‘Lawyer.’
Kelsey’s mother opens her mouth, but a grating sound catches their attention. The door into the main body of the prison has opened and an officer is in the doorway, beckoning them forward. It is time.
* * *
The prisoners are seated at tables in a large hall that smells of sweat and the stale oil of an antiquated heating system. Maggie is one of the last to enter. The others have rushed forward, have found the man they are visiting. Some children are in their fathers’ arms, whimpering at the unfamiliar contact, others hang back, warily. Most people are already seated, deep in conversation. More than one couple appear to be quarrelling.
Maggie stands, just inside the doorway, taking stock, trying to find the man she has come to visit.
Someone is watching her. This is not so very unusual in itself, a woman can’t look the way she does and not expect to be stared at, but this is different. This feels intense, even slightly predatory. She scans the room, the prickle of scrutiny stirring up the tiny hairs on her neck, knowing that somewhere in this mass of people, Wolfe has got her in his sights.
There he is. Directly beneath a window, its dust-clouded light softening the darkness of his hair. As their eyes meet, he remains as still as the walls that imprison him, and yet she has a sense of tremendous movement going on inside his head. He is processing her, absorbing information, preparing himself. She has to do the same, but it is as though a barrier has come down. All her usual powers of perception have deserted her. All she can see is the obvious.
She already knows that he’s tall, but he sits so upright, so straight in his chair as to give the impression of being even taller. She knows he is handsome, but she hadn’t expected the reaction just seeing him has provoked. He is brighter somehow, more colourful, the lines of his body sharper, than his surroundings.
Holding eye contact across the body-filled, stale-smelling room is like standing on the edge of a great lake, catching a glimpse of the far shore and being overcome with an urge to reach it. Swim, sail, float, whatever it takes. Or, like standing on a clifftop, looking down into the most perfect valley – lush and green, and wanting more than anything to get to it, but knowing the only way is to leap.
Maggie starts making her way towards him, weaving around tables, avoiding small children. She can see the detail of his eyes. The irises are green, maybe hazel. She sees his eyebrows lift, one corner of his mouth stretch out in a cautious smile. He is on his feet now, is smiling properly, his teeth white and perfect. His skin is so pale, has barely seen sunshine in two years. Physical contact is allowed, she remembers, at the start and end of these sessions. If he stretches out his hand, she’ll have to take it.
He doesn’t. He waits until she’s at the table and then his eyes dart across her face, her hair, her body. On the tabletop is an origami shape.
‘Hi.’
His voice is deeper than she expects, as though prison life has roughened and toughened it. He is wearing blue jeans and an oversized blue sweatshirt.
‘Hello, Hamish. How are you?’
How cool, how calm her voice is. It doesn’t sound as though her hands, were she to lift them from her sides, would be shaking.
‘Please.’ He’s indicating the chair. She sits. He does too, and now they seem only inches apart. The origami shape is made from silvery-white paper but she doesn’t want to look at it. His shoulders are wide beneath the sweatshirt. He is a powerfully built man.
‘Can I get you something?’ she says. ‘Tea? Coffee? Something to eat?’ Even here, in this dreadful place, social norms prove strong.
‘No, thank you.’ He isn’t cuffed, although she’d half expected that he would be. There is a graze on his right hand.
‘Did you have a good journey?’ he asks her.
She’d driven through snow in the pre-dawn darkness, the Solent had been rough, the ferry cold and uncomfortable. ‘Yes, thank you,’ she says, and thinks how polite they are being, the murderer and the – what, exactly?
He smiles again, suddenly, as though overcome by a moment of joy and she sees that his incisors are longer than his other teeth. They spoil the perfect symmetry of his mouth. ‘Why is your hair that colour?’ he asks her.
The question she never answers truthfully has an oddly relaxing effect. And she has her answer prepared. ‘When I was thirteen, my school went to see a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stratford on Avon. Titania had blue hair. I thought it was just beautiful, but of course there was no way my mother would agree to my dyeing my hair blue, so I had to wait.’
He says nothing, but holds eye contact and a faint smile plays on his face. He is interested in the blue hair story.
‘It didn’t seem quite the form with the legal profession when I was starting out. Goodness me, those people take themselves seriously, so I had to wait a bit longer. And then I had a stroke of luck.’
‘You became a maverick celebrity and they’re allowed to be quirky?’
‘I went prematurely grey. Not a lovely, snowy-white, sadly, but a rather coarse, iron grey. I had to change it. The blue moment had come.’
‘I can’t call you Titania.’
‘Maggie will do.’
‘Can I get straight to the point, Maggie?’
‘Please do.’
‘Do you believe me guilty?’
‘Yes.’
She sees a twitch around the eyes that might be annoyance. ‘Then why are you here?’ he asks her.
She looks down, at the origami shape on the table. ‘Is that for me?’ It is a fox, she sees now. An Arctic fox.
‘If you’d like it.’
She traces its outline gently with her index finger. ‘I’ll put it with the others you sent.’
His eyebrows lift but he doesn’t rise. Does she push it? Maybe not yet. Around them, she can sense people watching surreptitiously, straining to hear what she and Wolfe are saying to each other. Her voice, always low-pitched, falls even lower, forcing her to lean fractionally closer to him. ‘What is it you want from me?’ she asks.
‘Honestly?’ He leans back, and something treacherous inside her misses his closeness.
‘Of course.’ She doesn’t expect honesty. But she will know if she doesn’t get it.
‘I wanted to meet you.’
Actually, that does feel like honesty. ‘Why?’
His head lolls to one side. ‘Oh, come on. You wanted to meet me too.’
‘You killed four women. Why would any woman want to meet you?’
He takes in a deep breath and lets it out noisily. ‘It sometimes feels like every woman in Britain wants to meet me. God knows enough of them write to me.’ Then he sits up straighter, his face alive again, as though a sudden thought has struck him. ‘And it’s three women. You can’t count Zoe. She may not even be dead.’
‘I wanted to talk to you about Zoe in particular.’
His confidence falters. ‘I didn’t write that letter to her mother.’
‘I know. But her mother is suffering terribly. It can make no difference to you, and lots to her, if she can find and bury her daughter properly. I promised the police I’d ask you.’
He frowns. ‘Ask me what?’
‘To tell them where she is.’
The frank and honest smile is gone now. In its place is a smirk of pure cunning. ‘And what will they give me in return?’
‘They didn’t send me in here with an offer. You’d have to ask them.’
‘Will you pass on my terms?’ He is deadly serious. Her heartbeat, already in overdrive, picks up a notch.
‘If you want me to.’
‘I’ll show them where Zoe is, in return for two hours on a beach. With you.’
For a second, she doesn’t trust herself to speak. ‘You know the police will never agree to that. And you’re a murderer. Why would I want to spend any time with you?’
‘It will help Zoe’s mum, whom you pretend to care about. And it has to be fine. If it’s raining, we cancel and go another day. And it has to be jus
t the two of us. The police and guards stay out of earshot.’
‘The beach isn’t happening. But are you admitting to having killed those women? Do you know where Zoe is?’
He runs his hands over the back of his head, exhales loudly. ‘Of course I’m not. I have no idea where Zoe is. But I could run the boys in blue a merry chase through Cheddar’s caves. I could even escape. I know those caves very well.’
‘You’d live on the run for the rest of your life.’
He gives a quick, dismissive look round and more than one pair of eyes drops. ‘Has to be better than spending my life in here. And maybe I’d prove my innocence. Become a free man again. If I do, maybe you and I can meet normally.’
The conversation is spinning out of control. She needs to slow it down. ‘Let me explain a little about how I work. I monitor every high-profile or controversial conviction for murder or serious violence that takes place in this jurisdiction. I do some research, a bit of digging, into all those that catch my interest. I make notes and they form the first draft of a book. Currently, I have around two dozen books in progress. Most of them will never go beyond two or three chapters because I take on very few cases.’
‘How many chapters does mine have?’
His directness, his presumption, is bothering her. ‘Half a dozen,’ she says, although it has more.
‘I’m encouraged. But please tell me the title isn’t some lame reference to my name.’
She feels her face glow a shade warmer. ‘I think we’ve seen enough lupine puns over the past two years. The point I’m leading to is that, unless I become convinced there’s been some serious miscarriage of justice, I won’t get involved. More than that, and more important to me than justice, is a belief that I can win. I don’t flog dead horses.’
‘That’s why it has to be you.’
There is something in the simple sentence that feels too intimate. ‘It would be very foolish to pin hopes on me.’
‘You must have wondered why I haven’t appealed. Others did. And concluded, wrongly, that it’s because I accepted the justice of the sentence. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve been waiting for the right time.’
He reaches forward. He’s going to touch her. She waits for someone to step in. Physical contact is only allowed at the start and end of visits, not now, not—
No one does. Her hands stay, flat, on the tabletop, as though they are nailed in place. His fingertips rest lightly on hers.
‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
Chapter 32
PETE STANDS IN THE DOORWAY of Maggie’s kitchen, watching the crime scene processing team. One is taking photographs. Another is dusting for prints. The photographer pauses for a second. ‘We’ve got access to the whole of the house and the garages, but not the cellar. She says it’s permanently locked and only one way in. No one’s been in it for years, she says, and the stairs aren’t safe.’
Just the sort of place Pete wants to see. ‘Did she leave a key?’
‘Not that we’ve found.’
‘OK if I take a look upstairs?’
‘Yeah, we’re done up there.’
As he walks through the hall, Pete checks his watch. Visiting time at Parkhurst began half an hour ago. Barring an act of God, Maggie and Wolfe are together.
The stairs are a tall, straight flight, ending in a wide landing. White orchids, as pale and fragile as Maggie herself, stand on narrow tables along its length. Five doors. Gambling on her bedroom overlooking the front of the house, he turns left and passes an open door. A technician is inside it, sitting at Maggie’s desk. He doesn’t even look up. Pulling on latex gloves, Pete pushes gently on the next door.
He’d no idea how many shades of white there are in the world.
The walls are the colour that snow assumes on forest floors, the painted woodwork around the windows and doors a brighter shade, like sun on snow. The curtains and bedding are in the palest shades of grey. The bed is silver, the wooden furniture stripped birch. This has to be her room. Guest rooms are never this fancy. And yet, apart from the endless variety of white, he can see nothing in it that is essentially Maggie.
Almost without realizing what he is doing, he slips off his shoes to find the carpet is thick and soft beneath his feet. He checks the bedside cabinets, the dressing table.
The wardrobes line one wall. She favours trousers and sweaters, but there are a few slim, tailored dresses, all with long sleeves and low hemlines. She is a size eight. There are several woollen coats, including the fondant pink with black buttons that she’d worn to the station. Everything in the wardrobe is in bright, jewel colours or shades of white and cream. Nothing green, brown or beige.
Nothing that will fit a man.
A sound startles him and he opens the door of the en suite bathroom to see a male backside sticking out from beneath the bath.
‘Found anything?’ he asks.
Sunday shuffles out and sits back on his heels. ‘Plumbing needs some attention. Apart from that, nothing yet.’
As Sunday half disappears again beneath the bath, Pete pulls open the bathroom cabinet. Make-up, contact lenses, all the usual ‘lady products’. In a cupboard below the washbasin are toilet rolls, cleaning fluids and industrial-sized bottles of cream peroxide.
He turns to leave and gets halfway across the bedroom when he hears Sunday in the bathroom.
‘Whoa!’
Pete stops. ‘What’ve you found?’
‘Not sure. Give me a minute. I’ll catch up.’
Leaving Sunday behind, Pete makes his way along the landing. He finds a spare bedroom with empty cupboards and an unmade bed, a smaller room that is used as a furniture and box store.
The room at the end of the corridor has a plain wooden floor, and is almost devoid of furniture. There is a single leather chair, old, easy, comfortable, and a small coffee table holding seven hardback books. They are Maggie’s; her bestselling, true-crime books, one for each of the convicted killers she has represented. There is nothing else in the room at all, apart from what has been pinned to the walls.
‘Like a museum exhibit, isn’t it?’
Liz is behind him, is looking over his shoulder at the photographs, the newspaper cuttings, the internet screenshots and the case documents that have been arranged around the walls of the room.
‘Not one you’d take your kids to,’ Pete says. He still hasn’t moved from the doorway.
Huge cork noticeboards have been hung around the room, each one dedicated to one of Maggie’s clients.
‘It’s like an incident room,’ Pete says. ‘Except, it’s a bit, I don’t know…’
‘Gleeful?’ suggests Liz, who slips in and stands in front of the board dedicated to Shane Ridley. Maggie, as Ridley’s lawyer, had access to police files, and several of the key documents, including crime scene photographs, are here. Only three pieces of Lara Ridley’s body were ever found; one of them, her head, by a troop of scouts in woodland. Liz is looking at a photograph of that head now, empty eye sockets staring up at the camera from a pile of autumn leaves.
‘She’s really proud of her work, isn’t she?’ Liz says.
‘She’s very good at it.’ Pete has stepped closer to the portrait photograph of Ridley, taken on the couple’s honeymoon. His hair is windswept and damp, there is sand on the side of his face. His shoulders are bare.
Next around the wall is a board dedicated to Maggie’s first major success. Triple murderer Steve Lampton was released in 2007 after serving five years of a life sentence. He, too, is looking down at Pete now, surrounded by grisly photographs of the young women he killed.
Next is Nigel Upton who killed two teenagers in a well-known lovers’ lane near Buxton in Derbyshire. Upton, too, was released after Maggie’s intervention.
To one side of the big, uncurtained window is Niall Caldwell, who bludgeoned his mother to death to get his inheritance faster than he might otherwise have done. On the other side of the window, Russell Mulligan, who shot a village p
ostmistress in an armed robbery that went disastrously wrong. Then Bill Fryer. Arguably, Bill Fryer is the worst of them. He was the only one who went after kids.
‘She has pictures of dead children on her wall.’ Pete can’t help it. He’s seen some things in his time, but …
The final board in the room is dedicated to Hamish Wolfe. His picture is staring down at them.
‘She’s really odd, Pete.’ Liz is staying close to his side. ‘I know you think I’m biased against her. I know she has a job to do, but look at the table.’
Of all the things to capture attention in this room, Pete wouldn’t have bet on the coffee table, but he does what he’s told. It’s a mess, stained by several rings left by coffee mugs and glasses. The leather in the chair is old and worn and there is a glass beside the pile of books. He picks it up and smells Scotch.
‘She sits here, drinking coffee and Scotch and looking at innocent people who’ve been killed horribly and the monsters who she’s helping,’ says Liz. ‘What kind of woman does that?’
Pete can think of nothing to say. He turns to leave. Liz, though, seems reluctant to follow him. ‘You know what really freaks me out, though?’ she says.
Pete stops in the doorway. ‘What?’
‘Look at these blokes. Look at Ridley, Caldwell, not quite so much Mulligan but Fryer. And especially Hamish. Just look at them.’
Pete does, and sees exactly what she’s getting at.
‘If she’s only concerned with justice,’ says Liz, ‘how come she only gets involved with the good-looking ones?’
‘Pete!’ Someone’s voice calling from downstairs. ‘You need to see this!’
Leaving Maggie’s box room, he and Liz make their way back downstairs into the kitchen, where he almost falls over a pair of legs. One of the SOCOs is flat on his back, looking up at the underside of the table. The chairs have all been pushed away.
‘What?’
‘Come and see for yourself.’
Pete gets down, the floor tiles cold beneath him, and rolls over on to his back. The SOCO is shining a torch upwards.
‘Christ.’
‘Yeah. Think she’s seen it?’
Daisy in Chains Page 13
