Page 11 of The Mercy Chair

After the room had stopped laughing, Poe said, ‘But I don’t think Brexit will hit us in the same way it’s hitting other units. Serial killers and serial rapists tend to be shadow men. We rarely know who they are before they start offending.’

‘But you do liaise with Europol and our friends across the Channel?’

‘We do. But we use back channels when we speak to our counterparts on the continent. It’s quicker and you get to speak to the right person straight away.’

The chair frowned. ‘Back channels’ wasn’t something he could put on the report he had been tasked with compiling. The purpose of the meeting was to make a recommendation. Poe didn’t care. He went back to his doodling, but this time he left an ear open. His crack about annoying Flynn had been made in jest, of course, but he was now wondering if hehaddone something to upset her. She’d certainly been in a bad mood that morning when she’d packed him off to yet another pointless meeting. He should probably ask if her son was OK.

He turned over his mobile and was surprised to see he had three increasingly irate text messages from her. The last one simply said, ‘Call me now!’ Poe had ducked out of meetings on flimsier excuses, so he made his apologies and left the room. He tapped out a ‘What’s up?’ She called immediately.

‘Where are you?’ she said.

‘I’ve just left that meeting.’

‘Meet me in the lobby.’

‘You’re here?’

‘All three of us are.’

Chapter 9

‘Who were the three?’ Doctor Lang asked.

‘The boss, of course,’ Poe replied.

‘How do you get on with her?’

‘We’ve known each other a long time.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

‘I suppose we’re like an old married couple. We get on each other’s nerves occasionally, but we both know when to walk away. I used to be her boss, now she’s mine.’

‘Is that awkward?’

‘She’s a better detective inspector than I was, and I’m a better sergeant than she was. We work well together.’

‘Is she as committed to the job as you are?’

‘She is,’ Poe said. ‘But she has a young son, and a partner who wants her in a less dangerous role.’

‘Who else was there?’

‘Tilly.’

‘She was back from the States?’

‘This was five months after the badger incident.’

‘Tell me about her.’

Poe smiled. ‘Tilly’s . . . Tilly,’ he said. ‘An awkward haircut on top of a brain the size of Wales. Paler than a flour worm, brighter than a thousand suns. She’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but up until she started working with us, her only experience of life was in academia. She went to Oxford when she was thirteen and stayed there until her early thirties.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Pure mathematics, I think. I’ve asked several times, but I never understand her answers. She’s a true polymath though; can pretty much turn her hand to anything. Computers, profiling, databases, anything we need to know a lot about, fast.’

‘She sounds amazing.’

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