The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

‘Phone call for you,’ she said. ‘I’ll put it through to your office.’

‘DS Poe,’ he said when he picked up the phone. It felt strange to have a rank in front of his name again. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Hello, Sergeant Poe, this is Matilda’s mother.’

There was a pause and Poe filled it. ‘I’m sorry but are you sure you have the right number? I don’t know any Matilda.’

‘You’ll know her as Tilly. Tilly Bradshaw,’ she said. ‘My daughter’s just been on the phone saying she’s had to go home to pack a suitcase but she couldn’t find the tent. She wants me to leave work to go and buy one. She also said she’d need some canned goods and a tin opener. She wants me to bring it all to the office. You’ve got her awfully excited, Sergeant Poe.’

‘A tent . . . canned goods . . . I’m sorry, Mrs Bradshaw, but I’ve got no idea what she’s talking about. She’ll be staying at the same hotel as the rest of the team. I’d assumed that was obvious.’

‘Well, that makes a lot more sense, I suppose. But why is she going up to Cumbria at all? It sounds dreadful up there.’

‘Hey, I’m from Cumbria!’ he protested.

‘Oh, I’m sorry. But it does sound awfully bleak.’

Poe was about to reply, ‘That’s because it fucking is’, but thought better of it. He settled for, ‘It’s Cumbria, not Baghdad, Mrs Bradshaw. She’s going to be assisting on a murder investigation.’

‘And it won’t be dangerous?’

‘Not unless the Immolation Man decides to burn the hotel down.’

‘And is that likely?’

‘No, I was joking,’ Poe said. At least he knew where Bradshaw got her social skills from. ‘She’ll be perfectly safe. She’s coming up for analytical support only, I doubt she’ll even leave the hotel.’

That seemed to mollify her.

‘OK, I’ll allow it,’ she said, ‘on one condition.’

Poe bit back a sarcastic response. He thought about Bradshaw, worrying because she didn’t think she’d be allowed to go. She hadn’t been deliberately awkward at all. ‘Name it.’

‘She rings home every night.’

Under the circumstances that didn’t seem so unreasonable. ‘Deal,’ he said.

‘Now, there are a few things you need to know about Matilda, Sergeant Poe.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Well, first of all, you need to understand that she’s a wonderful girl and a marvellous daughter. I really couldn’t ask for anyone better.’

‘But . . .’

‘But she has led an extremely sheltered life. She was at university when she should have been playing outside. She got her first Oxford degree when she was sixteen.’

Poe whistled.

‘And she stayed on and got a master’s and two PhDs: one in computers and the others in mathematics or something. It’s all beyond me. We’d assumed she was going to spend her life at Oxford, going from research grant to research grant. People were throwing money at her.’

‘So how did she—?’

‘So how did she end up working for the National Crime Agency? Your guess is as good as mine, Sergeant Poe, but I suspect it’s something to do with the wilful streak she got from her father. She just came in from university one night and said she’d applied for a job. Wouldn’t tell us what as she knew we’d stop her.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘You’ve met her, DS Poe. Matilda has an extraordinary mind. A once-in-a-generation mind according to one of the professors who came to see us when she was thirteen. The flipside of that is, because she’s never really lived in the real world before, she’s never developed the life skills you and I take for granted. I suppose it was all about her brain’s priorities. She finds social situations extremely difficult and this has caused her problems in the past.’