Allyn Allyn - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 135, No. 1. Whole No. 821, January 2010

Carol wasn’t quite ready to let go the straw she’d grasped. “He might have come round to the idea of having some contact with the boy.”

“I doubt it. He died in the Boxing Day tsunami back in oh-four. So we’re back to square one and not a bloody thing to go at.”

Carol still couldn’t accept she’d reached the end of the road. “What about her colleagues? Any problems there?”

She could practically hear the shrug. “Not that they’re letting on about. Nobody’s got a bad word to say about Tina, and I don’t think they’re just speaking well of the dead. She’s been working there for four years and doesn’t seem to have caused a ripple with other staff or parents. I can’t say I share your notion that this has got anything to do with your body, but I tell you, if you come up with anything that makes sense of this, I’ll buy you a very large drink.”

Making sense of things was what Bradfield Police paid Tony for. But sometimes it was easier than others. This was not one of those occasions. Carol had dropped off the case files on Jonathan Meadows and Tina Chapman at Bradfield Moor, the secure hospital where he spent his days among the criminally insane, a clientele whose personal idiosyncrasies he did not always find easy to distinguish from the population at large.

Two victims, linked by their unlikelihood. There was no evidence that their paths had ever crossed. They lived thirty miles apart. Carol’s team had already established that Tina Chapman did not have her car serviced at the garage where Jonathan Meadows worked. He’d never attended a school where she’d taught. They had no apparent common interests. Anyone other than Tony might have been reluctant to forge any link between the two cases. Carol had pointed that out earlier, acknowledging that her counterpart in Leeds was far from convinced there was a connection. Tony’s instincts said otherwise.

As he read, he made notes. Water. Fire. Four elements? It was a possibility, but admitting it took him no further forward. If the killer was opting for murder methods that mirrored fire, water, earth, and air, what did it mean? And why did it apply to those particular victims? Tina Chapman was a French teacher. What had that to do with water? And how was a garage mechanic connected to fire? No, unless he could find more convincing connective tissue, the four elements wasn’t going anywhere.

He studied the file again, spreading the papers across the living-room floor so he could see all the information simultaneously. And this time, something much more interesting caught his attention.

Carol stared at the two pieces of paper, wondering what she was supposed to see. “What am I looking for?” she said.

“The dates,” Tony said. “October thirty-first. November fifth.”

Light dawned. “Halloween. Bonfire Night.”

“Exactly.” As he always did when he was in the grip of an idea, he paced, pausing by the dining table to scribble down the odd note. “What’s special about them, Carol?”

“Well, people celebrate them. They do particular things. They’re traditional.”

Tony grinned, his hands waving in the air as he spoke. “Traditional. Exactly. That’s it. You’ve hit the nail on the head. They’re great British traditions.”

“Halloween’s American,” Carol objected. “Trick or treat. That’s not British.”

“It is originally. It came from the Celtic Samhain festival. Trick or treat is a variation of the Scottish guising tradition. Trust me, Carol, it only got to be American when the Irish took it over there. We started it.”

Carol groaned. “Sometimes I feel the Internet is a terrible curse.”

“Not to those of us with enquiring minds. So, we’ve got two very British festivals. I can’t help wondering if that’s the root of what’s going on here. Tina died like a witch on the ducking stool. Jonathan burned like a bonfire guy. The murder methods fit the dates.” He spun on his heel and headed back towards Carol.

“So I’m asking myself, is our killer somebody who’s raging against Britain and our traditions? Someone who feels slighted by this country? Someone who feels racially oppressed, maybe? Because the victims are white, Carol. And the killer’s paid no attention to Diwali. Okay, we’ve not had Eid yet, but I’m betting he won’t take a victim then. I’m telling you, Carol, I think I’m on to something here.”

Carol frowned. “Even if you’re right — and frankly, it sounds even more crazy than most of your theories — why these two? Why pick on them?”

Tony trailed to a halt and stared down at what he’d written. “I don’t know yet.” He turned to meet her eyes. “But there is one thing I’m pretty sure about.”

He could see the dread in her eyes. “What’s that?”

“If we don’t find the killer, the next victim’s going to be a dead Santa. Stuffed in a chimney would be my best guess.”

Later, Tony’s words would echo in Carol’s head. When she least expected it, they reverberated inside her. As she sat in the canteen, half her attention on her lasagne and half on the screen of the TV, she was jolted by a news flash that chilled her more than the November snow: SANTA SNATCHED OFF STREET.

It had been a long time since Tony had been a student, but he’d never lost his taste for research. What made his investigations different from those of Carol and her team was his conviction that the truth lay in the tangents. An exhaustive police investigation would turn up all sorts of unexpectedness, but there would always be stuff that slipped between the cracks. People were superstitious about telling secrets. Even when they gave up information, they held something back. Partly because they could and partly because they liked the illusion of power it dealt them. Tony, a man whose gift for empathy was his finest tool and his greatest weakness, had a remarkable talent for convincing people that their hearts would never be at peace till they had shared every last morsel of information.

And so he devoted his attentions to identifying the unswept corners of the lives of Tina Chapman and Jonathan Meadows.

The first thing that attracted his attention about Tina Chapman was that she had only been in her current job for four years. In his world, history cast a long shadow, with present crimes often having their roots deep in the past. He wondered where Tina Chapman had been before she came to teach French in Leeds.

He knew he could probably short-circuit his curiosity with a call to Carol, but her gibe about the Internet was still fresh in his mind so he decided to see what he could uncover without her help.

Googling Tina Chapman brought nothing relevant except for a Facebook entry describing her as “everybody’s favourite language teacher,” an online review of the sixth-form performance of Le Malade Imaginaire that she’d directed, and a slew of news stories about the murder. None of the articles mentioned where she’d taught previously. But there was an interesting clue in one of them. Tina’s son wasn’t called Ben Chapman but Ben Wallace. “Lovely,” Tony said aloud. If Wallace had been Ben’s father’s name, there was at least a fighting chance that his mother had used it at some point.

He tried “Tina Wallace” in the search engine, which threw out a couple of academics and a real-estate agent in Wyoming. Then he tried “Martina Chapman,” “Christina Chapman,” “Martina Wallace,” and finally, “Christina Wallace.” He stared at the screen, hardly able to credit what he saw there.

There was no doubt about it. If ever there was a motive for murder, this was it.

Detective Inspector Mike Cassidy knew Carol Jordan only by reputation. Her major-case squad was despised and desired in pretty much equal measure by Bradfield’s detectives, depending on whether they knew they would never be good enough or they aspired to join. Cassidy avoided either camp; at forty-two, he knew he was too old to find a niche working alongside the chief constable’s blue-eyed girl. But he didn’t resent her success as so many others did. That didn’t stop him showing his surprise when she walked into his incident room with an air of confident ownership.