Read Chapter 11 first or start at the beginning.
“Thank God you’re OK!” Charlie said as Matt arrived home. “I’ve been trying to call you all weekend. When I heard there’d been a rail accident, I didn’t know if you’d been hurt or what!”
“I’m sorry,” Matt said, contrite. “I just, well, it was just too weird, Charlie. I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you before. You were right, this whole thing has turned into something creepy.”
Charlie noticed the bruising and cut above Matt’s eye. “You are OK, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” They walked into the lounge and Matt flopped onto the sofa. “It was strange. One second I was standing by the door, waiting for the train to pull into the station, and the next I’m on the floor and the train’s sliding along the tracks making a godawful din.”
“They said there were no fatalities.”
“A few broken arms and legs, maybe a bit of concussion, from what I saw. But I didn’t hang around to look, just ducked quietly out and got the hell away from there.”
“But you still went to Fimden?”
“Yeah. Not quite sure why. I mean, man, if they’re going to be derailing trains to stop me, then going to Fimden was stupid.”
“Well, I’m glad you did.”
Matt looked up at Charlie, surprised. Then he noticed her smiling, beaming almost luminously. She began to pace the room.
“Why is it a good thing that I put myself in harm’s way?”
“Well, this is why I was so desperate to get hold of you.”
“Apart from to check on my general wellbeing, of course.”
Charlie laughed. “Yes, of course, apart from that. But while you were in self-imposed exile this weekend, there’s been a meme going round the internet about a locative treasure hunt based on… Wait for it… GeoMaps!”
“There is?”
“It’s called Masquerade II, after the book by Kit Williams. Williams buried a golden hare at Ampthill in Bedfordshire and put clues in a book of paintings.”
“And you’re saying that all this phantom town stuff is part of Masquerade II?”
“Yes! I’m really sorry, Matt. I totally let my paranoia about online privacy get the better of me. You were right all along.”
“I was?”
“Yes. Those threatening emails were just another team trying to put us off the trail. You were right about them just watching our status updates and using them to scare me.”
Matt sat in silence for a moment.
“So who’s behind this Masquerade II?”
“Well, no one knows. Clues have been popping up in strange places, some of the weirder bulletin boards on the web. But get this: One of the clues that’s been doing the rounds is an anagram of Ibemcester. We are definitely on the right trail.”
“I don’t know, Charlie. This all feels a bit… What about the derailment?”
“I know that must have been scary, but in all honesty, these things do happen sometimes.”
“I suppose. I bought us new SIMs…” Matt fished in his pocket for the two SIM cards and held them up wanly.
“Come and look,” Charlie said, extending her hand. Matt took it and followed her into her bedroom. She stared at the wall for a moment, a sea of magnolia broken up by little islands of sticky notes, maps and diagrams. In the middle was a taped-together print out of a map of the UK with three dots labelled Argleton, Ibemcester and Fimden.
“You’ve been working hard this weekend.”
“Yep!” Charlie tried to rally Matt’s enthusiasm as he sat listlessly on the edge of the bed. “Let’s just look at the anagrams. First we have Argleton, SSID ‘Not real G’, password ‘Get on l’AR’.”
“Which makes no sense,” Matt said.
“Well, I’ve been thinking what AR might stand for.”
“Argon. Doesn’t have the same effect as nitrous oxide as far as I’m aware, so not a useful drug of choice. Would effectively suffocate you though.”
“Come on, try harder.”
“AR. Arkansas. Pronounced Ark-in-saw, which just goes to prove that Americans can’t spell.”
“Try again.”
“Ar. Country suffix for Argentina. Unless this is a cunning plan to wrest sovereignty of the Falkland Islands from British hands — and it would have to be very cunning, given that we aren’t exactly in the diplomatic game — I doubt it’s that.”
“Argleton. There’s a clue in the name.”
“Well, you’ve clearly worked it out, so spill.”
“Argleton. ARG. Alternate Reality Game. AR. Alternate Reality. This is the first confirmation that this is a geolocation game. Next is Ibemcester. Re me bisect. You can bisect a line or you can bisect an angle. For the first you need two points, for the latter you need three. Three points would give you a triangle…”
“And if you bisect all the angles, you get the centre,” Matt finished.
“Not the centre. A centre. Specifically, the incentre. Triangles have four different centres, depending on what method you use to construct them. There’s the incentre, the orthocentre, the circumcentre and the centroid. They are, potentially, all different, unless you have an equilateral triangle. Hell, they don’t even necessarily fall inside the triangle itself.”
Matt watched Charlie as she made her point. She looked animated, happy. She always was when she had a thorny problem to chew over, he thought.
“I take it you’ve figured out where the centre is?”
“Well, I was just going to start working on that when I heard your key in the lock.” She sat at her desk. “Probably the easiest way to do this is to convert the latitude and longitude to northings and eastings.”
“What?”
“Pretend that latitude and longitude are the X and Y axes of a grid. An easting is the eastward distance measured as an X co-ordinate, and the northing is the northward distance measured as a Y co-ordinate. Once we have the eastings and northings of each point, we do some simple maths and get the mean easting and northing, and that’s our centre.”
“It’s that easy?”
“Well, I’ll double check with a bit of basic Pythagorean maths, but yes. It’s that easy.”
“Maths seemed harder than this at school.”
“It really does depend on the teacher.”
Charlie tapped away at her keyboard, jotting notes with pen and paper and occasionally mumbling something to herself.
Matt sat and watched. He’d never realised what lovely hair she had, brown curls tumbling down her back, chestnut highlights shining in the sunlight. He hadn’t thought of her femininity before. She was always Charlie, the geek with the computer who regularly solved his computer problems without ever once complaining that he was taking her for granted. He had, he thought. And he had been deeply unfair to think of her only in terms of her computer skills, rather than who she was as a person. He felt ashamed.
“Here we are!” Charlie said, spinning round on her office chair. She was beaming again. She really did have a lovely smile.
“Where is it?”
“Drag that over here,” she pointed at a stool by her dresser, “and we’ll find out.”
She pulled up GeoMaps in her browser and carefully typed in: 52.139943, −1.310759. A pin sprang up as the map re-centred itself.
“Appletree?”
“I’ve never heard of it.” Charlie zoomed the map out to give her a better idea of the general location of the pin. “It’s between Coventry and Milton Keynes. We can get there in, oh, two and a half hours?”
“You really think we should go?”
“Fimden. Find me. They want us to go,” Charlie said, emphatically. “If we’re going to win Masquerade II, we have to. We can’t find what’s there unless we do.”
“I’m still not sure.”
“Oh, come on. I don’t want to let those bastards get there first. They’ve been messing with our heads and I won’t let them win.”
If you want to read Argleton all in one go, download the free ebook now. And why not try The Gates of Balawat or The Lacemaker as well!