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‘How do you want to do this, Tilly?’
‘Murder wall?’ she replied.
‘Murder wall,’ he agreed.
Herdwick Croft was small and tat-free. Everything that was there had earned the right to be there. Poe read a lot and any wall that was appliance-free had a bookcase hugging it. Cheap and mismatched, their fibreboard shelves sagged under the weight of a diverse selection of books. Most were non-fiction accounts of serial killers throughout the ages – Poe believed there were very few original thinkers when it came to murder and the answer was often found in the past. He had several books on mythology and religion – a rich seam of inspiration for serial killers – and books written by most of the major philosophers and thinkers, from Aristotle to Sartre. He also had shelves stuffed with paperbacks – with no television he read for pleasure as well as for work.
But … as important as books were to him, ever since the Immolation Man case Poe had kept a section of one wall free and used Blu Tack to display documents and photographs. Seeing them together, mosaic style, offered a different perspective than going through a logically laid-out file or printout from HOLMES 2 – the major enquiry software all police forces use. Seeing photographs that would ordinarily be in different parts of the file side-by-side allowed links to be made that might otherwise be missed. The dry, pale-blue scars of previous investigations peppered the wall like Smurf acne.
Bradshaw hadn’t finished dividing the wall into triage columns – their way of conducting an initial sift – when Poe’s mobile rang.
It was Sean Carroll. Poe put him on speakerphone.
‘This is probably nothing,
Sergeant Poe, but you know how I said that tracking down the person who did the silkscreen print transfer would be next to impossible?’
‘I do.’
‘Well, that might have been an exaggeration. I fixed my logo on using the museum’s equipment so I wasn’t aware of this, but I spoke to a man this morning who said that if you want something that’s going to stay on, isn’t going to fade, and can be scaled up or down depending on your needs, then there’s one printer that kite enthusiasts tend to use up here.’
‘And?’
‘And I called him for you and he told me he did a gold pterodactyl logo for a man in Cumbria two years ago.’
‘He’s sure?’
‘He is. Says it’s the only one he’s been asked to do.’
Bradshaw’s program had identified the pterodactyl as the shape statistically most likely to be the one on the kite. He wondered what the odds were for any other kite-flyer having a pterodactyl logo that was also gold. High, he reckoned.
‘I’m going to need a name and address.’
‘Ah,’ Carroll said. ‘We may have a problem there. The only thing he can remember is the date he sent it back.’
‘He can remember the date but not the name? That seems unlikely.’
‘The buyer paid cash. Posted him the outline of the design he wanted along with an envelope with six twenty-pound notes.’
‘So there’s no credit card trail to follow.’
‘Afraid not.’
‘And he can’t remember his name? Does he not keep records?’
‘Usually. Says it must have slipped his mind this time.’
Poe grunted. ‘In other words it was a cash-in-hand job so he didn’t record it anywhere.’
‘A penny hidden from the taxman is a penny earned,’ Carroll said.
‘How did he send the logo back?’
‘Logos. There were two of them. And he sent them back the way he always does: in a padded envelope with a large letter stamp fixed to it.’
Bollocks. Their promising lead had just turned into a duff one.
‘I’m going to need to speak to him anyway.’
