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Chapter 20

Witha meeting arranged with Doyle’s family solicitor for the following day, Poe decided to go home. He collected Edgar, his springer spaniel, from his neighbour, Victoria, and bought a fish supper from the Shap Chippy. He pulled up at the Shap Wells Hotel and Spa, where he had a longstanding arrangement to use their car park. Herdwick Croft was two miles from the nearest road and could only be accessed on foot or by the quad bike he kept at the hotel. Poe usually walked – it gave him space to think and Edgar got a decent run – but it would be pitch black soon and Shap Fell had teeth.

Poe hadn’t been home for a week and when he crested the last hill and saw his dilapidated shepherd’s croft, like a massage for the mind, tension he’d been unaware of eased slightly.

Herdwick Croft stuck to Shap Fell like a particularly stubborn wart. It was two hundred years old, but looked as though it had been there forever. The walls had been constructed from pink granite, formed 400 million years ago before being cut from the nearby quarry and sent all over the world. Shap pink granite could be seen in some of Britain’s grandest buildings – from Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh to Saint Paul’s in London. The granite at Herdwick Croft had been exposed to the elements for so long the pink crystals were no longer visible. A crust of lime-green lichen, thicker than a coat of paint, had flourished and spread and his home was now the same colour as Shap Fell. It was as much a part of the landscape as the trees and the sheep. It had faced down the Beast from the East, the Pest from the West, and a thousand other storms with little more than a shrug and a ‘Is that the best you can do?’ attitude. In all the time Poe had lived there, not even a slate tile had come loose.

It wasn’t so much Poe’s happy place as his refuge. The place where he felt safe. Bradshaw had once described Herdwick Croft as his Fortress of Solitude and he’d made the mistake of asking what that meant. He had then been forced to sit through a tedious film where a man wearing a blue onesie and red underpants made time go backwards by flying around the Earth really fast. Bradshaw had explained the pseudoscience behind it – something to do with him flying faster than the speed of light – but then spent an hour debunking it. She’d said that the only way time could go backwards was if there was a break in the spacetime fabric, and that would take infinite force, something that couldn’t exist in a finite universe. Poe had asked her what the hell she was yabbering on about.

By the time he had lit his wood-burning stove and fired up his generator, his chips were at that perfect temperature. Not too hot, not too cold. Warm and mushy, dowsed with sharp vinegar and liberally covered with sea salt, they were as comforting as comfort food got.

Edgar stared at him, a thin thread of drool hanging from his bottom lip. He gently whined.

‘Stare as much as you want, mate – you’re not getting any,’ Poe said, his mouth full of battered cod, passing him a chunk of fish even as he said it.

The spaniel threw back his head, wolfed it down like a gannet and went straight back to begging.

‘Greedy bastard.’

After he’d finished eating, Poe fixed himself a mug of strong tea and sat beside his now sleeping spaniel.

‘What’s going on, Edgar?’ he said. ‘How can someone kill Estelle’s dad then disappear without leaving a mark in the snow?’ The spaniel snored. ‘And how did she end up with gunshot residue on her hands but not her sleeves?’

Poe opened a fresh notebook and jotted down what he thought would be the CPS’s lines of attack. He rated the strength of each out of five.

1.Firearms discharge residue on her hands. 4/5

2.A window was broken from the inside, not the outside. Appears to be staged. 3/5

3.Her journey home took 30–40 minutes longer than it should have. 1/5

4.Motivation: Estelle’s just been written back into her father’s will. Slim but juries like to know ‘why’ something happened. 3/5

5.Unblemished snow proved no one else was in the house when Elcid Doyle was killed. 5/5

When he’d finished he flipped the page and started a new list, rating possible counter defences. He would show it to Estelle’s solicitor tomorrow.

1.FDR tests give false positives (Tilly to help). Should be a stronger defence but juries like forensic evidence. They trust it. 2/5

2.Elcid Doyle has clearly been murdered and if Estelle didn’t do it, someone else did. Said person also staged the burglary. Getting the jury to go along with the ‘someone else did it’ defence will be difficult. Check Estelle’s barrister is already rehearsing it. 3/5

3.Estelle’s journey taking longer. Irrelevant. Any half-decent barrister will explain this away. I can come up with ten reasons and I’m tired and full of chips. 4/5

4.The rebuttal of the CPS’s claim therewas motivation will have to wait until I’ve spoken to the solicitor. Will give it a provisional score of 3/5, the same as the CPS’s.

5.The snow is the load-bearing evidence in this case. They’ll play DCI Taiyoung Lee’s video evidence and show the snow around house was pristine and footprint free. Unless we can explain this, the ‘someone else did it’ defence can’t be used. 0/5

When Poe had finished, he totted up the scores. The CPS led by five points and Poe thought he was being harsh on them. He reckoned they were in a far stronger position than that. He sighed and reached for his phone. It was late, but he knew Flynn would still be awake.

‘Got two minutes, boss?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

He laid out the CPS’s case and how Doyle’s barrister might be able to respond.

‘You’ve got nothing,’ Flynn said when he’d finished. ‘Worse than nothing, actually.’

‘Worse than nothing? I don’t understand. We both know FDR is shit evidence and I can throw enough confusion at their timeline to make them drop it. And motivation always comes down to which side has the best barrister.’