The Curator (Washington Poe)

by M. W. Craven

  Poe tried to watch Rhona’s lips to see if he could see the words being formed but, as she was staring into her lap when she spoke, he could barely see her mouth at all. He watched it a couple of times but nothing leaped out.

  He dragged the progress bar back to where she’d smirked. She’d smirked and Robert had become distressed. Why?

  And in every interview he’d watched she’d remained in full control. So why did she bother speaking at all? It didn’t make sense. She hadn’t even confirmed her name, but for some reason she asked the cop to look into her eyes and see some sort of divine truth?

  Poe played it again.

  ‘Tilly, what’s wrong with this picture?’ he said.

  He played it for her.

  ‘I don’t know, Poe. What’s bothering you?’

  ‘She’s not looking at the detective when she tells him to look into her eyes. She’s not even looking at the camera.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, who’s she speaking to?’ he said. ‘Asking someone to look into your eyes but looking away from them while you do is plain weird, don’t you think?’

  Bradshaw frowned then looked at the laptop she’d been working on. It was Robert’s. It was connected to her own by a thick cable. A program was running on both of them.

  She pressed a button and killed it. The desktop image, the one he used as a background, reappeared on Robert’s laptop. It was a close-up photo of him and Rhona posing next to a kite-flying trophy. They were both smiling.

  ‘I wonder …’ Bradshaw said. ‘What if we have this all wrong, Poe? What if she wasn’t being figurative when she said, “look into my eyes”, what if she was being literal?’

  Ten minutes later Poe called Nightingale.

  ‘Ma’am, we have a big problem,’ he said.

  Chapter 50

  Nightingale glared at the wall monitor as if it was personally responsible for the disastrous turn the investigation had just taken. She’d wanted her senior team briefed but, given what Bradshaw had uncovered, Poe had insisted on it being a small and select group for now. There was only Nightingale, the chief constable and the assistant chief of operations.

  ‘Talk me through it,’ the chief constable said. Given the about-turn they’d all experienced, she seemed ready to take a more hands-on role. She wasn’t blaming Nightingale – she’d been following the evidence like everyone else – but it was clear she no longer wanted to hear things second-hand.

  ‘There was a hidden folder in Robert Cowell’s laptop,’ Bradshaw said. ‘The link to it was embedded in a single pixel in the desktop background photograph he was using.’

  ‘It was in his sister’s eye, to be precise,’ Poe added.

  ‘People can hide files in images without specialist software?’ Nightingale said.

  ‘If you have a decent steganography tool, yes,’ Bradshaw said.

  ‘And what was in this folder?’

  ‘He’d been spying on his sister for years,’ Poe said. ‘There are thousands of photographs and videos of her.’

  ‘Naked?’

  ‘Not just naked. There are lots of her masturbating and a fair few of her with various men.’

  ‘Dirty bastard,’ the chief constable said. ‘Well, at least we can add voyeurism to his charge sheet. I’m assuming he’d hidden cameras in her bedroom and bathroom?’

  Poe shook his head. ‘All the videos were handheld and almost certainly filmed on a mobile phone. He was standing outside her bedroom door when he recorded some of them.’

  ‘She left her door open when she was having sex?’

  ‘I’m fairly certain she knew she was being filmed and left it open deliberately, ma’am. In at least two of the videos she’s looking directly at the camera. In one of them she winks at it. She must have also known where Robert hid them on his laptop. It explains the cryptic message in her interview. When she said look in her eyes to see the truth, as Tilly worked out, she was being literal.’

  ‘She got off on it?’

  Poe nodded. ‘Probably loved the power she held over him. It explains why he seems so conflicted over her. Obsessed with her but hates her too.’

  ‘That’s messed up,’ the chief constable said.

  Poe agreed. Robert and Rhona Cowell certainly put Flynn’s rivalry with Jessica into perspective.

  ‘Sergeant Poe thinks this is what the Black Swan site administrator threatened to make public,’ Nightingale said.

  ‘Having that in the public domain would be a powerful motivator,’ the chief constable agreed. ‘I’m not seeing a problem, though. All this does is confirm what we thought: that he was being blackmailed into playing Black Swan. What haven’t I been told yet?’

  ‘Tilly?’ Poe said.

  ‘I’ve run every diagnostic tool I have and neither the phone he used to film Rhona Cowell nor the laptop itself have had their date and time stamp altered.’

  ‘So?’

  Bradshaw reddened and brought up a video on the monitor.

  ‘This is one of two videos shot the same night. This is the first and it starts just before midnight.’

  It was a still of two people having sex. A shaven headed man covered with black tribal tattoos lay on his back. Rhona Cowell straddled him.

  Bradshaw pressed play then turned her head so she didn’t have to watch.

  Rhona Cowell began to vigorously thrust her hips back and forth, her hands reaching behind her as she grasped the man’s thighs for support. After a minute, Rhona turned her head and looked directly at the camera. She held her gaze for a moment before smirking. She then shut her eyes, arched her back and climaxed. The video ended.

  ‘That’s really messed up,’ the chief constable said again.

  Bradshaw right clicked the video file. A menu appeared. She scrolled down and clicked ‘Get Info’. A detailed page appeared on the monitor. It had information on the kind of file, its size, where it was located on the hard drive, and finally, at the bottom of the page, when the video had been created …

  ‘No,’ Poe said. ‘This is what’s messed up.’

  He pointed at the date and time stamp.

  ‘Robert was filming his sister having sex on Christmas Eve. The video begins at 11.52 p.m. and ends forty-three minutes later at 12.35 a.m. Tilly has it being logged into the hidden folder at 2.16 a.m. The second video was filmed at 3.06 a.m. and lasts for thirty minutes. It was logged just before 4 a.m.’

  ‘But if he was watching his sister then, how could he have been …?’ The chief constable didn’t finish her sentence. Poe reckoned she was beginning to understand Nightingale’s anger.

  ‘How could he have been hiding in among the Midnight Mass congregation at a church on the outskirts of Barrow-in-Furness?’

  The chief constable nodded.

  ‘Obviously he couldn’t, ma’am.’

  ‘So either someone else is involved or your Special Agent Melody Lee is right: Robert is being set up as a patsy.’

  ‘And there’s still someone out there, killing people to an agenda we haven’t come close to figuring out …’

  Chapter 51

  After the chief constable and the assistant chief had left to form a media strategy, and Bradshaw had left to log the evidence with the High-Tech Forensic Crime Unit, Nightingale and Poe talked around the edges of alternative explanations.

  ‘It’s possible Robert didn’t hide among the Midnight Mass congregation. That he filmed his sister then drove to Barrow and found a way to break into the church after the service had ended.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Poe agreed.

  ‘But you don’t think so?’

  ‘I don’t, ma’am. From Carlisle it’s the best part of a two-hour drive to Barrow and, even if he had left as soon as he’d filmed the second video, he wouldn’t have had time to do what he needed.’

  ‘He could have left the fingers before Midnight Mass, I suppose,’ Nightingale said unconvincingly.

  ‘And no one noticed two fingers in the font?’ Poe said. ‘The font that eve
ryone in the congregation had to walk past.’

  ‘Fair point,’ she said. ‘So, you think Robert would have rather gone to prison for murders he hadn’t committed than show us the videos he’d taken of his sister?’

  ‘I absolutely think that,’ Poe said. ‘It also explains his “bitch” remark – he had the means to exonerate himself but he knew that he couldn’t use it.’

  ‘So when it became apparent that Robert wasn’t going to reveal that he’d been filming her, she decided she’d better help him out.’

  ‘Getting herself out of a jam in the process.’

  ‘What do we do now then?’ Nightingale asked.

  ‘I’d take the Cowells out of play and charge them for the abduction of the little girl. They’ll be safe and secure and we’ll know where they are.’

  ‘And then what? If there’s no link between the victims there’s nowhere to start.’

  ‘Not true,’ Poe said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘If we accept the possibility that we’re dealing with Melody Lee’s Curator, then we also have to accept the possibility that he’s hiding one murder in among three. We need to go deep into their lives, really deep. Maybe one of them did something that forced someone into hiring a hitman.’

  ‘That’s an awful lot of data to crunch.’

  ‘I have just the person for that,’ he said.

  DC Dave Coughlan had gone from antagonist to Bradshaw’s biggest fan.

  He’d set them up in a well-equipped, stench-free room off the main incident room. It had views of the old air ambulance helipad and fields beyond full of lowland sheep picking out what little grass hadn’t been covered by the recent blanket of snow.

  A large-scale, detailed map of the county covered one of the walls. Another was filled with press clippings, photographs, reports and documents. It was a more formal version of the murder wall at Herdwick Croft. Poe had seen these before in complex investigations. Wily SIOs would set aside a room, always near the main incident room, where cops could wander in with a brew and view things in a less pressurised environment. Sometimes this sparked a memory or helped someone make a connection. Poe immediately felt at home.

  Within an hour the first lot of new data had arrived. Phone, credit cards and bank records for the victims had been accessed and Bradshaw busied herself with running it all through one of her existing analytical programs.

  The door opened and Coughlan entered. He’d brought back a selection of snacks from the canteen vending machine. Crisps, dry sandwiches and Kit Kats. He put them on the table then wandered over to the murder wall.

  Poe tucked in.

  Bradshaw looked on in disgust. ‘Poe, you’re like a seagull: you’ll eat anything.’

  ‘Squawk,’ he said through a mouthful of cheese Quavers. ‘I thought I’d told you that you had to eat five bits of fruit …’ She stopped and frowned at the screen on her laptop.

  ‘That can’t be right,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Just checking something.’

  Five minutes later she picked up her mobile, scrolled down her contact list and called someone.

  ‘Malcolm Sparkes, this is Matilda Bradshaw from the National Crime … oh, you remember me?’ She covered the phone with her hand. ‘He remembers me, Poe!’ She removed her hand and continued, ‘I’d like you to tell me if Rebecca Pridmore had access to a car we don’t know about … yes, please, to the email address I gave you.’

  She hung up and Poe looked at her.

  ‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ she said.

  Knowing that it was pointless asking her to voice unproven theories – she’d tell him only when she had something concrete – Poe picked up an egg and watercress sandwich and joined Coughlan at the murder wall. He stared at it while he chewed on the stale bread and the claggy filling, the egg congealing on the roof of his mouth.

  Poe reread the victim summaries. Tried to will a new thought into his head. The only one he could summon, though, was that the differences between them couldn’t have contrasted more.

  Amanda Simpson was a no-frills working-class girl. Happy. Optimistic. Active circle of friends and a boyfriend she adored. She had a full employment record but it was obvious she worked to live rather than lived to work. She frequently changed jobs but stayed in the retail sector, mainly clothes shops.

  Rebecca Pridmore was the polar opposite: she lived to work. Her career was everything, and although she didn’t appear to be ruthlessly aggressive, she obviously loved what she did and took it very seriously. Despite Bradshaw’s mysterious phone call to Sparkes, Poe had dismissed her as the favourite to be the ‘one murder that counted’. She did have access to sensitive information, and while a bad report from her might send the share prices of some multi-billion-dollar private defence contractors plummeting, Malcolm Sparkes hadn’t been worried and he undoubtedly had information he wasn’t sharing. If the MoD were convinced she hadn’t been killed because of her work then, for now at least, Poe was too.

  Poe moved on to the third victim.

  Howard Teasdale. Fifty years old and fat. A self-employed web designer. Despite living on the top floor of a townhouse, he was a poster-boy basement dweller. The inventory of his possessions would have kept teenage boys wanking for years. Despite not being allowed to access the internet for pornography, he had every category there was saved onto his computer: Asian, BDSM, fisting, lesbian, threesomes, amateurs, gay, everything. Nothing illegal. If he was still into children, he was no longer sating it online.

  Of the three victims, Howard was currently Poe’s favourite. He spent his life online and was the type of person who’d stick his nose into the darkest corners of the web. Had he stumbled across something he shouldn’t have?

  Poe sighed. It could have been any of them.

  Or all three as it turned out …

  Chapter 52

  ‘You’re now saying the three victims are linked?’ Nightingale said.

  ‘We are, ma’am,’ Poe replied.

  Poe had taken Bradshaw’s findings straight to Nightingale’s office. He’d brought along Bradshaw to explain it and Coughlan to stop him gossiping. Nightingale would want a lid kept on the new information, at least until she’d decided what to do with it.

  Her office was roomy with a decent-sized conference table. Manuals and force policies were neatly arranged on her bookcase. Her desk had a computer, an empty in-tray and a photograph of her family. The coasters on the conference table were corporate, as were the mugs from which they were drinking. Other than that it was bare – it was an office to work from, not one to enjoy being in.

  Bradshaw was about to begin when Flynn walked in. Coughlan stood and offered her his seat. Poe winced; Flynn hated chivalry in all its forms but, to his relief, she accepted gratefully. She took off her shoes and began massaging her feet.

  ‘Tilly’s found something, I gather?’ she said.

  ‘She has,’ Poe said.

  Bradshaw hadn’t had time to put together a presentation. She flicked through some papers until she found the ones she wanted.

  ‘These are Howard Teasdale’s credit card statements. I’ve looked at the last six years. He had his shopping and takeaways delivered and everything else came from Amazon or other specialist online providers. His social life is entirely on social media. His main activities were gaming and collecting pornography. Other than his court appearances for possessing indecent images of children and the subsequent sex offender’s course he was forced to attend, he rarely left his flat.’

  She pulled out one of Teasdale’s statements and put it face up on the table. She’d highlighted a number of transactions.

  ‘Except, that is, for a two-week period in September three years ago. As you can see, there are several purchases in Carlisle, sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the middle of the day. Food and drink mainly. He ate at KFC six times. There are also daily receipts for train tickets.’

  ‘And it wasn’t work related?’

&
nbsp; ‘No, Detective Superintendent Nightingale. For that two-week period Howard Teasdale worked on his web design business in the evenings. Whatever he was doing in Carlisle, it wasn’t work.’

  ‘Could have been any number of reasons,’ Coughlan said.

  ‘I agree, Dave Coughlan, but it was an anomaly and that’s what I look for – things out of the ordinary.’

  She rifled through the documents again, this time pulling out a bank statement. It was Amanda Simpson’s. It looked like she had one of those interest-free basic accounts designed for people with low credit scores. She’d have been able to deposit and access her money but she wouldn’t have had an overdraft facility.

  ‘I couldn’t find train ticket payments for Amanda Simpson, but given that she had a car that’s not surprising. She doesn’t use her bank card to pay for petrol so that was no help, but what I did find was this.’

  She pointed at a single highlighted line on the bank statement. It was an outgoing payment to Accessorise in the Lanes Shopping Centre in Carlisle. Bradshaw had cross-checked with the store’s records and Amanda had bought three hair scrunchies, whatever they were.

  ‘For at least one of the days Howard Teasdale was in Carlisle, so was Amanda Simpson,’ Bradshaw said.

  She turned over another document. This time it was an HSBC Premier Account statement belonging to Rebecca Pridmore. Sure enough there was a payment made in Carlisle in the same two-week period. Again, Bradshaw had checked with the store: it was a blouse from Marks and Spencer.

  ‘Carlisle’s the only city in Cumbria,’ Nightingale said. ‘Travelling from the south of the county to shop there is hardly errant behaviour, especially for a fashion-conscious young woman. And Rebecca Pridmore lived on the outskirts anyway. She’d have visited most weeks. I go in most weeks and I live in Appleby.’

  Nightingale seemed disappointed. But then again, she didn’t know what they knew yet.

  ‘I’m not saying that Rebecca and Amanda popped in to do some shopping, Detective Superintendent Nightingale, I’m saying that they all spent the same two-week period in Carlisle.’