Page 42 of The Final Vow (Washington Poe #7)

Poe’s mobile rang fifteen minutes later. It was McCloud. He didn’t mince his words. ‘Did you get him, ma’am?’

‘We did.’

‘Anyone hurt?’

‘No. Textbook. We smashed in his front door and caught him unawares. He was heating up some soup.’

‘And?’

McCloud didn’t immediately answer.

‘He’s something , Poe,’ she said eventually. ‘But he isn’t our sniper.’ She sighed then added, ‘I think you’d better come and see.’

Gilbert lived in a pebble-dashed terraced house. It was new, not one of the munitions factory houses. It was neat and tidy. The doorstep was black. Looked to have been freshly painted.

McCloud met them at the front door. ‘I think this is more your area of expertise than mine,’ she said.

She led them inside. Gilbert was perched on the edge of a blood-red sofa.

He was in cuffs and leg restraints. Even sitting down, Poe could tell he wasn’t tall enough to be their sniper.

And even if he had been, Gilbert was squinting like he was Mr Magoo.

A pair of thick spectacles were on his coffee table, out of reach.

No way did someone with dodgy eyesight consistently hit targets over 1,000 metres away.

Two cops stood behind him, one stood facing him. They weren’t taking any chances.

‘What have you got?’ Poe said to McCloud.

‘Follow me,’ she said.

She walked out of the house and into the back garden.

Gilbert had a shed. A new one. It was green and large, about the size of a single-car garage.

Poe wondered if he’d had to get permission to put it up or whether it had been there when he moved in.

If he’d bought the house because it had a shed.

It had sturdy doors and an even sturdier padlock.

McCloud gloved up and took a key from an evidence bag.

She unlocked the padlock then put the key into a fresh evidence bag.

She reached for the light switch. Turned it on.

Poe’s first reaction was, ‘Blimey.’ Bradshaw’s was, ‘Gosh.’

The shed was neat and clean and organised.

It was also a church to role-playing games.

Poe took it all in. Noticed that it wasn’t just role-playing games Gilbert collected.

There were boxes and boxes of games he had played as a kid.

Monopoly , Risk , Battleships , Buckaroo!

A hundred other games he hadn’t seen before.

‘Weird, huh?’ McCloud said.

Poe took his time answering. Thought about where he’d just come from.

‘It’s weird, but it’s not dangerous weird, ma’am,’ he said.

‘He’s a collector rather than a compulsive accumulator.

Everything will have been carefully curated.

If you search his house, there’ll be an inventory or a catalogue somewhere.

It’ll probably detail where each piece was acquired. ’

McCloud nodded. ‘There is,’ she said. ‘We found a pile of them in one of the boxes underneath the workbench.’

Poe studied the bench. It was thick, wooden and clean. It looked as though Gilbert had been repairing an old Connect 4 grid. There was a tube of superglue and some small tools beside it. Poe picked up a yellow token and dropped it into the grid.

‘I used to love playing this with my dad,’ he said. He added a red. ‘He always beat me, though.’ He added another yellow. ‘What about you, Tilly? I bet you never got beaten at this.’

‘I didn’t like Connect 4 , Poe,’ Bradshaw said. ‘It’s a solved game.’

‘A what?’

‘A solved game. It means if both players play perfectly, the game’s outcome can be accurately predicted. In Connect 4 , the player who goes first should always win.’

McCloud cleared her throat.

‘Sorry, ma’am,’ Poe said. ‘Tilly’s quite hard to keep on task sometimes.’

Bradshaw rolled her eyes. Tutted.

McCloud reached under the desk. Lifted out a rigid plastic box. HANDLE WITH CARE – HUMAN ORGAN IN TRANSIT was printed on the side. Big red letters. It was plugged into the mains. Poe could see a green light on the top. McCloud opened the lid and took a step back.

‘It was when we opened this that I called you in,’ McCloud said. ‘It’s temperature controlled and I didn’t want to unplug it until you’d taken a look.’

Poe peered inside. It was full of plastic boxes, the same shape and size as jewellery trays.

Poe gloved up and lifted one out. It was a microscope slide box.

Poe opened it. Each slot held a glass slide – a thin flat piece of glass with an even thinner sheet of cover glass.

Each slide had a white square for labelling.

And they were all labelled.

Poe lifted out one of the slides and held it up to the light. Trapped between the two sheets of glass was a hair.

‘Is that a . . . ?’

‘Pubic hair?’ McCloud finished for him. ‘That’s certainly what it looks like, Sergeant Poe. Every single slide has one. They’re all neatly labelled with initials and dates. We assume the initials are the person’s name and the date is when it was collected.’

Poe put it down and lifted out another. Another pubic hair. A different initial and date.

‘You can see why I thought this was a job for the Serious Crime Analysis Section.’

Poe didn’t say anything. He put the slide back in the box and cast his eyes around the shed. He saw what he’d expected to see in the corner. ‘You can let him go, ma’am,’ he said.

‘These aren’t a serial killer’s trophies?’ McCloud said. She looked disappointed. As if catching a serial killer would make up for not catching the sniper.

‘He’s not a serial killer, ma’am,’ Poe said.

‘What is he then?’

‘He’s a fly fisherman,’ he said. ‘Lots of them believe that the pheromones in women’s pubic hair help attract fish. They tie their flies with them. If you go online there are whole forums discussing which is the most effective ethnicity, what time of the month is the best time to harvest.’

Poe gestured to the slide boxes. The top one held sixty slides and there were eight boxes. Assuming every slide held a pubic hair, that was four hundred and eighty. He shook his head in amazement. The things people did . . .

‘As Gilbert works at the hospital, he’ll have had ready access to .

. . material. A large part of his job is taking patients to surgery, to X-ray, to a whole host of hospital departments, and a lot of them will be wearing those stupid gowns.

The dignity strippers that don’t cover the arse.

When the patient gets out of the wheelchair or the bed, nine times out of ten, they’ll leave one of these little dudes behind.

He’ll have slipped it into an envelope and brought it home. It’s creepy but I doubt it’s illegal.’

‘This is a new low for me,’ McCloud said, shaking her head. ‘It’s hard enough being a woman in this job. It doesn’t matter what I achieve now – I’ll be forever known as the fucking pubethief catcher.’

Poe didn’t know what to say. He thought McCloud was being hard on herself. It was a mistake anyone could have made. But she was right: cops were merciless when it came to things like this. They had to be. Laughing at the silly stuff helped get them through the dark.

So he kept his own counsel. Thought about how the sniper was still out there, and how they were no closer to catching him.