Chapter 15
‘Hi,Poe,’ Bradshaw said. ‘How’s Estelle Doyle?’
‘Where’ve you been, Tilly? I thought you were coming up to Newcastle?’
‘Director of Intelligence Edward van Zyl said I wasn’t allowed.’
Poe grunted in annoyance. He respected Flynn and he respected Van Zyl, but he much preferred it when they let him do what he wanted.
‘How’s Estelle Doyle?’ Bradshaw said again.
‘Not great, Tilly. I know she’s being set up, but I can’t see how. There’s a problem with footprints in the snow that unless—’
‘I’m sorry, Poe,’ Flynn cut in, ‘but this will have to wait. We have a time-sensitive situation here.’
He frowned. Kane Hunt couldn’t get any deader. What hadn’t he been told?
‘Tilly,’ Flynn continued, ‘tell me what you have.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Bradshaw said. ‘I’ve logged into my British Library account and, now hyoscine has been identified as the murder weapon, the poem makes a lot more sense. We’ve also identified the petal.’
‘And?’
‘It’s from the plant genusMandragora. Its common name is the mandrake and, outside of Agatha Christie’sBlack Coffee, the last person to have used hyoscine as a murder weapon was Doctor Crippen.’
‘Tell me about the poem,’ Poe said.
‘You’ll remember the mandrake plant fromHarry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Poe?’
‘I don’t have a television. Why do I need to keep saying this?’
‘We watched it when you came to my house for Christmas. Even you should be able to remember that, it was less than a month ago.’
Poe winced. Christmas at Bradshaw’s had been … different. Her unbridled enthusiasm juxtaposed with his misanthropic approach to the festive season had definitively proved what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. The immovable object is forced to wear a paper hat and sing Christmas carols.
‘Was that the one about the boarding school for wizards?’
‘Yes!’
‘It’s possible some of the salient details escaped me.’
‘When you were asleep, you mean,’ Bradshaw said.
‘I didn’t fall asleep – that would have been rude, Tilly.’
‘Oh pur-lease. You had four bottles of beer with my dad at lunchtime. You were asleep.’
Chief Superintendent Stewart cleared his throat. ‘DI Flynn?’ he said.
‘Yeah, pack it in, you two,’ she said. ‘Can we at leastpretendwe’re normal?’
‘Sorry, DI Flynn,’ Bradshaw said. ‘As I was saying, the poem makes more sense now. “Under the hanged man’s hood, Beneath his dripping blood” references the superstition that the mandrake plant would only grow where the blood of a hanged man had soaked into the earth. “Below the yellow fruit” is easy, the Mediterranean mandrake has a yellow plum-like fruit. The bit about closing your ears and tearing it from the ground refers to the legend that when the root is dug up, its scream will kill anyone who hears it. It wasn’t just J. K. Rowling who wrote about this; Shakespeare also mentioned it inRomeo and Juliet.’
‘OK,’ Poe said. ‘We have someone who has access to dangerous medicine and a sardonic grasp of folklore.’ He turned to Flynn. ‘But we’re not here for that, are we?’
Flynn looked at Chief Superintendent Stewart. He nodded.
‘No, Poe,’ she said, ‘we’re not here for Kane Hunt; we’re here for something else.’