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‘I need to get off and ring van Zyl, Poe, but before I go is there anything else you want to know?’

‘There is, Steph,’ he said. ‘Something that’s been bothering me ever since I woke up.’

She inclined her head.

‘How the fuck am I still alive?’

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Flynn had some calls to make first and he needed his dressings changed. They agreed to discuss it again in an hour.

‘The heat was cracking stones and boiling glass,’ Poe said when she returned. He lifted his bandaged hand. ‘Even touching a body was enough to cause third-degree burns.’

‘We know,’ Flynn said. ‘I’ve seen the preliminary fire report. The house was drenched in that accelerant. It was little more than an empty shell by the time the fire went out.’

‘Went out?’

‘The fire engines were there within half an hour of getting the call but they couldn’t get near enough to the farm because—’

‘—of the stones blocking the road.’ So that’s why they’d been dragged there. ‘Who called them? And half an hour seems too long for me to have been lying in a burning building.’

‘Who do you think called them?’

Poe thought about it. He doubted Reid had. He’d planned to die in the furnace he’d created. Ashes to ashes and all that. And no one else had known where he’d been going.

Except someone had . . .

He remembered the headlights winding through the fog to the farmhouse. He hadn’t seen who was driving; Reid had set fire to the building as soon as he saw them approaching, but someone had been coming.

Other than Bradshaw, everyone else would have assumed he’d headed back to Shap Wells after leaving the Montague Price crime scene. But she couldn’t have worked out where he was.

Could she?

He shrugged.

‘The same person who dragged you out of there by the scruff of your neck: Tilly. Our real-life hero of the hour.’

‘But . . . how did she know how to find me?’

‘Your BlackBerry.’

The little minx! When Ashley Barrett had made him sign for it, he’d explained that the Protect tracker app had been turned on. On the journey up to Cumbria Poe had asked Bradshaw to turn it off. She’d told him she had.

‘When you’d asked her to disable it, she didn’t know you well enough so she only told you she had. Thank God she hadn’t. When she realised you were heading off to do something stupid, she followed you.’

‘How did she get to the farmhouse? She can’t drive.’

‘I think your insubordination must be rubbing off on her. She rang me to say you’d gone off on one. I said I’d be with her soon and that she was to stay put. She said it was urgent. She got a lift with uniform back to the hotel, and then using her own phone to track yours, she followed you up there. She reckons she was about half an hour behind you.’

‘Still doesn’t answer—’

‘Your quad, Poe. She drove your quad all the way up.’

Jesus . . .

Poe was lost for words.

‘Is she OK?’ It didn’t seem to convey the magnitude of what she’d done for him. What she’d risked for him.