‘I don’t have a TV.’
Towler’s eyeroll could have powered Herdwick Croft for a year. ‘Of course you fucking don’t.’
Poe mentally rehearsed what he would need to do. Decided he’d have as many dry runs as he could fit in. The grass wastough enough and wiry enough to spring back. He wouldn’t leave a trail.
‘How are you planning to turn yourself into a target?’ Towler asked.
Poe told him.
‘That’ll do it,’ Towler grinned. ‘I might even donate a tenner myself.’
‘Come on,’ Poe said. ‘Let’s have another beer. Make sure we’ve thought of everything. And while we do that, you can help me loosen the roof slates at the back of the house. I need to be able to get them off silently on the night.’
They removed four slates from his bathroom roof, a gap big enough for Poe to crawl through and drop to the soft ground without making an ‘Oof’ sound. They put them back on, examined their work from the outside. Even up close you couldn’t tell they were no longer fixed to the roof.
When they’d finished, they had another Spun Gold.
‘Nice beer that,’ Towler said. He held out his hand. They shook. ‘Let’s hope we get to share another.’
Towler kept hold of his hand. He looked Poe in the eye and said, ‘You have PTSD.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘Who told you?’
‘No onetoldme, Poe. It’s as clear as the spots on my arse.’
‘What a lovely phrase.’
‘You can’t give that bastard an inch,’ Towler said. ‘When this is over, me and you are going to talk about it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because talking about it is how you fix that shit.’ He let go of Poe’s hand. ‘Now, go and catch this prick, you fucking mental bastard.’
Chapter 100
So Poe went on television and he appealed to the British public and he made Joanne Addy a multimillionaire and Hannah Finch played her dangerous role flawlessly and Ezekiel Puck shot her through Bradshaw’s window and the bullet-resistant glass that Alastor Locke’s specialists had fitted stopped the .50 BMG bullet in mid-air and as Finch had predicted the noise was loud enough for her to fall off Bradshaw’s desk chair without thinking about it and then the BBC broke the news that Bradshaw was Ezekiel Puck’s twenty-first victim and Flynn made Poe sit in the media room even though it was hostile because his colleagues thought he was a reckless arsehole and he looked grim and he looked angry and there wasn’t any acting involved because even thethoughtthat someone might hurt Bradshaw just to get to him made him sick to his stomach and then the press turned as they were supposed to and from the bowels of an MI5 building Bradshaw manipulated social media while he prepared for the tsunami of hate that came his way, which it did, even more virulent than anyone had predicted, and when he became public enemy number one he hunkered down in Northumberland with his protection detail, every one of whom hated him, and he took his diuretics and they made him look gaunt and theydidmake him constipated, not that he told anyone that, and he waited for Estelle Doyle to play her part and call off their engagement even though she hated the idea and he was summoned to London to get suspended from the National Crime Agency for gross negligence and at his own request his protection detail was withdrawn, and as soon as all that happened he collected Edgar from Uncle Bertie’s riverside retreat and slunk back to Cumbria,making sure that he arrived at night and that it was dark and his quad’s spotlights were on and his headtorch battery was fully charged and he didn’t stop for a second and he made himself into an impossible shot and then he stepped into Herdwick Croft and he shut the door and at the end of the day he didn’t give a fucking shit about any of what had happened during the week because he’d got Ezekiel Puck on to Shap Fell and that was all that mattered.
Chapter 101
Poe had sweated through his hat, the one the headtorch was fitted to. He wasn’t surprised. Ezekiel Puck was almost certainly out there, and he had a gun the size of a broomstick, a sight like the Hubble Telescope and bullets like walnuts. Poe had told Towler that he had planned to come in hard and fast and bumpy to negate the risk. Towler had agreed that Puck was unlikely to engage a moving target, but there was a point when Poe had to step off and walk to his cottage. He couldn’t rush that. It had to look natural. He and Towler had discussed how to do this as safely as possible. In the end, the simplest solutions were always the best. Towler said as far as Puck was concerned, Poe hadn’t been home for weeks. It would not be unreasonable for him to have brought supplies. Food and beer, fuel for the generator. Logs for his wood-burning stove.
And dog food.
A big old bag of dog food. One that had to be carried in on his shoulder. Edgar’s kibble wouldn’t stop a .50 BMG round, not from the distance they thought Puck would be shooting from, but it might deflect it. Turn a headshot into a miss. Plus, Towler figured, Puck had no way to tell what was in the bag. It could be rocks for all he knew.
Poe threw the kibble – a 10-kilo sack of James Wellbeloved High Protein Adult Chicken & Turkey – on to his stone floor and shut the door behind him. He leaned against it, breathed in and out ten times to calm himself. He hadn’t felt that exposed since his final tour of Belfast. When he was back in control, he removed two items from his deep jacket pockets. Timer plugs, one for his bedside lamp, one for the downstairs light. Bradshawhad pre-programmed the times for him, even though it had looked simple enough. She said it would make her feel better. She had even labelled them upstairs and downstairs in big red letters. She didn’t want the lights going on in the wrong order. Poe let her fuss without comment. This was tough on everyone.
Towler had insisted he bring Herdwick Croft’s generator inside so Poe didn’t have to go back outside to turn on his power. It was a massive fire hazard, but it was only for one night, and there were more dangerous things to worry about. And the chug-chug-chug would help cover the sound of him climbing out of the roof.
When the generator’s orange light had turned green, Poe unplugged his downstairs light, a cheap thing from IKEA. He put the timer into the electricity socket and the plug into the timer. He turned on the light. Checked the timer was working correctly. It was. Bradshaw had programmed it to go off in twenty minutes, then come back on a couple of minutes after his bedside lamp in the morning. To Puck, it would seem like he had woken up then gone downstairs.
He had a quick snack – some cold Cumberland sausage in a bun, lots of brown sauce, lots of mustard – and drank a litre of water. He moved upstairs and fitted the timer to his bedside lamp, checked it was doing the business like its buddy downstairs. It was, of course. With his neck on the chopping block, Bradshaw had triple-checked the timers then triple-checked them again. He left the lamp on while he got Edgar settled. When Edgar finally dropped off, Poe stroking his head and enjoying the sound of his gentle snores, he carefully moved into his bathroom. He shut the door behind him. The last thing he needed was Edgar following him through the hole in the roof, thinking they were about to embark on another silly adventure.
Before he and Towler had left Herdwick Croft, they’d piled up some wet and spongy bog moss underneath the loosened rooftiles. Poe had planned to lift them and bring them inside and place them in the bath, but as he’d be doing this in near total darkness, they had factored in human error. Which was just as well because Poe dropped the first one. Prehistoric man had used slate as a bladed weapon, as its edge could be as keen as a razor-blade, and the first roof tile Poe grabbed sliced the web between his thumb and index finger. The roof tile fell to the ground, landed in the bog moss, and made no sound whatsoever. The next three were easier as the quarter moon had lit up the bathroom like mood lighting lights up a jazz bar. Poe carefully placed the tiles on a towel in the bath.
He was ready. Towler had told him that on no account was he to leave the safety of Herdwick Croft unless he was absolutely sure. He’d said that the bravest leaders were the ones who called off operations when they didn’t feel right. So Poe did exactly that. He mentally rehearsed the route he would take, the obstacles he’d navigate. He thought through that final 20 metres. Debated whether to rush Puck or sneak up. Towler reckoned he’d only know what to do when he got there. There was no point second guessing. But Towler had reiterated just how focused on Herdwick Croft’s front door Puck would be. He said Poe had this: that he was ex-Black Watch, ex-uniformed cop. Brawling was in his nature. He’d then finished by saying, ‘I’m soooo fucking jealous of you, right now.’
