Bread

THE JOURNAL OF ELLIOT CRIPPLESBY

  I have been brought up to date with my detective’s progress, whose name is apparently Geeza Vermies. He is always cautious of giving out his real name to anybody he meets.

  “There are some dodgy characters out there you know,” he explained to me.

  Pots and blackened kettles rose unbidden into my mind as he said it, I must just say. I had decided to let him follow the professor alone for a while however, because in the meantime I have received an important tip off with regards to my Scottish investigations.

  It is a little known fact, I am told by the natives around these parts, that the radio transmitter was invented in Scotland years before it caught on in the rest of the civilised world. Many years before. The world at large might have been wowed by Marconi and his machine in 1896, but up here they had known about transmitting messages over the airwaves for ages.

  And I mean ages.

  If all I have been told is true, then simply by tapping the horns of cows - or some other horned ungulate - and then listening up close with the aid of a large sea shell, one could listen to a myriad of frequencies.

  Similarly, by repeating the first part of the process and then speaking through the shell, you could send messages. It was as easy as that. Due to the Aberdeen Angus and other long horned varieties indigenous to the area, it is said by the locals that there was a complex intercommunications network established by the Celtic peoples thousands of years before the birth of Christ!

  It is further claimed that the ancients were in communication, not only with the Native American Indians, who used buffalo as their medium, but also the Chinese and the multitudinous population of the sub-continent. I also heard a local legend that the Scandinavians spoke to the Celts - and others - using a technique called Norse Code, but I feel this goes beyond the boundaries of my investigation.

  And so it was that I was staying in a guest house just on the outskirts of Edinburgh when my mobile phone announced that somebody wanted to talk to me. It was Mr. Vermies, and he had discovered something new.

  “Reading,” was all he said after I had greeted him.

  “I beg your pardon?” I said. “Is that Mr. Vermies?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he came back impatiently. He was obviously excited and wanted to skip the niceties. “Look, I’m in Reading; or nearby anyway. He’s been here! I’m right onto him!” Good news indeed! “Well, almost.”

  Ahh.

  He claims that our wily Professor is no more that two days ahead. How he knows this, or quite what he means by it he wouldn’t say. Two days to get to Reading? What’s he doing, walking? However, I am paying the man so all I can do is trust his information to be correct, and begin to think about making my way down there.

  ***