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Chapter 127

‘What’shappening?’ Poe said the second Flynn answered.

‘Tilly’s sent you an email.’

‘I don’t have much of a signal up here. I’ll walk to my go-to hot-spot and download everything as soon as we’re done.’

‘How’s Estelle?’

‘Asleep.’

‘Good,’ Flynn said. ‘She’s been through a lot and I doubt she slept much in prison. Don’t forget you need to rest too. Are you sure I can’t send a surveillance team up there? They’ll be discre— I don’t know, Tilly!’ Poe smiled as he listened to the muffled discussion in London. ‘Tilly wants to know if the clothes you bought Estelle were OK?’ she sighed.

‘Yes, about that. Please tell her that if she wants a pair of crotchless knickers in future, she can use her own credit card.’

‘Excuse me?’

Poe explained what had happened. Flynn laughed for five whole minutes.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s not you who’s out five hundred quid. No way can I submit my receipt now. It’ll be round the unit within a day. Anyway, what’s happening?’

‘Tilly’s age-progression software produced a likeness she’s happy with and Mathers has circulated it. It’ll be on the news later but we were too late for this morning’s papers.’

‘Temple Express Pharmacy?’

‘We went there as soon as you’d left. Got the MD out of bed and he let us look at everything. We were right, it was Christopher Goodson.’

‘The delivery driver?’

‘Yes. The MD was shown the age-progression likeness and he confirmed it. Said he was a model employee. Kept himself to himself. Never socialised outside of work but wasn’t so much of a weirdo that his colleagues talked about him.’

‘And the address they had for him?’

‘As we suspected. False.’

‘Mathers is staking out Temple Express Pharmacy?’

‘For what it’s worth. He’s never going back there.’

‘That press conference was a bloody disaster,’ Poe said. ‘Exactly what happens when senior managers get involved in operational decisions.’

‘You can’t blame her, Poe.’

‘I don’t blame her – I blame her commander. If he’d held his nerve for one more day we’d have had Beck in custody by now. He’d have turned up for his scheduled shift, right into our arms. Game over.’

‘She knows. Her commander knows. There’ll be an inquiry after all this and because you’d advised Mathers to hold off, she put it in writing. He overruled her and she has the email to prove it.’

Poe grunted in satisfaction. At least the right person would be held accountable.

‘Right, I’m off,’ he said. ‘I’m going to grab a few hours on the couch this afternoon. Make sure I’m rested before the night shift.’

‘I want you checking in every two hours, Poe.’