The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

‘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.’

Poe thought he knew where she was headed but he let her finish.

‘As you say, the abduction points are out of his control, and if we assume that the site he keeps them at is a fixed point, then the only random part is the selection of the murder site.’

‘And there’s no pattern?’

She shook her head. ‘There should have been, even if it was just the way he travelled to them, but I can’t see it, and that means there isn’t one.’ She wasn’t boasting, simply stating a fact.

‘Perhaps the pattern is there is no pattern.’

Bradshaw stiffened and stood up. ‘I’m such a silly goose, Poe! You said Cumbria had sixty-three stone circles. He’s used four – where are the other fifty-nine?’

‘All over the place,’ he replied. ‘Off the top of my head I don’t . . .’

Her fingers moved over the keyboard as if they were possessed. Twenty seconds later a document listing the county’s stone circles shunted its way out of the printer. For the next thirty minutes they plotted their locations on the map with yellow pins. He stood back.

Bradshaw joined him. ‘I told you, Poe. Data never lies – there’s always a pattern.’