The Puppet Show

by M. W. Craven

  Bradshaw’s hand shot up.

  ‘Our figurative lateral-thinking pants,’ Poe said without missing a beat. Her hand went back down.

  Bradshaw brought up the 3D image of Poe’s name and they all studied it. Reid said, ‘That the only one we have, Tilly?’

  As before, she took them through a series of slides. The last one was a deeper image and showed fragments of the wounds used to make up the letters in Washington Poe. These were the wounds that had cut so deep they’d caught the ribs. Most of the others hadn’t gone as deep. None of the other images seemed to offer up anything new and she returned to the first one.

  For five minutes, no one spoke as they absorbed what was projected onto Poe’s wall. Tilly opened as many screens as she could fit on the sheet and filled them with different pictures.

  ‘Anyone?’ Flynn asked.

  Poe was staring so hard his eyes were beginning to blur. Like the percontation point, the top images were the most distorted by the fire. The edges of the wounds weren’t as sharp as the ones taken from deeper inside the body.

  Bradshaw brought up some more. The new images were different to the ones they’d been viewing previously. The fire hadn’t managed to get that deep and the wounds Bradshaw was showing on the sheet were sharper. Thin and precise.

  Poe leaned in, squinted at one of the images and said, ‘Is it just me or do those letters look different?’

  Bradshaw responded first. ‘You’re right, Poe! The slant of the letters isn’t consistent. Neither is the spacing.’ She produced a laser pointer from nowhere and aimed it at the sheet. ‘I’ve studied forensic handwriting and I think the second, third and fourth letter in Washington and the first letter in Poe were written left-handed. The difference in the spacing would also suggest they were written before the right-handed letters were put in.’

  Poe said, ‘Steph? This is your investigation. What do you think?’

  She stood and walked to the makeshift screen. She traced the four letters with her hand. She turned and said, ‘I think you’re both right. I think those four letters are different and I think they do mean something. Unfortunately they’re of no help whatsoever.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Poe felt deflated. He waited for Flynn’s explanation.

  ‘It’s an anagram,’ she said.

  Poe had never been good at word puzzles; he was a lateral rather than analytical thinker. Reid was even worse than he was, which, for someone with his vocabulary, was surprising. Bradshaw could probably solve anagrams at the same time as she solved advanced equations.

  But even he could have a decent stab at a four-letter problem.

  Flynn didn’t give him time to think. ‘It’s Shap,’ she said. ‘That’s why the letters were different. It was to make sure we came to this Washington Poe.’

  Poe immediately reflated; he knew something Flynn didn’t. He and Reid exchanged glances. He said, ‘You ever googled yourself, Steph?’

  She blushed slightly and said she hadn’t.

  Yeah, you have, he thought. Everyone has.

  Poe was as ‘don’t give a shit what people think’ as they came, and he’d googled himself. When Peyton Williams had died, and someone – almost certainly Deputy Director Hanson – had leaked his name to the press, he’d stayed off the internet while the press called him a vigilante. In truth, it had been an easy thing to do; by then he’d been suspended and was living at Herdwick Croft where surfing the ‘net’ to idle away time was no longer possible. But curiosity is a funny thing. One evening he’d been in the bar at Shap Wells, and, taking advantage of the free wi-fi, he’d typed his name into Google. The first time he’d done it.

  The results were astonishing. The vitriol aimed his way was bizarre. Peyton Williams had abducted and killed two women, had almost killed a third, and yet, in some people’s eyes, Poe was the bad guy. He remembered the good old days when having strong opinions about issues you knew nothing about was considered a negative thing. Facts no longer mattered. Populism and fake news had seemingly turned half the population into mindless trolls.

  But . . . the other thing he’d learned from searching Google was that he shared his name with only one other person; an American politician from Georgia who had died in 1876.

  He was sure there must be others out there, but he doubted Gamble would have needed his name and location to work out to which Washington Poe the Immolation Man was referring. He could imagine the detectives in Cumbria – some of whom he’d worked with for years – saying, ‘Oh, that Washington Poe. Now he’s mentioned Shap, I know exactly who he means.’

  He explained that there were no other Washington Poes, but Flynn didn’t seem convinced.

  ‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ she said. ‘And the Immolation Man wouldn’t necessarily know there’s only one of you on the internet.’

  Poe shrugged. ‘I think it’s worth following up. If he hid Shap in the message just to make sure you came to me, then fair enough, but checking costs us nothing.’ He waited for her to make the right decision. She didn’t disappoint.

  She nodded and turned to Reid. ‘I think this might be a job for our liaison officer. Can you get onto Cumbria’s intelligence systems? See if anything weird has happened here recently.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘JDLR,’ Poe cut in. ‘You’ll know it when you see it.’

  ‘Just Doesn’t Look Right,’ Reid said. ‘OK, I’ll go to Kendal nick and check SLEUTH.’

  SLEUTH was Cumbria police’s intelligence system. Any intelligence, whether it was criminal behaviour or not, would be recorded there. Reid said he’d also ring Gamble to brief him on where they were.

  After he’d left, Poe said to Bradshaw. ‘While he’s away, Tilly, can you have a look and see what you can dig up?’

  ‘Can I go back to the hotel, Poe? The wi-fi is stronger there.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift unless . . . unless you want me to show you how to drive the quad?’

  Bradshaw looked at Flynn in excitement. ‘Can I, DI Stephanie Flynn? Please. Please.’

  ‘Can she?’ Flynn asked Poe.

  ‘Makes sense,’ he replied. ‘We don’t know how long we’re going to be up here and we all need to be mobile.’

  ‘Go for it, Tilly,’ Flynn said. She looked at Poe, then added, ‘Just don’t tell your mother.’

  For twenty minutes Poe demonstrated how to drive the quad. Other than computer games, Bradshaw had no driving experience whatsoever, but it was easy and she picked it up quickly. He showed her how to turn it on and off, how to disengage the brake and how to put it into drive. The throttle was on the right-hand grip and the rest, he explained, was a case of not getting stuck. Bradshaw laughed and smiled the whole way through.

  After five minutes of supervised riding she was proficient enough to set off on her own.

  They watched her leave as if she were their daughter going off to college.

  ‘And mind the road!’ Poe shouted. Crossing the A6 was the only time she’d be on a road; technically she needed a licence to cross it. He glanced at Flynn and hoped she hadn’t realised.

  Bradshaw waved without looking back.

  With half the team away on tasks, and with nothing for them to do until they reported back, Flynn and Poe took Edgar for a walk. It was mid-afternoon and it felt like they’d made some progress. The weather was the same as the day before but somehow it seemed brighter. It was funny how mood affected the senses.

  Flynn asked him about Herdwick Croft and how he’d ended up living there.

  ‘Bit of luck, really,’ he told her. ‘I wanted to buy something outright after I sold my flat but I needed something cheap as I assumed I’d be getting sacked. I was queuing at the council offices in Kendal, seeing if I qualified for housing support, and I happened to be standing behind this farmer. He was raging at this poor woman behind the reception desk. I calmed him down and took him for a pint. He told me that he owned large swathes of Shap Fell – the fell we’re on now – and some bean counter
in the council tax department had decided that, as Herdwick Croft had once been a shepherd’s dwelling, albeit over two hundred years ago, it was eligible for council tax. And without any discussion he’d been sent a bill through the post.’

  Flynn turned to look at the croft in the distance. ‘It’s a smallish building, though. Why didn’t he just pay it?’

  ‘It might be small but it’s near Kendal and that means it’s in a high band. He couldn’t even knock it down as it’s a Grade II listed building.’

  ‘So you offered to buy it?’

  ‘Did the deal that afternoon. Paid him cash for the building and the land. Twenty acres of bleak and desolate moorland. I spent a few grand on a reliable generator, hired a company to dig a borehole and put a pump in. Another lot buried the septic tank; it gets emptied every two years apparently. My only outgoings are generator fuel, gas and my car. Comes to less than two hundred quid a month.’

  ‘And now you’re back in the real world.’

  ‘And now I’m back in the real world. The IPCC investigation still stands so it may not be for too long.’

  Flynn said nothing. There were no reassurances she could give him and he was grateful she didn’t try to sugar coat it.

  A week ago, he’d have welcomed his termination. It would have been a full stop to that part of his life, but now, with his warrant card in his pocket, he was no longer sure he was ready to quit being a police officer. It had been depressingly easy to revert to ‘cop mode’. He knew one thing for sure though: Herdwick Croft was his home. He’d never move; he loved the land and he loved the solitude too much. Whatever the future brought, the isolated shepherd’s dwelling would remain part of it.

  Flynn’s phone rang. She answered it, then said, ‘That was Tilly. She hasn’t found anything.’

  Damn.

  If Bradshaw couldn’t find anything, it was unlikely Reid would.

  They made their way back to Herdwick Croft. They arrived at the same time as Bradshaw. The quad skidded to a halt and she leapt off with a huge smile. She was breathless with excitement and Poe’s first thought was that she’d found something after all until he realised it was simply the exhilaration of driving. She bounded over to Edgar and, with all the guile of a five-year-old, slipped him a piece of meat she must have begged from the hotel kitchen. She looked at Poe with an innocent face.

  An hour later, Reid appeared. I’m going to have to get another quad, Poe thought. Reid had walked miles that day.

  ‘Anything?’ Flynn asked.

  ‘Nothing obvious. No suspicious deaths for years and nothing on the system weird enough to be linked to the Immolation Man.’

  Poe could sense a ‘but’ coming.

  ‘But,’ Reid said, ‘and I’m loath to even mention this, as I was leaving the office, I gave a last shout out for anything.’

  ‘And?’ Poe asked.

  ‘And someone who lives in Shap reminded me that Tollund Man was found up here.’

  Poe was nonplussed. His history recollection wasn’t perfect, but even he knew the two-and-a-half thousand-year-old mummified body of the Tollund Man had been found in Denmark, not Cumbria. It was one of the weird facts that had stuck from his school days. That, and the Spinning Jenny having had something to do with the Industrial Revolution.

  ‘Not the Tollund Man, obviously,’ Reid clarified. ‘But twelve months ago, a John Doe was found buried in a salt depot up here. Although the salt had dried him out to no more than a husk, he was perfectly preserved. The cops who worked on it gave him the nickname and it stuck. Total fuck-up from start to finish. The guy on the JCB had scooped him up in the bucket, panicked when his workmate saw a hand sticking out. Dumped the full load on his mate, who died of a heart attack.’

  Poe hadn’t heard of it, but then again, why would he? He’d been little more than a hermit for the last year and a half. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘He was never identified. There were no obvious injuries and the pathologist thought the cause of death was probably natural. The prevailing theory is that he collapsed while trying to steal salt for his drive – a lot of that used to go on when the council stored salt and grit outside – and either died immediately or froze to death. The body gets covered with snow and then the digger doesn’t notice him when he’s loading the lorry.’

  ‘Surely he’d have clogged up the gritter, though?’

  ‘Not necessarily. He was found in the Hardendale Salt Store, that stupid-looking one at junction thirty-nine on the M6.’

  Poe knew it well – it was only a few miles from Herdwick Croft. It was dome-shaped and he’d assumed it was some sort of air-defence installation when it first went up. He remembered feeling disappointed when he discovered its more mundane purpose.

  Reid continued, ‘Anyway, Highways England have a contract with the council to keep it fully stocked. When the council closed some of their smaller depots, most of the salt was transferred to Hardendale. It’s likely Tollund Man was stealing salt from one of the smaller, outside deports when he died and was simply transported to Hardendale in the back of a council truck. If it hadn’t been for the brutal winter we’ve just had, it’s unlikely the salt would have been depleted low enough for him to be found.’

  ‘And it was definitely natural causes?’ Flynn asked.

  ‘That’s what the pathologist said.’

  ‘And the man who died at the scene?’

  ‘A walking heart attack apparently. The dickhead driving the JCB resigned before he could be sacked, but there was never any suspicion of foul play.’

  ‘Why was the body never identified? Surely someone must have missed him.’

  ‘He had nothing on him and, because of the salt, the pathologist couldn’t be sure how long he’d been dead,’ Reid replied. He removed a notebook from his inside pocket. ‘The official report is that he’d probably been in his early forties when he died but that could have been years ago.’

  ‘And missing persons was nowhere near as sophisticated back then,’ Poe said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Bradshaw had been busy on her computer for a change. Despite Tollund Man being seemingly irrelevant, she’d taken it personally that her beloved internet had let her down.

  Poe heard the printer she’d set up whirr into action. She collected the information and passed them a sheet each. It was an article in the Westmorland Gazette entitled: Man Dies After Unidentified Body Found in Hardendale Salt Store. It was a summary of what the press knew. It was less than Reid had told them and mostly conjecture.

  They read in silence.

  Poe got to the pathologist’s report. It said that, for the unidentified man to become as desiccated as he had been, he had to have been buried in salt for at least three years, and the clothes he was wearing meant he couldn’t have been there for more than thirty. The jacket he’d been wearing had only been available since the mid 1980s.

  But Poe wasn’t buying such a vague time of death. Not in the context of where they were, and what was happening. Not when you considered one other factor.

  ‘It’s him,’ he said. ‘This is who the Immolation Man is pointing us towards.’

  His statement was greeted by silence.

  ‘Go on,’ Flynn said.

  ‘The jacket he was wearing,’ Poe explained. ‘It wasn’t an expensive one. Certainly not one you’d wear for years and years.’

  Flynn nodded.

  ‘It indicates he’d been dead closer to thirty years rather than the three. Agreed?’

  Again, Flynn nodded. ‘Maybe. But so what?’

  ‘Yeah, Poe, share what you’ve got with the rest of the class,’ Reid said.

  ‘I’ll tell you why it’s important, boss,’ Poe replied. ‘If this so-called Tollund Man was alive today, he’d be in the same age group as the rest of the Immolation Man’s victims . . .’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘Nah. I’m not buying it, Poe,’ Reid said. ‘It’s a coincidence.’ He looked round for support. ‘How can it not be?’

  ‘I
agree with Sergeant Reid,’ said Flynn. ‘I can’t see how this is relevant, Poe. Even if you’re right about the date, and that involves a whole lot of guesswork, don’t forget, he died of natural causes.’

  Poe, who begrudged coincidences at the best of times, wasn’t prepared to dismiss it so easily. It was Shap: population twelve hundred. Nothing ever happened in Shap. The percontation point had to be alluding to Tollund Man. At the very least, it merited further investigation. Loose ends and unexplained details bothered him more than they should.

  ‘Fair point,’ he conceded. ‘But as we’ve got nothing else to go on, we may as well tug on this thread for a while. See where it takes us. Agreed?’

  Flynn nodded but Poe could tell she still wasn’t convinced. ‘We’ll look into it but I don’t want us ignoring everything else.’

  ‘What do you need from me?’ Reid asked, standing up and stretching. ‘I can root out the file; it’ll be on the system somewhere.’

  ‘Take the quad to your car, Kylian,’ Poe said.

  After Reid had left again, Bradshaw opened her laptop but didn’t start typing. ‘Please may I check the MPB database, Poe?’

  ‘Shit, I’d forgotten about that, Tilly,’ he replied. ‘You crack on.’

  When the National Crime Agency was established in 2013, one of the agencies it subsumed was the UK Missing Persons Bureau; the point of contact for all missing-person and unidentified body investigations. Tollund Man would be registered with them.

  ‘How long, Tilly?’ With fifteen unidentified bodies being recorded each month, and over a thousand on the database at any one time, finding him might take time. Each body was assigned an ID number, and basic details to help identification were publicly available.

  ‘Found him, Poe,’ she replied. ‘Case number 16-004528. I’ll print off a hard copy.’ The printer spat out a two-page document. Bradshaw handed it to Poe.

  There was no photograph; a lot of the cases listed didn’t have images. A significant percentage of suicide-by-trains would never be identified; their bodies were unrecognisable, and even more were washed up on beaches having been exposed to the elements for too long. Sometimes an artist was commissioned to sketch an impression of how the corpse might have looked in life, but with Tollund Man having been desiccated, mummified, petrified or whatever the correct term was for someone who’d been stored in salt for years, he doubted there’d have been value in either putting his photo on the site or trying to guess what he’d looked like before every bit of moisture was sucked from his body.