Page 30 of Girl, Entangled

‘No,’ Kate said, and finally the tears came. She wiped them away before the dam broke. ‘I can’t. I won’t.’

‘Fair. We don’t know much about the perpetrator, but we know he’s very large. Six-eight, perhaps bigger. Does that sound like anyone you know?’

Kate looked over Ella’s head, as if trying to visualize how tall six-eight might be. ‘No. Nobody.’

‘Okay, no problem.’

Ripley chimed in, ‘Kate, before we go, does the name Billy Hayes mean anything to you?’

Kate frowned at the table while she ran the name through whatever filing system grief had left her with. ‘No. Should it?’

‘Curtis never mentioned him? Never covered him on the channel, never had any contact with him that you know of?’

‘No. I’ve cut every video he’s ever made and I’ve never heard that name in my life. Who is he?’

‘Probably nobody,’ Ella said. ‘It’s just a name that’s come up. Thank you for your time, and once we have your passwords, we’ll leave you be. If you need anything, we can send a family liaison officer to stay with you.’

‘Not necessary, but thank you.’ Kate found a notepad in her kitchen drawer and began jotting her credentials. ‘Just take this and find whoever killed Curtis.’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A discrepancy in the psychological profile began to gnaw at Ella when she got back to the precinct and began looking through the Watchlist’s emails. The seed of doubt had arrived when the pathologist had mentioned that the perpetrator drugged Billy Hayes before killing him, because Ella knew for certain that this killer was a hulking behemoth of a human being.

The two did not compute. Men this size put that size to use. Utilizing physical prowess to dominate victims was usually the first port of call for serial killers in all subcategories. Drugging someone while you had inhuman strength on your side was like using a water pistol in a gunfight.

There must have been a reason for it.

Perhaps that reason was somewhere in the eleven thousand emails in front of her. She made the decision not to just start reading through them blindly, because a lot of the emails weren’t human correspondence. They were alerts and confirmations and whatever else. Eleven thousand emails at thirty seconds a piece was about a hundred hours’ worth of work, and she didn’t have a hundred hours to waste because there was every chance this killer wasn’t finished. Therefore, she had to zone in on the potentially authentic threats right away.

How?

Ella stopped thinking about the messages and started thinking about the man who would be behind them.

The killer had hanged Billy Hayes with an intended drop distance, a measured rope and a knot placed at the victim’s jaw, and the pathologist had said that it was close to perfect. Then the killer had taken Curtis Brennan’s head off in a single swing, which was a feat of strength akin to ripping up a phonebook. Neither act was rage. Both were craft, and craft meant study, and study meant years. Nobody taught themselves the Victorian long drop in the three days before they used it. This man had been a student of execution long before he became a practitioner of it, and that was the thing she could search for, because students had a weakness that murderers didn’t.

Students corrected people.

Ella had spent enough time around obsessives – at the Bureau, online, and once or twice across an interview table – to know the rule held without exception. A man who has given his life to a subject couldn’t watch an amateur get it wrong in front of a million people and say nothing. The compulsion ran deep. And Curtis Brennan had been loud, confident and most likely wrong four nights a week on a channel devoted to crime and punishment. If the killer had ever crossed Brennan’s audience, he hadn’t written you deserve to die. He’d written something specific to one of Brennan’s talking points.

So Ella ignored every word the threat-hunters would have searched for and typed in the vocabulary from Doctor Massri’s autopsy instead. Long drop brought back eleven results. Drop table brought back three. The fourth search term was Marwood, the name of the Victorian hangman who had invented the method, and that one brought back a single message, and Ella read the first line of it and reached for her pen.

The account name was Gallowglass1326. The message was eight months old, sent the night Brennan uploaded an episode titled BRING BACK THE ROPE, and it ran to nine paragraphs without a single misspelled word. Ella quickly found the episode transcript to double-check, and Ella found that Brennan had argued for the return of hanging on the grounds that it was slow. He’d told his audience that a hanged man strangled for ten minutes, and that ten minutes of strangling was exactly the deterrent the country was missing. Gallowglass1326 had written in that same night to tell Brennan that he was ignorant of his own subject. A hanging done properly killed in a fraction of a second, the message said. William Marwood had solved the problem in 1872 with mathematics: the weight of the prisoner, the length of the drop, the placement of the knot beneath the left ear. The message cited the official table of drops. It explained the mechanics of the second and third cervical vertebrae in terms the pathologist himself could have signed off on. And near the end it said the thing that made Ella set her pen down and read it twice.

Punishment is not cruelty, Mr Brennan. Punishment is a craft, and you advocate cruelty because you have never met a craftsman. The old executioners held a public trust. They did the state’s hardest work and they did it to a standard. You want spectacle. There is a difference, and one day you may learn it.

There wasn’t a single word that any moderation filter on any platform would flag. Kate had reported the messages that mentioned Curtis’s street and his car, and meanwhile this had sat in the archive for eight months, and Kate probably looked at it and dismissed it as unimportant. Gallowglass1326 had only promised an education.

Ella checked whether Kate or Brennan replied, and one of them had. The reply read: This is incredible. I’ll read this on air on Thursday!

She found the relevant episode in her transcripts and speed-read it. Brennan had indeed read the message out, and according to the subtitles, had been performed in an English accent. He’d then called its author the president of the hangman’s fan club and asked his viewers to picture a grown man measuring ropes in his basement. The subtitles said that Brennan was laughing, but Ella felt no urge to laugh with him.

Yes, she could see why this might upset the author.

Gallowglass1326 had written back two days later. The second message was four sentences.

You mocked what you do not understand, in front of people who understand even less. That is your trade and I accept that now. But every man eventually meets the standard he has set for others. I hope you are ready to meet yours.

After that, nothing. Ella sat with the two messages side by side and thought that the loud accounts Kate worried about had written to Brennan every week for years, and the dangerous one had said his piece, been laughed at, made a promise to himself and never typed another word. People stopped corresponding for two reasons. Either they got over it, or they elevated their game.