers. We didn’t have that on the list.”
Fiona wasn’t so sure. “You don’t let pizza delivery guys in your house, that’s why it wasn’t on the list. But also, Sarah Brown never ordered pizza in her life. She had a problem with mozzarella. Said it was like cheese-flavoured chewing gum, and I can’t imagine Ian Richard was a pizza fan either.”
“I bet he was more a cheese on toast man,” Daisy remarked.
Silence descended as the possible connection dried up in front of them. Reluctantly, Daisy began thumbing her phone screen again. For such a rich clue, full of endless possibilities, Fibonacci was offering them very little in terms of practical, usable information.
Partial Sue folded her arms. “What I don’t get is this Fibonacci sequence is all about things getting bigger. But in the case of our dominoes, it’s backwards. Numbers are getting smaller. Maybe Barry Taylor is to be the last victim and the next domino we’ll find on him will be completely blank to represent zero — the first number in the sequence.”
They all considered this for a moment. Was that the message the killer was trying to send them? Previously, they had all thought the numbers had been a countdown — a build-up to a gruesome crescendo. But now with this new information, perhaps it was the opposite. The sequence was winding down, about to end.
“Doesn’t matter,” Fiona said. “We still have to catch the killer. Stop this Barry Taylor from being the last victim, if that happens to be the case. But we shouldn’t assume anything.” Fiona paused, thought for a beat. “Maybe we should change tack. We’re not getting anywhere at the moment. Let’s stick a pin in it for now. How about we look into this bloke Barry?”
This change in direction gave Daisy a renewed energy. Her thumbs moved in a blur. “Online directory has seventeen Barry Taylors in the Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch area. Two of them are right here in Southbourne.”
“We need to find what links this latest victim and all the other victims,” Partial Sue said eagerly. “Then see if we can apply it to one of the Barry Taylors Daisy’s just found.”
“We’ve lost the only link the killer gave us,” Fiona pointed out. “Unlike the other victims, the latest one was middle-aged, online and worked. She doesn’t fit the pattern.”
“But she still lived alone,” Partial Sue reminded them.
“There is another link between all the victims, sort of,” Daisy said.
Partial Sue and Fiona regarded Daisy, eager for her new revelation. “What?” Fiona asked.
“Well, their names are all a bit dull, aren’t they? Sarah Brown, Ian Richard, Sharon Miller, Barry Taylor—”
“Fiona Sharp.” The victim’s namesake smirked.
“Yeah. I mean, no.” Daisy blushed. “Oh, gosh, sorry. But do you know what I mean? There’s nothing really exotic in there like, I don’t know . . . Jemima Glockenspiel.”
“You know someone called Jemima Glockenspiel?” Partial Sue asked.
“No,” Daisy replied. “But I’d love a name like that. Something you can really wrap your tongue around. Jemima Glockenspiel. No one’s going to forget that name.”
“Dull or not, let’s hope DI Fincher’s budget stretches to police guards for all the Barry Taylors. Seventeen is still quite a lot of people to protect, and that’s just the ones we’ve found.”
Fiona nodded in agreement as despondency filled the air, the mood bleak and hopeless with the prospect of more bodies piling up before they could catch a break. The killer was getting away with it, and this didn’t seem likely to change for the foreseeable future, unless the reverse Fibonacci sequence meant the killing spree was about to end abruptly. Neither DI Fincher nor the charity shop detectives were any closer to catching them than when they had started.
Partial Sue broke the silence. “That was a smart observation you made about the killer’s habit of setting people up, holding a grudge. Who do we know who has a grudge against Sophie?”
“Us,” Fiona replied. “Everyone else round here seems to love her. We’re the only ones who don’t like her, and she knows it. Probably why she thought it was us in the footage.”
Partial Sue gasped. “The Wicker Man! He could have a grudge against her.”
Daisy’s eyebrows raised. “Really? I would have thought her theatrics would be right up his street.”
“Exactly,” Partial Sue replied. “I can remember when Sophie first came to Southbourne. Before either of your time. He was besotted by her. Loved all that flamboyant nonsense. Lapped it up. Smitten, he was. Unfortunately, she wasn’t into him. Snubbed his offers of affection. The Wicker Man put a brave face on it, laughed it off, but I could tell he was hurt.”
“But if he’s trying to set up Sophie for the murders, why set up Malorie and June?” Daisy asked.
“As decoys,” Partial Sue explained. “If he targeted Sophie alone, it would look too obvious with his history of unrequited love. It would point the finger at him. But with three of them it blurs the lines of motivation.”
Fiona straightened up and took a large, confident breath. “Okay, that only strengthens our case against the Wicker Man. He’s back to being our number-one suspect.”
Daisy pulled a puzzled face. “Makes it trickier to prove, though. I mean, DI Fincher said this latest victim was online, probably had a smart meter. How’s he going to do his meter-reading trick to get in the house?”
“You don’t need to be online to have a smart meter,” Partial Sue replied. “Isn’t that what he said to you?”
“I think it’s irrelevant,” Fiona pointed out. “If she hasn’t got a smart meter, he just flashes a fake ID and says, ‘I’m here to read the meter.’ If she does have a smart meter, he could say something like, ‘Your smart meter’s malfunctioning and I need to recalibrate it, otherwise you’ll be overcharged.’ I’m sure most people would let him in. No one wants to be overcharged.”
“I’ve heard that some of them go on the blink now and again,” Partial Sue agreed. “Do we know where he was yesterday?”
Daisy thought hard. “He was in here first thing, I remember. To scrounge some of Oliver’s cake. Then he went back to his shop, I presume.”
Partial Sue became excitable. “His back’s better now. He could’ve popped out for an hour, done the dirty deed and nobody would be any the wiser.”
Fiona shook her head. “That’s not good enough. We have a serviceable theory but it’s worthless if we have no proof.”
Silence descended again. Three minds cogitated on how they would gather evidence of the Wicker Man’s guilt, preferably without breaking the law again.
Daisy clicked her fingers. “Wait, what was the date on the CCTV footage?”
“Twenty-seventh of September,” Partial Sue answered.
Fiona leaned in. “A rainy day. I remember it. The Wicker Man’s birthday. We got Oliver to bake him a cake with candles. Oliver complained about getting soaking wet. He left the moment we started singing ‘Happy Birthday’. Joyful occasions always get Oliver’s back up.”
“Wasn’t that just in the morning?” Partial Sue asked. “Did we know where the Wicker Man was for the rest of the time?”
“Er, no. He took the day off.”
“He could still have done it.” Partial Sue rocked back and forth, unable to contain her swelling excitement. “Plenty of time to get over to Westbourne and pretend to be Sophie to set her up.”
“Classic Libra trait,” Daisy added, as if she wasn’t surprised. “Affectionate but self-pitying. Holds a grudge.”
Fiona held up both her hands. “Okay, let’s not get carried away. It might be him in the footage, it might not. Could be anyone. It’s going to be tricky to find out. We can’t exactly ask him, and before anyone suggests it, we are not breaking into his house to see if he owns a cape.”
Partial Sue ignored the last comment, which was clearly meant for her. “If he’s smart, he’d have destroyed the evidence. We need to establish his whereabouts on the twenty-seventh of September. We can’t do that, but DI Fincher could. She could check traffic cameras, phone towers, establish where he went.”
Fiona blew out through her teeth. “I’d be reluctant to give her any more leads after the last one. Not until we have more, but I don’t know how we’re going to get them.”
The Catch-22 situation sent them into a deadlocked silence. They had a promising lead but no way of proving it without police help. But to get police help they would need to point the finger at the Wicker Man with nothing but a theory. A very good theory, but if it turned out to be wrong, they could very well repeat the Sophie debacle, tipping off the police about someone completely innocent. Without strong evidence, they would earn a reputation as three busybodies recklessly accusing those around them. What glimmer of credibility they had left with DI Fincher, if any at all, would be snuffed out for good.