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‘It’s right that you should have second thoughts, Tilly, and I don’t want to do this any more than you but I’m not sure we have enough time.’

‘You need a weapon then.’

She was right; he needed something. People who knew how to use a garrotte knew how to use other weapons.

His car was kitted out for winter with a shovel and rope in the boot. There was even a small pickaxe. He wished he’d had the foresight to bring it. What he’d give for a pickaxe handle right now. Like a baseball bat but with a lump of metal on the end.

He thrust his hand in his pockets – in an emergency he could use his keys. Grab the main bunch to put some weight in his fist – like holding a roll of ten-pence pieces – and leave one or two poking out between his fingers to act as a knuckleduster. A fistful of keys jabbed into the sensitive muscles around the eyes would spoil anyone’s day.

‘Bollocks,’ he said. He’d left his keys in his car.

He wondered what Bradshaw had in her bag. She had a laptop and it was a Mac and made of metal. He certainly wouldn’t want to get cracked on the side of the head with one. He dismissed it. You could maybe start a fight with one but he doubted you could end one. It was too unwieldy.

His thoughts raced back to his time in the army and a day spent in the classroom discussing improvised weapons. The difference between a thing and a weapon was intent, the instructor had told them. He’d explained that when the police began searching football hooligans at the turnstiles they’d had to find new ways of getting weapons into the ground. They’d had to improvise. So, instead of knuckledusters and coshes, they brought newspapers into the stadiums. Once inside they folded them until the newspaper was a wedge-shaped club. Bash someone with a Millwall Brick and they didn’t get up for a while.

Poe looked down.

He didn’t have an improvised brick but he didn’t need one. He was standing among a pile of rocks.

Big rocks. Small rocks. All potential weapons. Primitive but effective. Probably the first weapon in the history of the human race.

He picked one up and tested it in his hand. Swung it a couple of times. It would have to do.

Bradshaw watched him. He expected her to tell him that hitting someone with a rock was wrong. It was, but he’d rather have a rock and not need it …

‘Do you still have those green socks, Poe?’

He stared at her. Knew she wasn’t being Bradshaw this time, she was trying to help.

‘In the jacket you’re wearing.’

Bradshaw reached into the pockets and removed one. It was wringing wet.

‘Did you do physics at school? Specifically the relationship between acceleration and velocity?’

He was about to shake his head. Tell her he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

But all of a sudden he did.

Chapter 78

Poe had the eye of an ex-infantryman and he’d already plotted an approach that got within fifty yards of Atkin

son’s bungalow without him having to leave dead ground – ground that couldn’t be seen from the western tip of the island. Unless someone had watched him arrive on the island he’d be approaching under cover. Even with his aching muscles the dash across the last fifty yards would take no more than fifteen seconds.

It was tempting. It really was.

But … he wasn’t a soldier any more; he was a police officer. And police officers didn’t skulk around in the bushes; they walked up the garden path and knocked on the door.

And right now, Poe needed to be a police officer.

The moonlight was pale and delicate and, although it painted the island grey, it was more than enough to navigate by. The grass was wet and quiet underfoot. Poe took the route he’d taken previously. He passed the outline of the isolation hospital and he passed the five empty cottages. He startled the same rabbits and they bolted into the same burrows.

This time he didn’t turn to see if they’d reappeared after he’d passed.

His eyes never left the bungalow.

He was soon stepping over the remnants of the dry stone wall that marked the border of Atkinson’s land. The front of the bungalow, the side Atkinson never used, was in full view, all neglected and forlorn.