Chapter 12
He was glad he’d grown up when he had. Because now, porn was everywhere.
It didn’t matter how old you were, if you had an internet connection you could view the most depraved filth humans could think of doing to each other.
After he’d qualified as a detective with Cumbria Police, his first posting was to the high-tech crime unit.
Every new detective started in the high-tech crime unit.
It was the only way they could staff it.
If you did something stupid like volunteer, people whispered behind your back for the rest of your career.
The computer boffins would search the stuff that CID had seized, and the detectives would watch and classify it.
Some of it was enough to turn a horny man celibate. Vile.
By comparison, the stuff Malloy had been watching, and by default trying to force Esmerée to watch, was tame.
He seemed to be into middle-aged women having sex with well-endowed men.
Sometimes he watched MFF threesomes. Male-female-female.
Never the other way around. Never MMF. None of the stuff Poe had viewed so far would have ended up in court.
More importantly, there were no women with tattoos on the soles of their feet.
He finished one film, a twenty-minute clip involving a woman needing her stepson’s help in choosing lingerie before one thing inevitably led to another. Subtle. He was just about to click on the next one when there was a knock on his office door. His brow furrowed. He’d asked not to be disturbed.
Whoever it was knocked again.
It wasn’t Bradshaw. She was in her office showing Esmerée her computers.
Poe closed his laptop and went to see who it was. He opened the door.
Bugger Rumble stepped through.
Bugger Rumble was a Carlisle institution, the same way McVitie’s biscuit factory was a Carlisle institution.
McVitie’s made Carlisle smell like a witch’s gingerbread house; Bugger Rumble made Carlisle smell like a wet dog.
He was the most eccentric man Poe had ever met – and Poe had once spent an evening at the Authors’ Club in Whitehall.
Bugger called himself a street entertainer, but only if you used the loosest possible definition.
A more accurate definition would be an arsehole who arsed around until people paid him to go away.
He’d started out as the world’s only low-rope walker.
He would draw a line in chalk on the pavement outside the town hall and pretend to wobble along it like he was above the Grand Canyon.
When he got to the end, he’d hold out his top hat.
As soon as he had enough money for a pint, he’d dive into the Kings Head. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The reality was that Bugger was homeless and happy.
He wore a three-piece suit, a top hat and a pair of white plimsolls.
He had a beard like ZZ Top’s hairy uncle.
He was so homeless you wouldn’t have been surprised to see him carrying his possessions around in a bindle: a stick with a polka-dot bag tied at the end.
Poe had always thought of him as a hapless, bark-at-the-moon nutjob.
And he was. His relationship with reality was at best fleeting.
But there was more to Bugger Rumble than lunacy.
For one thing, he could hold his own with Bradshaw when it came to pure mathematics.
He didn’t have her intellect – no one did – but he could at least follow some of her arguments.
They’d formed an unlikely friendship. Carlisle’s geekier and much grubbier version of Lady and the Tramp.
The two of them would ensconce themselves in her office for hours on end, talking about things that made no sense to any normal person.
Bugger was a complex man. Bradshaw said he’d once been a brilliant man.
And who knows, maybe he was. Maybe, if he could stay off the turps long enough, he could be again.
But right now, he was still one hundred per cent nutter.
And because of that, people who should know better paid him scant attention.
That meant he went where he wanted, drank where he wanted. And he overheard everything.
When Poe was a Cumbrian cop, Bugger Rumble had been his best source of intelligence by a country mile.
He was completely reliable. So when Bugger came into his office and told him there was a group of men in a Botchergate pub drinking up courage to exact retribution against him because he’d twisted the ear of one of them, Poe took him seriously.
If Bugger said it was happening, it was happening.
Poe got some details, then tapped out a text. While he waited for a reply, he walked across the office waiting area and knocked on Bradshaw’s door.
‘What is it, Poe?’
‘Can you and Esmerée stay in here for a while? I think that idiot who threatened Indica is coming back for round two.’
‘You need help kicking his butt?’ Esmerée asked.
‘Gosh, should I call the police?’ Bradshaw enquired.
‘It’s in hand,’ Poe said.
He went back to watching porn. This time it was an overweight man who needed help after accidentally overdosing on Viagra.