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1st April 2014
“Morning, Boss, you wanted to see me?” Degsy was looking refreshed, more than could be said for his DCI.
“Yes, Derek.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “This folder. I need to bring you up to speed. Close the door, will you?”
Degsy pushed the door to. “I take it you didn’t get much sleep last night?”
Thurstan looked back at him. “Is it that obvious?”
Degsy shook his head, “No. Well, just a bit.” He flashed a faint smile.
“Right. Well, it can’t be helped. I was up most of the night wading through this lot.” He stabbed the folder with his forefinger then opened it and pulled out a sheet of A4 containing a list of names. He passed it across the desk to his Sergeant. “Take a look at this.”
Degsy sat down in silence, read the sheet then looked up and said: “I don’t want to look stupid, Boss, but...” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Exactly!” Thurstan was coming to life. “But!” He shoved another sheet across the desk. “Don’t look at that yet.” He sat back in his chair.
“Last night, I idly remembered a game I used to play with the SK at Speke when it was one of those really, really quiet nights. I’d be in my office doing some paperwork and he’d be on the front desk, minding the station. We used to phone each other up with odd names that had a double meaning or made a sentence. It would start with simple stuff like ‘if your surname was Green, would you call your daughter Theresa?’ Or ‘if your surname was Off-Shotgun, would you call your son Shaun?’ progressing to vaguer things such as ‘if your surname was Noone, would you call your son Ian Martin?” One look at Degsy told him that one hadn’t registered. “I. M. Noone. I AM NO ONE. With me now? Anyway, it was that sort of nonsense. We kept a score. It was puerile but it kept us awake.” He leaned forward, shaking his right forefinger with meaning at Degsy. “And that’s what triggered it. I. M. Noone. It’s on the top of the first list. You got it?” Degsy nodded. “Well, I remembered I’d seen one or two other odd little names so I went through the whole bloody thing again.” He stabbed the sheet of paper on his desk with his finger. “Take a look at that, Derek.”
Degsy picked it up. On one side of the sheet were the names in full; overleaf the shortened versions. He slowly scanned the reverse.
I M Noone
William Tredwell
I N Hughes
Samuel E Goole
J S Tyce
Donald T Forlow
P Lees
M L Eveler
Beneath was written, ‘I am no one. (I) will tread well. I and yous (have) same goal. Justice. Don’t follow, please. (I) am Level(l)er.’
Degsy looked up at Thurstan. “Is he taking the piss, Boss?”
Thurstan looked back at him deliberately and shook his head. “Despite the significance of today’s date, Derek, I don’t believe this is an April’s Fool. No, I don’t think he’s taking the piss. I think he’s being very serious.”
Degsy shot Thurstan a look of curiosity. “Well, what does he mean ‘I am no one’? He’s told us who or what he is? And what on earth is a Leveller anyway?”
The DCI released a tired smile. “Well, I think he’s telling us he’s one of many, in the bigger picture, he’s no one, and I have to admit I had to look up Leveller on the internet.”
He paused and picked up a sheet of paper from his blotting-pad. “Dictionary definition, Derek?” then read it aloud. “It’s ‘One that levels or one of a group of radicals arising during the English Civil War and advocating equality before the law and religious toleration or one favouring the removal of political, social, or economic inequalities or something that tends to reduce or eliminate differences among individuals’.” He put the sheet of paper back down. “Look at the fifth name on the list – Justin Tyce. I discovered last night, Derek, that another form of Justin, is the name ‘Justice’, and that ‘Tyce’, according to the internet, can mean ‘Fiery’. It seemed a bit dramatic so, I looked up synonyms and found ‘Torrid’ is one of them and the dictionary tells me one of its meanings is ‘hurried or rapid’. Rapid Justice. Now, Derek, don’t tell me that doesn’t fit with what’s happening here.” Degsy couldn’t.
Thurstan leant back in his chair. “And take a look at the last hotel he used, in particular the date.”
Degsy picked up the first list he’d been given. After several seconds he exclaimed: “He left it yesterday morning!” He rose and started towards the door. “I’ll get Gandalph and a couple of the others to start phoning around, see if we can find out where he is now, Boss.”
“I wouldn’t bother, Derek,” Thurstan reigned him back in, then stood up and calmly walked over to the coat stand, removed his jacket and started putting it on as he spoke. “I contacted the Border Agency earlier. He left Liverpool yesterday afternoon for Berlin.”
“Shit!” The DS looked disheartened.
Thurstan looked at him benevolently. “I know. It would destroy lesser men, Derek. But, we are not lesser men. We are the Plod! And we shall keep plodding on, like those Mummies in the horror films. You know, where the victims are running through the woods hell for leather yet the Mummy, dragging its foot, is always right behind them, gaining ground.” He smiled. “Until.”
He grabbed his phone from the desk and patted Degsy on the arm. “In the meantime, we have a hotel to visit. I’m pretty sure they will still have some CCTV we can look at. And who knows, it might even be worthwhile.”