Page 29 of The Final Vow

Poe shrugged. ‘I don’t, but it’s not something Commander Mathers will dismiss out of hand.’

Archie shook his head again. ‘If Jools was the intended target, it wasn’t for revenge.’

‘A warning maybe?’

‘No.’

‘You seem very sure.’

Archie sighed. ‘In the past, I have had to occasionally issue warnings. An unpleasant but necessary business strategy. And the one golden rule is that the person receiving the warning has toknowit’s a warning.’

‘And you don’t see one?’

‘I don’t. It’s the same with revenge. If it really is a dish best served cold, if the sins of the father have been visited upon the daughter, why hide it? Why not let me know? Add to my pain. Would that not make sense?’

‘It would,’ Poe conceded. ‘I’ll still need that list of names.’

‘How far back do you want me to go?’

‘Since you were a child. Grudges and slights don’t have a shelf life, they fester like fermented cabbage.’

Archie picked up his smartphone. Thumbed a text to someone. Whooshed it into the ether. ‘You’ll have it by the end of the day.’

‘Thank you,’ Poe said.

‘Don’t waste your time on this, Sergeant Poe. Nor you, Miss Bradshaw.’

‘Almost everything Poe asks me to do is a waste of my time,’ Bradshaw said.

‘Thanks, Tilly.’

‘You’re welcome, Poe. But don’t worry, Mr Arreghini; on the face of it, wasting my time is what I do. And that’s as it should be. Wasting time is what makes up the bulk of science.’

‘It is?’ Arreghini said.

‘Science is the pursuit of knowledge,’ Bradshaw said. ‘And ninety-nine per cent of that pursuit ends in failure. Most of the knowledge gained is hownotto do something.’

‘It sounds like a thankless task, Miss Bradshaw.’

Bradshaw’s eyes shone. ‘Oh, no, science iswonderful. Science is truth. And each time we fail, we are one step closer to finding that truth. So, when Poe asks me to correlate your list of enemies with everything we’ve gathered so far in the investigation, I’ll do it with a song in my heart and a smile on my lips. Because I won’t be wasting my time, I’ll be discovering one more way heisn’tselecting his victims. Do you understand?’

‘I certainly see why you and Sergeant Poe are such a formidable team,’ Archie said. ‘So, tell me, Miss Bradshaw. Where wouldyoustart looking for this man?’

‘Wherever Poe tells me to look.’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Poe said. ‘We have no forensics, no motive. No profile worth speaking of, and – believe me when I tell you this – Tilly is the best there is at that stuff. Other than this being the second time he’s targeted a wedding, we have nothing to go on at all.’

Bradshaw coughed nervously. ‘Actually, Poe, that’s not quite true.’

Chapter 22

‘Tell me again, Tilly,’ Poe said. ‘And for fu . . . flip’s sake, use smaller words this time. And don’t say central limit theorem again. No one but you understands what that is.’

‘In the sixteenth century,’ Bradshaw said, ‘Gerolamo Cardano, the Italian polymath, introduced binomial coefficients to the Western world. He—’

‘Tilly,’ Flynn warned. ‘Will you please, for the love of God, say it normally?’

‘Cheese and crackers, you guys are dumb,’ Bradshaw mumbled. She thought for a second. ‘Do you know what dice are? You might have used them if you’ve played snakes and ladders? Or Monopoly?’