The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

‘The jacket he was wearing,’ Poe explained. ‘It wasn’t an expensive one. Certainly not one you’d wear for years and years.’

Flynn nodded.

‘It indicates he’d been dead closer to thirty years rather than the three. Agreed?’

Again, Flynn nodded. ‘Maybe. But so what?’

‘Yeah, Poe, share what you’ve got with the rest of the class,’ Reid said.

‘I’ll tell you why it’s important, boss,’ Poe replied. ‘If this so-called Tollund Man was alive today, he’d be in the same age group as the rest of the Immolation Man’s victims . . .’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Nah. I’m not buying it, Poe,’ Reid said. ‘It’s a coincidence.’ He looked round for support. ‘How can it not be?’

‘I

agree with Sergeant Reid,’ said Flynn. ‘I can’t see how this is relevant, Poe. Even if you’re right about the date, and that involves a whole lot of guesswork, don’t forget, he died of natural causes.’

Poe, who begrudged coincidences at the best of times, wasn’t prepared to dismiss it so easily. It was Shap: population twelve hundred. Nothing ever happened in Shap. The percontation point had to be alluding to Tollund Man. At the very least, it merited further investigation. Loose ends and unexplained details bothered him more than they should.

‘Fair point,’ he conceded. ‘But as we’ve got nothing else to go on, we may as well tug on this thread for a while. See where it takes us. Agreed?’

Flynn nodded but Poe could tell she still wasn’t convinced. ‘We’ll look into it but I don’t want us ignoring everything else.’

‘What do you need from me?’ Reid asked, standing up and stretching. ‘I can root out the file; it’ll be on the system somewhere.’

‘Take the quad to your car, Kylian,’ Poe said.

After Reid had left again, Bradshaw opened her laptop but didn’t start typing. ‘Please may I check the MPB database, Poe?’

‘Shit, I’d forgotten about that, Tilly,’ he replied. ‘You crack on.’

When the National Crime Agency was established in 2013, one of the agencies it subsumed was the UK Missing Persons Bureau; the point of contact for all missing-person and unidentified body investigations. Tollund Man would be registered with them.

‘How long, Tilly?’ With fifteen unidentified bodies being recorded each month, and over a thousand on the database at any one time, finding him might take time. Each body was assigned an ID number, and basic details to help identification were publicly available.

‘Found him, Poe,’ she replied. ‘Case number 16-004528. I’ll print off a hard copy.’ The printer spat out a two-page document. Bradshaw handed it to Poe.

There was no photograph; a lot of the cases listed didn’t have images. A significant percentage of suicide-by-trains would never be identified; their bodies were unrecognisable, and even more were washed up on beaches having been exposed to the elements for too long. Sometimes an artist was commissioned to sketch an impression of how the corpse might have looked in life, but with Tollund Man having been desiccated, mummified, petrified or whatever the correct term was for someone who’d been stored in salt for years, he doubted there’d have been value in either putting his photo on the site or trying to guess what he’d looked like before every bit of moisture was sucked from his body.

Most of what the document said, Poe already knew from the newspaper article. Usually the site would list details like approximate age, height, build and an estimated date of death. The page he was holding had ‘unknown’ listed beside every one of those identifiers. Hair colour was listed as brown. What he was wearing was listed but it was unremarkable. Certainly nothing that would make someone jump and shout out: ‘That’s old Jim that is! He used to wear a top hat and a green cape!’

No possessions were listed.

Bradshaw logged into the database and brought up the non-public information but it didn’t add much value. There was a photograph on the NCA-only part of the site, but it looked more like a prop from a horror movie than a human being. Poe wasn’t expecting to recognise him.

‘At some point we’re going to need to see the body,’ Poe said.

Flynn looked at him.

Poe shrugged. ‘We might not have a choice. If this is linked then it probably wasn’t an accident. We’ll need to put it through one of those machines of yours. Find out what really happened.’

‘The MSCT?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Do you have any idea how expensive that test is?’ Flynn asked.