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“Awful.”
“You deserve it,” she’d said and he’d stared at her, disbelieving. “You should have said sorry.”
Cara looks at him now in the half light of the roof. “What do you suggest I do? Put laxative in Roo’s milkshake?”
Griffin laughs. “No. But you were always the calculated one, even then. I react.” He points a finger at her. “You think. You’ll figure it out,” he repeats, and she smiles. Then her face turns serious.
“Nate, this woman. This murder suspect. You need to bring her in.”
Griffin stays silent. He knows, he knows that Cara’s right. He’s getting himself in trouble. And Cara too.
“You haven’t found anything definitive on the arson, have you?” she continues. He slowly shakes his head. “So we need to deal with it the proper way. Legally,” she adds.
“Give me a bit longer,” he pleads. “And if I don’t find anything, I’ll arrest her myself.” But he knows he won’t. He could never put cuffs on her wrists, see the look of betrayal on her face. He tells himself it’s because she’s innocent, that it would be a miscarriage of justice, leaving her to the fate of Taylor’s shoddy investigation, but in his heart he knows it’s something else. A part of him that doesn’t want her to leave.
Cara gives him a hard stare. “Fine.” She goes to say something else, but her phone buzzes and she looks at it. “That’s Noah. Says he’s found a cryptographer, or whatever these people are called. Let’s hope they can solve this fucking code.”
Griffin nods and they head back in. As they go down the stairs, he adds: “Offer’s still open.”
Cara stops and looks at him.
“With Roo? I don’t have to break any bones, just rough him up a bit.”
Cara sniggers, and Griffin smiles. At least that’s one good thing, he thinks to himself. At least he can still make his big sister laugh.
CHAPTER
54
“THIS IS INTERESTING, very interesting,” Professor Barnet says, his attention focused on the piece of paper on his desk. He has a look on his face usually reserved for small children at Christmas time. Deakin had already sent him a copy of the message, but they’d brought the original along in case it offered anything else in the way of clues.
“But can you work out the code?” Cara asks, impatiently.
The professor’s abundant set of eyebrows dance as he chuckles. “This isn’t a code—it’s a cipher. Where each letter is substituted for another, or a symbol in this case. Does it translate across to the Zodiac ciphers that do have a solution?”
Cara shakes her head. They know that the first cipher received from the Zodiac Killer back in 1969 had been solved, by a teacher and his wife no less, but none of the letters match up. Same with the one cracked years later in 2020.
“Sadly not,” she says. “Do you think you can do this one?”
“I’ll certainly try,” Professor Barnet replies. “Ciphers like this can be solved using certain rules from our day-to-day language. For example, E is the most common letter, followed by T, A, O, and N. Some letters often appear doubled, like E and L, and some letters often occur together. We can apply these rules to the symbols to try to work out the substitution. For example, we might be able to guess that the word kill appears in the text, like it did in the original.”
“Seems simple enough,” Deakin says, but the professor laughs.
“That all assumes your guy has done a simple substitution. But given the subject matter and what’s at stake, he’s probably included some random stuff in there to throw us off, and because of the way it’s written, you have no idea where the words start or end. I’m also guessing it’s a homophonic cipher, using multiple substitutions for a single letter.” He stops and rubs his hands together. He looks happy. “We’ll have some fun in the meantime. And I’ll see if any of my colleagues at GCHQ want to have a go. As long as that’s okay?”
Cara agrees and she and Deakin leave, taking the original letter with them.
“Well, we’ve made his day, at least,” Deakin says. “Perhaps we should publish it in the newspaper—let the general public have a go.”
“And then what? Put the solution on Twitter? What if they get it wrong and start a lynch mob, Deaks?”
As they walk through the campus of the university, Cara looks at the other people there, the students, lecturers, going about their normal lives. She envies their ignorance, their ability to carry on not knowing that someone might murder and torture them tonight. It could be the person walking at their side, and they’d never know. She sighs, and Deakin glances at her.
“What happened earlier?” he asks. “At the restaurant.”
Cara can’t look at him. “Let’s just say you were right,” she mutters.
“Ah.” Deakin falls silent. “And did Griffin have anything useful to say on the subject?”
