He had written out the message dialogues by hand to fix them into his long-term memory. There were two correspondents. The first was a six-digit SMS short code. The code wasn’t traceable, and didn’t appear in the US or UK Short Code Directory. The messages were all outgoing. They were the same word each time, sent from Simeon’s phone.

OK.

One a day, always roughly at eleven o’clock. Forty-two messages in all.

The other messages were all with someone whom Priest suspected to be the instigator. USER3412.

Mims had been right. Simeon despised Alexia Elias but he hadn’t found any actual evidence of corruption, although it was the elephant in the room amongst Simeon and his other co-workers, all of whom had subsequently ‘moved on’, in Simeon’s language. Paid off, probably. USER3412 had persuaded Simeon to engineer something based on rumours circulating after the Free People’s Army scandal. The messages dated back two years and weaved a story of a vulnerable man trying to do what he thought was the right thing and who might have done it, had his conscience not choked him at the very last minute. The messages were a sad epitaph for a would-be hero, a dead one, right up to their chilling conclusion—

Priest scratched the back of his neck. William had concluded that Simeon’s killer could have been male or female. Priest tended to agree. Elinor Fox was therefore in the frame, but why kill Simeon? She had motive to kill Alexia, but not the witness.

He had also made a careful note of USER3412’s articulation. They had used syntax that was strategically untidy – mistakes that looked forced, peppered with sentences that were laid out faultlessly. Like a real writer.

Just like Simeon’s flat; the scene had been staged.

It didn’t make sense, unless a professional writer was deliberately writing poorly.

A professional writer like . . .

Elinor had been one step ahead at every moment. But that didn’t make her a killer and, besides, what was her motive, really? Her mother believed that Alexia Elias was a bad person? That wasn’t very compelling. And Rowlinson had let her go. He can’t have found any forensic evidence to link Elinor to the body in her car, although she had openly admitted to having tailed Simeon for months.

Then again, maybe Rowlinson had been too hasty to release her. Priest’s chest was vibrating. He had left her back at his flat, cuffed to the bed. I should have seen this earlier.

As he got up, there was a knock at his door, followed by Georgie.