Chapter 31

Herdwick Croft, the remote, once dilapidated shepherd's cottage Poe called home, had stood unoccupied for a week. Poe had been in London and Doyle had been staying at her ancestral home in Northumberland. It would need a bit of work before it became habitable. The generator would need to be filled and serviced; fuel would have to be cut. The wood burner wasn't going to fire up itself.

Poe had dropped off Bradshaw at the Shap Wells Hotel. The ex-prisoner-of-war camp was usually where she stayed when they were working in Cumbria. It was the closest occupied building to Herdwick Croft and she was well liked there. The staff knew which room she preferred. Unsurprisingly, it was the one with the strongest wi-fi signal. Linus had sloped off to find the black Range Rover that had dropped him off. Poe had told him to be at Shap Wells, outside the main entrance, at 7 a.m. the next day. He'd then driven into Kendal and bought some food and a few beers. He wasn't sure how long he was going to be up in Cumbria, but a bacon sandwich and a Spun Gold at the end of a long day never went amiss. Doyle was joining him the following day, so he reluctantly bought some fruit and vegetables as well. Some of that bread she liked, the brown stuff covered in seeds with a crust so hard it made your gums bleed.

Herdwick Croft was inaccessible by car, so Poe rode a quad bike to travel between Shap Wells and his home. Usually he would have collected Edgar, his springer spaniel, from Victoria, his neighbour, but the combination of a late finish and an early start meant there was little point.

The dry stone walls that bordered his land were as twisty and undulating as Shap Fell itself. The coping stones, the upright, tightly packed stones sitting on top of the walls that the vast flocks of hardy Herdwick sheep were unable to reach, sported delicate wigs of yellow and green lichen. Walls such as these had been used to demarcate land in Cumbria for hundreds of years and Poe knew his own like the back of his hand. Cumbria was essentially a tiny country between England and Scotland. It had its own customs, its own language and, although millions of tourists descended upon it every year, it had never lost its identity.

Poe had always accepted that the moment he purchased a part of Cumbria, he'd become a custodian of it. One of the first things he did was learn the skills needed to maintain his walls. He attended a course and found out how to prepare the land and dig a trench. How to use layers to form an A-shaped wall and how to fit locking stones and through stones. But ultimately he learned that repairing two-hundred-year-old dry stone walls was essentially a 3D jigsaw puzzle – complex if you didn't know which piece went where, but once you understood the wall, it was straightforward. And therapeutic. When a case was getting in his head, and he was unable to sleep or focus, he would often grab his trimming hammer and his pry-bar and go looking for something to repair. Sometimes the simple act of looking for a section of wall in need of attention was all it took for his mind to reboot.

It had stopped raining and the fell steamed like a damp dog. The earth smelled of sheep and heather and a hundred other things. Poe breathed in deeply and felt his muscles soften. That business with Linus had got to him. MI5 was looking over his shoulder and he didn't know why. It would be something to think about when he stripped and serviced his generator.

Shap Fell was usually so isolated that Poe felt like an astronaut, abandoned on a distant planet, but when the quad crested the final peak, Poe saw something unexpected. Instead of the shepherd's cottage being dark and gloomy, his home had light pouring from the windows, smoke spiralling from the chimney and the barking of a happy spaniel who knew what the sound of a quad bike meant.

It could only mean one thing: Estelle Doyle was a day early.