Poe was woken by a debilitating headache. His sinuses had swollen during the night, reducing the amount of oxygen getting to his brain. He shut his eyes and tried to will the pain away. He reached out for the aspirins he kept by the side of his bed and dry crunched four tablets. He laid his head gently on the pillow and gave the drug time to work.
Turning his shower up as hot as it would go, he forced himself to stand under it until he no longer felt like he had a knife in his skull. He stepped out, wrapped himself in a towel and checked his phone. He had a text from Bradshaw.
The Mole People had found something.
Not only had they completed psychological profiles on the eleven men left on the list, they had also identified their preferred suspect.
His name was Robert Cowell. He was twenty-two years old and he lived with his sister in a rented house near the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle.
Poe ran downstairs, his headache forgotten, and studied his details on the murder wall.
He remembered Cowell. Yesterday he’d been close to putting a red line through him on the basis of a
ge alone. Twenty-two seemed far too young to be such an accomplished murderer.
Poe read the Mole People’s new information and didn’t find it compelling. None of the usual causal factors that turned a normal person into a premeditated killer were present. He’d had an unremarkable childhood. Didn’t break any records at school but didn’t stand out as a dumb-dumb. He didn’t play any sports, but that wasn’t the big deal it had been when Poe was at school. Nerds were in vogue now. His late teens had been uneventful too. He’d taken a job at a small website development company but had left after three years to go into business with his sister who had largely followed the same life pattern.
The Mole People’s analysis was that, although he was statistically their preferred suspect, Cowell was more likely to be a conspiracy theorist than a murderer. Bradshaw had calculated that there was less than a 10 per cent chance that he had the capacity to kill.
Less than a one-in-ten chance.
More than they’d had before but nowhere near enough.
Poe needed more information.
He picked up Bradshaw two hours before they were due at Carleton Hall for the semiotic studies briefing. Poe’s opinion hadn’t changed overnight: it was still a colossal waste of time. He’d considered using his recent bout of ill health as an excuse to stay at home and spend more time obsessing at the murder wall. See if he could squeeze any more inspiration from it. In the end he decided it would only end badly if Bradshaw attended the briefing alone.
He hadn’t yet decided whether to tell Nightingale that Robert Cowell was a suspect she should look into. The way they’d narrowed down their seventy names was subjective, and the way they’d got their list was dubious. Sean Carroll’s friend could well be the discerning kite flyers’ printer of choice when it came to logos, but these days they could be ordered from anywhere. A man in the north-east of England could have designed the logo but it could just as easily have been designed by a child labourer in Bangladesh.
After Bradshaw had fussed over how awful he looked, she twisted round in her seat and shouted, ‘Hi, Edgar! I’ve brought you some bacon.’ She threw a couple of rashers through the bars of the dog guard. The spaniel gulped them down like a pelican eating fish.
‘I’d have had that,’ Poe muttered. He’d run out of bacon the previous night and had eaten a meat-free breakfast that morning.
‘You eat too much bacon, Poe,’ she said. ‘Where are we going anyway?’
‘We’re taking a drive past Robert Cowell’s house. I want to see if anything jumps out.’
‘OK, Poe,’ she replied, turning back round and fastening her seatbelt. ‘I had a look on Google Street View and Google Maps last night. He lives in a semi-detached house in a modern cul-de-sac.’
Poe nodded. Images of Cowell’s home had been included on the profile the Mole People had sent. It was a blah-blah suburban house on a family estate. The satellite image showed that the houses either side had swings and trampolines in their back gardens. That in itself didn’t mean much: serial killers were almost all psychopaths, and psychopaths were the human equivalent of leaf-tailed geckos – experts at blending in. Still … it would have been nice if there was something suspicious about where he lived to take to Nightingale.
Because Poe couldn’t risk Cowell spotting them as they filmed his house, he twisted the flexible arm of the phone cradle that Bradshaw had bought him and fixed his BlackBerry so it could record as they drove. Poe would drive slowly down Cowell’s street, as if searching for an address, and Bradshaw would pretend to be talking to him.
Neither of them would look in the direction of his house.
Poe entered the estate and his first thought was how clean it was. Despite being twelve years old, it looked like it had only been finished the previous week. As Poe drove down the street, geometric shapes straight out of an architect’s brochure flickered past the edge of his vision. The building company had tried to make each house stand out a bit by using different types of brick but the result was negligible. It seemed people no longer cared that the house they lived in had been repurposed all over the north of England. The same families living in the same design on the same type of estates.
Poe had lived like that once. Never again.
He reached the end of the cul-de-sac and used the turning circle to about-face. He waited as Bradshaw adjusted the camera before setting off again, this time at a faster pace. If anyone was watching it would appear that they hadn’t found the house they were looking for and were now moving onto a different street. As they passed Cowell’s house, Poe couldn’t resist taking a quick glance.
The kitchen’s blinds were up and Poe could see the glossy white of a fridge-freezer and the brushed steel of an oven extractor hood. He saw the same thing in the next kitchen on the street and realised that the appliances must have come with the house.
And then they were out of the estate and back on the main road. Job done. If he put his foot down they’d have enough time to review the footage before they met with Nightingale.
They found a quiet corner in Carleton Hall and Bradshaw uploaded the video to her laptop. They hunched over the screen and watched it a dozen times. Robert Cowell’s house was the same as the others. Nothing stood out, nothing raised suspicion.
Nightingale walked in.