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The professor didn't answer but instead started to snore gently. It seemed obvious that they weren’t going to get any answers out of him right then.
"He's too drunk to question," Simon said.
Amber nodded. Even if they got something from him like that, it wouldn’t be admissible. "I want to look around for a minute. Watch him."
She went through to the living room. As Simon had said, there were multiple chalkboards set up there, each with a difficult-looking problem on it. She could see what the professor had meant when he'd drunkenly talked about them not being impossible, though. One of them, a kind of maze problem, Amber could see a route through in seconds. The others... she imagined that it would take time, but she would be able to crack all of them with enough effort. They were interesting puzzles, but they didn’t look impossible.
There was one thing that caught her eye, though. There was a drawing there that was unmistakably a version of the Konigsberg bridge problem. It waspossiblethat the professor had only put it up there to try to adapt it or as a form of inspiration, but here and now, with everything that was going on, it was deeply suspicious. Amber used her phone to grab a photograph of the board, then went back through to Simon and the professor.
"What do you want to do with him?" Amber asked, with a nod towards the professor.
"We should bring him back to the Verdice PD and wait until he sobers up a little. Maybethenwe'll be able to find out the truth of all this."
***
Amber waited outside the Verdice PD drunk tank, watching the professor as he lay in there, looking awful as he edged towards sobering up at a snail’s pace. He seemed to be trying to draw problems in thin air with the fingers of one hand.
It was taking a painfully long time. It was already starting to get into the evening, but the truth was that she and Simon had nowhere left to go with this case before they managed to talk to the professor.
Even now, they probably couldn't do it. Maybe they could get a couple of semi-coherent answers out of him, but certainly, nothing that he said would be admissible in court. Like this, he could confess to everything, and any competent lawyer would get the case thrown out. It was frustrating, having to wait when their best suspect so far was too drunk to interrogate.
Amber headed through to the office that she was sharing with Simon. He looked up as she entered.
"Anything?"
Amber shook her head. "We still won't be able to get a coherent answer out of him. Which worries me a little."
"What do you mean?"
"Everything we've seen of him suggests that he's been drinking steadily at least since last night, possibly for days. Maybe ever since Victoria Crossing solved his puzzle. If so, would he have been in a fit state to murder anyone? Let alone plan and execute something so meticulous?"
"Or maybe he just got drunk after killing Victoria as a celebration of what he intended to be his last kill?" Simon suggested.
It was plausible, but Amber wasn't entirely convinced.
"Maybe you're right, but if you aren't, that means that the killer is still out there, maybe getting ready to kill again while we wait for the professor to sober up enough for us to talk to."
That was a terrifying thought, one that made Amber want to rush out there, looking for any other evidence that she could find.
"The local PD are still watching the bridges just in case," Simon said.
That was good. Amber hoped it would be enough to prevent anyone else from being killed.
“And there’s one other thing. He’s drawing in the air with hisrighthand,” Amber said. “Didn’t the coroner say that the killer was probably left-handed?”
“Maybe, but I’d guess that it’s hard to be precise about that kind of thing,” Simon said.
Amber still wasn’t convinced. For now, she found herself naturally drawn to the series of puzzles the professor had drawn on his chalkboard. For her, a puzzle was a way to understand someone. She felt as though she could tell a lot about them by whether their puzzles were hard or easy, geared towards pure logic or general knowledge, required leaps of lateral thinking or a grinding kind of reasoning.
Amber started to solve the puzzles that had been put up on the chalkboard. She was no mathematical genius, but she knew enough to understand what was going on in each case, and each was really a logic problem anyway. This wasn't P vs. NP but rather a series of real-world scenarios thatlookedimpossible until Amber started to dig deeper.
Rather like this case.
On impulse, Amber looked for the original problem that Professor Arran had come up with, the one that was supposed to be unsolvable but to which Victoria Crossing had come up with a solution.
It took a while, but Amber eventually found the original problem on a mathematics forum. She studied it carefully, trying to get into the mind of the professor and understand why he thought it was unsolvable. After a while, something clicked in her mind, and she saw the solution. It wasn't easy, but it was there, and it made sense.
Amber couldn't help but feel a sense of satisfaction as she wrote out the solution, but also a strange sense of dislocation. This... didn't feel right. Amber had seen the professor's work sketched out on the chalkboards. She'd worked through those problems, and they had one feel to them.
