The Devil Among Us, Ramsay Sinclair [black books to read .txt] 📗

Following the corridor around to DCI Reid’s office, I thanked a few officers who had kindly let me squeeze past with the files stacked high in my arms. The wooden door to his office hung ajar and DCI Reid can’t have arrived, as the belongings inside appeared untouched. His coat didn’t hung on its hook as it normally would, and there weren't any discarded food wrappers in the bin either; the cleaners had blitzed the station since we’d last been in our offices.

Grunting from effort, I smacked Tony’s paper files onto the desktop where a couple of glasses were waiting for DCI Reid to pour. To think I’d sat opposite him in this very room and discussed everything from our love lives to this case filled my veins with hot blood.

Dragging out his wallet from my back pocket, I placed it next to an opened diary. From afar, DCI Reid’s scrawled handwriting was visible. Noticing the page was still open on last week's date, I cast an inquisitive eye over the entry and hoped it would give us some indication of where the missing DCI had gone this morning.

There were a few notes jotted between the lines that were reminding himself to return files to other officers or meet Iona for lunch in the week just gone by. Flicking over to today’s date, there wasn’t anything written there yet.

“Hmph,” I exhaled disappointedly and stood up properly from my hunched-over position.

In the industrial office light, the shadows revealed an abnormality on the page. Standing up properly, I examined a variety of grooves that were covering the empty entry. Running my forefinger over the page to double-check, there were indeed indentations and scratches from the tip of a sharp pen. But there was no visible writing, nor had it scratched through from another page altogether.

These were indications of fully fledged sentences, yet nothing was visible to the naked eye. It was a long shot, but I wondered if DCI Reid had used a method of writing that wasn’t supposed to be detected or noticed easily.

After all, he had an affiliation with sneaking around and hiding things from us. DCI Reid had secrets that nobody was supposed to find and that would likely extend to his daily routines too.

Was there some sort of code inscribed between the diary?

I searched as far back in the diary as possible but couldn’t spot any telltale numbers nor words correlating between the pages or dates that DCI Reid had written on. I tried a few separate methods of folding back some of the pages to see if they matched up with writing on another. None of them revealed anything entirely legible. Flummoxed, I groaned and returned to the scratches on today’s date. If I was DCI Reid, how would I hide secret notes that people wouldn’t easily find?

Wracking my brains, I remembered a conversation our team had had a couple of months ago. There had been a news segment playing in the canteen, one which was intended for the children staying at home on the bank holiday. The news anchors had shown a fun challenge for kids to create their own invisible ink and use it to write notes for each other.

Cillian had immediately taken to the idea and had proceeded to write a bunch of rude letters to us, displaying the method they’d shown on the television. DCI Reid had found it all hilarious and started to reminisce about all the spy movies he’d seen. He’d watched a lot of them as a teenager at the cinema near his childhood home and said that’s part of what attracted him to the CID department. To find out people’s secrets.

If I was right and these pen scratches were from some sort of invisible ink, then I’d need a UV light to reveal whatever was inscribed there. Rummaging around in DCI Reid’s pen stash, I couldn’t find anything that would let off such a specialised light source. But what I did find was some sellotape and a bunch of coloured markers.

Working quickly in case DCI Reid suddenly returned, I grabbed my smartphone and placed it facing down on the tabletop. Then, I covered the flashlight with a layer of tape and coloured a swab of blue over the protected area. Repeating the same process again, I finished with a third and final layer of tape. Instead of using the blue marker this time, I coloured with the purple one to create a makeshift and slightly rickety UV light.

Though it wasn’t of a professional standard, I was confident the makeshift torch could do the job just as well. Holding my phone above the scratched page and switching the flashlight on, a couple of new scribbles were revealed.

“Gotcha,” I whispered in victory and studied the hidden writing. “Eleven am, meet with David Roy.” The man I was mistaken for at the gentleman’s club the night prior. I knew my hunch was leading somewhere. “Finish job at Seafield House.”

Seafield House wasn’t a million miles away. I’d still be able to make it if I hurried up. Certain that finishing this job had negative connotations, I didn’t want to waste even a single second. Dashing from DCI Reid’s office as fast as possible, DC Taylor nearly bumped into me as we paced along the corridor.

“Sir?” he called out quizzically and instinctively tried to match my fast pace. Lean, he may be but he wasn’t a match for my will power. “Where are you going?” He trailed off upon realising I wasn’t going to stop running.

“I’ll explain later,” I yelled over my shoulder and weaved between a few unsuspecting uniformed officers. Keeping it brief was for the best, in case they had a stupid idea to follow me into a potentially dangerous situation they were clueless about.

Jogging downstairs wasn’t as easy as it sounded, for someone had mopped the floor and had left it slippery. I tried hard to stay upright without losing momentum