“Really,” Maggie demurred, “I don’t live that far….”
“And then there’s that Blackout Beast we’ve all been reading about in the papers,” one of the officers said. “Nasty bit of work.”
“We’ve heard of him,” Durgin said drily.
“And of course we have plenty of bedchambers,” said the Queen. “Fifty-two, I believe. I’ll have the servants make up rooms.” As she yanked on a needlepoint pull, she said with a smile, “You must stay. After all, it’s a royal decree!”
—
The room Maggie was given was decorated in soothing tones of rose and fawn, with a large canopied bed and a small sitting area with a wide, long damask sofa and two wing chairs in front of a recently lit fire. The room was still freezing, and Maggie was grateful when there was a knock at the door and a maid stood there, offering a hot water bottle. “Please let me know if you need anything else, miss. The pull’s on the right-hand side of the bed.”
“Thank you,” Maggie replied, wrapping her hands around the heat of the rubber bottle covered in soft wool. “Good night!”
As she explored the suite, she was amused to see a five-inch water line in the bathtub. Even in Buckingham Palace…she thought. There was also a lace nightgown and peignoir in dark blue velvet lined in silk and quilted satin slippers laid out on the bench at the foot of the bed.
Just as Maggie had finished washing up and changing, there was a knock at the door. She opened it. “Thank you, but I’m fine—” she began.
But it wasn’t the maid, it was Durgin. “Don’t ever open a door without asking who it is!” he fumed.
“Keep your voice down!” Maggie whispered. “Get in before someone sees you!”
He was still in his uniform. Maggie flushed pink and pulled the belt of the robe tighter. “Well, what is it?”
“There’s a maniac out there,” he said, locking and chaining the door. “I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
“The snowstorm’s given us a bit of a reprieve.”
Durgin roamed the room, checking the closets and the locks on the windows. “Nowhere is safe.”
Maggie’s face darkened. “Not for Brynn, certainly.”
“And since you received that package, not for you, either.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m serious, Maggie. I don’t think you’re safe here.”
She gave a laugh halfway between a bark and a snort. “It’s Buckingham Palace, for heaven’s sake!”
“They’ve learned to protect themselves against falling bombs, but not a serial killer.”
She smiled. “Oh, and here I’d gotten used to ‘sequential murderer.’?”
“I’m staying,” he announced flatly. “I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“It’s much, much too short for you. You take the bed, I’ll take the sofa.”
“I won’t hear of it.”
“Well, I’m not tired anyway. Look, they’ve left us an electric kettle. Would you like some tea? There are even biscuits—Scottish shortbread. Although judging by the gray appearance and the oil on the doily, made with national flour and margarine. We can work.”
“Work?” Durgin sat gingerly on the edge of a pink silk wing chair.
As Maggie bustled about, filling the kettle and plugging it in, she told him, “I’ve had a few ideas and I want to discuss them with you.”
When the tea had been poured and shortbread laid out on the low table, Maggie went to her handbag and took out the map of London that Mark had given her. She’d kept track of all the places the women’s bodies had been left with dots of red ink. “Look,” she said, pushing it over to Durgin and sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the fire.
“A map of London. With the body dump sites marked. Yes, we have the same map back at the office.”
But Maggie was thinking. “I saw a darts game the other evening.”
“Maggie, we have a murderer to catch,” he said gently. “Do you really have time for darts?”
“No, listen to me,” she insisted. “You said that sequential murderers had certain patterns.”
He took a sip of tea. “But yes, that’s the right idea. No murderer is going to leave a body too near the scene of the crime or their residence.”
“So there’s a, a—let’s call it a defense area,” Maggie explained. “Now, when our Blackout Ripper dumps the bodies, he’s going to want it to seem random—no evidence too close to him or where he lives. But according to math, even when someone’s trying to do something at random and not make a pattern—there’s always an inherent subconscious design.”
“Not sure I’m following you, Maggie.”
She closed her eyes. Mathematics, cool and elegant, she thought. Math had always been her savior, her calm, her respite. Even her joy. Math would help. It always did. She took a deep sigh and tried to make sense of the patterns she was seeing emerge. “Look, the Ripper’s victim’s bodies are located at specific coordinates, around the defense area. We can express this in a formula. I need paper!”
“Can’t help you, I’m afraid.”
Maggie stood and went to a small desk. Inside was ivory letterhead engraved with BUCKINGHAM PALACE and matching envelopes. And several gold-capped Parker pens. She took an envelope back to the low table and sat down again in front of the crackling fire.
She wrote out a formula with Xs and Ys, subscripts, brackets, and parentheses, and a variety of Greek letters and algebraic symbols.
Durgin watched, eyebrows pulled together.
“Look, the summation in the formula consists of two terms—the first describes the idea of decreasing probability with increasing distance. The second deals with the concept of a so-called shield area. The main idea of the formula is the probability of crimes first increases as one moves through the shield area, away from the place where the murders were committed, but then decreases.”
Durgin set his cup down. “And if you’d say all that in the King’s English, I’d be most obliged.”
Maggie sat back to look at the formula. “The idea is—the probability of crimes increases as one moves through the shield area, away from the murder area, but then decreases afterwards. And while the killer is trying to place the bodies randomly, he’s not. He doesn’t want them too far or too near to him, or to each other. Basically, what he’s doing is creating a circle around where the murders are taking place. It’s like a reverse bull’s-eye.”
She realized he wasn’t following. “In other words, it’s a non-pattern that really is a pattern. I could work it out mathematically, with this formula, but we just don’t have the time or the manpower. Er, womanpower.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“It’s like…an accident of probability theory. With enough data points, patterns will emerge that point to the place where the murders took place.” She gave a maniacal grin that rivaled the best of Durgin’s. “The problem is that math is elegant and humans are…not. This is an ugly equation for ugly behavior.”
He gave a crooked smile. “Are you telling me you have a gut feeling?”
She took one last look at the formula, then looked at the map. “Absolutely not. My absolutely logic-based and mathematically worked out hypothesis is that our Beast is committing his murders right”—she made a black circle on the map, approximately in the middle of all the red marks—“here.”
She leaned in and squinted, looking at the maze of crossing streets. Her eyes widened. “That’s practically Ash Street, the address of the Castle Hotel for Women—”
“But we’ve always suspected the Castle Hotel.”
“Suspected, yes—but now we have actual mathematical proof. There’s a connection between the murder of SOE women and the Castle Hotel for Women. Someone left the Castle’s cards there, to give to prospective agents….”
“So we’re still where we started.”
“Not entirely.” Maggie took a sip of cooling tea. “It occurred to me that we’ve all done a great job keeping the real details of the Blackout Beast case out of the papers,” she said, “but now I’m thinking—maybe we can use the press.”