Page 97 of The Mercy Chair

‘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, shewillhave 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 theyhadmanaged to stop any external leaks, there’s no way it could have been kept a secret internally. She’d have heard something.’

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