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Poe stared at his empty glass.

‘You see, this is why I drink beer. If something’s going to taste like piss then the least it can do is get me drunk.’

‘I’ve been thinking of competitive kite flying, Poe.’

‘Who hasn’t?’ he grumbled.

‘It’s a real thing,’ she continued. ‘They have leagues and everything. Some competitions are about precision flying where they have to demonstrate compulsory figures as laid down by the judging panel. Another discipline is a freestyle interpretation of a piece of music. This is called a kite ballet. Both disciplines can be individual, in pairs or in teams.’

‘That’s a weird thing to know a lot about,’ Poe said.

‘Jeremy, one of my—’

‘Mole People.’

‘—team,’ she said without missing a step, ‘has been flying kites since he was a child.’

‘I flew kites when I was a child as well,’ Poe said. ‘Thing is, I stopped when I wasn’t a child. You know, like adults are supposed to do.’

‘Anyway, Mr Cranky Pants, I called Jeremy earlier—’

‘Called or emailed?’

Bradshaw never spoke to people face-to-face if an electronic message would do.

‘OK, I emailed Jeremy earlier and he told me that the kite in the tree looks very much like a stunt kite. Quite expensive as these things go.’

Poe sat up straight. This was more like it. They might have started out talking about the specific gravity content of piss in bar snacks but they were now firmly back in police territory.

‘And did Jeremy say where you might buy such a thing?’

‘Too many to list. He did say that the kite’s logo was probably bespoke, though. Most serious enthusiasts have their own design, apparently. Because we don’t have a great view of it, and because we had to leave the kite in situ, I’ll have to run the photographs you took through an object-based image analysis program.’

‘What’s that do?’

‘It will break the photograph into pixels then group them into homogenous objects. Each object has statistics associated with them, like shape, geometry, context and texture, which can assist with its identification.’

‘Which means?’

‘We’ll get a report containing a number of composite images with likelihood expressed as percentage points.’

‘The program can predict what the logo is?’

‘With a percentage point indicating likelihood beside each one.’

‘That’s one clever program,’ Poe said. ‘Yours, I take it?’

Bradshaw shook her head. ‘No. This is an open-source one I’ve adapted.’

‘When we get your report we’ll need to speak to someone,’ he said. ‘There’s bound to be some boring bastard out there who knows about this stuff.’

Bradshaw shook her head again.

‘So rude,’ she said.

Chapter 23

When Poe stepped out of Herdwick Croft the following morning, Shap Fell looked like someone had thrown a duvet over it. Snowflakes the size of bottle tops were still falling. They had softly covered the ground, changing the harsh ancient moorland into something altogether more welcoming.