‘He wasn’t?’
‘No, because he’d already had them.’
‘So what was he supposed to do?’
Poe stared at her for several moments. Watched her carefully.
‘He was to kill it,’ he said quietly.
Jessica took a drink of wine. ‘Bullshit,’ she said.
‘He was to record himself disposing of the body,’ Poe continued. ‘Somewhere it could never be found. On receipt of the recording his client would release the last payment.’
Flynn’s sister said nothing. She seemed to be sobering up, however.
‘Hartley-Graham planned to dump Scrapper in the Irish Sea, halfway between Montague Island and the Isle of Man.’
‘And you believe this Oliver Hartley-Graham? He was probably just trying to shock you, Poe.’
‘I believe him.’
‘Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought.’
‘Am I? Explain this then: why was there an untethered lobster pot full of rocks in the boat he planned to escape in?’
‘I have no idea, Poe. Perhaps he was trying to catch lobst—’
‘He told me he’d been instructed to feed Steph’s baby to the crabs, Jessica.’
He paused. Wanted to see if the mental image elicited a response.
It didn’t.
‘I threw the lobster pot as far into the sea as I could,’ he said. ‘I then gave everyone a more palatable version of the truth. No way can Steph ever know.’
‘This is a nice story, Poe, but I’m getting another drink,’ she said. She tried to get up but fell back down.
‘Why’d you do it, Jessica?’ He didn’t raise his voice. Kept it neutral. He could have been asking why she preferred green-topped milk to red-topped.
‘Have a drink, Poe!’ she said. ‘Everything’s OK when you’ve had a drink.’
Poe stood. He walked over to the mountaineering wall. The altar to her obsession. He stood in front of one picture in particular. It was next to her pride and joy: the Tenzing Norgay mountaineering axe. The photograph was of a group of Chinese mountaineers sitting around a fire at a base camp. All mugs of tea and smiles. It had been taken in 1960 and documented the country’s first successful Everest attempt.
‘This is where you went wrong,’ he said, pointing at the photograph. ‘If you hadn’t tried to be clever, if you’d used a randomly generated username, who knows, we may never have caught up with you.’
Jessica Flynn looked thoughtful.
‘But you didn’t, did you? You chose the height of Everest according to the Chinese.’ He pointed at the photograph’s annotation. ‘The Chinese don’t accept the official height of 8848 metres. They believe the height should be to the top of the rock, not the top of the snow. The Chinese say that the official height of Everest is 8844 metres. Like it says here.’
Jessica’s eyes narrowed.
‘That’s it?’ she scoffed. ‘You came all this way with a silly little number?’
‘Tilly did the odds for me. The chances of someone choosing a random four-digit number that corresponds with the one in your flat is … how did she put it? … statistically unlikely.’
It was the first lie he’d told. He hadn’t involved Bradshaw in this. He hadn’t involved anyone.
Jessica waved him away. ‘I don’t care what the odds are, it’s a coincidence. I live in a rented apartment and occupy a minor position in an investment bank, where the fuck am I supposed to get three million pounds from?’