The Cutting Season

by M.W. Craven

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Poe's just hanging around on a Saturday afternoon...

Dangling from a hook in a meat packing plant isn't how Detective Sergeant Washington Poe wants to spend his weekend. He's been punched and kicked and threatened, and when a contract killer arrives it seems things are about to go from bad to worse. He goes by the name of the Pale Man and he and his straight-edged razor have been feared all over London for twenty years.

But Poe knows two things the Pale Man doesn't. Although it might seem like a hopeless situation, Poe has planned to be here all along. More importantly, a nerdy, computer whizz-kid called Tilly Bradshaw is watching his back. And now things are about to get interesting . . .

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This is a short story, not a full-length novel.
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Praise for M W Craven:

'I've been following M.W. Craven's Poe/Tilly series from the very beginning, and it just gets better and better. Dead Ground is a fast-paced crime novel with as many twists and turns as a country lane. I can't wait for the next one.' Peter Robinson

'Dead Ground is both entertaining and engaging with great characters and storyline. I loved this first dip into the world of Tilly and Poe!' BA Paris

'A brutal and thrilling page turner' Natasha Harding, The Sun

'A thrilling curtain raiser for what looks set to be a great new series' Mick Herron

'One of the most engaging teams in crime fiction' Daily Mail

'A powerful thriller from an explosive new talent. Tightly plotted, and not for the faint hearted!'
David Mark

'A gripping start to a much anticipated new series' Vaseem Khan

'Satisfyingly twisty and clever and the flashes of humour work well to offer the reader respite from the thrill of the read' Michael J. Malone

'Nothing you've ever read will prepare you for the utterly unique Washington Poe' Keith Nixon

'Beware if you pick up a book by M.W. Craven. Your life will no longer belong to you. He will hold you spellbound. Linda's Book Bag

'Craven's understanding of the criminal world is obvious in this cracking read' Woman's Weekly

'Breath-taking' Random Things Through My Letterbox

'5 Stars... another fantastic literary experience and a welcome addition to the already brilliant Poe and Tilly series' Female First

'An explosive plot, slippery twists and my fave new crime-busting duo...Fantastic!' Peterborough Telegraph

Release date: April 14, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 105

Sample

It started with an old lady.

An old lady who had stepped in front of a train.

There were gangsters and bent cops and a contract killer called the Pale Man, but they were not as important as the old lady. And neither was the dead good man who turned out to be a dead bad man.

In the years that followed, some people would forget about the old lady. They would forget that, if it was not for her, none of this would have happened. Nobody would have been murdered. Nobody would have dangled from a meat hook in a cold warehouse. Nobody would have called in the Pale Man.

Washington Poe would never forget about the old lady, though.

Poe was a detective sergeant in the National Crime Agency. He had been involved in many weird cases, but he would remember this case for as long as he lived. His part in the story did not start with the old lady. It started when he was told to go to Bristol. He went there to see if someone really had eaten part of the dead good man, who would later turn out to be a dead bad man.

(Yes, eaten.)

Things had kind of got out of hand after that.

Later on, Washington Poe would dangle from a meat hook, his body bruised and battered. Then, the gangsters and the corrupt cop and the contract killer called the Pale Man all thought they had won. They thought they had won and Washington Poe had lost. They thought a man dangling from a meat hook was a stone-cold loser with no more cards left to play.

They were wrong.

Because Washington Poe knew two things they did not know.

The first thing was that he had a friend called Tilly Bradshaw. Tilly was possibly the cleverest person in the world. She knew a lot about maths and science and computers and things like that. She was not a police officer like Poe, but she did work with him. And in every case they worked, she always watched his back.

The second thing Poe knew was that he did not play by his rules, the police rules. He played by the criminals’ rules. The gangsters and the corrupt cop and the contract killer known as the Pale Man did not know that.

But they would find out.

Oh yes they would.

The human body might look like a lump of meat held up by a skeleton and kept together with stretchy skin, but really it is a machine. It is a machine like a motorbike. The feet are the wheels and the bum is the seat. The mouth is the horn and the bones are the frame and handlebars. You do not want to know what the exhaust is.

The engine of this human motorbike is the heart. Without the heart there really is not much point in having a body. A body without a heart will not work – the same way a motorbike without an engine will not work. It does not matter how carefully you polish it or how much air you pump into the tyres. A motorbike without an engine is as much use as a waterproof teabag.

The heart sends fresh red blood to all the organs that need it, in the same way the engine sends fuel around the motorbike to make it work.

The heart sends blood around the body through a huge network of tubes. Some of the tubes are as thick as your thumb. Other tubes are too small to see. There are so many tubes that, if you laid them on the ground end to end, they would stretch around the Earth nearly three times.

Unfortunately for the man who was tied to the kitchen stool, a whole load of these tubes were not in his body any more. Along with some fat, some skin and some flesh, some of the tubes were lying in a bloody heap on the carpet. Two flies were playing about on the heap.

Detective Sergeant Washington Poe thought the man was missing about four hundred miles of tubes. That is roughly the distance between Glasgow and London. The heap looked like someone had dropped a bag of chopped liver on the carpet. The heap was not steaming now, but it would have been steaming when it was cut out of the man.

The man was naked and very, very dead. The rest of his body was pale and hairy but unharmed. Whoever had done this – because the man could not have done it to himself – had carved the flesh from the soft bit above one of the man’s hips. Poe thought the soft bits were called love handles. They were soft and flabby and easy to slice through with a sharp blade.

The carpet beneath the stool and around the heap of flesh was dark red and crusty with blood. Poe thought the victim had probably passed out during the assault. He hoped he had anyway.

‘First impressions?’ a woman in a white crime scene suit asked Poe.

The woman was called Detective Chief Inspector Lucy Sampson. She was in charge. She was the cop who had called the National Crime Agency unit that Poe worked for. The unit investigated serial killers and weird murders. Poe could only see the eyes of DCI Lucy Sampson because she wore a face mask, but she looked worried.

Poe pointed towards the huge wound on the body of the dead man. ‘It looks like someone was trying to take a pound of flesh,’ he said.

‘I suppose,’ Sampson said. ‘We thought that maybe someone wanted to eat his flesh.’

‘Taking a pound of flesh has come to mean the punishment for an unpaid debt,’ Poe said. ‘I think someone felt that this man owed them something. When he would not give them what he owed them, they took his flesh. Nobody has eaten him, that is for sure.’

‘That is a relief,’ Sampson said. ‘What happens next?’

‘I think you need to meet Tilly Bradshaw.’

Three hours earlier.

In the National Crime Agency office, the last Friday afternoon of every month was ‘Ask Tilly Anything Friday’. Poe had invented it in a hurry after his boss, Detective Inspector Stephanie Flynn, had asked him to come up with a team-building exercise everyone could do. She wanted something that would take their minds off the day job of hunting serial killers. . . .