Page 35 of The Mercy Chair

Herdwick Croft, the remote, once dilapidated shepherd’s cottage Poe called home, had stood unoccupied for a week. Poe had been in London and Doyle had been staying at her ancestral home in Northumberland. It would need a bit of work before it became habitable. The generator would need to be filled and serviced; fuel would have to be cut. The wood burner wasn’t going to fire up itself.

Poe had dropped off Bradshaw at the Shap Wells Hotel. The ex-prisoner-of-war camp was usually where she stayed when they were working in Cumbria. It was the closest occupied building to Herdwick Croft and she was well liked there. The staff knew which room she preferred. Unsurprisingly, it was the one with the strongest wi-fi signal. Linus had sloped off to find the black Range Rover that had dropped him off. Poe had told him to be at Shap Wells, outside the main entrance, at 7 a.m. the next day. He’d then driven into Kendal and bought some food and a few beers. He wasn’t sure how long he was going to be up in Cumbria, but a bacon sandwich and a Spun Gold at the end of a long day never went amiss. Doyle was joining him the following day, so he reluctantly bought some fruit and vegetables as well. Some of that bread she liked, the brown stuff covered in seeds with a crust so hard it made your gums bleed.

Herdwick Croft was inaccessible by car, so Poe rode a quad bike to travel between Shap Wells and his home. Usually he would have collected Edgar, his springer spaniel, from Victoria, his neighbour, but the combination of a late finish and an early start meant there was little point.

The dry stone walls that bordered his land were as twisty and undulating as Shap Fell itself. The coping stones, the upright, tightly packed stones sitting on top of the walls that the vast flocks of hardy Herdwick sheep were unable to reach, sported delicate wigs of yellow and green lichen. Walls such as these had been used to demarcate land in Cumbria for hundreds of years and Poe knew his own like the back of his hand. Cumbria was essentially a tiny country between England and Scotland. It had its own customs, its own language and, although millions of tourists descended upon it every year, it had never lost its identity.

Poe had always accepted that the moment he purchased a part of Cumbria, he’d become a custodian of it. One of the first things he did was learn the skills needed to maintain his walls. He attended a course and found out how to prepare the land and dig a trench. How to use layers to form an A-shaped wall and how to fit locking stones and through stones. But ultimately he learned that repairing two-hundred-year-old dry stone walls was essentially a 3D jigsaw puzzle – complex if you didn’t know which piece went where, but once you understood the wall, it was straightforward. And therapeutic. When a case was getting in his head, and he was unable to sleep or focus, he would often grab his trimming hammer and his pry-bar and go looking for something to repair. Sometimes the simple act of looking for a section of wall in need of attention was all it took for his mind to reboot.

It had stopped raining and the fell steamed like a damp dog. The earth smelled of sheep and heather and a hundred other things. Poe breathed in deeply and felt his muscles soften. That business with Linus had got to him. MI5 was looking over his shoulder and he didn’t know why. It would be something to think about when he stripped and serviced his generator.

Shap Fell was usually so isolated that Poe felt like an astronaut, abandoned on a distant planet, but when the quad crested the final peak, Poe saw something unexpected. Instead of the shepherd’s cottage being dark and gloomy, his home had light pouring from the windows, smoke spiralling from the chimney and the barking of a happy spaniel who knew what the sound of a quad bike meant.

It could only mean one thing: Estelle Doyle was a day early.

Chapter 32

Doyle had guessed Poe’s meeting with the bishop might go on longer than expected, so had made the decision to travel across from Northumberland early and get Herdwick Croft ready. She owned a temperamental 1974 MGB Roadster so servicing and booting up a modern generator presented no difficulties. Poe had somehow missed her car at Shap Wells. Doyle had even collected Edgar from Victoria. The two women got on well, far too well for Poe’s liking. Whenever they were laughing and giggling together, he suspected it was at his expense.

She was wearing one of his old Ferocious Dog tour T-shirts, a pair of faded jeans and no makeup. Poe thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

‘Have a beer and catch up with Edgar,’ she said. ‘I have a stew in the oven. It’ll be ready in half an hour.’

After they’d eaten Poe said, ‘The bishop asked if I believed in God today.’

Doyle burst out laughing. ‘How on earth did you answer that? I hope you were tactful.’

Poe considered it. ‘I was certainly more tactful than Tilly’s science answer,’ he said eventually. ‘By the time she’d finished explaining how we were all born in the heart of a star, I think he was ready to throw in the towel and open a payday loans company.’

Doyle laughed even harder. ‘She didn’t?’

‘This is the same woman who asked someone if they had werewolf syndrome – of course she did.’

‘But now you’ve had time to think about it?’

Poe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Life is decay. We’re all going to die and at some point we’ll be forgotten.’

Doyle smiled. ‘Tough day?’

Poe told her about Cornelius Green and the Children of Job’s not-so-secret agenda. ‘They call girls who are at risk of, you know, being girls, “licked lollipops”. That if they don’t comply with their rigid views of purity no decent man will want them. It’s abhorrent. So no, right now I don’t believe in a higher power, certainly not the same one they believe in.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Poe,’ Doyle said. ‘You’re the most spiritual man I know. I’ve seen you sit on the fell and stare into nothing for hours at a time. Just you, Edgar, and a flask of tea.’

‘You say spiritual,Isay hungover,’ he said.

‘Anyway,’ she said, standing up, ‘forget about answering to a higher power – tonight you’re answering to me.’

Which shunted the Children of Job out of Poe’s mind immediately. He smiled happily.

‘Oh, before I forget, Jo Nightingale wants you to do Cornelius Green’s post-mortem. I told her it would probably be OK.’

‘I’m not your personal pathologist, Poe,’ Doyle said. ‘If you want to schedule a PM, call the office like everyone else.’

Poe checked his watch. ‘I’ll call first thing in the morning.’

‘Ring them now, Poe. We operate an out-of-hours system for emergencies.’

He scrolled through his phone until he found the number for Doyle’s office. He pressed call. The ringing tone hiccupped slightly. ‘I think it’s being redirected,’ he said.

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