Chapter 1
Washington Poe nudged open the door to the outer office with his hip and smiled at the sign stencilled on the reeded glass.
He always smiled at the sign. It made him happy.
Only Tilly Bradshaw could have commissioned a sign like that.
He’d thought it, she’d done it. He wondered if the sign was why they didn’t have any clients.
If it was, they were keeping it.
‘I have your smoothie, Tilly,’ he shouted at her closed door. ‘Where do you want it?’
‘I’ll come through, Poe,’ Bradshaw yelled back. A pause. ‘You didn’t spill any this time, did you?’
Poe looked at the thick gloopy sludge in the plastic cup. It looked like someone had liquefied the mouldy gunk that got stuck to the bottom of the garden waste bin. ‘I don’t think you can spill this, Tilly.’
‘You spilled the last one,’ Bradshaw said, walking into his office. She was holding a file.
‘I dropped it. That’s different. Even then, most of it stayed in the cup.’
‘Some of it went on your shoe, though, Poe. You moaned about it for three days and six hours. You said it looked as though you’d been kicking Kermit the Frog up the … bottom.’
Poe grinned and handed her the smoothie.
She held it up to the dusty light and nodded in satisfaction.
He removed the lid from his own cup and took in the smell of fresh coffee.
They had tea- and coffee-making facilities in the outer office – just in case a client wandered in by mistake – but sometimes you needed the real deal.
Fresh beans, freshly ground. He poured it into his Stiff Little Fingers mug.
It held three quarters of a pint so was big enough for the large coffee he’d bought himself.
By the looks of things, he was going to need it. Bradshaw wore a determined expression.
‘We need to have a meeting, Poe,’ she said.
‘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 jalapeno’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.