Blue's Revenge by Deborah Abela

clothes racks and a barrow packed with cheeses.
    â€˜There!’ Linden pointed. ‘He’s the street performer.’
    Amongst the milling shoppers and sellers, they saw him. A tall, thin man dressed in tights, with a whitened face and heavily coloured red lips.
    â€˜He has the same looking-over-his-shoulder expression he had on the yacht.’
    Harrison smiled. ‘Well done, Linden. Sorenson is not only an expert of disguise but of language as well, and as he has no fixed address, he is very difficult to pat down … I mean, track down .’
    â€˜We’ve been close to capturing him on several occasions,’ Alex said pointedly. ‘But he’s managed to disappear just before capture. He works alone, has no ties, and when he has killed, he leaves no traces it was him or clues as to where he is going next.’
    â€˜It’s as if he becomes invisible,’ Harrison concluded.
    â€˜If he’s so good,’ Max frowned, ‘how come none of the agents are …’ She couldn’t say the word sitting on the edge of her lips.
    â€˜Because he didn’t intend to kill them,’ Harrison answered. ‘Take a look at this.’
    It was a photo of Blue standing on a podium in front of a well-dressed dinner crowd. Even though they’d had news of his death, his face was still enough to drive a shiver into Max.
    â€˜This was taken a few months ago, before Blue’s imprisonment. Here he’s being honoured by the Royal Humanitarian Society.’
    â€˜Anyone told them yet they got the wrong man?’ Linden asked.
    â€˜Look closely at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen,’ Harrison continued.
    Steinberger zoomed in. There was a table at the back of the room, swathed in darkness, and standing behind it was a man with his arms folded. He was dressed in a tuxedo, wore thick glasses beneath a balding head and had that same guarded, over-his-shoulder look.
    â€˜Sorenson?’ Max asked.
    â€˜Yes. After photographic analyses wereconducted on all four images, Quimby has confirmed that the man in each picture is Sorenson.’
    â€˜So Sorenson was working with Blue?’ Eleanor shivered at the idea of two such devious minds working together.
    â€˜We believe it is here that Blue’s relationship with Sorenson started to take shape,’ Alex informed them.
    Linden stepped towards the screen to take a closer look at the killer’s disguise. It was good. ‘But if Blue is dead, why is Sorenson doing this?’
    Harrison’s brow bulged into a complex tangle of lines, as if there wasn’t enough room for all the thoughts crammed into his head. ‘Before he was attacked Steinberger received a disk containing a message that was recorded yesterday.’
    Harrison nodded to Steinberger, who slid a disk out of a round cover and placed it in his computer. A startling image appeared before them.
    It was Blue. Thinner than his usual self but with the same self-satisfied grin he wore for his most victorious moments.
    â€˜But he’s dead?’ Max said more as a question.
    â€˜So we thought,’ Harrison replied.
    â€˜It must have been filmed before the fire,’ Ben suggested.
    â€˜Locked within the digital code of the disk is the time it was recorded,’ Suave added. ‘Which was several hours after the fire took place.’
    â€˜So it’s really him?’ Eleanor spoke softly.
    â€˜We still have Blue’s Vibratron reading from his days at the Force, which confirms the fingerprint-like identification of his vibrations,’ said Alex.
    â€˜You can measure those vibrations from a digital image?’ Linden was amazed.
    â€˜With Quimby’s Vibrations Decoder we can, yes, and it is an identical match.’
    Max deflated. It was getting harder to know what was real and what wasn’t.
    â€˜It’s either him or a very good copy.’ Steinberger pressed play, causing the image of Blue to come