The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

And told him why.

Poe was furious. Peyton Williams wasn’t going to go anywhere near Muriel Bristow now. Not with that kind of attention. If she were still alive, she wouldn’t be for much longer. She’d die of dehydration.

He wasn’t the type of cop who’d palm off the unpleasant tasks to others. He’d made the trip to the family’s home himself. Before he left, he printed off a Family Liaison Case Summary, a heavily sanitised account of what was happening in the investigation. After telling the Bristows what he could, h

e handed over the file for them to review in their own time.

And later that day, all hell broke loose.

Poe had made a mistake. A terrible mistake. As well as printing off the Family Liaison Case Summary, he’d printed off an updated summary for his own file. This one wasn’t sanitised. It contained all his suspicions and all his frustrations.

The wrong report had ended up in the wrong file . . . The Bristows got to read all about Peyton Williams . . .

Only later, after Williams had been snatched and tortured by Muriel Bristow’s father, and long after he’d given up Muriel’s location and she’d been safely returned to her family, did anyone stop to think how Bristow even knew about Peyton Williams at all.

The mistake had been quickly uncovered, and despite Poe having been right all along, and despite an innocent girl being returned to her family, he’d been suspended with immediate effect. A few weeks later, Peyton Williams died of his wounds.

Until Flynn had showed up at Herdwick Croft, Poe hadn’t seen anyone from the NCA since.

‘You disappeared without saying goodbye to anyone,’ said Flynn.

He felt a tinge of guilt. When he’d been suspended, Poe had ignored all the texts and voicemails offering support. A man had been tortured and he’d been responsible. He’d had to learn to live with that. He’d returned home to Cumbria. Got away from his well-meaning colleagues. Hid away from the world. Alone with only dark thoughts for company.

Flynn continued, ‘Between you and me, van Zyl told me he thinks the IPCC aren’t far off a finding of “No Case to Answer”. They can’t prove it was definitely you who put the wrong report in the family’s file.’

The thought offered Poe no comfort. Perhaps he was getting used to his monastic existence? He opened the case file and began reading everything SCAS had on the Immolation Man.

CHAPTER SIX

Although it was a triple murder and the documentation was copious, Poe had seen enough files to locate the important stuff. He went straight to the senior investigating officer’s early description of the first crime scene.

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 . . .