The Curator (Washington Poe)

by M. W. Craven

A stern-looking woman seated near the front nodded. ‘Will do, ma’am.’

  Poe continued, ‘The other thing you all need to be aware of is that the garrotte used to kill Howard Teasdale was impregnated with industrial diamond dust. That’s an assassin’s weapon. Easily hidden in plain sight, assembled in seconds and as deadly as anything you’ll have come across. If you are the one who has to arrest him, take my advice and keep him at arm’s length. PAVA spray is good, Tasers would be better.’ He gestured towards the armed response team. ‘Ideally, though, he needs two shots to the torso.’

  Nightingale frowned. ‘Sergeant Poe means after you’ve correctly identified yourself and tried to effect a peaceful arrest.’

  She looked at him for confirmation.

  Poe shrugged. ‘I suppose, if someone’s watching.’

  The room laughed.

  A uniformed cop on the front row wearing sergeant’s stripes raised his hand. It was Nightingale’s briefing and Poe let her call on him.

  ‘Jim?’

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like this before, Sergeant Poe?’

  ‘DI Flynn and I have been involved in virtually all serial murderer investigations in this country for the last six years. They are all different but, up until now, they’ve also been a bit samey. This does seem different. He kills but, with Howard Teasdale at least, he does it quickly. He mutilates but he’s also used anaesthetic. He selects his victims at random but he doesn’t have a type. And he’s a—’

  A coughing fit stopped him in his tracks. When it was finished he grabbed the nearest cup and swigged it down. He grimaced at the taste and looked to see what he’d just drunk.

  ‘Fruit tea,’ he muttered. ‘What’s wrong with you all …?’

  More laughter.

  ‘And he’s bold,’ Poe continued. ‘Best guess is that he deposited the body parts in full sight of everyone. He’s calm too. If something didn’t go to plan he either improvised or his contingencies were so well practised that despite operating in busy environments no one saw him, and the only cameras he’s on are the ones he knew about. The kite in the tree is the only mistake he seems to have made.’

  Poe paused. The room was silent, each face glued to his.

  Another cop raised her hand. ‘Is he finished?’

  ‘Serial killers very rarely stop. They either get caught or they die. But this man … this man is dancing to a tune only he can hear. My answer is we don’t know – he might be finished; he might just be getting started. We’re in uncharted waters here so we’re having to learn as we go.’

  A palpable sense of fear and unease filled the room.

  Good … Fear and unease were their friends right now.

  ‘What are your plans for tomorrow?’ Flynn said when the room had cleared.

  ‘Sean Carroll says he’ll get back to us tonight with information on kite logos,’ Poe said. ‘There’ll probably be a lot of names so I’ll triage then set Tilly loose on them.’

  ‘You working here?’

  ‘From home.’

  ‘I’ll work from there as well, DI Flynn,’ Bradshaw said. ‘Poe sees things my program can’t.’

  ‘OK, makes sense.’

  ‘It does. As you said to Detective Superintendent Jo Nightingale: “He’s a pain in the … bottom but it’s like having Rebus on the f-word team.”’

  ‘Why’s it always me?’ Flynn said, exasperated. ‘Why don’t you ever remember some of the things Poe says?’

  ‘I do, but he adds things like “Don’t tell the boss that, obviously.”’

  Poe smiled. After a while Flynn did too. Bradshaw stared at them quizzically.

  Flynn said, ‘I have the morning briefing to attend and then a strategy meeting with Superintendent Nightingale and the assistant chief. I’ll join you at Herdwick Croft later.’

  ‘Not happening,’ Poe said.

  Flynn’s jaw hardened.

  ‘Boss, the journey from the car park at Shap Wells is dodgy enough at the best of times but with half the hazards hidden by snow or standing water it’s bloody treacherous. I accept that pregnancy isn’t an illness but there has to be some common sense involved.’

  Poe knew his words had hit home.

  ‘I’m just not used to all this inactivity,’ she said. ‘Did you know that when I did my Krav Maga exercises this morning I couldn’t even touch my toes? I’m a third dan black belt and I can’t touch my toes.’

  Poe, who hadn’t been able to touch his toes since he left the army, said, ‘You’ve got a fully formed human growing inside you, boss. Perhaps it’s OK to take it easy for a while.’

  Flynn gave him a weary smile. ‘OK, I’ll go to my meetings then rest up for the remainder of the day. See if I can get my ankle swelling down a bit. Maybe try and get a pair of normal-sized shoes on.’

  She looked down at two emerging damp patches on her blue blouse.

  ‘Saying that,’ she said, ‘I’d be just as happy if my fucking tits stopped leaking.’

  Chapter 28

  Bradshaw arrived at Herdwick Croft while Poe was out walking Edgar. She was waiting for them when they returned. He’d told her to ring him for a lift when she got to Shap Wells. Evidently she’d fancied the walk.

  Poe didn’t blame her. It was cold enough to sting the eyes but the morning was beautifully crisp and clear. His cough had improved overnight. It had progressed from tickly to hacking. He still felt weak and achy but he knew he was over the worst. A pale blue sky and a white horizon stretched on forever, the snow’s crust was crunchy underfoot and the standing water was covered in unbroken sheets of ice. Edgar crashed through them with sheer joy.

  Bradshaw had collected his mail for him. There was another one from the council’s legal services. He threw it in the wood-burning stove without opening it.

  ‘What was that, Poe?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Come on, we have work to do.’

  And they did.

  Carroll had called Poe late the previous night. He’d been in contact with as many event organisers as he could but it would take time to hear back from some of them as they were still away for Christmas. He’d sent them both a provisional list just after 10 p.m.

  Unsurprisingly, lots of kite enthusiasts preferred flying things when it came to choosing a logo, and the list, at over one hundred names, was already too unwieldy to be useful.

  ‘How do you want to do this, Tilly?’

  ‘Murder wall?’ she replied.

  ‘Murder wall,’ he agreed.

  Herdwick Croft was small and tat-free. Everything that was there had earned the right to be there. Poe read a lot and any wall that was appliance-free had a bookcase hugging it. Cheap and mismatched, their fibreboard shelves sagged under the weight of a diverse selection of books. Most were non-fiction accounts of serial killers throughout the ages – Poe believed there were very few original thinkers when it came to murder and the answer was often found in the past. He had several books on mythology and religion – a rich seam of inspiration for serial killers – and books written by most of the major philosophers and thinkers, from Aristotle to Sartre. He also had shelves stuffed with paperbacks – with no television he read for pleasure as well as for work.

  But … as important as books were to him, ever since the Immolation Man case Poe had kept a section of one wall free and used Blu Tack to display documents and photographs. Seeing them together, mosaic style, offered a different perspective than going through a logically laid-out file or printout from HOLMES 2 – the major enquiry software all police forces use. Seeing photographs that would ordinarily be in different parts of the file side-by-side allowed links to be made that might otherwise be missed. The dry, pale-blue scars of previous investigations peppered the wall like Smurf acne.

  Bradshaw hadn’t finished dividing the wall into triage columns – their way of conducting an initial sift – when Poe’s mobile rang.

  It was Sean Carroll. Poe put him on speakerphone.

  ‘This is probably nothing,
Sergeant Poe, but you know how I said that tracking down the person who did the silkscreen print transfer would be next to impossible?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Well, that might have been an exaggeration. I fixed my logo on using the museum’s equipment so I wasn’t aware of this, but I spoke to a man this morning who said that if you want something that’s going to stay on, isn’t going to fade, and can be scaled up or down depending on your needs, then there’s one printer that kite enthusiasts tend to use up here.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I called him for you and he told me he did a gold pterodactyl logo for a man in Cumbria two years ago.’

  ‘He’s sure?’

  ‘He is. Says it’s the only one he’s been asked to do.’

  Bradshaw’s program had identified the pterodactyl as the shape statistically most likely to be the one on the kite. He wondered what the odds were for any other kite-flyer having a pterodactyl logo that was also gold. High, he reckoned.

  ‘I’m going to need a name and address.’

  ‘Ah,’ Carroll said. ‘We may have a problem there. The only thing he can remember is the date he sent it back.’

  ‘He can remember the date but not the name? That seems unlikely.’

  ‘The buyer paid cash. Posted him the outline of the design he wanted along with an envelope with six twenty-pound notes.’

  ‘So there’s no credit card trail to follow.’

  ‘Afraid not.’

  ‘And he can’t remember his name? Does he not keep records?’

  ‘Usually. Says it must have slipped his mind this time.’

  Poe grunted. ‘In other words it was a cash-in-hand job so he didn’t record it anywhere.’

  ‘A penny hidden from the taxman is a penny earned,’ Carroll said.

  ‘How did he send the logo back?’

  ‘Logos. There were two of them. And he sent them back the way he always does: in a padded envelope with a large letter stamp fixed to it.’

  Bollocks. Their promising lead had just turned into a duff one.

  ‘I’m going to need to speak to him anyway.’

  ‘He’s expecting your call,’ Carroll said. ‘But there was one more thing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The buyer didn’t include his home address with his payment.’

  ‘So how—’

  ‘How did he get hold of his logos?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The designer was given the address of a courier firm in Carlisle. They have a collection service apparently.’

  Poe breathed out in relief.

  Carroll’s printer friend might not have recorded the name of the man who’d ordered the logos but he was damn sure the courier firm would have recorded who’d collected them …

  Chapter 29

  Poe had visited ANL Parcels before. It had cropped up during the Jared Keaton investigation. He’d found them helpful. Even so, he doubted they would simply hand over client details without a warrant.

  He considered ringing Nightingale and asking her to get one of the murder team to apply for it but quickly dismissed this. The warrant would need to be creatively worded. They couldn’t say the man who’d purchased the silkscreen prints from Carroll’s printer friend was the kite’s owner, and because it was still up a tree in a wood, they weren’t even sure the logo was a pterodactyl. Nightingale wouldn’t be able to authorise that warrant.

  Luckily Poe knew a man who could help …

  Poe had met Owen Dent at a workshop on ethics. His speciality was the legal minefield of warrants, specifically how badly worded, or downright false, warrants could be cause for future appeals. They had shared a drink and had kept in sporadic touch ever since. He occasionally helped Poe with drafting warrants.

  Poe wrote a five hundred-word summary of what they thought they knew, how they had come by the information and what they wanted.

  He pressed send and sat back.

  It was an hour before Owen Dent responded. He asked Poe to complete a 5 x 5 x 5 intelligence assessment. It was standard practice but Poe had deliberately avoided sending one with his summary.

  5 x 5 x 5 was a three-stage intelligence evaluation system. The first stage, an evaluation of the source, Poe had to score as an E: Untested. He’d never met Carroll before, and he wasn’t registered as an informant. The second stage, an evaluation of the intelligence received, Poe couldn’t score high either – the information on the silkscreen printing was second-hand. They’d heard it from Carroll but Carroll had heard it from someone else. The third was information on how the intelligence could be disseminated. Poe didn’t care so ticked the middle box.

  He asked Bradshaw to download a blank template from the NCA intranet.

  He looked at the completed 5 x 5 x 5 despondently, thought of a way he could improve either of the first two ratings and decided he couldn’t. Bradshaw sent it back to Dent as an attachment with the word ‘sorry’ in the subject line.

  ‘Don’t worry, Poe,’ came the reply.

  Before he could stop her, Bradshaw typed ‘Thank you’.

  ‘Here we go,’ Poe sighed.

  ‘What is it, Poe?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Sure enough an email appeared in the inbox. ‘You’re welcome,’ it said.

  ‘Owen’s a nice man, but he always has to have the last word on any email exchange.’

  Email etiquette aside, Owen Dent came through for them. Within fifteen minutes of receiving the 5 x 5 x 5, he’d sent them draft wording for a warrant that he assured them pushed what they had to the very edge without going into any grey legal areas.

  Poe cut and pasted Owen’s words into a warrant and pressed print.

  He checked his watch and said, ‘I’ll get this signed at Kendal Magistrates’ during the afternoon sitting. You stay here and carry on working. We won’t be doing anything with it until tomorrow anyway.’

  ‘OK, Poe.’

  Two hours later Poe stood on the steps of Kendal Magistrates’ Court. He sucked in the cold air, then wished he hadn’t when he was hit with a coughing fit. It hadn’t been a straightforward application, partly due to his insistence that the courtroom was cleared of press and the public, and partly due to the lack of solid evidence.

  The middle magistrate of the three, known as the bench chair, had suspected Poe was on a fishing expedition and had asked searching questions. In the end, the persuasiveness of Owen Dent’s words won through and the chair begrudgingly signed a warrant to seize information from ANL Parcels pertaining to the murders of Howard Teasdale, Rebecca Pridmore and Amanda Simpson.

  Poe’s spine stiffened as he reread the document. He was in the game now.

  Chapter 30

  ‘Why would people get things delivered to a courier’s depot, Poe?’ Bradshaw said. ‘Why wouldn’t they get them delivered straight to their home?’

  It was 7.58 a.m. and they were outside ANL Parcels, waiting for them to open. Poe could see movement inside but it was the front desk he needed. He’d seen the delivery drivers ANL employed and some of them looked as though they’d witnessed evolution happening from the start; he doubted they’d be able to identify a computer, never mind search one to find a name from two years earlier.

  ‘Lots of people do, Tilly,’ Poe said. ‘Some don’t like getting home deliveries in case they’re out. Things go missing, neighbours deny having signed for them. Wheelie bins get raided by drug addicts, that type of thing. Easier and safer for some to just go and collect it from the depot. And some people just don’t want sellers knowing their home address.’

  At eight o’clock exactly, the front door was unlocked. Poe and Bradshaw were first through. The receptionist hadn’t even made it back to her desk.

  Poe showed her his ID and asked to see the duty manager. They were asked to take a seat.

  Rosie, the operations manager Poe had spoken to the last time he’d been there, approached them. She looked worried.

  ‘Sergeant Poe,’ she said, reaching for their o
utstretched hands, ‘what can I help you with this time?’

  The last time Poe had spoken to her, he’d been checking the chain of evidence on a blood sample. He’d found her open and helpful. He hoped she’d be the same after she’d read the warrant.

  She took them through to her office and asked them to wait while she checked with the CEO. ANL was a local courier firm and there was no corporate headquarters or batteries of legal departments to check with – just a woman who’d built up her business from scratch.

  Rosie read the warrant out over the phone. Eventually she nodded and said, ‘Thank you, Alison.’

  She touched her mouse and the ANL logo on the computer screen changed to a login screen. ‘Tell me what you need,’ she said.

  An hour later Rosie provided them with a ‘collect at depot’ printout for the date stated on the warrant. Thirty-two names. Addresses all over Cumbria and south-west Scotland. Bradshaw completed a quick cross-reference and confirmed none of ANL’s names were on the list that Carroll had provided the day before.

  ‘And they were all collected?’ Poe asked.

  Rosie nodded.

  ‘What ID would you need?’

  ‘For a missed delivery it’s either the card we leave or photo ID. For parcels delivered to the depot it’s always photo ID.’

  ‘Could someone claim it on their behalf?’

  ‘If their ID has the same surname and address then we use discretion. As long as we’re sure the person signing for the parcel is who they say they are, then we try to be helpful.’

  Poe nodded and thanked her. When they got back in the car he handed the list to Bradshaw.

  Reducing a list of thirty-two names down to a list of one was a job for a mathematical and analytical genius.

  Chapter 31

  On the way back to Herdwick Croft, Poe called Flynn and updated her.

  ‘And how did you get this list of names?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Poe … what did you do?’

  ‘All above board,’ he said. ‘Ask Tilly.’

  ‘All above board, DI Stephanie Flynn,’ Bradshaw said. ‘Poe had to ask his friend how to lie properly on the warrant but—’