Page 36 of The Mercy Chair

Doyle’s mobile began to ring. She answered it. ‘Hello?’

‘Ha ha,’ Poe said, throwing his phone on the couch.

‘I’m on call this week,’ she said.

‘Can I schedule a post-mortem, please, Professor Doyle?’

‘Of course you can, Poe.’

Chapter 33

Poe arrived at Shap Wells at 7.30 a.m., half an hour later than he’d arranged to meet Linus, but at theexacttime he’d arranged to meet Bradshaw. He swapped his quad for his car and drove to the front of the hotel. Bradshaw and Linus were waiting for him under the covered entrance. Wordlessly, Linus got in the back.

‘Good morning, Poe,’ Bradshaw said, climbing into the passenger seat and buckling up. She jerked the seatbelt twice to make sure the locking mechanism was working. ‘How is Estelle Doyle and how is Edgar?’

‘Both fine, Tilly.’

‘Linus tells me you said to be outside at seven a.m., but you told me seven-thirty, Poe.’

‘I didn’t want him missing his ride again.’

‘But you drove off on purpose yesterday.’

‘That’s not how I remember it, Tilly.’

Linus rolled his eyes. ‘Where are we going, Sergeant Poe?’

‘Didn’t I tell you last night? How forgetful of me.’

‘No, you didn’t. Your last words to me were, “If you use my phone to track my whereabouts again, I’ll remove the SIM card and stick it up your fucking arse.” It seemed like a suitable way to end the evening.’

Poe grunted. He’d made a conscious decision last night to not let Linus’s presence bother him. Doyle had said if there were national security concerns with the Children of Job, he should let Linus do his job. He’d called Flynn but she seemed less bothered about Linus’s motives and more bothered about whether Poe would lose his temper and do something stupid. It seemed the universe was telling him to calm down and accept it.

‘Tell Snoopy where we’re going, Tilly,’ he said.

‘The Chapel Wood Institute, Linus,’ Bradshaw said. ‘We’re going to see the Children of Job.’

Chapter 34

The Chapel Wood Institute estate was on the southern slope of Sale Fell, on the A66 side of Bassenthwaite Lake. It was three hundred yards from theactualChapel Wood and half a mile from Barf, a steep, rocky fell internationally known for the whitewashed pillar of rock on its lower slopes. According to local legend, the rock marked the exact spot where, in 1783, Frederick Augustus Hervey, the Bishop of Derry, was killed falling from his horse after a foolish – and no doubt drunken – wager he could ride all the way up to the top. Poe had mentioned this to Bradshaw a couple of years earlier, thinking she’d be impressed he knew something she didn’t. She’d responded by telling him that Frederick Augustus Hervey had actually died twenty years later in the Italian peninsula. When he’d asked her why the mountain rescue team still whitewashed the rock every year if it hadn’t happened, she’d replied that tradition was just peer pressure from dead people. This time when they passed Barf, Poe refused to look at it.

As soon as he turned off the A66 he hit a series of smaller and smaller roads. Poe’s satnav gave up but Bradshaw was able to direct him via the GPS on her mobile.

‘Turn left in thirty metres, Poe,’ she said.

‘Thereisn’tanywhere to turn, Tilly. It’s . . . oh, hang on, here it is.’

He stopped the car and the three of them stared at the track leading to the Chapel Wood Institute.

‘Not exactly welcoming, is it?’ Linus said.

Linus had a point, but Poe wasn’t going to admit it. He put the car back in gear and began inching along what was little more than a sun-baked dirt track, broken up by clumps of dandelions, their petals the colour of egg yolk.

The Bishop of Carlisle had told them that when it had been a private boarding school, the access road to Chapel Wood had been well maintained, but it seemed the Children of Job had allowed it to fall into disrepair. It had so many craters it looked like the satellite image of a bombed runway, and the vegetation either side was so overgrown it was scratching Poe’s car. In the rare gaps between the dense brush, Poe caught glimpses of barbed wire fences, and beyond them fields and grazing cattle. The grass here was valley grass and it was lush and green. The exact opposite of the short, dry stuff on the fells that the Herdwick sheep eked out a living on.

‘Superintendent Nightingale says they have a modern minibus,’ Poe said, his eyes back on the road. ‘They use it for supply runs and for picking up students.’

‘She knows more than she did yesterday afternoon then,’ Linus said.

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