Page 50 of The Final Vow

Poe nodded. ‘Really,’ he said.

Chapter 39

‘He’s showed us his arse,’ Poe said.

‘What a delightful expression, Poe,’ Flynn said. ‘Please don’t ever use it again.’

They’d pulled over at the next motorway services and switched seats. Bradshaw was a safe driver, but Poe was afastdriver. As soon as they were back on the M6, Bradshaw had set up a conference call between them, Mathers and Flynn.

‘All this time we’ve been dismissing the possibility of him hiding one murder among a bunch of other murders.’

‘We have,’ Mathers said. ‘Were we wrong to? Did it have something to do with Archie Arreghini after all?’

Poe glanced at Bradshaw. ‘No, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I’m confident that the murder of Jools Arreghini is unrelated to her father’s business empire.’

Bradshaw nodded.Whatdidshe know about Matt Towler?

‘But you think he’s hidden a murder in among, how many now, nineteen?’

‘I don’t think that either, ma’am.’

‘This isn’t twenty fucking questions, Poe,’ Flynn snapped. ‘Tell us what you think.’

‘He was hiding alocation, ma’am,’ Poe said. ‘All the other murders were just to give him cover.’

‘You mean Gretna Green?’

‘I do, ma’am. The other locations were randomly selected with twenty-sided dice, but Gretna Green was selected using cognitive functioning. In other words, hechoseit. For reasons unknown, the town is important to him.’

Mathers took a moment. She didn’t dive in with unanswerable questions like ‘Why?’ Instead, she asked the only question that mattered: ‘How long to collate the mailing lists you gathered today?’

Poe nodded in approval. A location and a bunch of names to cross-reference against that location was progress.

Bradshaw checked her laptop. ‘It’ll be finished in approximately seventeen minutes, Commander Mathers.’ She clocked theWELCOME TO CUMBRIAsign. ‘Make thattwenty-threeminutes, we’ve just entered District Twelve.’

‘District . . . ?’

‘It’s what Tilly calls Cumbria, ma’am,’ Poe explained. ‘I don’t know what it means.’

‘I have daughters, Poe,’ Mathers said. ‘It’s a reference toThe Hunger Games. It’s considered the least advanced of the thirteen districts of Panem.’

‘They don’t even have fresh jackfruit here, Commander Mathers,’ Bradshaw said.

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ Poe said testily.

Cumbria was never going to have lightning-quick broadband or saturation mobile phone coverage. There were too many mountains, too many valleys. And the countydidappear to revel in its failure to embrace certain twenty-first-century civilities. Modern farming techniques were not only shunned; in the National Park area of Cumbria, they were actively legislated against. Stepping into Cumbria could, superficially at least, feel like you were stepping back in time. It appeared old-fashioned. Backward even. Poe wasn’t surprised to hear you couldn’t get fresh jackfruit. Cumbria was a pastoral county. It farmed livestock, not crops. Which meant the county that until recently thought strawberry yoghurt was a ‘fancy London pudding’ was unlikely to embrace the idea of substituting lamb with a stringy yellow fruit.

‘How many names on the list, Tilly?’ Mathers asked.

‘Over a million, Commander Mathers.’

‘And how long to get information about the population of Gretna and Gretna Green so we can start cross-referencing it with the mailing lists?’

‘I already have the online records, but the physical records will need to be collected in person. Some of them won’t be online.’

‘Like?’

‘Hotel guestbooks for people who paid cash. Wedding venue records. Museum and visitor attraction comments books. That kind of thing.’