Page 131

‘What if I hadn’t noticed the kite?’ Poe asked. ‘Or the printer test page you’d planted in his bin?’

‘I had contingencies to make sure you ended up at Robert Cowell’s house.’

‘Let me guess: an anonymous phone call?’

‘Something like that. You’d have found the document I planted in his bin eventually. If you missed that one, I’d have planted another.’

Poe had thought the Immolation Man was the ultimate puppet master. Hartley-Graham took things to the next level. They’d all danced to whatever tune he’d played …

Hartley-Graham said that, while they’d been running around Cumbria and the north-east, he’d been getting used to Atkinson’s medical mask and spending time in his wheelchair. Immersing himself in his new legend.

‘How long did you keep him alive before you killed him?’ Poe asked.

‘Four days,’ Hartley-Graham replied. ‘I needed to become him. That could only happen with an in-depth interrogation.’

‘Something you learned in army intelligence.’

Hartley-Graham nodded. ‘I then found a guy who’d been on the jury. He did some stupid interview with the press a year ago. I paid him ten grand for the names of the not-guilty jurors.’

Poe didn’t say anything. Nightingale’s team had already charged the man who’d leaked the names.

He told Poe how he’d practised with the rigid collodion, the solution used on actors to create the effects of scarred skin. Played about with different shades until he had the look of an acid-attack survivor. He explained that by the time Poe arrived on Montague Island, he’d been using it so much that his skin was wrinkled and puckered even when he wasn’t wearing it.

Poe asked how he kept his client up to date with his progress. As he’d expected he didn’t understand any of Hartley-Graham’s technical explanations. It didn’t matter – Bradshaw was watching and would provide him with any supplementary questions. He wrote everything down anyway, mainly so he didn’t have to look at him.

Something he said made him pause.

Something about his client’s username. He’d said it was anonymous earlier, but he hadn’t actually told him what it was.

He asked him to repeat it.

Hartley-Graham did.

Poe wrote it down then underlined it.

It was a number.

8844.

He tapped it into his phone. In less than a second Google returned over seventeen million results.

8844 was a form used by the IRS, the American tax authorities.

It was a Lego helicopter set.

It was part of the genomic sequence for a protein found in a human chromosome.

‘This username, is it randomly generated?’ Poe said.

‘No. The user chooses their own.’

‘So there’d be nothing to stop someone from calling themselves say … James Bond or Basil Fawlty?’

‘Nothing at all. Obviously no one uses anything that could identify them. It’s why random number streams are so popular.’

‘A bit like numbered bank accounts?’

‘I guess.’