Page 17 of The Final Vow (Washington Poe #7)

The man in the ghillie suit stared at the wedding party through the Schmidt the idiot who called himself the Curator; the idiot the press called the Botanist. A bunch of other idiots.

She explained the science in the way only Bradshaw could: she made something complicated sound even more complicated.

She spent ten minutes on Benford’s law, a mathematical model about real-life sets of numerical data.

But she also told everyone about how they’d met, and how their friendship had formed and blossomed.

She said she’d never had a friend until she met Poe, now she had five – Poe, Flynn, Doyle, Poe’s nearest neighbour Victoria Hume, and Edgar – and how she’d never thought she’d ever go to a wedding, never mind give a best man’s speech.

‘And I don’t even have a penis!’ she’d said excitedly.

She explained, in detail, why pasta wouldn’t be served at the wedding breakfast. ‘Poe says it doesn’t taste of anything and he can’t go to the toilet properly afterwards.

’ She mentioned Edgar seventeen times. She said he didn’t drink enough water twice.

At one point Flynn was laughing so hard she had to go outside.

She went on to describe how he still had PTSD after their last major case but somehow made it funny – ‘He wakes up screaming so loud it’s as if he’s accidentally drunk low-alcohol beer’ – then finished with a delightful anecdote about how Poe had been drinking breast milk when he found out Doyle had been arrested for her father’s murder.

Bradshaw sat down to thunderous applause.

Poe doubted there’d been a best man’s speech like it in recorded history.

He smiled at his friend and nodded his approval.

She breathed a sigh of relief and gave him a goofy wave in return.

He was reaching for his fourteenth cube of belly pork when his phone began to ring. So did Flynn’s and Bradshaw’s.

Doyle stopped laughing. Flynn answered her mobile and listened for less than a minute. Her face darkened. She hung up and looked at Poe.

‘There’s been another one?’ Doyle asked.

Flynn nodded.

‘Go,’ Doyle said. ‘All of you.’