The Puppet Show (Washington Poe Book 1) Read online

  Herdwick Croft looked as though it had grown out of the ground. The walls were made of unrendered stone – too big for any one man to lift and manoeuvre into place – and it merged seamlessly with the ancient moorland it inhabited. It was squat and ugly and looked like it had been frozen in time for two hundred years. Poe loved it.

  Flynn said, ‘I’ve been here a couple of hours waiting—’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Flynn reached into her briefcase and pulled out a thick file. She didn’t open it. ‘I assume you’ve heard of the Immolation Man?’

  Poe jerked his head up. He hadn’t expected her to say that.

  And of course he’d heard of the Immolation Man. Even in the middle of the Shap Fells, the Immolation Man was news. He’d been burning men to death in some of Cumbria’s many stone circles. Three victims so far, unless there was another he hadn’t heard about. Although the press had been speculating, the facts were there if you knew how to separate them from the sensationalism.

  The county had its first-ever serial killer.

  Even if SCAS had been called in to help Cumbria police, he was on suspension: subject to an internal investigation and an IPCC inquiry. Although Poe knew he was an asset to any investigation, he wasn’t irreplaceable. SCAS had moved on without him.

  So what was Flynn really doing there?

  ‘Van Zyl’s lifted your suspension. He wants you working the case. You’ll be my DS.’

  Although Poe’s face was a mask, his mind worked faster than a computer. It didn’t make sense. Flynn was a new DI, and the last thing she’d want would be the old DI working under her, undermining her authority just by being there. And she’d known him a long time and knew how he responded to authority. Why would she want to be a part of that?

  She’d been ordered to.

  Poe noticed she’d made no mention of the IPCC inquiry so presumably that was still ongoing. He stood and cleared away the mugs. ‘Not interested,’ he said.

  She seemed surprised by his answer. He didn’t know why. The NCA had washed their hands of him.

  ‘Don’t you want to see what’s in my file?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he replied. He no longer missed SCAS. While it had taken him a long time to get used to the slower pace of life on the Cumbrian fells, he didn’t want to give it up. If Flynn wasn’t there to sack or arrest him, then he wasn’t interested in anything else she had to say. Catching serial killers was no longer a part of his life.

  ‘OK,’ she said. She stood up. She was tall and their eyes were on the same level. ‘I need you to sign two bits of paper for me then.’ She removed a thinner file from her briefcase and passed it over.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You heard me say van Zyl’s lifted your suspension, right?’

  Nodding, he read the document.

  Ah.

  ‘And you realise that as you’re now officially a serving police officer again, if you refuse to come back to work it’s a sackable offence? But rather than go through all that, I’ve been told I can accept your resignation now. I’ve taken the liberty of getting HR to draw up this document.’

  Poe studied the one-page sheet. If he signed at the bottom, he was no longer a police officer. Although he’d been expecting it for a while, he found it wasn’t as easy to say goodbye as he thought. If he did sign, it would draw a line under the last eighteen months. He could start living.

  But he’d never carry a warrant card again.

  He glanced at Edgar. The spaniel was soaking up the last of the sun. Most of the surrounding land was his. Was he ready to give all this up?

  Poe took her pen and scrawled his name across the bottom. He handed it back so she could check he hadn’t simply written ‘piss off’ on the bottom. Now that her bluff had been called she seemed less sure of what to do next. It wasn’t going to plan. Poe took the mugs and coffee pot inside. A minute later he was back outside. Flynn hadn’t moved.

  ‘What’s up, Steph?’

  ‘What are you doing, Poe? You loved being a cop. What’s changed?’

  He ignored her. With the decision made, he just wanted her to go. ‘Where’s the other document?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You said you had two things for me to sign. I’ve signed your resignation letter, so unless you’ve got two of them, there’s still something else.’

  She was all business again. Opening the file, she removed the second document. It was a bit thicker than the first and had the official seal of the NCA across the top.

  She launched into a rehearsed speech. It was one Poe had used himself. ‘Washington Poe, please read this document and then sign at the bottom to confirm you’ve been served.’ She handed over the thick sheaf of paper.

  Poe glanced at the top sheet.

  It was an Osman Warning.

  Oh shit . . .

  CHAPTER THREE

  When the police have intelligence that someone is in significant and immediate danger, they have a duty of care to warn the victim. The Osman Warning is the official process for discharging that duty. Potential victims can consider the protective measures being proposed by the police, or, if they aren’t happy, they can make their own arrangements.

  Poe scanned the first page but it was full of officious bullshit. It didn’t say who he was at risk from. ‘What’s this about, Steph?’

  ‘I can only tell you if you’re still a serving police officer, Poe.’ She handed him the resignation letter he’d just signed. He didn’t take it.

  ‘Poe, look at me.’

  She held his gaze and he saw nothing but honesty in her eyes.

  ‘Trust me. You need to see what’s in this file. If you don’t like it, you can always email Hanson your notice later.’ She handed him back his resignation letter.

  Poe nodded and tore up the letter.

  ‘Good,’ she said.

  She passed across some glossy photographs. They were of a crime scene.

  ‘Do you recognise these?’

  Poe studied them. They were of a dead body. Blackened, charred, almost unrecognisable as a human being. Shrunken, as anything primarily made of liquid is after exposure to extreme heat. The corpse looked as though it had the same texture and weight as the charcoal Poe removed from his wood-burning stove every morning. He could almost feel the residual heat through the image.

  ‘Do you know which one this was?’ Flynn asked.

  Poe didn’t answer. He flicked through the sheaf of photos searching for a point of reference. The last one was a shot of the whole crime scene. He recognised the stone circle. ‘This is Long Meg and Her Daughters. This . . .’ he pointed at the first photograph, ‘. . . must be Michael James, the Tory councillor. He was the third victim.’

  ‘It is. Staked in the middle of the stone circle, covered in accelerant, then set on fire. His burns were over ninety per cent. What else do you know?’

  ‘Only what I’ve read. I expect the police were surprised at the location; it’s not as rural as the other two.’

  ‘Not half as surprised as they were at how he’d successfully managed to evade every bit of surveillance they’d put in place.’

  Poe nodded. The Immolation Man had chosen a different stone circle each time he killed. It was how the press had come up with the name. Immolation meant sacrificing by burning and, with no other motive, the press jumped on it. Poe would have expected the police to be watching all the circles. Then again maybe not . . . there were a lot of stone circles in Cumbria. Add the barrows, henges and standing stones and you’d have nearly five hundred to watch. Even if they used minimal surveillance details, they’d need a team numbering close to two thousand cops. Cumbria barely had a thousand badged officers as it was. They’d have no choice but to pick and choose where they put their limited resources.

  He passed the photographs back. As gruesome as it all was, it didn’t explain why Flynn had made the long journey north. ‘I still don’t understand what this has to do with me?’

 
She ignored the question. ‘SCAS were called in after the Immolation Man’s second victim. The SIO wanted a profile.’

  It was to be expected. It was the unit’s speciality.

  ‘Which we did,’ she continued. ‘Came up with nothing useable, the usual stuff about age ranges and ethnicity, that type of thing.’

  Poe knew that profiles could add value, but only when they were part of a multi-strand investigation. He doubted they were talking because of a profile.

  ‘Have you heard of multi-slice computed tomography?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  ‘It’s where a machine photographs the body in very thin slices rather than as a whole. It’s an expensive process but sometimes it identifies ante- and post-mortem injuries that the conventional forensic post-mortem has missed.’

  Poe had been very much a ‘need to know what it can do’ rather than a ‘need to know how it works’ kind of guy. If Flynn said it was possible, then it was possible.

  ‘The post-mortem found nothing, but the MSCT found this.’ Retrieving another set of photographs, she placed them on the table in front of him. They were computerised images of what appeared to be random slashes.

  ‘These were on the third victim?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘On the torso. Everything he does is designed for maximum impact.’

  The Immolation Man was a sadist. Poe didn’t need a fancy profile to tell him that. He studied each page as Flynn turned them over. There were nearly twenty but it was the last one that caused him to gasp.

  It was the sum of all the parts. The computer image where all the random slashes came together to form the picture you were meant to see. Poe’s mouth turned to glue. ‘How?’ he croaked.

  Flynn shrugged. ‘We were hoping you could tell us.’

  They stared at the last photograph.

  The Immolation Man had carved two words into the victim’s chest.

  ‘Washington Poe’.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Poe sat down heavily. Blood leached from his face. A vein in his temple began pounding.

  He stared at the computerised mock-up of his name. And it wasn’t just his name – above it had been carved the number five.

  That wasn’t good . . . That wasn’t good at all.

  ‘We’re interested in why he felt the need to carve your name into the victim’s chest.’

  ‘And it’s not something he’s done before? It’s not something that’s been held back from the press?’

  ‘Nope. We’ve retrospectively put victims one and two through the MSCT and they’re clear.’

  ‘And the number five?’ There was only one plausible explanation and he knew Flynn agreed. It was why she’d issued the Osman Warning.

  ‘We assume you’re earmarked as the fifth victim.’

  He picked up the last photograph. After the crude attempt at the number five, the Immolation Man had given up on curves. All the letter strokes were straight.

  Although they were only looking at a computer image, Poe could see the wounds were too crude for a scalpel. His money was on a Stanley knife or similar. The fact that the letters had been picked up by the MSCT meant two things: they were ante-mortem – if they hadn’t been, the post-mortem examination would have found them – and they were deep; the burning would have destroyed shallower wounds. The victim’s last few minutes must have been hell on earth.

  ‘Why me?’ Poe said. He’d spent a career making enemies but he hadn’t worked a case involving someone this nutty before.

  Flynn shrugged. ‘As you can imagine, you’re not the first person to ask that question.’

  ‘I wasn’t lying when I said I only know what’s been reported in the papers.’

  ‘We know that when you were a Cumbria police officer, you had no official contact with any of the victims. I’m assuming you hadn’t had any unofficial contact with them?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’ He gestured to the croft and surrounding land. ‘This place takes up most of my time these days.’

  ‘That’s what we assumed. We don’t think the link is the victims; we think the link is with the killer.’

  ‘You think I know the Immolation Man?’

  ‘We think he knows you, or knows of you. We doubt you know him.’

  Poe knew that this was the first of many discussions and meetings, and that whether he wanted to or not, he was involved. In what capacity was still up for debate.

  ‘First impressions?’ Flynn asked.

  He studied the slash marks again. Not including the messy number five, he counted forty-two. Forty-two wounds to spell out ‘Washington Poe’. Forty-two individual expressions of agony. ‘Other than the victim wishing I’d been called Bob, nothing.’

  ‘I need you to come back to work,’ she said. She looked around at the desolate fells he now called home. ‘I need you to re-join the human race.’

  He stood up, all previous thoughts of resigning dismissed. There was only one thing that mattered: the Immolation Man was out there somewhere, selecting victim number four. If he ever wanted to feel at ease again he had to find him before he reached number five.

  ‘Whose car are we taking?’ he asked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As soon as they were out of Cumbria the land flattened and the M6 stretched ahead like a runway. Spring was having delusions of summer grandeur, and Poe found himself having to turn up Flynn’s air-conditioning. Sweat pooled in the small of his back. It had little to do with the heat.

  An uneasy silence had stifled them. When Poe had dropped off Edgar with his nearest neighbour, Flynn had changed out of her crisp power suit into a more casual outfit of jeans and a jumper, but despite her relaxed attire, she twirled her fingers through her long hair as she stared at the road.

  ‘Congratulations on your promotion,’ Poe said.

  She turned her head. ‘I didn’t want your job. You must know that?’

  ‘I do. And for what it’s worth, I think you’ll make an excellent DI.’

  He wasn’t being spiteful. She relaxed and said, ‘Thank you. You being suspended wasn’t exactly how I envisaged getting a DI position, though.’

  ‘They had no choice.’

  ‘They might not have had a choice when they suspended you,’ Flynn said, ‘but anyone could have made that mistake.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘We both know there’s a clear evolutionary line from that mistake to what happened, Steph.’

  Flynn was referring to their last case. His last case. A mad man in the Thames Valley area had abducted and killed two women, and Muriel Bristow, a fourteen-year-old girl, was missing. SCAS had been involved from the beginning. Offender profiles and crime mapping had been completed but it was the geographic profile that led them to their main suspect: Peyton Williams, an MP’s aide. Everything fit. He had a previous conviction for stalking, was in the area every time a girl had been abducted, and had a string of failed relationships.

  Poe wanted to arrest and question him, but his boss, Director of Intelligence Talbot, had refused. A general election had been called and they were in the pre-election period known as purdah – without evidence, arresting an MP’s aide in a marginal seat could be viewed as election tampering. At least it could in Talbot’s eyes. ‘Go and find something solid,’ he’d been told. In the meantime, Talbot told Poe he would inform the MP in question. Tell him they were investigating a member of his staff. Poe begged him not to.

  Talbot ignored him. The MP fired his aide.

  And told him why.

  Poe was furious. Peyton Williams wasn’t going to go anywhere near Muriel Bristow now. Not with that kind of attention. If she were still alive, she wouldn’t be for much longer. She’d die of dehydration.

  He wasn’t the type of cop who’d palm off the unpleasant tasks to others. He’d made the trip to the family’s home himself. Before he left, he printed off a Family Liaison Case Summary, a heavily sanitised account of what was happening in the investigation. After telling the Bristows what he could, h
e handed over the file for them to review in their own time.

  And later that day, all hell broke loose.

  Poe had made a mistake. A terrible mistake. As well as printing off the Family Liaison Case Summary, he’d printed off an updated summary for his own file. This one wasn’t sanitised. It contained all his suspicions and all his frustrations.

  The wrong report had ended up in the wrong file . . . The Bristows got to read all about Peyton Williams . . .

  Only later, after Williams had been snatched and tortured by Muriel Bristow’s father, and long after he’d given up Muriel’s location and she’d been safely returned to her family, did anyone stop to think how Bristow even knew about Peyton Williams at all.

  The mistake had been quickly uncovered, and despite Poe having been right all along, and despite an innocent girl being returned to her family, he’d been suspended with immediate effect. A few weeks later, Peyton Williams died of his wounds.

  Until Flynn had showed up at Herdwick Croft, Poe hadn’t seen anyone from the NCA since.

  ‘You disappeared without saying goodbye to anyone,’ said Flynn.

  He felt a tinge of guilt. When he’d been suspended, Poe had ignored all the texts and voicemails offering support. A man had been tortured and he’d been responsible. He’d had to learn to live with that. He’d returned home to Cumbria. Got away from his well-meaning colleagues. Hid away from the world. Alone with only dark thoughts for company.

  Flynn continued, ‘Between you and me, van Zyl told me he thinks the IPCC aren’t far off a finding of “No Case to Answer”. They can’t prove it was definitely you who put the wrong report in the family’s file.’

  The thought offered Poe no comfort. Perhaps he was getting used to his monastic existence? He opened the case file and began reading everything SCAS had on the Immolation Man.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Although it was a triple murder and the documentation was copious, Poe had seen enough files to locate the important stuff. He went straight to the senior investigating officer’s early description of the first crime scene.