Chapter 83

Nightingale arrived, panting, within minutes. She had blown off the meeting she was due to chair and by the looks of it had run most of the way. She didn't even try to catch her breath. Just stormed into the hotel room and growled, ‘What the hell's going on, Poe? Every time I let you loose, another fucking body turns up.'

‘Honestly, ma'am, I have no idea,' he replied. ‘The whole thing's bonkers, absolutely bonkers. I don't think I've ever been involved in something with so many moving parts.'

Nightingale slumped on the bed beside him. She looked exhausted. Poe was in this up to his ears, was barely sleeping himself, and he didn't have a tenth of the responsibilities she did. He wouldn't be the SIO on a complex murder investigation for a giant black pudding. Everyone second-guessed your decisions, everyone knew better than you, and you were the only one without an umbrella when the brown rain started.

‘This is a nightmare,' she said. ‘I'm getting grief for Nathan Rose's suicide. We'll have to reopen the accidental death for the body the badgers dug up, which, at best, will make us look incompetent. And the chief constable's now getting calls from the religious community.'

‘Why?'

‘They're claiming we aren't taking Cornelius Green's murder seriously.'

‘They're ignoring the Children of Job's agenda to score cheap political points?' Poe said. He wondered what the bishop thought of that.

‘They are. And rather than placating them with case progression, the chief's now going to have to tell them we'll be exhuming graves up and down the county.'

Anything Poe could say would be trite, and Nightingale was a rugged enough cop to get by without platitudes, so he kept his mouth shut. She was expressing her frustrations now so she wouldn't later when she was briefing the troops. Other than Flynn, Nightingale was the best senior officer he'd worked with and if she wanted to blow off steam in a safe environment that was fine with him.

‘Honestly, Poe,' she continued, ‘if someone had sat me down years ago and told me to list the worst things I'd ever have to do in this job, informing an almost certainly still grieving family that I have to dig up their twelve-year-old son to see if some bastard's hidden a body under his coffin, would be number one.'

‘I don't actually know what would be worse,' Poe said. ‘Finding an extra body or digging up his grave for nothing.'

‘Finding a body,' Nightingale said immediately. ‘Definitely finding an extra body. Think about it – you've been putting flowers on your son's grave every other Sunday and suddenly you find out he's been sharing his eternal resting place with a stranger. How's that going to make you feel?'

‘Not great,' Poe admitted.

‘You'd better tell me everything. I'm going to have to brief the chief constable and I'll need to answer her questions. And believe me, she will have questions.'

‘Tilly can take you through it, ma'am. She made the connection.'

Nightingale stood and stretched. She crossed the room and took a seat beside Bradshaw. ‘I hate to ask this, Poe, but could you get me a coffee? I'm dead on my feet here.'

‘Of course,' Poe replied. ‘Snoopy, go and get the superintendent a black coffee.'

‘But she said you . . .'

Poe stopped him with a look. ‘Why have an intern and bark yourself?' he said after Linus had grumbled his way out of the room.

While Bradshaw took Nightingale from A to B, ‘A' being Cornelius Green's post-mortem and ‘B' being a corpse dug up by badgers, Poe considered what the latest bombshell meant. Up until Bradshaw's discovery, they had assumed Cornelius Green was the victim and Bethany Bowman was the most likely perpetrator. But, if Bradshaw was right, and Poe knew she was, these new bodies had been dumped between 2001 and 2007. Bethany Bowman was eight in 2001. Poe didn't care how psychotic she was, she wasn't killing people when she was little more than a toddler. He had the feeling they'd got things the wrong way around. That despite being dead, Cornelius Green should be their primary suspect. He strongly suspected Bethany Bowman was a killer, but was she a victim as well?

A noise returned Poe to the present. Linus was back. He used his hip to open the door and edged into the hotel room like a crab. He was carrying a tray full of drinks. He handed Nightingale her coffee and Bradshaw a cup of something funky.

‘I've got you a coffee too, Poe,' he said, passing him a mug. ‘You know, because that's what us interns do. We get coffees and we bark.'

‘You heard that?'

‘I did.'

Poe considered this. Realised he didn't care. ‘Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves, Snoopy,' he said after a couple of beats. He inhaled the steam, enjoyed the rich smell. Bradshaw's room had a kettle and some of those little sachets of crumbly, freeze-dried stuff, but at the front end of a long night you needed the real deal.

‘This is so messed up,' Nightingale said.

‘Agreed,' Poe said.

‘Theories?'

‘Some people had corpses that needed to disappear – and given his tattoos, Cornelius Green has to be at the centre of it – and the same people knew when and where these poor sods were due to be planted. Tilly says the graves for morning interments are dug the night before, so I suspect it was simply a case of going to the graveyard in the early hours and digging down a bit further. Throw in the corpse and cover it with six inches of loose earth. Stamp it down so it looks like it did before they arrived. Who's going to notice? And as soon as the grave's rightful inhabitant is in the ground, you need a coroner's order to get it back up.'

‘You've given this some thought.'

‘It was either that or talk to Snoopy.'

‘But who are they?' Nightingale said.

‘Cult members who crossed Cornelius, maybe? He was charismatic but he also had a cruel side. Lots of people admired him, but no one liked him.'

‘Tilly says his grave tattoos represent roughly a burial a year over a six-to-seven-year period. We'd have noticed a pattern of missing people like that.'

Poe agreed. There were computer programs these days and police intelligence systems were all linked. ‘And even if you had somehow missed it, someone would have talked by now. No way a group that size keeps a secret like this. You'd have known if Cornelius was murdering members of his own cult.'

‘And you said Alice Symonds has taken it upon herself to work undercover there. Even if they had managed to stop any external leaks, there's no way it could have been kept a secret internally. She'd have heard something.'

‘People gossip,' Poe said, nodding. ‘We're social animals and we like to share stuff.'

‘You're not a social animal, Poe,' Bradshaw said. ‘The other day you said you wanted to move to that remote Scottish island you'd read about. The one with all the seals.'

Nightingale laughed, the first time she had for days, Poe suspected.

‘OK,' he said. ‘Maybe they're cult members who died of natural causes then. No one knows how many of them there are up there – perhaps one way of keeping their numbers hidden is to hide the dead as well as the living.'

‘Possible, I suppose,' Nightingale said. ‘Some are registered with GPs, and some have jobs in the community, but you're right; we don't really know how many live at the compound. Children's Services go in occasionally, but they always come away with the suspicion that they haven't been given full access.'

‘The problem with that theory is that the poor sod the badger unearthed doesn't fit the profile of a Children of Job member.'

‘No. The post-mortem found evidence of long-term intravenous drug use. He was a heroin addict basically.'

‘He was never identified, was he?'

She shook her head. ‘No, he's still a John Doe. His DNA wasn't on the system and foxes had eaten his fingers. We've ordered another post-mortem and I was wondering if Estelle might do it? To see if her opinion matches the original pathologist's? I somehow doubt it will.'

‘You think Cornelius wasn't the only person stoned to death, don't you?'

‘It's hard not to think that,' she admitted. ‘Which means, if there are extra bodies in these graves, we're back to asking who they were. And if they were also stoned to death, why? And what the hell's the connection to Cornelius Green's murder?'

‘I don't know,' Poe said. ‘But I know a man who might.'

‘Who?'

‘Israel Cobb,' he said. ‘I think it's about time we had a chat without coffee.'