Page 153 of The Mercy Chair

She smiled without showing her teeth. ‘We already have.’

‘Oh . . . that’s good then.’

‘I’d like to see you again in a fortnight, Washington. Will the training unit let you have the time off?’

‘I’m not with the training unit any more. I had a . . . disagreement with one of the other instructors. As soon as I recovered from my injuries, he found a reason to move me on.’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Officially? I help tackle the threat of drugs before they reach the UK.’

‘And unofficially?’

‘I work with some misfits from the Border Force on the stupidest pilot scheme in the history of law enforcement. We go out to sea on the smallest, leakiest tug in the Royal Navy fleet and do intelligence-led stop and searches of fishing vessels. We board the boats and me and this bloke called Amer root through their catch to see if they’re smuggling drugs.’ He held up his hands. ‘It’s why my hands are so badly scratched – the fins and teeth on some of those fish are razor sharp. And it’s why, no matter how long I shower, or how hard I scrub myself, I always smell of halibut.’

‘That seems a . . . waste of your talents.’

‘I suspect Tilly’s new employers would prefer it if I quit,’ Poe said. ‘Wasting my time and talents is probably the point.’

‘And Tilly? How is she coping?’

Poe shrugged. ‘I think she must be somewhere she’s not allowed her phone; there are huge blocks of time when I don’t hear from her at all. I rarely speak to her; I see her even less.’

‘And you have no idea what it is she does?’

‘She won’t tell me. Won’t even tell me where she’s based.’

‘Is she happy?’

‘No,’ Poe said. ‘I don’t think she is. I thinks she misses her friends and I think she misses the work we did.’

‘And Alice? How is she coping?’

‘She’s doing OK,’ Poe said. ‘We keep in touch.’

‘It must have been a shock for her to realise her best friend was alive after all. And that she’d just murdered her brother and sister and was about to murder a police officer.’

Poe said nothing.

‘It was just as well she turned up when she did,’ Doctor Lang continued. ‘I doubt we’d be having this discussion if she hadn’t.’

‘It wasn’t Alice who stopped Bethany from murdering me, Doctor Lang,’ Poe said quietly.

‘It wasn’t? But you said it was.’

‘No. I said Ithoughtit was Alice. But I was concussed, and Bethany had made me wear that hood. Alice was still at the Children of Job compound, forty miles away. She was nowhere near that basement.’

‘Who stopped Bethany, Washington? Tell me who saved your life.’

Poe’s eyes flattened. His expression hardened.

‘You did,’ he said.

Chapter 131

Doctor Lang folded her arms and examined Poe carefully, her eyes radiated an intense, uncompromising intelligence. She didn’t look surprised at what he had said; resigned, maybe. Eventually she sighed and said, ‘I was afraid something like this might happen.’

‘Something like what?’ Poe said.

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