The Puppet Show

by M. W. Craven

  ‘I’m not conceal—’

  ‘Piss off,’ Poe snapped. ‘I’ve been doing this job fifteen years and I’ve never seen a worse liar.’

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘Whatever.’ Poe couldn’t tell if Sharples was shocked at the change in tone or the fact someone didn’t believe him. ‘You can be as pretend outraged as you want, Frankie, I’m about to arrest you for assisting an offender and perverting the course of justice.’ Before Sharples could object, he added, ‘And at this stage, as you’re the only person connected with the case who we know to be lying, I am formally telling you that you are now considered a suspect in five murders. At the very least you will be convicted of joint enterprise.’

  It was bullshit but Poe was banking on knowing more about the law than Sharples did. ‘Get dressed, you’re coming with me.’

  Sharples was now shaking. Tears were in his eyes. Poe looked round the room. He’d been working on his book the night before. Or at least he wanted to give the impression he’d been working on his book. A neat stack of paper was lined up next to his laptop. It was his manuscript – where anyone who visited would be able to see it, Poe noticed – and there seemed to be about seventy pages. He picked up the title sheet: ‘The Increasing Relevance of Philosophy in a Smaller World’.

  ‘Nice computer, Mr Sharples,’ Bradshaw said, looking at his Apple laptop. ‘This model’s top of the range.’

  While they talked computers, Poe looked at the expensive décor in the expensive flat in the expensive part of town. He’d wanted to ask Sharples last time how an unpublished philosophy graduate afforded a place like this.

  ‘How did you pay for all this, Mr Sharples?’

  His eyes dropped to the floor.

  ‘I can have a forensic accountant here in a matter of hours, Mr Sharples. They’ll go through everything, and I mean everything. Better by far if you tell me now.’

  Sharples mumbled something but it was too quiet for Poe to hear.

  Bradshaw had, though, ‘He said he took something from the corpse.’

  Poe nodded. ‘And what would that have been?’

  ‘A watch,’ he croaked.

  Poe wasn’t a fashion guru but even he knew some watches were incredibly expensive. ‘Make and model?’

  ‘A 1962 Breitling 765. The strap must have broken when I accidentally tipped the body on top of Derek. I didn’t think, I put it in my pocket. To keep it safe.’

  ‘To keep it safe.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what, you forgot you had it?’

  ‘I did. When I found it later I was scared the police might think I’d stolen it.’

  ‘Imagine that,’ Poe said. ‘So where is it?’

  He didn’t have an answer. Poe suspected he’d sold it. Sharples continued to stare at the floor.

  ‘I said—’

  ‘I don’t have it any more!’

  ‘I want the serial number and photographs,’ Poe said. He turned to Bradshaw. It was what you did when you wanted something checking on the internet. She was already on her phone.

  ‘Value?’ Poe asked her.

  ‘A Breitling 1962 model would cost approximately ten thousand pounds, Poe,’ she replied. She seemed to be enjoying her first trip out into the field. At some point Poe would have to explain that it wasn’t official. Let her decide whether she wanted to carry on or not. But not just yet.

  Poe turned to Sharples and asked, ‘Who did you sell it to?’

  ‘I want a deal.’

  Poe snorted. Even Bradshaw giggled.

  ‘You watch too much shit television, Mr Sharples,’ he said. ‘This isn’t America. There’ll be no deal. What there might be is mitigation. That’s where the judge looks at something good you might have done, instead of just the bad. And the only way you’ll get mitigation is if I get hold of that fucking watch. Now, tell me who you sold it to.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he whispered. ‘I sold it on a specialist watch site to an anonymous collector in the States.’

  ‘Tilly?’

  ‘Please can you move out of the way, Mr Sharples,’ she said as she pushed past Sharples and powered up his Mac. ‘Password, please?’

  He told her.

  While Bradshaw searched the computer, Poe asked, ‘How much did you get for it?’

  ‘Certainly not ten thousand pounds!’ he said. He seemed annoyed he’d been fleeced. ‘I got five thousand dollars, which came to a touch over three thousand sterling.’ He eyed Bradshaw nervously. ‘What’s she doing?’

  Poe said, ‘What most people don’t realise, Mr Sharples, is that you can delete things from your computer all you want, but everything’s recoverable. Tilly here will uncover anything you’ve written about that Breitling. How long, Tilly?’

  ‘Found it, Poe’ she said. ‘Do you have a printer, Mr Sharples?’

  He opened a cupboard and pressed a button. A green light came on and the printer whirred and clunked its way to being ready. ‘It’s wireless,’ he said.

  Bradshaw rolled her eyes and said, ‘Duh.’

  She printed off some documents. She handed them to Poe without looking at them.

  He flicked through them. They were colour and the first few pages were good – certainly enough to secure Sharples’s conviction – but it wasn’t until the last two that he hit the mother lode.

  The buyer had wanted to see what he was buying and Sharples had been happy to oblige. Six full-colour photographs, three to a page. It was the fifth that made Poe smile.

  It was of the back of the watch.

  And there, as clear as day, was its unique serial number.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  They left Sharples but told him to stay where he was. Uniformed officers would be coming for him. They would be, but not for a while and not until Poe had finished chasing down the watch’s original owner.

  Poe told Bradshaw that as he was officially on leave she should head back to Shap, but she was keen to see through the Breitling line of enquiry. Poe relented. They decided to grab breakfast from the Sainsbury’s café. Poe chose the full English and Bradshaw got the vegetarian equivalent. They shared a pot of tea.

  As the bacon broke over his tongue, the salty flavour like a bomb in his mouth, they discussed the best way to track down the watch’s owner. Bradshaw wanted Poe to go straight to Breitling – she assumed there’d be a central database somewhere – but he had reservations. They were a big company, with clients all over the world, and some of them would be extremely wealthy. Breitling weren’t going to breach their confidentiality policy just because some dickhead from the NCA asked them. Instead, he planned to hit the county’s high-value dealers and frighten them until they gave him what he wanted. There weren’t many, and if Tollund Man had been a Cumbrian, it was possible the watch had been bought locally.

  As he was mopping up egg yolk with a bit of fried bread, Bradshaw asked him why he was taking leave now of all times.

  ‘Just need a bit of time, Tilly.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not because of me, Poe?’

  ‘What . . . no, of course not. Why would it be about you?’

  ‘People get sick of me.’

  ‘Well, if they do, they’re idiots,’ he said. ‘No, the real reason is because last night DCS Gamble asked me to leave his investigation.’

  ‘Is that why DI Stephanie Flynn rang me to say I was to help if you asked?’

  ‘I didn’t know she had.’

  ‘She said I wasn’t to tell you.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Friends should never lie to each other, Poe.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Come on, eat your sawdust. The shops will be open soon.’

  As they’d been talking Bradshaw had taken advantage of the store’s free wi-fi. She’d been trying to shorten the search by finding jewellers with staying power, those who’d been around for a long time. She’d collated a list, then switched to a news channel. It was nine o’clock and the headlines were on. Bradshaw’s mouth opened as she stare
d at the screen. ‘No . . . no . . . that’s not right at all,’ she cried.

  ‘What isn’t?’ Poe said absentmindedly, as he chased a snide baked bean around the plate with his knife.

  ‘Look at this, Poe!’ She turned the tablet round so they could both see it. She turned up the volume and pressed play.

  In the middle of a scrum of cameras and oversized microphones, wearing a clean suit as if he hadn’t just spent three hours in a Kendal graveyard, was Gamble. The news anchor led into the interview by saying, ‘Police have said that the body found in a grave in Kendal early this morning could be another victim of the serial murderer known as the Immolation Man. We’ll now go live to Cumbria where Detective Chief Superintendent Ian Gamble will be making a short statement.’

  Gamble had been waiting for the go-ahead and he started speaking as soon as the anchor finished. ‘After some exceptional police work by Cumbrian detectives, the investigation team applied for an exhumation order for a grave in the Parkside Cemetery in Kendal. We had reason to believe that a coffin that should have contained the unidentified body found at the Hardendale Salt Store last year had been recently tampered with. As expected, the coffin’s original occupant was missing. In its place was the body of an as yet unidentified male who we believe to be a victim of the Immolation Man.’

  Gamble’s statement was concise, well written, didn’t contain a single lie and was total bullshit. The NCA wouldn’t dare contradict him; they wouldn’t risk exposing their own faultlines. Poe had seen to that.

  ‘Prick,’ said Poe. ‘Come on, let’s get going.’

  Although he knew the watch could have been bought anywhere, Poe planned to start looking in Carlisle as they were already there. If he were lucky, it had been bought before online shopping took off, when people tended to buy high-end items in person.

  He was happy to discount the cheaper stores and focus his efforts on the smaller upmarket chains and family-owned businesses. There was only a handful of smaller shops that sold watches – although to be thorough they would check the ones that didn’t in case they used to sell watches – but even so, they were soon struggling.

  Every shop except one was happy to let Bradshaw into their records, and the one that didn’t was able to confirm that they’d never sold Breitlings, new or second-hand.

  The serial number BR-050608 wasn’t on any of the computer databases they checked, and because very few of them had transferred their paper records to electronic, searching old ledgers was slow and laborious.

  One jeweller smiled as he dumped ten ledgers on his table, each one thicker than a copy of Yellow Pages. Poe groaned, although it didn’t seem to faze Bradshaw. She had the kind of analytical mind that relished things like cross-referencing lists.

  However, effort didn’t guarantee outcome. After she’d finished the seventh and final ledger in a shop that might have sold Breitlings a few years ago, Poe called a halt. It was lunchtime and standing around doing nothing had made him hungry.

  They walked to the car and bought another parking ticket before wandering over to a little-known old-school coffee shop he’d recently discovered in Carlisle. Coffee Genius was down Saint Cuthbert’s Lane, near the medieval West Walls. It had a high counter, expensive-looking chrome machines and plenty of home-made cakes and scones. They roasted their own beans and it was a coffee snob’s paradise. Poe found the smells intoxicating: freshly brewed coffee, the acrid smell of espresso, sweet warm caramel and chocolate, a tingle of cinnamon . . . His mouth watered as soon as he walked in.

  It was full of the lunchtime crowd but they found a seat near a window. Poe ordered a slow-brewed Peruvian black and the club sandwich of the day – pulled pork and caramelised onions. Bradshaw ordered a hot chocolate before asking him if she was allowed the meal deal: soup and a sandwich.

  ‘Get what you want, Tilly. My treat.’

  She nodded happily and placed her order. Like birds flitting from branch to branch, her eyes were everywhere, taking in all the new experiences. Her mother had told Poe she’d led a sheltered life before joining SCAS, but he had no idea just how sheltered. As they waited for their food and drinks Bradshaw asked what he thought about the morning’s search.

  ‘It’s a fool’s errand,’ Poe said. He was beginning to doubt the course of action they were on. It had felt like a wasted morning.

  ‘It’s not, Poe,’ she said. ‘It’s just going to take time. If it’s out there, I’ll find it.’ And with that she begged the wi-fi password from the barista and took out her tablet. Within seconds she was immersed in something. Poe knew he wouldn’t get another word from her until the food arrived.

  The barista came over with the drinks and placed a small triple egg timer on the table. The sand on Poe’s right was for a strong brew and he watched as it slowly ran down. It was therapeutic and he could feel his mind unwinding. He’d have to get one. When it ran out, he poured his coffee.

  The sandwiches arrived ten minutes later. Bradshaw photographed her food and texted the picture to her mum. ‘She likes to know what I’m doing,’ she explained.

  Poe, who was getting used to her eccentricities, kept his own counsel. She arranged her napkin to her liking then took a bite from her sandwich. ‘This is nice isn’t it, Poe? I usually eat lunch on my own.’

  When they’d finished they ordered more hot drinks.

  One of the things he liked about Coffee Genius was that the staff were always happy to stop and chat. While Bradshaw worked, Poe and the barista talked about the benefits of buying your own beans and grinding them at home.

  ‘What do you do?’ the barista asked.

  Poe told him but left the details a bit fuzzy. ‘We’re searching for the owner of an old watch today.’

  The barista sat down, and without mentioning the murder angle, Poe explained.

  ‘All a bit needle-in-a-haystack, isn’t it?’ the barista said.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  The barista laughed.

  ‘And that’s not even including the shops that don’t exist any more. Got no way of searching for them online.’

  The barista huddled up to him. ‘There’s a man and his wife come in here a couple of times a week. He’s retired now but I’m sure he used to work in the jewellery business. And the reason I know is that I’ve just got engaged and he advised me on which jewellers wouldn’t rip me off.’

  ‘You got a name?’

  ‘Charles. His wife’s called Jackie, I think.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘The boss is in, she might know. I’ll go and ask her.’

  Two minutes later he returned with a bit of paper. ‘Charles Nolan. The boss says they come in most Saturdays and Wednesdays. Thinks they do their shopping in Marks and Spencer. If you leave your name and number, I can pass him a message if you want.’

  Poe declined. He didn’t have the time to wait. He excused himself and walked outside to make a call.

  Kylian Reid answered immediately.

  ‘Oi, oi! It’s Burke and Hare!’ Reid said without preamble.

  ‘Ha-fucking-ha,’ Poe replied. ‘I kept you out of it, didn’t I? And I saw Gamble preening about on TV this morning. He knows I did him a favour.’

  ‘Like that matters. He’s still fucking furious.’

  ‘I need another favour,’ Poe said.

  ‘OK . . .’ Reid said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on leave?’ He was wary. If Gamble had found out Reid had passed him the information for the exhumation order, it could have meant his job.

  ‘I am. It’s just something I’m following up on. Nothing that’ll raise any eyebrows.’

  ‘Going to need more than that, mate.’

  Poe was reluctant to tell him. Reid was his friend but he was also a bloody good cop. If he thought the investigation team were better equipped, he’d have no qualms about pulling the plug on him.

  ‘Best you don’t know, Kylian.’

  ‘Prick,’ he said. ‘I meant I’m going to need more than just “I need another favour”, I need to know what t
he fucking favour is.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Within the hour Reid had emailed Poe a list of all C. Nolans, Charlie Nolans and Charles Nolans registered for council tax in Cumbria. There were fourteen. He passed the list to Bradshaw, who asked how she could refine it.

  That was easy enough.

  Excluding motorway services, there were only four Marks and Spencer stores in Cumbria. He told Bradshaw to remove anyone who lived in West Cumbria or Eden; they’d use the Workington or Penrith stores for their regular shopping. For the same reason, he told her to remove anyone living below junction 39 on the M6 corridor: the Kendal store served the bottom half of the county.

  That left the Carlisle area, and reduced the list to four. One lived in the city centre and Poe discounted them – retired jewellers were more likely to live in one of the thousand and one picturesque villages dotted around Cumbria, not in the middle of a grubby city.

  One lived in Brampton and the other two lived in villages: one in Warwick Bridge and the other in Cumwhinton. On the basis that it could be any of them, Poe decided to start with the nearest Nolan then work outwards. C. Nolan in Warwick Bridge would be first; it was a nice village just outside Carlisle. They’d then move on to the other C. Nolan in Cumwhinton, and turn back for the Charles Nolan in Brampton.

  * * *

  They got lucky on the first go – although, as Poe said to Bradshaw, when you’ve narrowed your search to just four people, how lucky is it?

  The man who answered the door was genteel and polite. He was in his early sixties. He wore a frayed cardigan, thick-lensed spectacles and a broad smile. When they’d confirmed that they were the Nolans who frequented Coffee Genius twice a week, his wife put the kettle on and insisted they stay for some cake.

  ‘Washington, eh? There’s an ambassadorial name if ever there was one. I can just imagine it being mentioned in high-stakes diplomatic dispatches. The sort of name that stops war being declared. There’s a fascinating story behind it, no doubt?’

  Everyone’s a fucking onomatologist . . .

  ‘You don’t know, do you, Poe?’ Bradshaw said, unwittingly rescuing him.