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Another text: It’s OK, Washington.

His jaw hardened.

Washington Poe swallowed his rising bile, got out of his car and walked towards hell.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

What was left of the fog-trapped sun was behind the farmhouse. The front was cast in long shadows. It was as silent as the sheeted dead. Although the air was cooling, Poe was sweating; it ran down his spine and pooled in the small of his back.

When he was seventy yards away he stopped. In front of him, and less than forty yards away, were rectangular shapes. The shadows made it difficult to see what they were. They must have been placed in his path deliberately, like stage props. He approached them.

Coffins.

Three of them.

Oh no . . . Surely not?

His forehead knotted with tension. They were laid out on clean blankets. Poe ran his fingers along the warm pine of the first one. The polished brass fittings gleamed.

He found his phone’s torch function and shone the light on the brass plates. His heart felt as though it would burst.

Three names that would forever remain etched into his soul.

Michael Hilton.

Andrew Smith.

Scott Johnston.

The three boys were missing no more.

Poe snapped some photographs, then looked at the bleak and silent farmhouse.

Where the fourth boy waited for him.

* * *

Poe walked towards Black Hollow Farm. The front door was made of oak, and was dense and heavy. It was mounted on huge forged hinges, built in an age when things were only made once. The windows were shuttered with the same heavy wood. The natural courtyard was well-trodden shale.

It looked more like a fortified keep than a domestic home.

As he got closer, a familiar chemical stench assaulted his nostrils.

Petrol . . .

Poe’s stomach lurched. The back of his throat began burning. Judging by the pervasiveness of the smell, the farmhouse was primed like an incendiary bomb. It was time to run like hell, but not before he found the two children. He looked towards the ten-cell prisoner-escort lorry. The wheels had been removed. If the farmhouse burned, the lorry went up too.

Were the children in there? He headed towards it.

One of the farm’s wooden shutters opened.

Reid appeared at the first-floor window.

‘This our High Noon, Kylian?’ Poe said. ‘Or should I call you Mathew?’ He kept on walking towards the truck. He had to find Swift’s grandchildren before anything else could happen.

Reid said, ‘I don’t suppose I can ask you to stop?’

Poe entered the sheepfold and walked up the metal steps to the mobile prison. He tried the door but it was locked. A keypad, black, with silver numbers, kept whoever was inside from getting out.