Chapter 130

‘If only I hadn't crammed all those pickled onions into my mouth,' Poe said to Doctor Lang. ‘If I hadn't, Tilly wouldn't have solved that stupid maths problem. And if she hadn't solved the maths problem, she wouldn't have been invited to America to receive that big prize.' He thought it through to its logical conclusion. ‘And if Tilly and Estelle had still been in the country, I wouldn't have been in the pub when the badgers dug up that corpse. It could have been someone else sitting here today.'

‘Do you really think the cause and effect is that clear?' Doctor Lang replied.

‘I suppose not,' Poe admitted.

‘And having lunch in that pub was a coincidence, Washington. Nothing more.'

‘But—'

‘But nothing. Answer me this: if you hadn't been in the pub that day, would you still have investigated Cornelius Green's murder?'

Poe nodded. ‘The link between Cornelius and the corpse the badgers dug up wasn't established until after Tilly had solved the tattoo riddle.'

‘Exactly. And Tilly being a maths genius would not have been news to the security services. She undertook research at Oxford. She'd worked with them before. The bio DI Flynn provided states they had already tried to recruit her.'

‘Twice, apparently.'

‘And didn't you say she'd hacked an MoD laptop in under two minutes a few years ago?'

Poe shrugged.

‘I'd imagine they'd had their beady eyes on her for a while,' Doctor Lang continued.

‘I guess.'

‘It was probably only a matter of time before they made a move.'

‘There's a point to this?'

‘My point, Washington, is you don't need my qualifications to know that crows aren't the cause of your nightmares.'

‘They're not?'

‘No. All the crows did was bookend a horrific experience. They're not the harbingers of doom your subconscious thinks they are.'

‘What are they?'

‘You're a fighter, Washington. It's what you do. What you've always done, I suspect. The truth is your North Star. It's what guides you and it's what makes you keep on fighting against injustice.' She tapped the file on the table. ‘And because you're a fighter, it's how you chose to deal with what you've been through. Your subconscious needed a fight and it chose crows as the battleground.'

‘I hardly think—'

She held up her hand to stop him. ‘We've already established your involvement in the case would have happened regardless of you being present when the first victim was discovered. And I think we've agreed that the security services had almost certainly been after Tilly for a while.'

Poe nodded. He didn't know why. Being analysed so easily was an unsettling experience. Anger had always been the fuel that burned his engine, but having that stripped down to its component parts was unnerving.

‘In your mind, beating the crows means beating your PTSD,' Doctor Lang continued. ‘Nathan Rose committing suicide in front of you. Being forced to watch the tapes of those young men being stoned and murdered. Discovering the awful truth about the Bowman family. Being there when Bethany murdered Eve and Aaron. Almost being murdered yourself. In your mind, the crows represent it all.'

‘OK, how do I fight . . . how do I manage this?'

‘Together,' she said. ‘We manage this together. It isn't a black hole: it won't pull you in, not unless you let it. The mind is resilient, yours more than most, I suspect, and, with a bit of help, it won't be long before you can remember what happened without reliving what happened. When that happens, the nightmares will stop.'

‘When do we start?' Poe asked.

She smiled without showing her teeth. ‘We already have.'

‘Oh . . . that's good then.'

‘I'd like to see you again in a fortnight, Washington. Will the training unit let you have the time off?'

‘I'm not with the training unit any more. I had a . . . disagreement with one of the other instructors. As soon as I recovered from my injuries, he found a reason to move me on.'

‘What are you doing now?'

‘Officially? I help tackle the threat of drugs before they reach the UK.'

‘And unofficially?'

‘I work with some misfits from the Border Force on the stupidest pilot scheme in the history of law enforcement. We go out to sea on the smallest, leakiest tug in the Royal Navy fleet and do intelligence-led stop and searches of fishing vessels. We board the boats and me and this bloke called Amer root through their catch to see if they're smuggling drugs.' He held up his hands. ‘It's why my hands are so badly scratched – the fins and teeth on some of those fish are razor sharp. And it's why, no matter how long I shower, or how hard I scrub myself, I always smell of halibut.'

‘That seems a . . . waste of your talents.'

‘I suspect Tilly's new employers would prefer it if I quit,' Poe said. ‘Wasting my time and talents is probably the point.'

‘And Tilly? How is she coping?'

Poe shrugged. ‘I think she must be somewhere she's not allowed her phone; there are huge blocks of time when I don't hear from her at all. I rarely speak to her; I see her even less.'

‘And you have no idea what it is she does?'

‘She won't tell me. Won't even tell me where she's based.'

‘Is she happy?'

‘No,' Poe said. ‘I don't think she is. I thinks she misses her friends and I think she misses the work we did.'

‘And Alice? How is she coping?'

‘She's doing OK,' Poe said. ‘We keep in touch.'

‘It must have been a shock for her to realise her best friend was alive after all. And that she'd just murdered her brother and sister and was about to murder a police officer.'

Poe said nothing.

‘It was just as well she turned up when she did,' Doctor Lang continued. ‘I doubt we'd be having this discussion if she hadn't.'

‘It wasn't Alice who stopped Bethany from murdering me, Doctor Lang,' Poe said quietly.

‘It wasn't? But you said it was.'

‘No. I said I thought it was Alice. But I was concussed, and Bethany had made me wear that hood. Alice was still at the Children of Job compound, forty miles away. She was nowhere near that basement.'

‘Who stopped Bethany, Washington? Tell me who saved your life.'

Poe's eyes flattened. His expression hardened.

‘You did,' he said.