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‘But if he was watching his sister then, how could he have been …?’ The chief constable didn’t finish her sentence. Poe reckoned she was beginning to understand Nightingale’s anger.

‘How could he have been hiding in among the Midnight Mass congregation at a church on the outskirts of Barrow-in-Furness?’

The chief constable nodded.

‘Obviously he couldn’t, ma’am.’

‘So either someone else is involved or your Special Agent Melody Lee is right: Robert is being set up as a patsy.’

‘And there’s still someone out there, killing people to an agenda we haven’t come close to figuring out …’

Chapter 51

After the chief constable and the assistant chief had left to form a media strategy, and Bradshaw had left to log the evidence with the High-Tech Forensic Crime Unit, Nightingale and Poe talked around the edges of alternative explanations.

‘It’s possible Robert didn’t hide among the Midnight Mass congregation. That he filmed his sister then drove to Barrow and found a way to break into the church after the service had ended.’

‘It’s possible,’ Poe agreed.

‘But you don’t think so?’

‘I don’t, ma’am. From Carlisle it’s the best part of a two-hour drive to Barrow and, even if he had left as soon as he’d filmed the second video, he wouldn’t have had time to do what he needed.’

‘He could have left the fingers before Midnight Mass, I suppose,’ Nightingale said unconvincingly.

‘And no one noticed two fingers in the font?’ Poe said. ‘The font that eve

ryone in the congregation had to walk past.’

‘Fair point,’ she said. ‘So, you think Robert would have rather gone to prison for murders he hadn’t committed than show us the videos he’d taken of his sister?’

‘I absolutely think that,’ Poe said. ‘It also explains his “bitch” remark – he had the means to exonerate himself but he knew that he couldn’t use it.’

‘So when it became apparent that Robert wasn’t going to reveal that he’d been filming her, she decided she’d better help him out.’

‘Getting herself out of a jam in the process.’

‘What do we do now then?’ Nightingale asked.

‘I’d take the Cowells out of play and charge them for the abduction of the little girl. They’ll be safe and secure and we’ll know where they are.’

‘And then what? If there’s no link between the victims there’s nowhere to start.’

‘Not true,’ Poe said.

‘Go on.’

‘If we accept the possibility that we’re dealing with Melody Lee’s Curator, then we also have to accept the possibility that he’s hiding one murder in among three. We need to go deep into their lives, really deep. Maybe one of them did something that forced someone into hiring a hitman.’

‘That’s an awful lot of data to crunch.’

‘I have just the person for that,’ he said.

DC Dave Coughlan had gone from antagonist to Bradshaw’s biggest fan.

He’d set them up in a well-equipped, stench-free room off the main incident room. It had views of the old air ambulance helipad and fields beyond full of lowland sheep picking out what little grass hadn’t been covered by the recent blanket of snow.

A large-scale, detailed map of the county covered one of the walls. Another was filled with press clippings, photographs, reports and documents. It was a more formal version of the murder wall at Herdwick Croft. Poe had seen these before in complex investigations. Wily SIOs would set aside a room, always near the main incident room, where cops could wander in with a brew and view things in a less pressurised environment. Sometimes this sparked a memory or helped someone make a connection. Poe immediately felt at home.