The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

‘Sir?’

Her expression darkened as she listened. ‘Shit,’ she muttered finally. ‘And there’s no doubt?’

She frowned some more before hanging up.

Poe raised his eyebrows.

‘Hilary Swift’s daughter has just landed. She’s confirmed that her mother was in Australia when Clement Owens was killed at Cockermouth.’

Poe felt his pulse quicken. ‘So, we are looking for someone else . . .’

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Gamble called an emergency meeting for later that day, and as the files on the children from Seven Pines hadn’t revealed anything actionable, they’d returned to Shap Wells. Jackson had copied everything for them and Poe vowed to take them home and read it all again later. Sometimes his brain needed a calmer environment.

Bradshaw hadn’t been slacking while they’d been away. She was surrounded by reams of paper. She’d needed the hotel’s strong wi-fi, so the Garden Room, despite its drawbacks, had become their makeshift incident room again. It was as cluttered as the inside of Poe’s mind. Bradshaw looked up anxiously. ‘DI Stephanie Flynn, I think I’ve spent all our money on colour printing.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Tilly, I’m the budget holder . . .’ She stared at the masses of paperwork. ‘Er . . . exactly how many sheets have you printed?’

‘Eight hundred and four,’ she replied.

Flynn looked worried.

Bradshaw dug her grave a little deeper. ‘The hotel had to send out for more ink twice.’

‘It’s cheap if we find something, boss,’ Poe said. ‘Now we know there’s another player, ANPR might just be our best shot.’

Unlike Cumbria Constabulary, the National Crime Agency had live access to the Automatic Number Plate Recognition database. ANPR is the law enforcement system that reads, checks and records every vehicle that passes one of the eight thousand fixed and mobile cameras in the UK. With over forty-five million cars in the country, ANPR cameras take close to twenty-six million photographs a day, and because the National ANPR Data Centre, or NADC, holds every image for two years, at any one time there are over seventeen billion photographs in its archives. Poe knew that Gamble had requested mobile ANPR cameras on the likely routes to some of the more prominent stone circles, but had bust out.

‘What have you got for us, Tilly?’ Poe asked.

Bradshaw, still not sure if she was in trouble or not, coughed nervously and said, ‘After I’d downloaded the data from the ANPR cameras I wanted, I ran it through a program I’ve been working on for a couple of months in my spare time. The way I see it, this is a chaotic system problem so I adapted the Kuramoto model to assess the synchronisation order.’

She looked at them as if she’d just said something they had any chance of understanding.

‘Dumb it down a bit, Tilly,’ Poe said, not unkindly.

‘Oh right, basically, Poe, under the right conditions, chaos spontaneously evolves into a lockstep system.’

Flynn and Poe continued to stare at her blankly.

‘I’ve redefined the parameters,’ she sighed.

Neither of them responded.

‘You have to be kidding me?’ Bradshaw said, shaking her head. ‘Jeez, do you two still point at planes?’

‘Eh?’ Poe said.

‘I ran a program and I’ve got you a list of car registration numbers.’

‘Ah, a list. Why didn’t you say so?’

Bradshaw stuck her tongue out at him before pulling a pile towards her. ‘I focused on the journeys the Immolation Man would have had to make. Abduction to containment site, containment site to crime scene.’

Poe nodded. This he could follow.

‘We know when and where four of the victims were killed and I correlated that with the cameras nearest their homes.’