The One-Way Lake

Prologue

"We're quite clearly dealing with a suicide-"

"Incorrect. It's a murder."

Detective Inspector Linton crossed his arms and matched Ebony's steely glare with one of his own. "Indeed? What evidence can you provide?"

"The gunshot is on the right side of his head. The victim was left handed," she blanched. "It requires quite a bit of contortion to shoot yourself on the opposite side of your head with your right hand."

The detective's eyebrows furrowed as his arms lowered to rest on his hips, the subtle give away of decrease in self confidence not escaping the rivalling detective's constant scrutinising eyes. "Left handed?"

She regarded him for a moment, before turning and pointing at different objects around the victim's apartment. "Coffee mug: handle pointing to the left. Power socket: habitually uses the one on the left. There's a knife on the bread board with butter on the right side of the blade because he used it with his left hand. So sir, it's highly unlikely that a left handed man would shoot himself in the right side of his head."

Detective Linton hesitated for a moment before gesturing to the reporter, who was silently taking short notes of the younger detective's deductions, to follow him out of the tiny apartment.

Ebony watched them almost bump into a middle aged man with an unruly mop of brown hair and panicked green eyes at the doorway. He rushed into the room, sighing with relief as soon as he got past the two men.

In one swift glance, Ebony deduced that he had been listening in on the conversation, as his left ear was more flushed than his right, and also the faint marks of the lines of the door frame were imprinted on his left hand. Thick glasses and numerous passcodes written hastily in pen on the inside of his wrist show that he has a job as a professional hacker.

His clothes told a bigger story. He wore a formal black and white suit. His pants were muddied and wrinkled, but not much - he just ran out of work judging by the stiff collar, ironed that morning. His clothes were also a bit damp - he hasn't been running for long as it only recently started raining. Running away, that is, from obvious danger.

The man rushed up to Ebony, protruding a white slip of paper from his pocket and offering it to her. She took it, analysing it's message, and gestured for him to start talking. He never did get to speak as a gunshot rang out and he lurched forward, collapsing to the ground in a pool of red blood.

Ebony watched, with a fraction of pity, as the traitor fell dead at her feet. The two men that shot him stormed up to her, but she ignored them, hiding the paper in her pocket before they could notice, and strutted out the door, head held high.

She didn't need to tell them why he betrayed his own company. It's quite obvious when a man as panicked as he was rushes up to one of the best detectives in the country with a note of warning, written in binary code about Parkinson - the criminal mastermind that escaped from prison a week ago, and gets shot by his team.

DI Linton rushed back up the stairs, but she couldn't be bothered to follow, so she continued to descend. Besides, she had a much better case quite literally, in her pocket.

Ebony Woods, a twenty eight year old mastermind with wavy blonde and striking clear blue eyes who absolutely detests the human species. Ebony took pride in who she was - a young detective who bests any other in the country, a graduate of Harvard University in criminology that moved back to her home in Ireland after years of intensive studies, but most of all, a dearly loved daughter and sister with fabulous friends and incredible boyfriend. The only thing she didn't like being, was a human.

So naturally, she did everything in her power to be smarter than your average oblivious human. Her mind, constantly working on overdrive, eyes flitting to and fro, taking in every little detail of the things around her. From the pattern of the shoe sole of the man two seats ahead of her, to the elderly woman who had been on the same bus as her for the past ten minutes and fifty two seconds, impatient to get back home and feed her dog. Her ears would always be attentive to the sounds around her. Little things she paid attention to that any normal person would shrug off as unimportant.

She sighed and allowed her mind to wander off to the simple white note in her pocket. Written hastily in blue pen was a paragraph of zero's and one's. She had taught herself the calculations to convert denary numbers to binary code and back at the age of eleven and learned it's connection to the alphabet a few months after.

It said: Parkinson, Oberon Incorporate & SON.

Undeniably, Ebony was a little miffed by the message. Anthony Parkinson was a serial killer that had taken the police a whole year of cracking clues in fifty crime scenes of the people he had killed to catch. He indeed had a squad of hackers working for him so that they could locate people to kill.

How had they caught him? Easy. He made the terrible decision of breaking into the flat above Ebony's, allowing her to catch a glimpse of him in the process (which was all she needed), to mercilessly slay the snobby motormouth living there. The rest was a matter of sitting back and watching her boyfriend wrestle the serial killer to the floor until the police arrived. The judge has passed a life sentence on him, only to find out that he had escaped last week after spending only three days in prison.

What bothered her, was the "Oberon Incorporate & SON". Alfred Oberon was a childhood friend of hers, a successful businessman, who had recently established a new plant in her city of his business Oberon Incorporate & Sons. As a matter of fact, that thought reminded her of the formal party he had invited her to, in just two hours, in celebration of the new building set up.

Ebony remained in an unnatural daze for the rest of the bus journey, subconsciously making her way up to her flat and speeding to get ready for the party. She slipped into a simple red dress and beloved long, brown trench coat before fixing her hair and striding back out the door with a taxi she had pre booked waiting outside.

Staring out the window as the taxi driver took her to the new building, her mind drifted to the message. Oberon Incorporate & SON... Why had the man written that? Everyone knew the name of the famous company is Oberon Incorporate & Sons. Why would he write it so differently?

Stepping outside, she paid the driver and greeted an enormous amount of people as they socialised, a fake smile on her face, her mind elsewhere.

The man had betrayed his leader risking his life to give her that note. It was obviously an urgent note of... Warning? Warning about what, though?

Parkinson, Oberon Incorporate & SON.

She graciously took a glass of wine that was offered to her by Oberon himself with a warm smile as he stepped up to the podium and began to speak to his guests.

"I would like to thank you all for accompanying me today, as I announce the opening of my new plant, Oberon Incorporate & Sons in Dublin city!"

Applause. Oberon Incorporate & SON.

SON.

Raise a glass to my new plant!"

Cheers and more applause. Ebony felt light headed. Dizzy.

Something was wrong. Someone was going to be murdered right here, right now.