Page 6 of The Killer’s Mark

‘Another one?’ he moaned.

‘Yes, another one.’

‘But we had one last week.’

‘We had one three weeks ago.’

‘I’ve got to be honest, Tilly, when I left the National Crime Agency, I thought there’d be fewer meetings, not more.’

‘Tough luck, buster. You made me managing director, and I say we’re having a meeting.’

‘And what’s this one about?’ he said. ‘Has Nigel threatened to read your palm again?’

‘No, you said I should just ignore him, so I do.’

‘Yes. Yes, you do. I meant don’t let him get to you, rather than blank him like he doesn’t exist, but hey-ho, it seems to have worked. He hasn’t been cadging our milk lately.’

‘He’s doing paranormal investigations as well now. He actually believes in ghosts.’

‘He thinks he can predict the future by studying the palm of your hand. Of course he believes in ghosts.’ Poe started to laugh. Cowie House was the weirdest building he’d ever worked in. It was a four-storey townhouse on the cobbled part of Fisher Street in Carlisle’s historic quarter, equidistant between the Kings Head – which Poe liked – and the Quaker Meeting House, which he wasn’t yet sure about (they seemed nice enough, but they got really upset if you used their car park without permission). It was a rickety old building, hotter than a jalapeño’s armpit in summer, colder than a polar bear’s toilet seat in winter. An eddy-like wind whistled through it at a whim, hurling into the air any paper that wasn’t weighted down. The floors were so uneven you got weird muscles in your lower legs keeping your chair still, and the staircase was so wonky it could only have been designed by a drunk.

Poe loved it.

He didn’t love the other tenants, though. Not all of them. It was as though the landlady had deliberately hunted out the biggest bunch of whack-a-doodle crackpots in Cumbria then leased them rooms at an insanely affordable price. Nigel, the palmist-cum-ghost-hunter who they shared the top floor with, was the quintessential Cowie House resident. The living example of what happened when an entire generation was raised to believe that everything they thought, said and did was newsworthy, and any challenge to that belief must be against their human rights. Poe didn’t like Nigel. Neither did Bradshaw.

He liked the tenants on the floor below theirs. They were his kind of people. William, the antiquarian book dealer, whose crippling shyness was so severe it rendered him mute; and Indica, the twenty-five-year-old tattooist, whose own tattoos didn’t quite hide the self-harm scars running up and down her arms.

And he was ambivalent about the tenants on the first floor. There was Miserable Les, the talent(less) agent, whose auditions for a cruise-ship production of Annie had resulted in a noise complaint being upheld; and Stephen Dunn, the pet portrait artist, who wore a striped jersey and a beret. All that was missing was a baguette and a string of garlic around his neck. Bradshaw had bought Poe’s wife a pet portrait session for her birthday. Estelle wanted a painting of him and his English springer spaniel, Edgar. It hadn’t gone well. Poe had been hungover, and before he could stop him, Edgar had eaten someone’s gerbil then voided his bowels all over Dunn’s studio. They hadn’t been invited back and Bradshaw didn’t get a refund.

The ground floor was the landlady’s domain. She was called Monica Costelloe, and she owned the building. She was in her fifties, as bald as a bubble, and the gap between her front teeth was so big she could eat a chip without opening her mouth.

Sometimes Poe thought he and Bradshaw were the only normal people in the building. Probably just there as curiosities. Then he remembered that Bradshaw still did freelance work for MI5, he still had PTSD, and there was an absurd sign on their office front door. Perhaps they were where they were meant to be.

He took a drink of his coffee. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘What is this meeting about?’

‘Why we don’t have any clients, Poe,’ Bradshaw said softly.

Chapter 2

‘That’s not fair, Tilly,’ Poe said. ‘We’ve had clients.’

‘Uh-uh,’ Bradshaw said. ‘I’m not talking about the kind of clients where you don’t have to leave the office. Where you just call up one of your chums in Cumbria Police and find out who’s been having an affair with who. I mean real clients with real problems. Ones where you have to get off your lazy butt.’

Poe let ‘chums’ go. He let ‘get off your lazy butt’ go too.

‘We’re still establishing ourselves,’ he said. ‘It takes time to build up a successful private investigation business in the UK. It’s because we’re unregulated. Any idiot can call themselves a PI. The only way to get a decent reputation is by being selective with cases.’

‘Oh pur-lease, that’s such a load of baloney,’ Bradshaw said. ‘That man who came in two weeks ago had an interesting case. He worked for BAE Systems, so if we’d solved it, it could have led to a contract with the largest defence contractor in Europe. But no, you turned him down without even listening to what he had to say. Do you remember why?’

Poe did, but he didn’t want to say it out loud. It seemed silly now.

‘It was because you thought he looked like Ken Dodd,’ Bradshaw said.

‘He did look like Ken Dodd! He’d probably lost his Diddy Men.’

‘We need cases, Poe. You need cases.’

‘Is this about money? Is the business struggling?’