Concrete Evidence by Conrad Jones

I’d leave that to you,” he grinned. “I wanted to get this out of the way before I got distracted with riddles.” He shrugged. “I’ve never been good at riddles.”     
    “So you said,” Annie frowned. “I’ll go and see where we are at.” She looked at her coat and decided that it could stay there. It had her purse and car keys in the pocket but it was also surrounded by thirty detectives. Her mobile was another matter and she picked it up as she headed to where Google and his team were working. As she approached, the officers stopped what they were doing. “How is it going?”
    “Well this is very exciting,” Google picked up several pieces of paper and held them up as if they were trophies. “We started by ruling out the more popular ancient scripts, Hebrew, Greek, Samerian,” Google began his thesis. “I knew it was a type of Cyrillic but not the most popular text used. It’s different.”
    Annie held up her hand and grimaced. “Stop, stop,” she said loudly. “Listen Google,” she joked. “Please don’t think that you have to detail exactly how you’ve arrived at every conclusion.” His three team members grinned widely. He didn’t look offended by the use of his nickname. He deemed it a compliment about his intellectual prowess. “All I need to know is why the killer used it and what it says.”
    “Sorry, Guv,” he took off his glasses and wiped them on his tie. “Firstly, it’s a script called Glagolitic. In the days when it was used, it was sometimes called the ‘witches language’.” He paused. Annie’s expression told him that she wasn’t in the mood to be spoon fed the findings crumb by crumb. Although he wanted to go into as much detail as he could muster, he thought that a summary would be better for his career. “It became popular in about eight hundred, along with other Old Church Slavic languages but Glagolitic was also used to record spells and ceremonies so that prying eyes couldn’t decipher them. Bearing in mind that for centuries before it became widely used, there was paranoia about witches, which led to the burning of hundreds of women, you can see why some would seek a text which couldn’t be translated if their writings were discovered. It was a method of hiding information.” He shrugged matter-of-factly as if what he was saying was obvious.
    “Slavic?” Annie raised her eyebrows.
    “Yes, it’s part of the old ‘Eastern Block’.”
    “I know where Slavic refers to, Google!” Annie sighed, slightly annoyed.
    “Of course you do, Guv. Sorry.” He blushed and carried on nervously. “It was used in parts of Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and even some of the Mongolian tribes used it.”
    “Okay,” Annie said slowly digesting his words. “Why carve that specific script into our victim?”                    
    “You’ll have to ask the killer that,” he said putting his spectacles on the end of his nose. “At first, I thought it was linked to a satanic ritual because of the pentangle daubed on the wall but the more we translate, the less likely that is.”
    “Go on.” Annie said intrigued.
    “Get this,” Google said excitedly. “‘We are each our own Devil, and we make this world our own hell, amen.’” 
    “The bible?” Annie guessed.
    “Oscar Wilde.”
    “Oscar Wilde?”
    “Not what you were expecting, I know but when put it together with the other stuff, we have a theme and some numbers that don’t make any sense yet.”
    “Numbers?”
    “Yes, although I can’t see anything that they relate to yet.”
    “Do you know what he’s trying to say?”
    “On its own, it means nothing to me,” he held up his finger, “but listen to this, ‘As evil as the Devil and twice as pretty.’” He looked over his glasses. “He’s berating women.” He paused. “‘The Devil became a serpent and tempted Adam, his male descendents are still tempted by snakes this day. They will tempt you and then destroy your