The Curator (Washington Poe)

by M. W. Craven

  ‘OK, OK, I’ve heard enough,’ she cut in. ‘This list, Poe, you’re sure the killer’s on it?’

  Now wasn’t the time to exaggerate. It was a lead based on second-hand information based on an assumption that a crumpled logo, when straightened out, would be what they thought it was. And, as Bradshaw had said, surely more than one kite enthusiast would have a flying dinosaur as a logo. Nerds liked dinosaurs.

  He said as much.

  ‘OK,’ Flynn said after a short pause, ‘I’ll pass it up to Superintendent Nightingale but don’t expect her to leap up and down with excitement – this is about as tenuous as it gets.’

  ‘It is,’ Poe admitted. ‘I don’t think we can ignore it, though.’

  ‘You can’t,’ she agreed. ‘I take it you’re going back to Herdwick Croft to work on reducing the numbers down from thirty-two?’

  ‘We are,’ Bradshaw replied. ‘I’ll use statistical correlation of criminal behaviour and some other tricks I’ve wanted to try for a while. I’ll let Poe reduce it further by giving him a red pen.’

  Bradshaw wasn’t being sarcastic. The red pen method had worked for them in the past. Science could only take things so far; sometimes it needed instinct.

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Flynn said.

  ‘We’ll ring you every hour, boss,’ Poe said. ‘I take it you’re with Nightingale?’

  ‘I’m taking the day off, Poe. I’ve got indigestion like you wouldn’t believe. It feels like I’ve been eating raw chillies all week.’

  Poe winced. He’d heard that indigestion was probably the worst thing in the later stages of being pregnant.

  ‘And don’t ask me about my haemorrhoids.’

  ‘I definitely won’t,’ Poe said, quickly revising his last thought.

  ‘They’ve inflamed so much they’re almost glowing. If there was a power cut I swear I could read by the bastards,’ she said. ‘That’s something they don’t tell you at the mother and baby class.’

  Poe looked at Bradshaw. ‘What? No questions, Tilly?’

  ‘Are your breasts still leak—’

  ‘Not long now, boss, hang in there,’ Poe said hurriedly.

  ‘Oh, while I remember,’ Flynn said, ‘Nightingale wants you both at Carleton Hall for a briefing tomorrow morning. She’s bringing in an expert in semiotic studies.’

  Bradshaw booed. She turned in her seat and gave Poe a double thumbs down.

  ‘What the hell’s semiotic studies?’ Poe said.

  ‘It’s the pseudo-science that claims to interpret signs and symbols,’ Bradshaw said. ‘And it is, of course, an utter waste of time. You’d have more chance predicting the future from animal poo.’

  ‘The Met uses someone to help decipher gang tags,’ Flynn said.

  ‘And that’s who Nightingale’s got, is it? This London dork?’ Poe said.

  ‘No. She has a lecturer from the university coming in,’ she replied. ‘He’s going to talk about what the bird symbols found at the first crime scene might signify. The ones that the mug had been wrapped in.’

  Bradshaw booed again.

  ‘She’s desperate, Tilly,’ Flynn said.

  ‘I’m with Tilly on this, boss. It does sound like a waste of time,’ Poe said.

  ‘Oh, it’s a massive waste of time, Poe,’ Flynn agreed. ‘But she wants you there and she’s running the show.’

  ‘Fine. What time?’

  ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘We’ll be there.’

  ‘Good. And Tilly, please don’t boo tomorrow.’

  Chapter 32

  ‘We’ll need a new list, Poe,’ Bradshaw said. ‘We need to know about everyone who lives at those addresses, not just the names ANL supplied to us. It’s possible that the two logos were a present for someone. The person who ordered them might not be who they were intended for.’

  Poe nodded. ‘And if they were a present, it could explain why they weren’t delivered to the home address – they wanted them to be a surprise.’

  ‘I’ll log onto the Police National Computer and the electoral roll.’

  When Bradshaw finished adding anyone who lived in the same house as those people on the ‘collect at depot’ list, they had a final tally of seventy names. She spent an hour doing what she called ‘snap profiles’ – basic information such as gender, date of birth, ethnicity, any history of criminal behaviour – then Blu Tacked everything to the murder wall.

  ‘I’ll go through it first, Tilly,’ Poe said.

  He started by putting a red line through all the females. Poe had seen the killer on the CCTV at Fiskin’s Food Hall, and although his face had been obscured, he was very definitely male. And he’d moved like a younger man so Poe felt confident in putting a line through anyone over the age of sixty.

  That left eighteen.

  Two of the men in the right age range were Asian and one was black. Nightingale’s team had interviewed every member of John Bull Haulage and all the bookmen who’d been seen entering the office had been white. Bradshaw added that all research on serial killers suggested they kept to their own ethnic groups when selecting victims. Poe put a red line through them.

  Fifteen.

  Bradshaw took over. One of the men was in the Royal Navy, had been overseas for three months and wasn’t due back until April.

  Fourteen.

  Another was ex-army. He’d lost an arm in an IED incident in Afghanistan. Poe crossed him off – using a garrotte needed two hands.

  Thirteen.

  Using a database Poe didn’t recognise, Bradshaw discovered that one of the men had spent Christmas in London and was yet to return and another was an Australian who had flown back to Melbourne for the Boxing Day test match. She highlighted them both on her screen – her version of Poe’s red pen.

  Eleven.

  Bradshaw wanted to reduce the list further by using her rudimentary profiles, but Poe stopped her.

  Two hours later and Bradshaw had gone deep into the online lives of the remaining eleven. The murder wall was almost full.

  Poe stared at the information she’d gathered. Some of the people on the list were active on social media, others barely touched it. Some took their online security seriously, others may as well have posted photographs of their birth certificates and bank accounts on Facebook.

  His gut told him the man they were looking for would be naturally secretive, but a lack of social media presence wasn’t a safe way to reduce the list further. If he was clever he’d have taken steps to blend in online. Bradshaw maintained countless social media avatars, all of which could withstand scrutiny by a third party; there was no reason their killer couldn’t have done the same. A bland profile full of fluff and cat videos would disguise his secretive nature without him ever posting anything of significance.

  On that basis it could have been any of them.

  Eleven names.

  One killer.

  Chapter 33

  Poe was woken by a debilitating headache. His sinuses had swollen during the night, reducing the amount of oxygen getting to his brain. He shut his eyes and tried to will the pain away. He reached out for the aspirins he kept by the side of his bed and dry crunched four tablets. He laid his head gently on the pillow and gave the drug time to work.

  Turning his shower up as hot as it would go, he forced himself to stand under it until he no longer felt like he had a knife in his skull. He stepped out, wrapped himself in a towel and checked his phone. He had a text from Bradshaw.

  The Mole People had found something.

  Not only had they completed psychological profiles on the eleven men left on the list, they had also identified their preferred suspect.

  His name was Robert Cowell. He was twenty-two years old and he lived with his sister in a rented house near the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle.

  Poe ran downstairs, his headache forgotten, and studied his details on the murder wall.

  He remembered Cowell. Yesterday he’d been close to putting a red line through him on the basis of a
ge alone. Twenty-two seemed far too young to be such an accomplished murderer.

  Poe read the Mole People’s new information and didn’t find it compelling. None of the usual causal factors that turned a normal person into a premeditated killer were present. He’d had an unremarkable childhood. Didn’t break any records at school but didn’t stand out as a dumb-dumb. He didn’t play any sports, but that wasn’t the big deal it had been when Poe was at school. Nerds were in vogue now. His late teens had been uneventful too. He’d taken a job at a small website development company but had left after three years to go into business with his sister who had largely followed the same life pattern.

  The Mole People’s analysis was that, although he was statistically their preferred suspect, Cowell was more likely to be a conspiracy theorist than a murderer. Bradshaw had calculated that there was less than a 10 per cent chance that he had the capacity to kill.

  Less than a one-in-ten chance.

  More than they’d had before but nowhere near enough.

  Poe needed more information.

  He picked up Bradshaw two hours before they were due at Carleton Hall for the semiotic studies briefing. Poe’s opinion hadn’t changed overnight: it was still a colossal waste of time. He’d considered using his recent bout of ill health as an excuse to stay at home and spend more time obsessing at the murder wall. See if he could squeeze any more inspiration from it. In the end he decided it would only end badly if Bradshaw attended the briefing alone.

  He hadn’t yet decided whether to tell Nightingale that Robert Cowell was a suspect she should look into. The way they’d narrowed down their seventy names was subjective, and the way they’d got their list was dubious. Sean Carroll’s friend could well be the discerning kite flyers’ printer of choice when it came to logos, but these days they could be ordered from anywhere. A man in the north-east of England could have designed the logo but it could just as easily have been designed by a child labourer in Bangladesh.

  After Bradshaw had fussed over how awful he looked, she twisted round in her seat and shouted, ‘Hi, Edgar! I’ve brought you some bacon.’ She threw a couple of rashers through the bars of the dog guard. The spaniel gulped them down like a pelican eating fish.

  ‘I’d have had that,’ Poe muttered. He’d run out of bacon the previous night and had eaten a meat-free breakfast that morning.

  ‘You eat too much bacon, Poe,’ she said. ‘Where are we going anyway?’

  ‘We’re taking a drive past Robert Cowell’s house. I want to see if anything jumps out.’

  ‘OK, Poe,’ she replied, turning back round and fastening her seatbelt. ‘I had a look on Google Street View and Google Maps last night. He lives in a semi-detached house in a modern cul-de-sac.’

  Poe nodded. Images of Cowell’s home had been included on the profile the Mole People had sent. It was a blah-blah suburban house on a family estate. The satellite image showed that the houses either side had swings and trampolines in their back gardens. That in itself didn’t mean much: serial killers were almost all psychopaths, and psychopaths were the human equivalent of leaf-tailed geckos – experts at blending in. Still … it would have been nice if there was something suspicious about where he lived to take to Nightingale.

  Because Poe couldn’t risk Cowell spotting them as they filmed his house, he twisted the flexible arm of the phone cradle that Bradshaw had bought him and fixed his BlackBerry so it could record as they drove. Poe would drive slowly down Cowell’s street, as if searching for an address, and Bradshaw would pretend to be talking to him.

  Neither of them would look in the direction of his house.

  Poe entered the estate and his first thought was how clean it was. Despite being twelve years old, it looked like it had only been finished the previous week. As Poe drove down the street, geometric shapes straight out of an architect’s brochure flickered past the edge of his vision. The building company had tried to make each house stand out a bit by using different types of brick but the result was negligible. It seemed people no longer cared that the house they lived in had been repurposed all over the north of England. The same families living in the same design on the same type of estates.

  Poe had lived like that once. Never again.

  He reached the end of the cul-de-sac and used the turning circle to about-face. He waited as Bradshaw adjusted the camera before setting off again, this time at a faster pace. If anyone was watching it would appear that they hadn’t found the house they were looking for and were now moving onto a different street. As they passed Cowell’s house, Poe couldn’t resist taking a quick glance.

  The kitchen’s blinds were up and Poe could see the glossy white of a fridge-freezer and the brushed steel of an oven extractor hood. He saw the same thing in the next kitchen on the street and realised that the appliances must have come with the house.

  And then they were out of the estate and back on the main road. Job done. If he put his foot down they’d have enough time to review the footage before they met with Nightingale.

  They found a quiet corner in Carleton Hall and Bradshaw uploaded the video to her laptop. They hunched over the screen and watched it a dozen times. Robert Cowell’s house was the same as the others. Nothing stood out, nothing raised suspicion.

  Nightingale walked in.

  ‘Have you got two minutes?’ she said.

  They followed her down the corridor and into her office.

  ‘No DI Flynn today?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s not feeling great,’ Poe said. ‘She’s up to date with everything we’ve done, though. Still making sure we stay out of trouble.’

  Nightingale cracked a tired smile. She looked exhausted. Bleary, bloodshot eyes in shrunken sockets. The pallid skin of someone who hasn’t spent enough time outside. Yesterday’s clothes hung on the back of her door.

  ‘You OK, ma’am?’ Poe asked.

  ‘Have you got anything for me, Sergeant Poe?’

  She sounded frustrated. Poe understood why. With the surveillance of the kite, she’d called a play that wasn’t working. It hadn’t been the wrong play but if her assistant chief asked another force to undertake a progress review, the detectives coming in would have had eight hours sleep and be armed with twenty-twenty hindsight. Their first question would be about her effective resource strategy. A large number of detectives had been taken out of the mainstream investigation to watch the tree. So far she’d got nothing for it.

  ‘It’s possible the kite logos were provided by a printer in Newcastle,’ he said. ‘We don’t have a name but we’ve tracked the parcel to a courier firm in Carlisle. We’ve narrowed down the list of names they gave us from seventy to eleven.’

  Nightingale didn’t ask how he had convinced ANL Parcels to provide their customer details. Poe suspected she already knew. Flynn had probably told her.

  Poe handed her the Mole People’s profiles.

  ‘Anyone stand out?’ she said after she’d flicked through them.

  Poe told her that Robert Cowell was statistically their most likely suspect.

  ‘How likely?’ she asked.

  ‘Under ten per cent.’

  Nightingale frowned. ‘We can only surprise him once. If we rush in now and find nothing – and let’s face it he’s hardly put a foot wrong so far – then he’ll be out in twenty-four hours and he’ll either disappear or clean up.’

  ‘We had a look at his house this morning,’ Poe said.

  ‘Who told you to do that?’ she said sharply.

  ‘We weren’t peeping through his letterbox, ma’am, we drove past quickly with a fixed camera.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he admitted. ‘Nice estate. Quiet. One of those new builds cropping up everywhere.’

  ‘So we’re back to watching the tree, hoping the killer comes back for the kite.’

  Poe said nothing. At some point, no matter how hard it was, you had to cut bait. Stop throwing good detectives into a bad gig. He shuddered to think how many investigative hour
s had been lost watching a tree.

  ‘You could put a team on Cowell,’ Poe said.

  Nightingale let out a long sigh. It sounded like she was deflating.

  ‘I don’t have unlimited resources, Poe,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to speak to the chief. See if she can stretch the budget. She might not, though – not for a one-in-ten chance.’

  Poe didn’t push it. He wasn’t convinced that Cowell was their man either.

  Chapter 34

  The expert in semiotic studies, clearly enjoying a rare moment of employment, looked like he was auditioning for Doctor Who. He wore a tweed trench coat and a scarf, and had sweeping hair he had to keep flicking out of his eyes.

  It seemed the ill-health excuse Poe had thought of using was catching. Half the room was empty and the cops who were there looked tired and cranky.

  ‘Ladies and gents,’ the man said, ‘my name is Spencer Maxwell and I’m an academic with an expertise in semiotic studies. Detective Superintendent Nightingale has asked me to speak to you about the pictures of Anatids that were left at one of your crime scenes—’

  ‘Anatids?’ a huge cop with a ham-coloured face and a monobrow said.

  ‘The Anatidae are the biological family of birds that includes swans, ducks and geese. They are—’

  ‘Well say that then,’ Monobrow snapped. ‘It’s bad enough we’ve got to sit through this shit without you talking bloody Latin.’

  ‘It’s not Lat …’

  Monobrow glared at him.

  ‘Yes, well. Anyway, I’m here to talk to you about what these Ana … birds might represent to the killer. Hopefully by the time I’ve finished you’ll be able to draw up a detailed profile of what he wants and what he plans to do next. Are there any questions?’

  There weren’t. There were a lot of bored faces, though. Maxwell used the silence to distribute some handouts.

  ‘So, what is semiotics? Semiotics is anything that can stand for something else. A symbol rarely stands on its own; it is almost always part of something. To the person using the symbol – and in this case, judging by the neck to body ratio, it’s almost certainly a swan – it will have significant meaning.’