The Anagramist

by David W Robinson

  Wesley Drake considered himself to be a free-thinking, freewheeling individual, but even so, there were those rigid routines about his life which never varied.

  Whether at his isolated home, overlooking the southern boundary of the Yorkshire Dales on the outskirts of North Howley, or crashing at his father’s London apartment, or in a hotel anywhere in the world, he rose early, showered, shaved, and dressed appropriately for the day before taking breakfast. And if that meal varied according to his location and/or fancy, he still scanned the morning newspapers while he ate, and over a second cup of coffee, he would check his emails.

  His partner, Sergeant Rebecca Teale of Howley police, was exactly the opposite. She was as lacking in such regimentation as she was disciplined in her work. When on early shift, she would be up an hour before she was due to sign on, but when, as now, she was not due on duty until two in the afternoon, she could get up anywhere between eight in the morning, when he was preparing to face the day ahead, and noon.

  It was no more than a coincidence, therefore, when she stepped into the front room, as he was frowning over an email.

  She nuzzled his cheek, the musky scent of a night’s sleep filling his nostrils and rousing his senses. Peering over his shoulder, she read the email, and asked, “Spam?”

  The sensual huskiness of her voice reminded him of their joint indulgence eight hours previously, and for one moment, he was tempted to roll her to the carpet, throw off the neatly pressed trousers of his business suit, and take her on another journey into libidinous hedonism.

  He resisted, and ran his eyes over the email once again.

  On hard brill fod

  Shake nanny with an

  Arch tone pea

  The Anagramist

  Normally, he would agree with Becky, but there were elements of the message which persuaded him otherwise.

  He realised that many seconds had passed since her query. “I don’t think it is spam. For a start off, the subject line reads, FAO Wesley Drake. There are no links in it, and spam or phishing attempts are usually littered with links. Finally, it’s nonsense, but his handle leads me to conclude that the nonsense is built of anagrams.”

  Becky yawned. She was obviously feeling the effects of their late-night exercise. “Oh well. Whatever it means, it looks like a nuisance communication. If I were you, I’d print it out, and save a copy in case you get more, and if you do, take them to the station. Malicious communication. It’s an offence, Wes.”

  He did not entirely disagree, but could not help feeling that it contained a message which would pique his interest, even though he did not know what form that might take.

  A tutor at Howley College, head of his department, he was also a counsellor to staff and students alike. He taught business management, specialised in motivation, especially self-motivation, and at one time in the not too distant past, he had been something of a celebrity with a fifteen-minute slot on a daytime TV magazine show. When he tired of it, he took the offer of a post at the college instead, and settled for an ordinary life, or as ordinary as could be achieved with a police sergeant for a partner.

  He suffered a low threshold of boredom, and his preferred way of tackling it was compiling word puzzles, especially cryptic crosswords. They ranged from the comparatively simple to the fiendishly difficult, and had been published across a range of newspapers and magazines. Such work, a distraction for his fine mind, also granted him an ability to dissect to reconstruct anagrams, but in most cases he preferred them to give some hint of their solution. Side rota in orbit, was a simple but perfect example. ‘Side rota’ yielded the word ‘asteroid’ and, the word ‘orbit’ hinted at a planetary body.

  In the case of the mysterious Anagramist’s email nothing made sense, and there was no hint to the potential solutions.

  It was intriguing, nevertheless, and he took some of Becky’s advice. He had no intentions of going to the police with it, but he printed out the email in full, including the header and delivery information, and rather than leaving it to one side in anticipation of similar messages arriving, he dropped it in his briefcase. If nothing else, it would provide him with something to tax his mind during his lunch hour.

  At half past eight, he slipped into his jacket, and carrying his briefcase in one hand, car keys in the other, gave Becky a final kiss on the cheek. She promised to see him at half past ten that evening when she got home from her day’s work, and he stepped out of the house, pressed the remote for his Audi A6 to unlock the doors and disable the alarms, and climbed into the car.

  The cold bit into his skin, even beneath his shirt. January had been mild by comparison with other years, but even so, leaving the temperature controlled environment of his isolated home came as a shock to his system. Fortunately, his car had an excellent heating system and before he reached the bottom of Moor Heights Lane, three quarters of a mile away, he would be comfortably warm.

  The worst part of any day, whether in the icy cold of mid-January or the oppressive heat of July, was the drive from his home on the northern edge of the town, to the college, which sat on Keighley Road, South Howley. To get there, he had no choice but to cut through the town centre, and at this hour it was invariably heaving with traffic.

  Aged thirty-seven, he would be the first to admit that he had led a charmed life. His grandfather had founded the family firm of solicitors, and his father was the current senior partner, with his eldest son, Robert, second-in-command, and his daughter, Hannah, coming a close third. The family expected Wesley to follow suit, but the youngest son, had his own ideas. His education at the exclusive Nostell School for Boys was (as far as he was concerned) a complete waste of this father’s money. His A-level results were no better than average, and reading Law was never an option.

  Instead, he spent three years at Manchester University studying Business Administration and Management, and by the time he qualified, he was ready to take matters to the next stage. He borrowed money from his father, and set himself up as a consultant. He was lauded as an overnight success, but the reality behind that success was four or five years of hard graft all over Great Britain, Europe and further afield. By his mid-to late twenties, he was earning a staggering amount of money from his commissions, when television came along. Unlike his full-time occupation, his work on TV dealt with ordinary men and women, whom he counselled in the delicate art of self-motivation. Once again, he was a success, and by the time he grew tired of it, he was worth a considerable amount of money and still very much in demand.

  He wanted the quieter life of academia, and the post at Howley College was too good to resist. He had a list of private clients, all of them seeking counselling, and the Yorkshire police made infrequent calls on him to counsel officers deemed to be suffering from stress.

  All in all, it was a cosy, comfortable life, enhanced (although he would never publicly admit it) by his father’s election to Parliament as the result of a by-election during the Brown Administration. The vote for the old man went against the New Labour trend with which Blair had seduced the electorate, but Edward Drake proved a popular MP, and had been re-elected no less than four times. Although Wes purposely distanced himself from his father’s new-found political career, many of his private clients admitted that they came to him in the knowledge that the old man was an MP. Lionel Quentin, college principal, had also once hinted that the interviewing panel had been persuaded to appoint him because his father was the local parliamentary representative, and he had little doubt that the Chief Constable’s office had been similarly persuaded when they appointed him as a civilian counsellor.

  His success had other, unexpected effects. If his father, brother and sister disapproved of his initial choice of career, none of them complained now, and the old man’s occasional quote from one of Wes’s books on motivation stamped the seal of family approval on his work, as well as increasing sales.

  But there were downsides, most noticeable in the years when he was a minor ‘celebrity’. He lost count of the
number of women, not all of them young and single, who tried to seduce him purely for the opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of his reputation. How many times had he walked out of a bar after some idiot challenged him to a fist fight with the words, ‘see if you can motivate me, prick’? Too many to count. He grew tired of paparazzi following him, documenting his every move, some to praise him, most seeking a chink in the armour which would help destroy him. In the end, when his five-year contract was due for renewal, he refused to sign, and walked away to lead a quieter life.

  It was that series of unpleasant experiences which prompted his belief that the mysterious email held some kind of a message, one he might not find palatable. His expertise as a crossword compiler, his skill at dissecting and reconstructing anagrams was – like most aspects of his life – widely known, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the paparazzi were seeking him out again.

  Twenty minutes after leaving home, he drove through the college gates, along the broad, tarmac drive, and slotted the car into his reserved parking space, close to the main entrance.

  A comparatively new building, it was a bizarre construction of glass and steel, which (according to legend) cost an absolute fortune to heat during the winter, and cool during the summer. A triangular entrance, similar in appearance to the glass pyramid fronting the Louvre, led to a three-storey, rectangular block, and it was only in the administration offices and reception rooms where any kind of privacy could be enjoyed. Drake hated the building. In his disciplines, especially counselling, absolute privacy, rooms closed off from prying ears and eyes were essential.

  As he climbed out of the car, collected his briefcase, and locked the vehicle, he noticed several police cars, and idly wondered what was going on. A break-in over the weekend, was his guess. As he made his way towards the entrance, the trim, shapely figure of Detective Inspector Kirsty Pollack stepped out into the fresh air.

  A year younger than him, a bubbly blonde possessed of a naughty twinkle in her blue eyes, she was one of Becky’s closest friends, as a result of which, Drake had known her for years. Unlike Becky, who had her reasons for preferring the routine of uniformed policing, Kirsty had elected to move into CID, and she had progressed rapidly through the ranks until she was now the second highest senior officer in Howley CID. She was an experienced detective with a solid insight into criminal psychology and activity, and if Drake had to mark her down for anything, it was that she had insisted on taking the firearms course. Although he appreciated the need for some police officers to be armed, he disapproved of weapons per se, and he had never been able to understand why a senior detective would need a handgun.

  “Morning, Wes.” She greeted him with a pleasant smile and nodded backwards at the building. “Madhouse in there.” She glanced at her watch. “Nearly late for work?”

  “I will be by the time I’ve done chatting with you. Is that why you’re here? Has Lionel put out a search party for me?”

  Her smile disappeared, and in its place came a sad frown. “A bit more serious, I’m afraid. A young girl murdered last night on Bradford Hill Road. She was a student here. I’ve just had a word with Quentin, see what he could tell me about her, and we have bodies talking to student and staff.”

  He felt her sadness. “Anyone I know?”

  Kirsty shrugged. “I shouldn’t think so. She was a secretarial student. Listen, I’d love to stay and chat, but it’s all hands to the pumps at Mill Street, and Charlie will be up in arms if I don’t get back to him.”

  “No problem. Hey, remember. If any of your people are stressed out, you know where I am.”

  With a twitch of the head signalling her agreement, Kirsty went on her way, and Drake entered the college.

  It was as if he had climbed into the car again, so warm was the interior. He was almost tempted to take off his jacket, but he refrained. As he approached the long reception counter, Lionel Quentin was talking earnestly to one or two of the clerks.

  Somewhere in his early fifties, Quentin was a pedant of the first order. Short of stature, portly, he was invariably dressed in a Harris Tweed suit, of which he possessed an extensive range, and beneath it a country-check, patterned shirt, and Paisley tie, all of which gave the impression of a gentleman farmer, or perhaps a veterinarian accustomed to visiting such businesses. He was obsessed with minutiae, never more apparent than at this time of year, with the previous quarter over, and the need to collect and collate various departmental reports.

  Drake had no real problems with him, but there had been disagreements in the past, usually sparked by Quentin’s vague suggestions that obfuscation was preferable to negativity. Drake invariably argued that his counselling efforts were almost impossible to quantify, and the students’ progress could only be measured in terms of ongoing assessment, often in the workplace, and not examination success. There was never any need to fudge the reports, and he categorically refused to do so.

  It was obvious, however, that Quentin was not talking to the receptionists about annual reports. His rubicund features were grim and his chubby hands floundered in an effort to articulate something serious to the reception crew. After bumping into Kirsty, Drake needed no guesses to work out what.

  It was none of his concern. After signing in, he turned to walk past and make his way quickly to his office. He had gone three yards, when Quentin stopped him.

  “Ah, Wesley. Could I have a word?”

  Drake did an about turn, and came back to the reception counter. “I bumped into Kirsty Pollack. Is it about the murdered girl?”

  “Indeed. I was just stressing the need for discretion. At the moment, we know very little, and the police are being quite circumspect. I’d appreciate it if you, along with all the other tutors, naturally, would pass the message on to your students. When this kind of thing happens, it doesn’t take long for rumours to explode on social media. The truth is, Wesley, we know nothing other than the poor young woman’s name and where she was found.”

  “No problem, Lionel. For the record, what is her name?”

  “Shana Kenny. Secretarial student. Been with us about two years now. I can’t say I… Wesley? Whatever is the matter?”

  It was as if someone had opened the box of a jigsaw puzzle, waved a magic wand over it, said, ‘abracadabra’ and the pieces fell from the box onto a table, all slotting perfectly into place to leave the jigsaw complete.

  Shana Kenny – shake nanny. Bradford Hill – hard brill fod.

  “Wesley?”

  Quentin’s repeat of his name, brought Drake out of the stunned realisation of the mystery email’s meaning. He pulled himself together. “I’m sorry, Lionel. I have to go to the police station.”

  “But you’ve only just got here. And you said you’d met with Inspector Pollack outside.”

  “Yes, but she didn’t tell me who the victim was. I’m sorry. I have information the police may need.”

  Quentin was still puzzled. “What kind of information?”

  “I can’t say any more, Lionel. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Chapter Four

  He was so wound up that he failed to notice Kirsty’s car still on the car park when he tore out of the college, his tyres protesting on the drive as he kicked the accelerator.

  Howley police station was situated on Mill Street, towards the back of the town centre, close to the banks of the sluggish River Wharfe, an area where old woollen mills had stood since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Those stone-built leviathans were long gone, and in their place were smart, new and smaller industrial units, a couple of modern pubs, and amongst them, the Victorian, blackened brick building of the police station.

  Drake was a familiar visitor, and Sergeant Peter Rickson, a regular on the public reception desk, greeted him pleasantly enough.

  “Becky’s not on duty for a good few hours yet, Mr D.”

  “I know.” Drake smiled. “I live with her, remember. To be honest, Pete, I’ve come about this dead girl. I have some in
formation. I don’t know whether it’ll be any use to CID, but they should know about it. Is Kirsty Pollack available?”

  Rickson reached for the telephone. “I haven’t seen her come back. I’ll bell Charlie Adamson. Hang on a minute.”

  While the sergeant spoke to CID, Drake looked around the shabby surroundings. The walls were painted a drab, military green, the noticeboard decked with the usual warning signs to be wary of burglars, conmen and so on, a couple of wanted posters, and a notice to the effect that the police no longer dealt with parking tickets. A small, wooden bench stood by the wall close to the exit, and alongside it was a pass door which would lead into the station proper.

  “Charlie’s on his way down, Mr D. Why don’t you sit down for a minute?”

  Drake grunted, and sat on the bench, clutching his briefcase on his knees, almost as if he was worried that someone might try to steal it.

  It was a good deal longer than a minute before Detective Chief Inspector Charles Adamson, the nominal head of Howley CID, appeared.

  A square-shouldered man, almost as tall as Drake’s 6’2”, he portrayed himself as a no-nonsense copper, a man who had seen and done it all, one who had no time for political correctness, a man who told it as it was. The fingers of his large hands were stained with nicotine, and his eyes, partly shaded by a pair of Reactolite lenses, were like tiny diamonds, but without the attraction of precious stones. Instead, his gaze was one of permanent irritation, matched by his booming voice.

  “Drake. What can we do for you?”

  “It’s more what I might be able to do for you, Chief Inspector. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “It depends how urgent it is. If you haven’t heard—”

  Drake, who invariably met Adamson’s antipathy with some of his own, cut him off. “I’ve heard. It’s the reason I’m here. I received an email telling me about this girl. Now, can we talk somewhere in private?”

  With a sigh, Adamson turned, punched in the five-digit, alphanumeric code for the pass door, which had automatically closed behind him. He opened it and ushered Drake through.