309828-0830-3333

approval, and he had finally learned to put the emphasis on the last syllable.
“No, we did not,” Trevor said. “But our conversation has run off the rails rather early this
time, if you’ll all pardon the pun, and the full ramifications of Rayley’s question have thus remained
unexplored.” He squinted down at his papers. “This train was a local, the route running between
Aberdeen to Edinburgh with seven stops, three of them very close to the small town where the attacks
occurred.”
“So the man could have boarded the train at any point along the route,” Rayley said. “And
gotten off at any of the stops as well.”
“I find it most interesting that he must have for some reason changed his methodology,” Emma
said. “You said the first two times the rapes occurred shortly after the train had passed through the
depot. This seems to me quite the logical sequence. A man disembarks from a train in a small town
and commits a crime. But then the last time the rape occurs just before the train is scheduled to leave,
which implies that he was already in the town. In this final instance he was more concerned with
using the train as a means of departure rather than arrival and timed his attack accordingly.”
“How often do trains pass through?” Tom asked.
“And would you explain to us exactly why you raise that question?” Trevor asked in turn. He
disliked his role as the stern schoolmaster of the group but if the games were to maximize their
usefulness, he could not indulge great vaulting leaps of speculation in any of his team members, no
matter how apt they might be. They must march together, step by step, through the entire bloody
process if they were to emerge as a fully functioning unit.
“Because Emma’s statement is quite right,” said Tom. “The change in modality seems a major
clue to something or another, although right now I can’t think what. The first two times, yes, he steps
from the train, finds his victim, and does the deed. But then what? He must wait around the town
avoiding detection, until the next train arrives? It hardly seems a sensible plan, especially in light of
the fact he is a rapist, not a murderer. His victim is presumably left quite capable of running about
shrieking out her story, alerting both the police and any nearby brothers or husbands with a pitchfork.
How long would he have to wait?”
Trevor smiled slightly. The debates of Tuesday night were rapidly becoming his favorite part
of the week. “Quite good, Tom and Emma, for this is precisely the first part of the puzzle the Scotland
police latched upon. The trains run an hour apart in the mornings and early evenings when workers
are commuting to and fro from Aberdeen, but makes only two stops at this particular small depot in