BY THE EDITOR

As Editor of this esteemed publication, my duties are many and varied. I am a curator of fine prose, a guardian of grammatical fortitude, and a shepherd to a flock of writers who, while brilliant, occasionally possess the common sense of a startled pheasant. It is, therefore, paramount that my successor, the ever-keen Deputy Editor James ‘Bembers’ Bembridge, possesses a quality even more vital than a mastery of the semi-colon: a functioning nonsense-detector.

The role demands a certain steeliness. For every genuine article on the merits of the English Longhorn, there will be a dozen cunningly wrought submissions from sly lefties—pieces that begin with a fond recollection of grouse season and end with a fervent plea for collectivised farming.

The ability to spot these wolves in waxed cotton is non-negotiable.

Which brings me to my concern. Bembers’ enthusiasm is boundless, his trust in his fellow man… absolute. It is a charming but dangerous trait. To test his mettle, I conceived a small exercise. A harmless bit of field training. I would lay a trail, a mere breadcrumb or two, suggesting a dark and ludicrous secret about our esteemed correspondent, Mr Roger Watson. The goal was for James to follow the crumbs, scoff at the absurdity, and declare the matter a fiction. A simple test of critical faculties.

I chose my fiction carefully. I led him to believe that our Roger (in on the joke, of course)—an eminent nurse of Scottish and military heritage whose idea of high drama is a misidentified foot fungus and whose most violent impulse is towards an under-seasoned stew—was in fact the notorious 1960s Scottish serial killer, Bible John (also suspected of having links to Glasgow hospital and perhaps the services).

Bible John is the moniker given to an unidentified serial killer who is believed to have murdered three young women between 1968 and 1969 in Glasgow, Scotland. The victims of Bible John were all brunettes between the ages of 25 and 32, all of whom met their murderer at the Barrowland Ballroom, a dance hall and music venue in the city. The perpetrator has never been identified and the case remains unsolved and one of the most extensive manhunts in Scottish criminal history. The case was the first time in Scotland in which the Crown Office authorised publication of a composite drawing of a person suspected of murder. This unidentified serial killer became known as “Bible John” due to his having repeatedly quoted from the Bible and to have condemned any form of adultery while in the company of his final victim.

^{Bible (l) Roger (r)}

I thought the clues were suitably outlandish. A whispered aside about Roger’s “uncanny knowledge of Glasgow bus routes.” A ‘misplaced’ memo noting his “distinctive hypnotic stare and crooked lower teeth (Bible John had crooked lower teeth).” I even left some paragraphs on WhatsApp about the case and a link to a documentary, with a passage on the killer’s “quiet, gentlemanly demeanour” subtly underlined. I awaited the moment of revelation, when Bembers would burst into my office, cry “Jolly good joke, Wightman!” and we would share a whisky and a laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

What followed was not a moment of clarity, but a descent into pure, unadulterated melodrama.

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Bembers did not scoff. He investigated. With the grim determination of a man on the trail of the truth and a mega scoop, he began connecting dots that simply did not exist. He analysed Roger’s piece on Scottish abattoirs, convinced he’d found “coded messages.” He became certain that Roger’s habitual wearing of a smart tweed suit to the pub was a “deeply unsettling affectation” meant to throw us off the scent. So focused did he become about poor Roger that he was certain, but for a date of birth (ten years out) that he had his man.

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The situation reached its crescendo this summer. He had a timeline sketched out on the back of a Drummer Magazine, cross-referencing Roger’s fishing holidays to Scotland with the original murders. He looked up at me, his face a mask of tragic gravitas, and whispered, “It all fits, Dom. The man’s a monster. We have to act.”

I had not created a test.

I had created a believer.

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END OF PART ONE: PART TWO FOLLOWS HERE