Page 31 of Girl, Entangled

Now she needed the man behind the account, and the account itself was a dead end. It was registered to a webmail address with no recovery number and nothing Kate’s laptop could see.

But usernames were habits. People built them young or built them around an identity they cared about, and then they carried them from site to site for decades. To an obsessive, the name was part of the work. Gallowglass on its own was hopeless as a search term; it was a real word, a class of medieval mercenary, which itself told her something about the reading habits of the man who’d chosen it.

The number, however, was the gift. 1326 narrowed the world.

She put the full handle into a search engine and the second result was a profile on a forum called The Armory, which described itself as the largest online community for historical European arms, armor and martial culture. Gallowglass1326 had been a member since 2011. He had nine thousand posts.

Her heart rate picked up speed. She had some reading to do.

***

Ella spent an hour on The Armory, and it treated her to a guided tour through the head of someone who might just be her unsub.

Gallowglass1326 posted in the metallurgy threads and the fifteenth-century threads, and at length – always at length – in a long-running thread titled Judicial History & The Headsman’s Trade, where he was seemingly treated by the other members as the resident authority. He wrote about sword-against-block beheadings in Reformation Germany. In 2019, in an argument about executioner’s blades, he’d written that he didn’t need to speculate about the balance of a heading sword because he had built three of them, and a moderator had replied with a photograph request, and he had posted the photograph.

Ella looked at it for a long time. It showed a two-handed sword with a broad, squared-off tip, lying on a workbench next to a forge, and the watermark in the corner of the image read HALE FORGEWORKS.

It was a far cry from the ax the unsub had used, but swords and axes weren’t far apart on the spectrum of medieval weaponry.

The signature line under every one of Gallowglass1326’s nine thousand posts carried the same link. She followed it to a clean, modest website for a one-man business in Frederick, Maryland: museum-grade replica arms, edged tools and ironwork, commissions undertaken for collections, film and living history. The about page had no photograph of the owner, which she noticed, but the business registration was public record and took four minutes to pull. Hale Forgeworks, sole proprietor Francis Hale, with a workshop address on a rural lot off Ballenger Creek.

One more thing from the forum, and it was the thing that had been sitting at the base of her skull since the photograph. In a thread about wearing reproduction armor, Gallowglass1326 had complained that no harness off the rack would ever fit him, because the historical record stopped at six foot two and he was past that, and a member had joked that he should fight for the other side, and he had replied: I usually do.

Ella was reading that line for the third time when Ripley came through the door with two coffees and an expression that said the CCTV had been a bust.

‘Tell me your morning went better than mine,’ Ripley said.

‘Maybe. Victor Hale.’ Ella turned the laptop and walked Ripley through it in order: the autopsy vocabulary, the nine-paragraph correction, Brennan laughing at him in front of his followers, the four-sentence promise, the username, the forum, the forge, his apparent height. Ripley followed it with the coffee halfway to her mouth.

‘And he’s above six-two?’

‘That’s what he claims, but people lie online.’

Ripley set the coffee down untouched and reached for her jacket, and that was apparently the whole of her verdict. ‘Frederick’s an hour away. Is he at the workshop now?’

‘Maybe not.’ Ella scrolled to the page she’d left open: the events tab on the Hale Forgeworks site, where three dates this month were listed under the heading DEMONSTRATIONS. ‘He does living history work. This week he’s running a daily forging demonstration at the History Museum in Alexandria. One o’clock.’ She looked at the clock above the door, which said five past noon. ‘He’s there right now, standing in front of a crowd, swinging a hammer.’

‘Then let’s go and watch the craftsman work,’ Ripley said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The History Museum was a converted carriage house off Prince Street, and by the time Ella and Ripley had crossed half of Alexandria to reach it and followed the chalkboard signs around to the courtyard at the back, the demonstration was almost over.

Ella smelled it before she saw it. Coal smoke hung over the courtyard, sweet and dirty at the same time, and under the smoke came the heat. Around forty people were standing in a horseshoe around a portable forge, including parents and a school group in matching yellow caps.

And at the open end of the horseshoe, behind a rope barrier and an anvil, stood Francis Hale.

Ella stopped at the back of the crowd and looked at him the way she’d been looking at him in her head for the past hour, and the first thing she had to do was adjust the picture.

He was big. There was no argument about that. Francis Hale was six-four on a good day, perhaps a touch over it, and had width on his size too. His chest strained the linen shirt he was wearing under his leather apron and he had forearms like dock rope where the sleeves were rolled back. The forearms were the thing her eyes kept returning to, because the man in Brennan’s video had worn his sleeves rolled the same way. Hale’s were burned in places, with old white scars and newer pink ones scattered from wrist to elbow.

But six foot four was not six foot eight.

‘Thoughts?’ Ripley asked. She’d taken up a position at Ella’s shoulder, both of them now playing the part of two more adults at the back of a school trip.

‘I’m thinking.’

‘Think louder.’