11. What’s In A Name

Next morning, nibbling on toast, Kathy glanced over her cold case notes on the student who had walked out of the shower and into a knife. She’d made a note to follow up on the missing weapon, now she added a note to probe for any connection between Deborah and the murdered student.

Later that day, sitting in a tedious planning meeting at work, her thoughts drifted. The cold case victim had been called Catrina Somers. She doodled the name Catrina in curly cursive writing. Beside it she wrote Shaye, the name of the woman who had died in her arms. As the head of her department droned on, she tapped her pen on the pad and wrote both names in block capitals – then felt a cold trickle in her stomach.

Kathy could read upside down, sideways and backwards. It’s handy for reading documents on other people’s desks. Now she read that last name backwards, EYAHS. It was a nonsense word but it would sound like Eyass if you said it out loud – and Kathy had heard it said very loud indeed, every time Deb Citlali struck a killing blow in her make believe knife fight.