Dead Ground (Washington Poe Book 4) Read online

  More praise for M. W. Craven

  ‘Craven is making outstanding seem

  normal with the revelatory Poe and

  Bradshaw series’

  Rob Parker

  ‘Intelligent. Sophisticated. Intriguing. Poe and Bradshaw are a memorable duo

  no crime fiction fan should miss’

  Mari Hannah

  ‘Keeps on getting better and better

  with every new volume’

  Maxim Jakubowski

  ‘So twisty and turny and just so

  brilliantly clever’

  Woman’s Way

  ‘Our new favourite troubled cop/eccentric buddy duo’

  Crime Monthly

  ‘A superbly plotted, witty, violent thriller’

  The Tablet

  ‘The brilliance and

  unpredictability of Poe and Bradshaw

  propel the storyline’

  Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine

  ‘Nothing shy of complete genius’

  Phonotonal

  Also by M.W. Craven

  Washington Poe series

  The Puppet Show

  Black Summer

  The Curator

  Cut Short (short story collection) Avison Fluke series

  Born in a Burial Gown

  Body Breaker

  Copyright

  Published by Constable

  ISBN: 978-1-47213-199-7

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © M.W. Craven, 2021

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Constable

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  More praise for M. W. Craven

  Also by M.W. Craven

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  To Joanne – my ‘lockdown’ buddy, my best friend, my wife.

  You type too loudly and had me doing early-morning Pilates,

  but you’re OK really …

  The mongoose I want under the stairs when the snakes slither by

  Attributed to Hannibal

  Chapter 1

  The man wearing a Sean Connery mask said to the man wearing a Daniel Craig mask, ‘Bertrand the monkey and Raton the cat are sitting by the fire, watching chestnuts roast in the hearth.’

  Which was as good a way as any of getting someone’s attention.

  ‘OK,’ Daniel Craig said.

  The men wearing George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton masks stopped what they were doing to listen. Pierce Brosnan, with his headphones on and his laptop spitting out complex instructions, was oblivious to everything but the vault door and the Diebold three-keyed timer and combination lock in front of him. Roger Moore was outside in the van.

  ‘Bertrand tries brushing the coals aside but he’s scared of burning his hand,’ Sean Connery continued. ‘But he wants those chestnuts and he doesn’t want to wait for the fire to cool. Instead, he persuades Raton to scoop them out, promising him an equal share.’

  ‘And the cat does?’

  ‘He does, yes. Raton moves the red-hot coals and picks out the chestnuts one by one. And each time he does, Bertrand gobbles them up. Eventually a maid disturbs them and they have to flee. Raton gets nothing for his pains.’

  Timothy Dalton was Sean Connery’s man, but the rest were Daniel Craig’s. George Lazenby was his muscle, Pierce Brosnan was his technical guy and Roger Moore was his

  wheelman. As crew leader, Daniel Craig felt he should be the one to ask the obvious question.

  ‘Why are you telling us this?’ he said.

  ‘No reason,’ Sean Connery said. ‘It’s a fable adapted by the French poet Jean de La Fontaine. It’s called “Le Singe et le Chat” and it’s about people sacrificing others for their own ends. The saying “cat’s paw” comes from it.’

  ‘It’s an idiom, actually,’ Timothy Dalton said, ‘not a saying.’

  Sean Connery turned and glared at Dalton. The mood in the vault’s anteroom changed. It had been tense; now there was an undercurrent of menace.

  ‘What part of “You do not sp
eak, ever” didn’t you understand?’ he said, his voice low.

  Under his mask they sensed Timothy Dalton blanche.

  Daniel Craig glanced at the Bonds in his crew and shrugged.

  Sean Connery was paying and he paid well. If he wanted to talk about monkeys and cats and chestnuts and humiliate his own man then who were they to stop him?

  The anteroom descended into silence.

  Pierce Brosnan broke it.

  ‘We’re in,’ he said.

  Few banks offer a safety deposit box service these days.

  The vault that the Bonds had broken into was one of several purpose-built facilities belonging to a specialist provider. It had cutting-edge security, but a combination of offsite hacks and Pierce Brosnan’s onsite safecracking skills had rendered them redundant.

  At least until the backup systems kicked in.

  ‘How long?’ Sean Connery said.

  ‘We’ve had eighteen minutes, twenty seconds,’ Daniel Craig replied.

  He glanced at the watch on the inside of his wrist. They still had plenty of time.

  The vault was rectangular, fifteen feet by thirty, and had a low ceiling. It was lit by neon lights. A steel table was fixed to the wall opposite the door. Safety deposit boxes stretched from floor to ceiling on the two longer walls. The boxes were suitcase-sized at the bottom and got progressively smaller as they reached eye level and above.

  The CCTV cameras were working but had been fixed so they were on a sixty-minute delay. The staff monitoring the vault would see what they were doing, but not for another hour.

  ‘We’ll start here,’ Timothy Dalton said.

  Sean Connery had hired him to evaluate the boxes’

  contents and he was keen to contribute. So far he’d been a passenger. He made a move to one of the larger boxes.

  ‘Not that one,’ Sean Connery said, removing a piece of paper from his pocket. He read out a serial number: 9-206.

  The Bonds spread out and searched for the box. George Lazenby found it. It was at head height and was one of the smaller boxes.

  ‘Mr Brosnan, if you will?’ Daniel Craig said.

  Pierce Brosnan studied the lock. The vault’s door had been a challenge but, as no one should be in the vault unsupervised, the security on the boxes was perfunctory, little more than cylinder locks. He pulled a snapper bar from his bag: a locksmith tool specially designed to break and open cylinder locks. It took less than a minute. He put the snapper bar back in his bag and stepped away.

  Sean Connery opened the small door. The safety deposit box was empty, as he’d been told it would be. Under his mask, he smiled.

  ‘Never mind,’ Dalton said. ‘We have hundreds more to check.’

  ‘Actually,’ Sean Connery said, ‘we’re not here to make a withdrawal.’

  ‘We’re not? Well, what are we doing?’

  ‘Making a deposit.’

  Sean Connery pulled a snub-nosed revolver from his waistband, pressed it against the back of Timothy Dalton’s head and pulled the trigger.

  He was dead before he hit the polished floor. A cloud of pink mist hung in the air where his head had just been. The vault smelled of cordite and blood.

  And fear.

  ‘What the hell!’ Daniel Craig snapped. ‘No guns, I said!

  We don’t carry guns on jobs.’

  ‘You know what’s always bothered me about that fable?’

  Sean Connery said. He held the gun by his side but it was clear he’d use it again if he had to.

  ‘Enlighten me,’ Daniel Craig said, tearing his eyes from the twitching corpse.

  ‘There was no mention of what happened next. No mention of what Raton the cat did to Bertrand the monkey after his betrayal.’

  Daniel Craig looked at the corpse again. It had stopped moving. ‘This man betrayed someone?’ Betrayal was a legitimate motive in the circles he moved in.

  Sean Connery said nothing.

  ‘Dalton was a shit Bond anyway,’ Daniel Craig said, looking at his watch. ‘We done?’

  ‘Almost,’ Sean Connery said. He removed something from his pocket and placed it on the lip of the empty safety deposit box. He spent some time making sure it was in the right position.

  ‘Now we’re done,’ he said.

  And with that, the Bonds left.

  Thirty minutes later, alerted to a robbery in progress by the security company monitoring the vault’s CCTV, the first police officers arrived.

  But all they found was a corpse cooling on the floor and a ceramic rat looking over it …

  Chapter 2

  Detective Sergeant Washington Poe usually hated attending court. He found the bureaucracy and the subservience to idiots in wigs archaic. He hated being at the beck and call of barristers and he hated the way cops were universally viewed with suspicion when they gave evidence. He hated that so-called experts were allowed to pull apart decisions made in a fraction of a second.

  But most of all he hated that when he attended court it meant someone had been failed. A family would never see a loved one again. A woman would never trust a man again.

  An old man would never leave his house again.

  There were many reasons to hate being in court.

  But not this time.

  This time he was attending as the defendant.

  And he planned to enjoy it.

  His case was being heard at the Carlisle Combined Court, a modern building in the centre of the city. Its only nod to the past was the Grade II-listed statue of the nineteenth-century Member of Parliament who’d dropped dead outside.

  Poe approved of statues like that. He wished there were more of them.

  The district judge, who had lost patience with him a while ago, tried again.

  ‘I must impress upon you, Mr Poe,’ he said, ‘I know this is only a civil matter but I strongly advise you to get legal representation. I’m sure your friend is’ – he checked his notes – ‘“as clever as Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair”, but what happens here today cannot easily be undone.’

  ‘Consider me advised, your honour.’

  ‘And it’s been explained that refusing legal representation is not grounds for a later appeal?’

  ‘It has.’

  The district judge had jowls like a bulldog and an unsettling resemblance to Rumpole of the Bailey. Tufts of hair sticking out from his ears made it look as though furry animals were burrowing in them. He peered at Poe over his half-moon spectacles. Poe stared back.

  ‘Very well,’ he sighed. ‘Mr Chadwick, you may proceed.’

  The council solicitor got to his feet. Small and moustached, he was an officious-looking man, the type who would take the minutes at Neighbourhood Watch meetings.

  ‘Thank you, your honour.’ He opened a thick manila file and picked up a summary sheet. ‘The facts in this case are not in dispute. Almost five years ago Mr Poe legally bought land on Shap Fell from a Mr Thomas Hume. This land—’

  ‘Mr Hume is now deceased, I understand?’

  ‘Regrettably that is the case, your honour. Mr Hume was the legal owner of the land and he was well within his rights to sell it to Mr Poe. This land included an abandoned shepherd’s croft.’

  ‘The building in question?’

  ‘Yes, your honour. We understand that Herdwick Croft has been there since the early 1800s. It has recently come into the catchment area of the Lake District National Park. The position of the local planning authority is that the croft has been a designated heritage asset since 2005, and therefore cannot be modified without the express permission of our office. Herdwick Croft’s original owner was informed of this designation.’

  ‘Mr Poe, would you like to interject?’ the judge said.

  Poe looked at the person beside him. She shook her head.

  ‘No, your honour,’ he said.

  ‘You’re aware that challenging the heritage-asset status of the croft is one of the few legal avenues you have left at

  this point?’

  ‘I am, your hono
ur. Although to be fair, I was unaware of Herdwick Croft’s status when I bought it. Thomas Hume must have … forgotten to tell me.’

  Poe felt, rather than saw, someone stiffen in the public gallery. He knew that Victoria Hume, Thomas’s daughter, was there to support him. She felt responsible for her father’s duplicity despite Poe reassuring her she wasn’t. Poe hadn’t completed the usual legal checks prior to handing over his cash and he was now paying the price.

  ‘As a serving police officer, I’m sure Mr Poe will be aware that ignorance of the law is not a legal excuse,’ Chadwick said.

  Poe smiled. He had hoped he’d say that.

  Chadwick spent ten minutes detailing the modifications Poe had completed at Herdwick Croft: the roof he’d fixed; the borehole and pump he’d installed to provide fresh running water; the septic tank he’d buried; the generator and how it supplied power. In short, everything he’d done to make the croft modern and comfortable. Even his beloved wood-burning stove got a mention.

  When Chadwick had finished the judge said, ‘And how was it you came to be aware of Mr Poe’s modifications?’

  ‘Your honour?’

  ‘Who told you, Mr Chadwick?’

  ‘A concerned citizen, your honour.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be the member for Oxenholme, would it?’

  Chadwick didn’t rise to the judge’s bait. ‘How we came to find out about the modifications is not the business of this court, your honour.’

  Poe knew the judge had got it spot on, though. The man who’d informed the council about his unauthorised restoration project was a former police officer, a direct-entrant detective chief inspector called Wardle. They’d butted heads during the Jared Keaton case. Wardle had double-downed on the wrong line of enquiry and it had cost

  him his career. He had since left the police and was now pursuing his new calling: local politics. Poe turned in his seat, half-expecting to see him sitting in the public gallery but, other than Victoria Hume, the benches were empty. It didn’t matter; if it hadn’t been Wardle it would have been someone else. Poe collected enemies the same way the middle class collected Nectar points.

  ‘Get on with it then, Mr Chadwick,’ the judge said.

  The local authority solicitor spent another ten minutes detailing the planning regulations Poe had fallen foul of.

  After two minutes Poe had drifted off.

  He’d had an extended stay at Herdwick Croft recently. The Serious Crime Analysis Section, shortened by everyone to SCAS, hadn’t had a major case since the Curator and, given how that had ended, no one was looking for a new investigation. The director of intelligence, Edward van Zyl, had given everyone involved a month off.