CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A discrepancy in the psychological profile began to gnaw at Ella when she got back to the precinct and began looking through the Watchlist’s emails.
The seed of doubt had arrived when the pathologist had mentioned that the perpetrator drugged Billy Hayes before killing him, because Ella knew for certain that this killer was a hulking behemoth of a human being.
The two did not compute. Men this size put that size to use. Utilizing physical prowess to dominate victims was usually the first port of call for serial killers in all subcategories. Drugging someone while you had inhuman strength on your side was like using a water pistol in a gunfight.
There must have been a reason for it.
Perhaps that reason was somewhere in the eleven thousand emails in front of her.
She made the decision not to just start reading through them blindly, because a lot of the emails weren’t human correspondence.
They were alerts and confirmations and whatever else.
Eleven thousand emails at thirty seconds a piece was about a hundred hours’ worth of work, and she didn’t have a hundred hours to waste because there was every chance this killer wasn’t finished.
Therefore, she had to zone in on the potentially authentic threats right away.
How?
Ella stopped thinking about the messages and started thinking about the man who would be behind them.
The killer had hanged Billy Hayes with an intended drop distance, a measured rope and a knot placed at the victim’s jaw, and the pathologist had said that it was close to perfect.
Then the killer had taken Curtis Brennan’s head off in a single swing, which was a feat of strength akin to ripping up a phonebook.
Neither act was rage. Both were craft, and craft meant study, and study meant years.
Nobody taught themselves the Victorian long drop in the three days before they used it.
This man had been a student of execution long before he became a practitioner of it, and that was the thing she could search for, because students had a weakness that murderers didn’t.
Students corrected people.
Ella had spent enough time around obsessives – at the Bureau, online, and once or twice across an interview table – to know the rule held without exception.
A man who has given his life to a subject couldn’t watch an amateur get it wrong in front of a million people and say nothing.
The compulsion ran deep. And Curtis Brennan had been loud, confident and most likely wrong four nights a week on a channel devoted to crime and punishment.
If the killer had ever crossed Brennan’s audience, he hadn’t written you deserve to die.
He’d written something specific to one of Brennan’s talking points.
So Ella ignored every word the threat-hunters would have searched for and typed in the vocabulary from Doctor Massri’s autopsy instead.
Long drop brought back eleven results. Drop table brought back three.
The fourth search term was Marwood, the name of the Victorian hangman who had invented the method, and that one brought back a single message, and Ella read the first line of it and reached for her pen.
The account name was Gallowglass1326. The message was eight months old, sent the night Brennan uploaded an episode titled brING BACK THE ROPE, and it ran to nine paragraphs without a single misspelled word.
Ella quickly found the episode transcript to double-check, and Ella found that Brennan had argued for the return of hanging on the grounds that it was slow.
He’d told his audience that a hanged man strangled for ten minutes, and that ten minutes of strangling was exactly the deterrent the country was missing.
Gallowglass1326 had written in that same night to tell Brennan that he was ignorant of his own subject.
A hanging done properly killed in a fraction of a second, the message said.
William Marwood had solved the problem in 1872 with mathematics: the weight of the prisoner, the length of the drop, the placement of the knot beneath the left ear.
The message cited the official table of drops.
It explained the mechanics of the second and third cervical vertebrae in terms the pathologist himself could have signed off on.
And near the end it said the thing that made Ella set her pen down and read it twice.
Punishment is not cruelty, Mr Brennan. Punishment is a craft, and you advocate cruelty because you have never met a craftsman.
The old executioners held a public trust. They did the state’s hardest work and they did it to a standard.
You want spectacle. There is a difference, and one day you may learn it.
There wasn’t a single word that any moderation filter on any platform would flag.
Kate had reported the messages that mentioned Curtis’s street and his car, and meanwhile this had sat in the archive for eight months, and Kate probably looked at it and dismissed it as unimportant.
Gallowglass1326 had only promised an education.
Ella checked whether Kate or Brennan replied, and one of them had. The reply read: This is incredible. I’ll read this on air on Thursday!
She found the relevant episode in her transcripts and speed-read it.
Brennan had indeed read the message out, and according to the subtitles, had been performed in an English accent.
He’d then called its author the president of the hangman’s fan club and asked his viewers to picture a grown man measuring ropes in his basement.
The subtitles said that Brennan was laughing, but Ella felt no urge to laugh with him.
Yes, she could see why this might upset the author.
Gallowglass1326 had written back two days later. The second message was four sentences.
You mocked what you do not understand, in front of people who understand even less. That is your trade and I accept that now. But every man eventually meets the standard he has set for others. I hope you are ready to meet yours.
After that, nothing. Ella sat with the two messages side by side and thought that the loud accounts Kate worried about had written to Brennan every week for years, and the dangerous one had said his piece, been laughed at, made a promise to himself and never typed another word.
People stopped corresponding for two reasons.
Either they got over it, or they elevated their game.
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.