Page 56 of The Mercy Chair

Bradshaw shrugged. ‘More data is always better than less data, Linus.’

‘Did you see what his tattoos were, Poe?’

‘I only saw them for a second, Snoopy,’ Poe replied. ‘They were underneath his dressing gown the rest of the time and I don’t have 3D vision.’

‘Yes, you do, Poe,’ Bradshaw sighed. ‘Everyone does.’

Poe paused. Realised he’d meant to sayX-rayvision, not 3D vision. ‘Steeleye Stan doesn’t,’ he said eventually. ‘He’s only got one eye.’

‘Who?’ Linus asked.

‘A bouncer in Carlisle. Lost an eye in a bar fight and he uses a ball bearing as a prosthetic now.’

‘Bloody northerners,’ Linus muttered, before adding, ‘OK, because youdon’thave X-ray vision; why not apply for a warrant instead?’

‘To examine his tattoos?’ Poe replied.

Linus nodded.

‘On what grounds? I’ve sent Superintendent Nightingale a text and she’s agreed to chase down Cobb’s alibi for the night of the murder. Unless it’s full of holes all we have is a man with possibly similar tattoos who knew the victim fifteen years ago. Not only would we not get a warrant, it would be an abuse of police powers to even apply for one. For all we know, all the Children of Job old-timers have these tattoos.’

‘We’re ignoring them?’

‘For now,’ Poe said. ‘We need to chase down everything that was in that note first. We need to know about these missing courses.’

‘But they weren’t on any of their curriculums, Poe,’ Bradshaw said.

Poe considered what he knew about the courses theydidhave on their curriculum. They were well attended. Some were rooted in rigid interpretations of the Old Testament. Some, like the thinly disguised conversion therapy, were repugnant. Others, such as the Christian and spiritual leadership courses, were more positive. But they all had one thing in common: none of them were free.

‘Start with their bank records, Tilly,’ he said. ‘Even if Cornelius Green didn’t record the courses anywhere, you can be damn sure he charged money for them.’

Chapter 49

Poe didn’t sleep well. Doyle had picked up a summer cold and snored the whole night, although he would rather have pickled his own tongue than tell her that. And at 3 a.m. Edgar had started barking at what Poe assumed to be rabbits. Possibly a fox. Whatever it was, they were long gone by the time he’d put on some clothes to let the excited spaniel out. At five he gave up on sleep and crept downstairs to read the bishop’s file again. Bradshaw had downloaded it to his phone, and although the text was too small for his unaided eyes, he’d found a magnifying glass that made it bearable.

Usually he would have asked Bradshaw to print off everything and they would spend a couple of hours Blu Tacking it to the wall he kept free for exactly that purpose. The murder wall, they called it, and they’d spent many an hour in front of it, rocking back and forth on their heels as they stared at an unbound case file. Poe found it easier to make links this way. Murder files were arranged in a necessarily predetermined order but being able to see everything at once was how he liked to review the information. In this case, though, with him having sworn secrecy to the bishop, he didn’t feel he had the right to print off anything.

So Poe made coffee and bent over his phone with his little magnifying glass until his back was crooked and he looked like Sherlock Holmes examining cigar ash. By the time Doyle came down he was no further forward. He got up, stretched, and poured her a cup of the rich dark roast he was drinking. Doyle said the smell of coffee was part of her day’s rhythm and she drank it black and intense.

‘Couldn’t sleep?’ she said after she’d taken a sip. ‘I wasn’t snoring, was I?’

‘Absolutely not,’ Poe said.

‘Who were you referring to when you told Edgar, “She sounds like an asthmatic bulldog”?’

‘You heard that?’

She shrugged. ‘You woke me when you got up.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I had another two hours uninterrupted sleep. Have you been staring at your phone all this time?’

‘I need to absorb what’s in the bishop’s file and I can’t do that in front of Snoopy.’

‘As a medical doctor, you know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?’ she said.

Luckily Poe was spared another lecture on digital eyestrain as his phone jauntily chirped out the opening lyrics to ‘YMCA’ by the Village People. Doyle raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. ‘How did you upset her this time?’

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