The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

Before he could be patronised, he continued. ‘I know you’re going to give me a lesson in serial killers and how their urge to kill is sated after the first murder, but the amount of time this holds them is ever reducing. Am I right?’

Flynn nodded.

‘And none of the victims knew each other, right?’

This time it was Reid who answered. ‘The investigation has found no link between them. Of course, I can’t speak for the fourth victim; he hasn’t been ID’d yet.’

‘What’s your point, Poe?’ Flynn asked.

‘My point, Steph, is that you’re thinking like someone who doesn’t know Cumbria. It might be the third largest county in England but it’s sparsely populated.’

‘And that means . . .?’

‘That it’s statistically unlikely that these men didn’t know each other.’

Flynn and Reid stared at him. Bradshaw – for whom the word ‘statistic’ was a starter pistol – began typing.

‘I’m from here, and so is Kylian, and we can tell you that everyone seems to know everyone.’

‘It’s a bit thin,’ Flynn said.

‘It is,’ Poe agreed. ‘But if you also consider that all the victims were in the same age and socio-economic group, the odds of them not knowing each other reduces even further. This isn’t Knightsbridge. Parts of Cumbria have a lower GDP than the Czech Republic. Just how many millionaires do you think we have?’

The only sound was Bradshaw’s keyboard.

‘But we’re sure they didn’t know each other,’ Flynn insisted. ‘Unless you’re saying we’ve all missed something?’

Poe shrugged. ‘Sort of, but it comes back to my first point. Why was there such a big gap between the first and second victims?’

He waited.

‘What if these men did know each other but had made concerted efforts to hide it? And what if these men would know if they were being picked off? A pattern only they could see. Now, when Graham Russell’s murdered, so what? He’d overseen the hacking of the phones of murder and paedophile victims all over the country – the list of people who wished him harm must have been huge. And whatever the file might say now, we know that’s the line of enquiry Gamble initially took. If I’m right, it’s entirely possible the others simply put it down to bad luck on Russell’s part. But when victim number two is killed in the same way, even the most optimistic of them would know what was happening. The Immolation Man has no reason to take it slowly any more; in fact, if he’s working through a list, he has every reason to speed up.’

Flynn frowned. ‘But if they knew they were being targeted, why didn’t they go to the police?’

‘They couldn’t,’ Reid said. ‘If Poe’s right then they might be linked by something they couldn’t speak about.’

‘And given their individual wealth, it’s almost certainly something illegal,’ Poe added.

‘But we’re not sure when the men were abducted,’ Flynn said. ‘It’s possible they were all taken before anyone was killed.’

No theory was perfect, thought Poe.

‘Three-point-six per cent,’ Bradshaw said, looking up from her computer.

They stared at her.

‘Using a program I’ve just written, I’ve calculated that the odds of three men from that

social group, in a county with a population of seventy-three-point-four people per kilometre squared, not knowing each other are three-point-six per cent. There are some variables that take it as low as two per cent and as high as three-point-nine, but the maths is sound.’

Reid was staring open-mouthed. ‘You wrote a program?’ He looked at his watch. ‘In under five minutes?’

Bradshaw nodded. ‘It wasn’t hard, DS Reid. I simply adapted an existing tool I have.’

Poe stood up. ‘That’s settled then. We don’t argue with Tilly and maths.’

Bradshaw gave Poe a shy, grateful glance.