It’s also their biggest weakness.
Because snipers need spotters. They need them like babies need milk. The spotter’s role isn’t just to identify targets; it’s to provide situational awareness. And protection. They’re the eyes and ears of the team, vigilant because the sniper can’t be. The sniper is the weapon, the spotter is the early warning system.
And right now, Ezekiel Puck’s warning system was going into overdrive. It was screaming DANGER at the very top of its voice.
Even as he stared down the sight, the muzzle already starting to twitch, he realised the danger was at his end, not Poe’s. Without thinking, without moving, he mentally checked his five senses. He thought that was where the answer would lie.
Nothing had changed visually. Poe was still hunkered down in his cottage. It wasn’t sight that was giving him the shakes. He couldn’t hear anything untoward either. Nothing had touched him and for obvious reasons he could discount taste. Smell perhaps? He didn’t think so.
Maybe he’d imagined it. He’d seen Poe enter his cottage and he’d been watching the only way in and out all night. Poe was inside. His dog was inside. He could still hear it barking. There was no doubt about it. All five senses checked out. He breathed out again. Took a fresh one. Held it again, waited for Poe to open the door.
But his unease persisted. He’d forgotten something, he was sure of it. Unbidden, a memory resurfaced. It was one of his lessons with Davy Newport, the guy who’d taught him to shoot. The dour Scotsman had been a bore, but he knew his stuff when it came to stalking the most cautious prey animal in the UK. He remembered one particularly tedious lecture on a damp morning in the Scottish Highlands. Newport had told him that the nervous system’s five main senses were important, but he shouldn’t neglect the others.
Newport had told Puck that as far as the stalker was concerned, humans hadnineprimary senses, not five. He’d explained that proprioception was the ability to tell where your appendages were. Close your eyes and lift a finger to your nose. Proprioception allows you to find it without looking. Important if you need to reach for something but can’t move your head. And what about chronoception: sensing the passage of time? The stalker had to know how long the hunt had lasted without relying on a watch. Checking your watch was unnecessary movement. Newport didn’t have a name for the stalker’s eighth primary sense – the ability to detect changes in wind pressure – but as changes in wind direction meant changes inscentdirection, knowing which way the wind was blowing meant you could stay downwind. Downwind was good, upwind was bad. And finally, there was thermoception. The body’s ability to sense temperature. It’s how humans can tell if something is hot without having to touch it. Newport had told Puck that of all the additional four primary senses, thermoception was the most responsive to subtle changes. The most accurate.
And then Puck understood the terrible danger he was in. The back of his neck was warm. Shap Fell was cold but his neck was warm. Logically, that could only mean one thing. An external heat source. Someone was standing over him.
Someone wasbreathingover him.
His brain processed this in a fraction of a second, but it still wasn’t quick enough. He tried to spin round but the man standing over him was too quick. He’d seen the man’s serious reflexes before, but only from a distance. When he’d grabbed Matilda Bradshaw out of harm’s way on the roof of that London skyscraper. The man stamped on his arm, snapping it like a twig. He then brought his boot down on Puck’s throat. Held it there, pinning him to the cold, wet moorland.
‘How?’ Puck managed to gurgle.
‘Hello, Ezekiel,’ Poe said. ‘Nice to finally meet you.’
Chapter 88
Thirty-six hours later
Charing Cross Police Station, London
Poe stood in the interview room doorway and stared at Ezekiel Puck. He was breathtakingly bland. He looked like the tax accountant that tax accountants used. The kind of man who watched BBC Four documentaries. But Poe guessed that was the point. Bland had been good for Ezekiel Puck. It had worked for him.
The interview room was hot and stuffy, and Puck was sweating like an otter in a greenhouse. He was pale and his right arm was in plaster. He had a bruised throat. Poe could still see his tread marks. His hair was thinning. He had dark circles under puffy red eyes. Looked like he’d been crying. Other than that, he seemed to be in good spirits.
After Poe had delivered Puck to Kendal Police Station, trussed up like an Easter brisket, he made some phone calls while Puck’s transport down to London was arranged. Understandably, an irate Cumbrian chief constable wanted Puck out of her county as soon as Westmorland General Hospital had set his broken arm. She wasn’t too keen on Poe staying either, but as she had no authority over him, she was limited in what she could do. Poe avoided any awkwardness by volunteering to accompany Puck to London with the police convoy. The journey took exactly five hours, a succession of police forces providing a blue light escort all the way into Central London.
‘I understand you’ll only talk to me?’ Poe said.
Puck smiled. ‘Take a seat.’
‘I’m fine here, thanks.’
‘Please sit down, Sergeant Poe. There are things I need to say.’
‘That may be true, Ezekiel,’ Poe said. ‘The thing is, I’m not in the mood to hear them. Not now, not ever. And the beauty of this is that I don’t have to. We have your gun. We have your ammunition. We even have the videos you made. We have everything we need to secure a whole-life sentence.’
‘Then why are you here?’
It was a good question. And the answer was that Commander Unsworth, the man who’d smirked when Poe had been suspended, had met Ezekiel Puck’s police convoy at the entrance to Charing Cross Police Station. Poe was in the first car. Unsworth had flashed Poe a constipated smile then nodded for him to follow him into an office he’d annexed. He’d tried to apologise, but Poe wasn’t having any of it. Anger would have been Unsworth’s correct response; gloating, not so much. And the way he’d gleefully withdrawn Poe’s police protection, the way he’d cruelly informed him his engagement to Doyle had been called off, smacked of someone Poe didn’t want or need an apology from.
But, although Poe could refuse to accept his apology, with his suspension withdrawn, he wasn’t able to refuse a direct order. Unsworth had told him to stay while Puck was being interviewed. He said he might be needed to clarify things that Puck told them. Fat chance. Puck hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t gone ‘no comment’, hadn’t even asked for the duty solicitor. It didn’t matter. Poe had no choice but to stay until Puck had been charged and remanded into custody. He booked into a hotel and caught up on his sleep. A day later he got the call to come into the police station.Thatwas why he was standing in the doorway of the interview room. Poe wasn’t going to say all that, obviously. Instead, he said, ‘I like the coffee here.’ He stepped into the roomand slipped into the seat opposite Puck. ‘I would offer to get you one, but I fear the temptation to spit in it would be too much.’
‘I’m fine,’ Puck said. ‘Your colleagues are looking after me very well considering . . .’
‘Considering you killed their commander?’
Puck shrugged. ‘What choice did I have? Alastor Locke shouldn’t have released my picture. As he would say, that was bad form.’
