Free Playing the Game by Simon Gould Page A

message he had heard himself that afternoon. After a minute, he regained some of his composure. ‘There’s more’, he told McCrane. ‘The message I heard this afternoon was from Conrad Conway’.
                McCrane sat down, digesting what he’d just been told. It was no secret amongst the Animi that Conway wasn’t exactly faithful to his wife, but to sleep with another member’s wife? That had crossed a line, absolutely no doubt about it. It was something that could not be tolerated under any circumstances. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked his friend. Burr drained his glass, considering his response.
                ‘I want you to help me kill him’, he answered.
                Having known Jameson Burr for more than three decades, that was the answer that McCrane had been expecting. His friend was not one to let anyone who crossed him, either in business or pleasure, go unpunished. Conway had crossed Burr in the worst possible way. ‘I’m sure we can come up with something’, he responded, his mind already weighing up one or two options. ‘Give me a couple of days to think about it, let me see what I can work out’.

19

                Breaking the news to Stella’s mother was no easier than I had expected. I’d done it myself, my tone as compassionate as I could be, but my words must have seemed cold and stark. I was sure we weren’t here just to learn Stella’s identity. There must be something else; the next step, the next part of the game. As our initial search had uncovered nothing but the photograph, I suspected that the mother held the key. And the sooner she realised that, the more chance her daughter had of coming out of this alive.
                I did all I could to assure Laura Edwards that there was every reason to believe we could get her daughter back safely. She clung to the slim possibility that we were mistaken. It was true that at the moment we had no hard fact, merely speculation, but the code had brought us here, her daughter fitted the profile and was presently unaccounted for. What were the chances we were wrong?
                I completely understood her need to cling to that, and if that’s what got her through this, if that’s what made her more receptive to our questioning, so be it.
                We relocated to the living room, having given Laura just enough time to pull on a robe. Our questions over the next half an hour or so were nurturing, coaxing as much information as we could out of Laura. The PD had an on-call psychologist who had arrived on-scene after around twenty minutes, and was in danger of undoing all our groundwork by taking a completely different tack. We didn’t have the time to backtrack.
                From what we could gather, Stella just seemed like your typical average girl. Just like the other two. No reason on earth why they should be singled out for special treatment by The Chemist. Her mother and father had separated a couple of years ago, but Stella had not let this detract from maintaining an excellent academic record that didn’t waiver once during that difficult time. She was a popular girl, lots of friends and a good social life, yet her mother said she had never overstepped the mark in that respect. She had been a good girl.
                We quickly built up a picture of a happy girl with her whole life ahead of her. This would be yet another tragic loss if we didn’t win the game and get her back.
                Just as the psychologist was about to backtrack yet again, with a seemingly irrelevant line of questioning, Charlie asked the question that perhaps, in retrospect, I should have asked at the beginning.
                ‘Laura?’ he asked, remembering the engraving on the key we’d been given by The Chemist. ‘Do the numbers three-sixteen mean anything to you?’
                Her brow furrowed as she tried