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‘TLD?’ Mathers said.

‘Top level domain, Detective Chief Superintendent Mathers.’

‘Gotcha. You want me to read it out, Tilly?’

‘Why would I?’

Poe suppressed a smile. ‘Tilly has a photographic memory, ma’am,’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Poe. There hasn’t been a single documented case of a photographic memory. What I have is anexceptionalmemory.’

She finished typing the URL into her browser and pressed enter.

They stared at the screen in astonishment.

‘Well, this has just got a whole lot weirder,’ Poe said.

‘It was a poll?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Mathers replied. ‘It seems the Botanist has moved away from the flowers and poems and gone for an online poll this time. It goes live in two hours.’

‘I think you’d better elaborate, Detective Chief Superintendent.’

***

‘I think you’d better elaborate, Tilly,’ Mathers said. ‘This is a website where people vote on who the Botanist should kill next?’

‘Out of the two people listed, yes,’ Bradshaw replied. ‘It’s a simple enough system. The website captures your IP address so you can only vote once, although if you have more than one device, like me, you could technically vote again. Most people have a laptop, a smart-phone and a tablet so some double-voting will be inevitable.’

‘So, in twenty-two hours this thing goes live and anyone in the country can—’

‘Anyone in theworld.’

‘Anyone in the world can effectively condemn one of these two to death?’

‘Yes, Detective Chief Superintendent Mathers. The poll will be up for seven days, after which the person with the most votes dies.’

‘And given he managed to sneak into a hospital ward that was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, does anyone doubt he can do exactly what he says?’

Flynn shook her head. She pointed at the thumbnail pictures of the two potential victims.

‘Who are they?’ she said.

‘And more importantly,’ Mathers said, ‘can we shut this website down?’

‘Canwe shut it down?’ Commander Ratface asked.

‘Tilly says as soon as it goes live, she could do it quite easily. Something to do with the onion router not being as private as people think it is. She believes she can trace it back to the host server and either ask the authorities in whichever country it is in to do it on our behalf, or, failing that, she can simply send a code that she’s developed directly into the server. She says it will fry it.’

‘Why can’t she do that now? Stop it going live in the first place?’

‘The website you have in front of you is the beta version, sir. We think the Botanist developed it with two purposes in mind: as proof of concept and to demonstrate what’s about to happen.’

‘We ask Tilly to shut the real site the moment it goes live then. Problem solved.’

‘It’s not as simple as that, sir,’ Mathers said. ‘There are clear instructions on what will happen if the website is tampered with.’

‘As bad as the public voting on who dies next?’