The Puppet Show (Washington Poe Book 1)

by M. W. Craven

  These were often the most useful as they contained first impressions. Later reports were more measured and considered.

  The SIO was a detective chief superintendent called Ian Gamble. Normally the Force Major Incident Team would lead on something that big, but they were in the middle of another investigation, so Gamble – who was also head of CID – appointed himself, and, given the media attention Cumbria was getting, it seemed a sensible move.

  Gamble had been a detective inspector when Poe knew him. A solid copper who ran tight, if unimaginative, investigations. He was the one who’d noticed a chemical smell above the obvious one of petrol at the first scene. His suspicions had been well founded. The Immolation Man had used a home-made accelerant. No wonder the bodies had been turned to charcoal.

  ‘Scary, isn’t it?’ said Flynn. ‘Apparently all you need to do is add bits of chopped Styrofoam to petrol until it won’t dissolve any more. The boffins at tech support say the result is a white jelly-like substance that will burn so hot it’ll render down fat. When that happens, the body acts as its own fuel and burns until there’s no flesh and bone left.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Poe whispered. Prior to joining the police he’d served for three years with the Scottish infantry regiment, the Black Watch, and had trained with white phosphorous grenades. He imagined the results would have been similar; once it was on you, it wasn’t coming off. The best you could hope for was that your flesh fell off; if it didn’t, it kept burning.

  The first victim had been killed four months ago. Graham Russell had started his newspaper career in a local Cumbrian rag forty years earlier but had soon moved to Fleet Street. There he rose to be the editor of a national tabloid heavily criticised during the Leveson Inquiry. He hadn’t personally been implicated in anything, but he’d taken a massive pension and retired to Cumbria anyway. The Immolation Man had abducted him from his small country estate. There had been no sign of a struggle, and some time later he’d been found in the middle of Castlerigg stone circle near Keswick. As well as being burnt to a crisp, he’d been tortured.

  Poe frowned as he followed the team’s early lines of enquiry. ‘Tunnel vision?’ he asked Flynn. Inexperienced SIOs sometimes saw things that weren’t there, and although Gamble was hardly a junior officer, he hadn’t run a murder investigation for some time.

  ‘We think so, though they’re denying it, obviously,’ she replied. ‘But DCS Gamble seemed pretty keen on the first murder being a Leveson revenge crime.’

  It wasn’t until a month later, when the body of Joe Lowell was discovered, that the TIE enquiries – Trace, Interview, Eliminate – stopped focusing on phone-hacking victims. Lowell had never been involved in the newspaper trade; he was from a family of landowners who’d farmed south Cumbria for seven generations. The Lowells were – and always had been – solid and popular members of the community. He’d been taken from Lowell Hall, the family home. Despite his son living with him, no one reported him missing. His body was found in the middle of Swinside stone circle, near Broughton-in-Furness in south Cumbria.

  Consequently, the investigation got even more serious. All thoughts of Leveson were forgotten – to the point the murder file was amended – and the focus turned to where it had always been heading: a serial murderer investigation.

  Poe searched the file for the section on stone circles. With the killer seeming to have a connection to them, Gamble would have collated as much information as he could.

  Cumbria had the highest concentration of stone circles, standing stones, henge monuments, monoliths and barrows in the UK. They were all unique and from a range of time periods – from early Neolithic to Bronze Age. Some were oval and some were round, some of the stones were pink granite and others were slate. A small number had an inner circle of smaller stones. Most of them didn’t. Gamble had brought in academics to brief the team on their probable purpose but this was less than useful. Theories ranged from death ceremonies and trade routes to an intimate association with the lunar cycle and astronomical alignments.

  The only thing academia seemed to agree on was that, in the entire history of stone circles, they had never been used for ritual sacrifice.

  Of course, Poe thought, tomorrow’s history is written today . . .

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Poe was reading about the third murder – Michael James, the South Lakes councillor who’d died two weeks ago with Poe’s name carved into his chest – when he came across a document that made him laugh out loud. It had been written by one of the detective sergeants on the case and he was the only man who could get away with describing the smell at the crime scene as having a ‘miasmatic quality’ to it.

  He was one of life’s clowns but he was also one of the most intelligent men Poe had ever met. The type of man who could win a game of Connect Four in three moves. His name was Kylian Reid and he was also the only real friend Poe had in Cumbria. They’d met in their early teens and had been close ever since. He felt a pang of guilt he hadn’t looked him up since he got back; he’d been so wrapped up in his own problems it hadn’t occurred to him. Saying that, he and Reid had known each other a long time and had far too much history for them to ever really fall out. Poe borrowed Flynn’s phone and opened the dictionary app. He typed in miasmatic. It meant noxious vapours from decomposing organic matter. He wondered how many people before him had been forced to do the same. It was Reid all over. Getting one over on senior managers by making them feel stupid. No wonder he was still a sergeant.

  Things were looking better if they were going to be working together again. Poe picked up the rest of the file and read on.

  After the second victim had been found and SCAS were called in, Flynn’s name began to appear in reports. The second victim also started a media race to name the killer. In the end – as they always did in matters like this – the red tops won with ‘Immolation Man’.

  He finished his first readthrough and put down the file on the rear seats. He closed his eyes and rolled his neck. He’d read the file again soon, every document. Get it imprinted on his memory. The first time was simply to get a flavour of what he was dealing with. SCAS were rarely called in immediately, so reviewing files like they were cold cases was an important skill. They weren’t just looking at the evidence; they were looking for mistakes the investigating teams had made.

  Flynn noticed he’d finished reading and said, ‘Thoughts?’

  Poe knew he was being tested. He’d been away for a year – she and van Zyl needed to know he was still up to the job.

  ‘The circles and the immolations are probably a dead end. They’ll mean something to the killer but we won’t find out what until after he’s caught. He has an idea of what he wants but he’s happy to change if the reality doesn’t live up to the fantasy.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The first victim was tortured, the others weren’t. For some reason, that didn’t do for him what he thought it would. So he stopped doing it.’

  ‘Michael James had your name carved onto his chest. Seems like torture to me.’

  ‘No, he put that on for a reason we don’t know yet. The pain he caused was incidental. Graham Russell’s pain was intentional.’

  Flynn nodded for him to continue.

  ‘All the men are in the same age group and they’re all wealthy. You’ve found nothing to suggest they knew each other.’

  ‘You think he’s choosing them at random?’

  Poe didn’t, but he wasn’t ready to say why yet. He needed more information. ‘He wants us to think he is.’

  She nodded but said nothing.

  ‘And none of them were reported missing?’ Poe asked.

  ‘Nope. They all seemed to have genuine reasons to be away from home. It wasn’t until after they were killed that we discovered the lengths the Immolation Man went to make sure they wouldn’t be reported missing.’

  ‘How?’ Poe knew it was in the file but sometimes it was better to get an interpretation of the facts.

  ‘Graham Rus
sell’s car and passport were logged getting onto a ferry, and his family got emails saying he was holidaying in France. Joe Lowell sent his family texts from Norfolk saying he was staying with friends and he’d be shooting red-legged partridges until the season ended. Michael James lived on his own so wouldn’t have been immediately missed, but his computer history still showed he’d been planning a bespoke whisky tour of the Scottish Isles.’

  ‘So you can’t be sure when any of them were taken?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  He thought about what that meant and decided all it did was confirm what he already knew. The Immolation Man was well organised. He told Flynn.

  ‘How so? He leaves a chaotic crime scene.’

  Poe shook his head. She was still testing him. ‘He’s in control at the crime scene. No improvisation. Everything he needs, he brings with him. No physical evidence at the abduction sites or the murder sites, and given that evidence transfer is inevitable and retrieval techniques have never been better, that’s remarkable. By the third victim there was a fair bit of surveillance on the stone circles, I gather?’

  ‘Most of them. The one at Long Meg had only just been lifted.’

  ‘So, he’s also surveillance aware,’ Poe said.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Have I passed?’

  Flynn smiled. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. There’s something missing from the files. A control filter, something the SIO is holding back from the media. What is it?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘The Immolation Man might not be a sadist but he’s acting sadistically. There’s no way he leaves the bodies unmolested.’

  Flynn pointed at her briefcase on the back seat. ‘There’s another file in there.’

  He leaned across and retrieved it. It was stamped ‘Secret’ and someone had written ‘Not to be shared without written permission from DCS Gamble’. Poe didn’t open it.

  ‘Have you heard of the cutting season, Poe?’

  He shook his head. He hadn’t.

  ‘It was originally coined by the NHS. It refers to the time of year – the summer holidays usually – when young girls, some as young as two months old, are taken out of the UK, ostensibly to visit relatives abroad. What they’re going for is to undergo female genital mutilation. They go in the long summer break so their wounds have a chance of healing before they return.’

  Poe knew a little bit about FGM, the abhorrent practice of removing parts of a young girl’s genitals to ensure she can’t experience sexual pleasure. It was believed to keep them faithful and chaste. The reality was that the victims had a lifetime of pain and medical problems. In some cultures, the wounds were still stitched together with thorns.

  It dawned on Poe why Flynn was telling him this. ‘He’s castrating them?’

  ‘Technically no. He cuts off the veg and the meat. Neatly and without anaesthetic.’

  ‘He’s keeping trophies,’ Poe said. A high percentage of serial murderers kept parts of their victims.

  ‘Actually, he isn’t. Open the file.’

  Poe did and nearly lost his lunch. The first photograph explained why the victim’s screams hadn’t been heard.

  He’d been gagged.

  The photograph was a close-up picture of Graham Russell’s mouth: it was stuffed with his own genitals. The next few photos showed the penis, testicles and scrotum – which were still attached to each other – after they’d been removed from the mouth. Blackened at the end exposed to the fire, surprisingly pink and undamaged at the other. Poe flipped through the rest of the photographs and found them to be much the same.

  And he was supposed to be the fifth victim? As if the stakes hadn’t been high enough already. He crossed his legs.

  ‘We’ll get him before he gets anywhere near you, Poe.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Deep in the heart of Hampshire, in the grounds of the old Bramshill Police College, lies Foxley Hall. The college might have seen its last course, but Foxley Hall was still the home of the Serious Crime Analysis Section.

  For a unit that tended to avoid attention and work in the shadows, the building itself was surprisingly quirky. It was wider than it was tall, had sloping roofs that almost touched the ground, so it looked like SCAS worked in an abandoned Pizza Hut.

  Flynn had spent the night at home. Poe had checked into a hotel.

  He’d had a fitful night. His nightmares had returned. When he’d been working, the dead had always stayed with Poe. They messed with his dreams and they interrupted his peace. Being back in Hampshire had reopened old wounds. Despite what he’d done, Peyton Williams hadn’t deserved to die. During the early hearings, Poe had been shown photographs of the injuries Mr Bristow had inflicted upon Williams. Teeth removed with pliers, spiral fractures to all his fingers, the punctured spleen that would eventually kill him. It had been six months before Poe managed to get a full night’s sleep.

  And now the nightmares were back. Perhaps they’d never gone away . . .

  It was eight o’clock in the morning and Poe had to be escorted into Foxley Hall as if he were an official visitor. The receptionist’s bored look changed to one of sycophancy when she saw her boss. She handed Flynn some mail and looked at Poe rudely.

  ‘And you are?’ Poe asked, glaring back. He might be wearing jeans and look more mountain man than cop, but she was about to learn that SCAS had a sergeant again.

  The receptionist looked like she had no intention of answering unless she was told she had to. That was the problem in areas with high employment: no one took their jobs seriously any more. It was little more than pin money.

  ‘I’d answer him if I were you, Diane,’ Flynn said as she rifled through the letters she’d just been handed. ‘This is DS Poe, and you’d better believe he’s not going to take your shit.’

  Instead Diane smirked and said, ‘Deputy Director Hanson is waiting for you in your office.’

  ‘Is he now?’ she sighed. ‘You’d better stay out of his way, Poe. He still blames you for not getting the director’s job.’

  Hanson had never taken responsibility for his own failings. Not being promoted had to be either someone’s fault or part of a wider conspiracy against him. That he’d backed Talbot in the Peyton Williams case was neither here nor there. ‘Glad to,’ Poe replied.

  Flynn turned to Diane. ‘Go and get DS Poe a cup of coffee. Do that and he’ll be your friend for life.’

  Poe and Diane looked at each other. Both doubted that, but Poe was in no mood for a fight this early. Flynn went off to see Hanson and Diane led Poe across the open-plan office to the kitchen area. As she poured him some filter coffee, Poe surveyed the office he used to manage.

  Things had changed. When he’d been the detective inspector, the tables were arranged depending on wherever people fancied sitting that day, and because of inter-office politics, the office layout was constantly changing. Even though he’d known that had irritated Flynn, he hadn’t intervened. If she’d wanted order, she could have put her sergeant’s stripes to use.

  But now, with her inspector’s pip, she’d decided to use her management authority. Analysts, some of whom he recognised, most of whom he didn’t, were seated around an ordered central hub. It acted as the centre of a wheel, with offices and specialist pods forming the spokes. It wasn’t quite a cubicle farm but it wasn’t far off. There was a low hum of noise; muffled phone conversations, the clack of keyboards and the shuffle of paperwork. Despite it being early, no one was eating breakfast at their desks. That had been another thing that had made Flynn’s bile bubble: people arriving at work then spending thirty minutes making porridge.

  SCAS might have been functioning professionally and efficiently but, to Poe, it had about as much charm as an out-of-office email. If he were forced to spend time there, he knew that within an hour he’d be using the word ‘fuck’ like a comma.

  At least his large map of the United Kingdom was still there. Poe wandered over and scanned it. It dominate
d the wall. Different colour markers, laid over it like weather patterns, indicated where the various crimes were on their radar. If the colours were the same, it suggested there was enough evidence that the crimes might be linked. Analysts were constantly scanning the media and crime reports from the territorial forces, looking for patterns and anomalies. Part of what SCAS did was crying wolf – seeing patterns and letting police forces know they might have a serial rapist or murderer. Most of the time they were wrong.

  Sometimes they were right.

  There were three red markers in Cumbria; the Immolation Man was being worked hard.

  A hush rippled across the room as people began to realise who had walked in with the boss. Poe heard his name being whispered. He ignored it. He hated being the centre of attention but he knew he was a cause célèbre. Not just because his name had been carved into the chest of a man sleeping in a cold bed at Carlisle’s mortuary, but also because of the way he’d run the unit when he was in charge.

  And the way he’d left; he shouldn’t forget that.

  The silence was broken by muffled shouting. It was coming from his old office, technically Flynn’s office now. Poe wandered over.

  Although most of the shouting was indistinct, Poe heard his name every now and then. He opened the door and eased inside.

  Hanson leaned over Flynn’s desk. Both his hands were planted knuckles down on the wood.

  ‘I told you, Flynn, I don’t care what the director said, you shouldn’t have reinstated him.’

  Flynn was taking it calmly. ‘Technically Director van Zyl reinstated him, not me.’

  Hanson stood up. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Flynn.’

  Poe coughed.

  Hanson turned. ‘Poe,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise you’d travelled back with DI Flynn.’

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ Poe said.

  Hanson ignored his outstretched hand.