The Puppet Show (Washington Poe Book 1)

by M. W. Craven

  Five times he studied the block of vehicles. And on the sixth he saw the photograph that changed everything.

  There it was. Bold as brass. The anomaly. The vehicle that had no right to be there. Poe felt the hairs on his neck stand up.

  Surely it couldn’t be so simple?

  ‘Poe?’ Flynn asked.

  For several moments he didn’t dare open his mouth, and when he did he ignored her question. Instead, he said to Bradshaw, ‘Tilly, can you get on to the HMCTS website and see which Cumbrian courts sat on the day Joe Lowell was murdered? Check Preston Crown Court as well.’

  She glanced between Poe and Flynn, unsure what to do.

  Flynn said, ‘Do as he asks, Tilly.’

  They waited while Bradshaw logged into Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service website. The information Poe wanted was publicly available and he could have found it himself, but Bradshaw was quicker. Flynn had known him long enough to know she wouldn’t get anything out of him until he was ready so she didn’t bother trying.

  Five minutes later Tilly said, ‘No courts sat on the day Joe Lowell was murdered, Poe. It was a Sunday.’

  Poe nodded. He was right. He jabbed his finger against a vehicle in the Joe Lowell block, before turning to face Bradshaw and Flynn.

  ‘So what the fuck is that GU prisoner-escort van doing there?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Like most cops, Poe held strong views on the prisoner-escort service and the shameful low it took in 2004 when it was taken out of the hands of the prison service and sold to huge multinational companies. For some time, those companies had been looking upon the annual one-and-a-half million prisoner transportations with their insatiable lust for profit. The fact that it was a Labour government that did this was no surprise to him; they were as susceptible as anyone else to those false promises of the private sector: efficiencies and innovations.

  Innovations that included cramming prisoners into cells measuring no more than two feet squared, and efficiencies that included refusing to stop for toilet breaks, with the result that prisoners – some of whom were on remand and hadn’t been convicted of any offence – had to piss and shit in their cells. Legally, animals being taken to slaughter were entitled to better conditions. By the time the Home Office realised what was happening, it was too late – palms had been greased, directorships had been promised and contracts had been signed – so they did what every government does; they lied and manipulated statistics. Poe knew there were no votes in telling the truth.

  As an extra kick in the public’s teeth, and as an example of the law of unintended consequences, no one in the Home Office had considered what would happen when the first tranche of contracts ended and new providers took over. In a remarkable lack of foresight, no one had thought to regulate what happened to the vehicles owned by the original contractor when they were no longer needed.

  Entire fleets were offered for sale on the open market, and although a Daily Mail article highlighted the potential for abuse, the government was powerless to stop it. While the minister in charge blamed his civil servants and the civil servants blamed their minister, the result was that, for a few thousand pounds, anyone could legally purchase a vehicle that was, in all but name, a mobile prison.

  The prisoner-escort van that Bradshaw had placed on the Sunday block of vehicles was one of the smaller models. It contained four cells. Poe knew that some of the larger ones could transport three times that number. The smaller size meant it was nippy enough to get to all the locations to which the Immolation Man had been.

  None of the photographs had the driver in shot. The windscreen seemed to have been treated with some sort of tinting agent. Poe was unsurprised.

  There was some immediate work to do. Flynn called Gamble to tell him what they’d uncovered, and Bradshaw checked PNC. She found the registration number was still with GU Security. A call to their operation’s centre was met with an unsurprising eagerness to cooperate; image is everything with the private companies who compete for public sector contracts.

  Yes, that was one of their four-cell vans.

  No, it had never been in Cumbria, and no it had never been involved in any part of the north-west’s prisoner escort contract. Vehicle Number 236, as they called it, was used for a UK Border Agency contract in the south-west.

  And, yes, they could prove it. All their vehicles were fitted with satellite tracking equipment so the control room knew where they were at all times.

  After GU promised to email the information, Poe ended the call. Bradshaw said, ‘What does that all mean, Poe?’

  ‘It means the registration number was cloned to make sure it wouldn’t be flagged as false or on the wrong type of vehicle.’

  ‘Gosh. How clever.’

  It was. ‘And because GU have the north-west prisoner contract, they’re on our roads all day and well into the evenings. You get so used to seeing them, they blend into the background.’

  The Immolation Man had been hiding in plain sight.

  Flynn had left for her emergency meeting with Gamble. Hopefully a coherent strategy on how to trace the GU van would emerge.

  But just in case it didn’t . . .

  Poe glanced across at Bradshaw. She had begun to pack. She looked despondent. The excitement of the discovery had fizzled out once the information was passed to Gamble. The change in her was remarkable. A week ago, data was simply a puzzle to solve, and once she had, it had been passed to Flynn and forgotten about. Other than in the abstract, Poe knew she’d never had to think about the human cost behind the data she deciphered. And now she had, he knew she’d be a better analyst for it. Sometimes cold reason wasn’t enough; sometimes you needed skin in the game. Being personally involved forced you to go the extra mile.

  ‘You don’t think we’re done here, Tilly?’ Poe asked, smiling. ‘Get yourself comfortable, we have work to do.’

  Bradshaw clapped. She opened her laptop, pushed up her glasses, and waited for instructions.

  Poe sat beside her and said, ‘DCS Gamble’s going to start checking the sales of those vehicles, Tilly. He’ll need a warrant.’

  She waited for him to make his point.

  ‘But if the Immolation Man is as intelligent as we think he is, the van purchases are going to be hidden. He won’t have paid for them with a credit card. And GU wouldn’t have sold them directly to the public themselves anyway: they’ll have sent them to one of those companies that buy cars in bulk. The van we want could have been bought through an auction, or through a subsidiary company of a subsidiary company of a . . . well, you get the point.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do, Poe.’

  ‘I’m saying we need to find a quicker way, Tilly. Let Gamble track the van through the paperwork. He’ll get there in the end, but while he’s doing that, I want you to think of another way to catch this prick . . .’

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Bradshaw smiled shyly. ‘Poe, what did I tell you a couple of days ago?’

  It could have been anything. The topics of their recent conversations had been wide-ranging and varied; from the bowel habits of the elderly, to why he was called Washington.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, before taking a guess. ‘Something about the gaming industry now being bigger than the music industry?’

  ‘About data points,’ she prompted.

  He remembered something about data points. It had been one of those discussions where Bradshaw missed all his non-verbal clues and had enthused at length about some technical point in chaos theory. He found it easier to let her finish than try to stop her. It hadn’t been long before his mind went into screensaver mode. ‘It’s possible I might have forgotten the salient details,’ he admitted.

  ‘I said that, with enough data points, I can find the pattern in anything.’

  ‘So?’

  He got the impression his stupidity with statistics remained a source of intense frustration to her. Although part of him missed her unintentional rudeness, the fact she
was now keeping her comments to herself was testament to how much she’d changed.

  ‘So,’ she said, pointing at the photograph-covered wall, ‘when I downloaded all those photographs, all I was working on was the days of the murders.’

  Realisation dawned on Poe.

  Of course!

  Now they knew the vehicle, they could get every ANPR record for it. Every time the Immolation Man’s mobile prison passed a camera, they’d know about it. ANPR records were kept for two years, and although they would end up with two records – there was still a GU van with legitimate plates working in the south-west – it should be easy enough to separate the two.

  Bradshaw was already inside the ANPR database. Within minutes the printer was churning out sheet after sheet of information. She said, ‘This is a good example of Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect, isn’t it, Poe?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Poe muttered, his mind full of auction houses and other ways vehicle fleets could be sold.

  ‘The butterfly effect.’

  ‘I’m not following you, Tilly.’

  ‘I said, this is a good example of it. How one small, seemingly insignificant event can snowball into what we have here.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Well, all of this,’ she waved her arms at everything on the desks, computers and walls, ‘and everything you and I discovered, all came from that one small thing.’ She shook her head as if she were amazed. ‘The one thing that anchored everything else.’

  It was often how the harder cases broke. Small pieces of evidence led to larger pieces and so on. ‘Yeah, we got lucky with that body in the salt store,’ he admitted.

  ‘Really? I think it goes back further than that. I think this whole thing goes back to a chance remark.’

  The printer’s out-tray was overflowing. Poe walked over and emptied it. As he picked up the sheets that had fallen on the floor, he asked, ‘What chance remark was that, Tilly?’

  ‘When someone in Kendal police station reminded Kylian Reid about the body in the salt store. He’d forgotten about Tollund Man and you didn’t know about it. It wasn’t recorded as a crime so I wouldn’t have found it. Just think, everything started with that chance remark.’

  She was right. Sort of. Poe was inclined to think it started when a psychopath carved his name into someone’s chest, but essentially she was correct. Without Reid coming back from Kendal with Tollund Man, they wouldn’t be where they were now.

  Bradshaw mistook his silence for disagreement and began pushing her point. Poe was no longer listening. He’d picked up the top sheet off the printer and was staring at it. Bradshaw had searched in reverse chronological order, so the most recent records were first.

  He hadn’t been expecting to see anything he would recognise – this was Bradshaw’s area, not his – but two results halfway down the page caused him to stop. A feeling of dread came over him. Acid churned in his stomach. His mouth went dry.

  The results he was looking at were from one of the cameras covering the A591. They were there to help track the gangs that supplied drugs to the heart of the Lake District. Unless they had extraordinary local knowledge, anyone travelling to Ambleside or Windermere – whether it was from the Keswick end or the Kendal end – would pass one of the A591 ANPR cameras.

  And Ambleside and Windermere weren’t the only places accessed via the A591.

  There were several other small villages.

  Once of which was Grasmere.

  Where Seven Pines was located.

  The dates matched.

  The times matched.

  If Poe’s notes were accurate – and he knew they were – the prisoner-escort van had driven past the ANPR camera about ten minutes before he and Reid had. Hilary Swift wasn’t the Immolation Man’s accomplice at all. She was his next victim.

  He’d abducted her.

  And taken her grandchildren with him.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  ‘The Immolation Man has the kids as well!’ Poe shouted into the phone. Flynn was on her hands free and the reception was scratchy. As she was on her way to see Gamble, giving her the information directly was the quickest way of getting it to the right people.

  Flynn got the message, and even through the poor reception, Poe could hear the car’s revs increase as she put her foot down.

  On the thousand-to-one chance that Flynn had an accident, Poe decided to cover all bases. He rang Reid but it went to voice-mail. He left a message and hung up. As far as he was concerned, the information had been passed on. He emailed Flynn the document showing that the Immolation Man’s vehicle had been in the Grasmere area on the day Swift and her grandchildren had disappeared.

  He tried to calm his racing thoughts. Things were making a bit more sense. Swift being abducted was a better fit than her being involved in the murders. And in the scheme of things – including Poe’s new-found theory that the case was motivated by revenge rather than money – it all clicked. Whoever the Immolation Man was, he was systematically working his way through everyone on the charity cruise that night. Only Montague Price had avoided his fate, and that was because he’d had the foresight to flee as soon as he recognised the pattern.

  The mechanics of snatching Swift from under the noses of two experienced cops were troubling him. How had the Immolation Man administered the drugs? Had he been in the house at the same time as they were? Had he sneaked in while they were talking to Swift and put propofol in the milk? A plan that relied on knowing when police officers were going to be drinking tea seemed too random for the Immolation Man; he’d never left anything to chance so far. It was typical of the case: each time they made a breakthrough more questions were posed.

  Bradshaw was still working on the ANPR data for the prisoner-escort van, trying to find a pattern that might help them. In contrast to Poe’s hunt-and-stab method of typing, her fingers moved so quickly across the keyboard they were a blur. The printer had been a constant whir of noise, and for the next half hour Poe was little more than an office junior. He loaded the printer with paper and replaced empty ink cartridges. The staff must have been getting sick of Bradshaw’s printer – she’d exhausted the hotel’s conference stock again, but Poe convinced the staff to steal ink from other machines in the building.

  Eventually Bradshaw stopped. ‘I’m going to need an hour to look at this. Can you go and get a map of Cumbria, Poe? The larger the better.’

  Poe was about to say he’d send someone out for it, but realised she probably wanted him out of the way while she worked. He’d been like a caged beast while he waited.

  ‘Will do,’ he replied.

  An hour later he was back. Getting a map of the area hadn’t been an issue; the shops were full of them. The issue was that the maps the shops sold were for tourists. They were geared for fell walking, not for driving.

  He’d been about to give up. He knew Kendal police station had a map that covered the entire wall; he and Bradshaw could take their data there and start plotting it. He was pondering this – the drawbacks as well as the advantages – when he glanced in the shop window he was standing beside. It was an Age Concern charity shop and he saw a basket of maps in the window. He found what he needed: an Ordnance Survey Tour Map. He opened it up and saw the scale was just right for their needs. He gave the woman twenty pounds and told her to keep the change.

  The map was pinned to the wall and Bradshaw had fully plotted it. If there was a pattern there, Poe couldn’t see it. Red and blue pins had been placed in clumps. He recognised some of the larger, more intense groups as the county’s main thoroughfares: the M6, the A66 and the A595. Some of the smaller groups were around known victim-abduction sites. Long Meg and Her Daughters aside, the other stone circles the Immolation Man had used as murder sites weren’t heavily covered by ANPR – they were too rural.

  Bradshaw was frowning at the map as if something wasn’t working.

  ‘What’s up, Tilly?’

  Eventually she said, ‘This doesn’t make sense, Poe.’

 
‘How?’

  ‘It doesn’t conform to my model.’

  ‘Explain, and use the crayon method please.’

  Bradshaw usually smiled. This time she didn’t.

  ‘Well, you know that this type of profiling is to assist with understanding the offender’s spatial behaviour?’

  Poe didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. He wasn’t even sure he knew what ‘spatial’ meant. ‘Dumb it down a bit more can you, Tilly?’

  ‘An offender will have a natural aversion to committing crimes close to home,’ she said. ‘It’s called their buffer zone.’

  Not shitting on your own doorstep, he’d have called it, but he knew what she meant. Even low-life heroin addicts tended to move into the next street before they started shaking hands with door handles.

  ‘Well, conversely they’ll also have a comfort zone in which they feel safe. It’s usually somewhere they know well. It’s called the distance decay theory; the farther someone is away from their regular activity space, the less likely they are to offend.’

  That made sense too. Poe was convinced that the Immolation Man knew the areas he was working in; it was the only explanation for him having avoided so many of the fixed-point cameras on the roads. ‘But we now know he wasn’t picking his victims at random. He had a list he was working through. He had no control over where they lived,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve built that into my model.’

  Of course she had.

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘It’s the murder sites. That’s the thing that doesn’t make sense. There are three variables involved in each killing: where he abducts the victim, where he keeps the victim and where he kills the victim.’