‘And you guessed this, when you met her?’ he asks.
She points at the still-vacant chair. ‘When I saw the police photographs of the red boots I knew something didn’t add up. The blood spots were exactly where women get blisters if their shoes are too tight. I never saw the blood as necessarily sinister and when I looked in Zoe’s wardrobe and realized her feet were actually nearly two sizes larger than the boots, I realized that they were probably a gift from her mother and that Zoe herself hated them.’
He sits back down, and the chair creaks beneath his weight. ‘Why would Zoe’s mother buy her boots two sizes too small?’ His face is baffled. He has no idea what women obsessed with size do to themselves. To each other. Size five boots squeezed on to size six and a half feet. Of course they were going to hurt, but Zoe was going to wear them all the same, because her domineering, controlling mother had paid good money for them, money she could ill afford, and for heaven’s sake, if Zoe lost a bit of weight then maybe the swelling in her feet would go down and they would fit.
‘There were lots of clothes in Zoe’s wardrobe that were far too small. Her mother was always bullying her to lose weight.’
Maggie closes her eyes and, for a few seconds, is back in the coffee bar in Aberdeen. ‘She didn’t like me because I was fat,’ Zoe is saying as she clings to her older sister’s hand. ‘I let her down. Embarrassed her in front of the neighbours. She was always trying to get me to lose weight but somehow, when someone’s on at you all the time, it just makes it worse.’
Maggie wants to hold her hand too.
‘She used to weigh me before I went out. If I was over what she felt I should be, she wouldn’t let me go. She phoned Kevin to say I was ill. Some days, she just wouldn’t give me food.’
‘She made her sit at the table and watch us eat.’ Stacey says. ‘Kimberly and I sneaked food to her as often as we could, but it wasn’t always easy.’
‘Zoe met Stacey the night she disappeared,’ Maggie tells Hamish. ‘Stacey borrowed her boyfriend’s car and drove down from Aberdeen. Zoe threw the boots out of the car window, as they were driving through Cheddar Gorge. They realized it was stupid and went back for them, but only found one.’
‘And how are your two new best friends feeling about my serving time for killing one of them?’ says Hamish.
‘They feel bad.’ Maggie thinks a bit more, knows she has to be honest with him. ‘But as Stacey was quick to point out, you’d have been sent to prison just the same, if Zoe had still been living at home.’
‘If you knew this, if you guessed it before you got on a plane, why did you even bother going? I’m not paying you to swan round the country on wild goose hunts.’
She doesn’t point out that, for the moment, he isn’t paying her at all. ‘Two reasons. One, I had to be sure. I have very little to work with here and I can’t leave a stone unturned.’
He waits.
‘Two, I need you to trust me.’
He wasn’t expecting that. She can tell from the slight start of his head, the narrowing of his eyes.
‘I am very good at what I do, Hamish. A woman who has hidden, successfully, from the police for years, I found in a matter of days. I needed you to know that, so that you do what I tell you to and keep nothing from me.’
His head sways in what might be a grudging nod. ‘The trouble is, my one and only alibi vanishes like hot air when everyone realizes that Zoe’s disappearance was in no way connected to the murders of the other three.’
He’s right. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘So, what happens? Zoe stays in Aberdeen and I continue to get petitioned by her family to tell the world where her body is?’
‘If the time comes when the truth will help you, I won’t hesitate to tell it. In the meantime, I’m hoping they’ll tell it themselves. They’re planning to wait until the younger sister is old enough to move north and live with them, before they come clean.’
‘In the meantime, Zoe stays dead.’
‘I’m sorry, Hamish. It’s a setback, I can’t deny that.’
‘Actually, I’m encouraged. You’re right, it is very impressive that you found Zoe so quickly. It gives me every hope for—’
‘I’m not looking for Daisy.’ She checks her watch. ‘I have to go. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you better news.’
She gets up without looking at him, picks up her bag, fastens her coat. Only when she is turning to knock on the door for release does she look back. Hamish is staring at the tabletop. The lines of his face have fallen. He looks older, beaten. For the first time, she realizes, he has let the mask slip.
He lifts his head a fraction and their eyes meet. Eyes gleam. A tear starts to fall, then another. Then too many to stop.
She turns, bangs on the door and sets off along the corridor. Only when she is back in the cold, salt air, does she slow down. Still the tears flow.
They are hers, not his.
Chapter 62
Email
Sent via the emailaprisoner service
From: Maggie Rose
To: Hamish Wolfe
Date: 23.12.2015
Subject: Daisy
I simply do not understand, given everything else facing you, why you are fixating on a woman who hasn’t been in your life for nearly twenty years.
Daisy is an irrelevance, Hamish. If you can’t see that, I’m not sure I can help you.
I’m sorry I left abruptly just now. When I say I hope you have a good Christmas, please believe I mean it sincerely. I’ll be in touch after the weekend.
Best wishes,
Maggie
Sent from my iPhone
Chapter 63
HMP Isle of Wight – Parkhurst
Clissold Road
Newport
Wednesday, 23 December 2015
Dear Maggie,
Let me tell you something about Daisy.
She loved to dance. When music was played, music of just about any sort, she could not keep still. Her shoulders, her hips, her toes and her fingertips started jigging and bouncing and shaking in time. I teased her, she tried so hard to stop. She failed completely.
No dance style was beyond her. She dragged me to modern jive classes. I was close to hopeless but it was worth it to see the joy in her eyes when we, occasionally, got a movement right. It was worth it for the passion she brought to our lovemaking afterwards, as though the hour’s dance class had been a sweaty, exhausting session of foreplay. Dancing turned Daisy on so much. She fucked like a rabbit afterwards.
She and I used to critique each other’s written work. She was merciless with me, picking me up on every error, however minor, and yet went into a major sulk if I pulled her up on anything. She was a stickler for grammar, but not the expert she considered herself to be.
She also had the funniest, dirtiest laugh imaginable, like a donkey on speed. She was very self-conscious of it, tried so hard not to laugh out loud, but there were times when she simply couldn’t stop. It was a badge of honour, in class, to make Daisy laugh and whoever managed it didn’t have to buy drinks that evening.
She was one of the cleverest women I ever met, but so shy. She’d been to a small, all-girls school in the North and I think felt out of her depth at Oxford. She was one of the best, the brightest there, but she was the only one who couldn’t see it.
You ask why I want to see Daisy again. I want to tell her that she was quietly wonderful. That she deserved better. And that I’m sorry.
Hamish
Chapter 64
From the office of
MAGGIE ROSE
The Rectory, Norton Stown, Somerset
Thursday, 24 December 2015
No, Hamish, let me tell you something about Daisy.
She was eighteen, little more than a child, away from home for the very first time, at a university where the pressure to succeed is enormous. She was a young woman seriously self-conscious about her weight (fat women always are), a woman who’d been teased and bullied and de
spised from the age she first became conscious that body-size was even a thing.
She would not have believed her luck when she attracted the attention of a man like you. At the same time that she fell completely in love with you, she told herself it was too good to be true. She braced herself for the inevitable rejection. She steeled herself to deal with the sight of you moving on to prettier, worthier girls. She never imagined how bad it was going to be.
You took this innocent, trusting, nice girl and you broke her.
I think you taped something that should have remained forever private and you showed it to your mates. Then I think you duplicated that video and sold copies to sad, seedy little men all over the UK.
And you know what else I think? I think you let her find out. You didn’t even have the common sense and courtesy to keep the video well hidden. I think that’s why she left. You drove her from the university she’d won a place in, from her new friends, from the career she’d longed for since being a child.
That’s the kind interpretation of what you did to Daisy, Hamish. Others are making different, far darker, assumptions about what happened.
Tell me the truth about what happened that night, and then, maybe, I’ll look for her.
M
Maggie seals the letter. The last postal collection on Christmas Eve is 10.30 a.m. and she has missed that by a couple of hours, but she doesn’t want her letter to Hamish sitting in the house over the holiday weekend. She might be tempted to burn it. She opens the front door just as a delivery van is pulling up in the road outside.
A woman wearing a green gilet swings open the gate and crunches her way up the path. Her hands are red, dirty and cracked around the tips and nails, but there is an expectant smile on her face. Florists expect to be welcomed – how can someone get a delivery of flowers and not be pleased? – but this woman’s smile is fading as she gets close enough to see the expression on Maggie’s face.
‘Christmas delivery for you,’ she says when she’s within earshot, because she hasn’t quite lost hope that all will be as it should be, that Maggie will break out of whatever stressed daydream is keeping her in thrall and say what’s she’s supposed to say – Flowers, how lovely, thank you, so sorry to bring you out in the cold.
‘No card,’ the florist goes on. ‘Apparently you’ll know who they’re from. The sender was very specific about the arrangement, though.’
Maggie has no choice but to take the cellophane-wrapped cluster of blooms. ‘Everything all right?’ the florist asks, although clearly it is not.
‘Yes, thank you,’ says Maggie, knowing that asking questions about who sent them will get her nowhere.
The florist turns and half runs back down the path as Maggie stares at the flowers that someone has sent her for Christmas.
A single rose, fat, pink and perfect. Surrounded by daisies.
Chapter 65
MAGGIE WAKES, sometime in the early hours of Christmas morning.
‘He was pretty fit when I knew him.’
When has she heard that? Hamish’s voice, but when exactly?
She switches on the light. Yes, definitely his voice, not something he wrote in a letter or an email.
Pretty fit when I knew him.
‘And this is only occurring to you now?’
Is she never to have any peace? ‘I’ve had a lot on my mind.’
Hamish had been talking about Pete and she’d assumed he’d been referring to the time of his arrest. The two men, inevitably, would have seen a lot of each other.
‘That feel right to you?’
‘No.’ Not any more, it doesn’t.
He was pretty fit when I knew him.
‘It suggests an intimacy, somehow, don’t you think? Something more than would come from sitting across a table in an interview room?’
‘Maybe.’
‘How can you judge someone’s fitness just by how they sit, stand, enter and leave the room?’
You can’t. You’ll see weight, percentage of body fat. ‘A medical doctor would be more in tune with what bodies are saying than a layman.’
‘Even so.’
Is it possible Pete and Hamish knew each other? Properly knew each other, before the arrest?
From close by in the room comes a soft, low laugh. ‘Maggie, Maggie, what are you not being told?’
Chapter 66
THE THIRD CRACKER in a row fails to snap and a heaviness sinks into the group of six people that has nothing to do with the amount of food they’ve eaten. ‘Cheap Poundland rubbish,’ Liz says, Yuletide exhaustion making her face seem thinner and paler than normal. Even her hair has lost some of its usual springiness. ‘Tell you what, we could pile them all up in the middle of the table and set fire to them. They’d spark then.’
The younger of her two sons looks up from his new tablet. ‘Yeah, Mum, can we?’
Liz glances towards the head of the table. ‘Or failing that, stick the lot down Pete’s trousers, followed by a lighted match. Might just get his attention.’
Pete starts. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘miles away.’
He spoons the last piece of soggy sponge into his mouth. There is still half of the giant sherry trifle left in the bowl and he has a horrible feeling second helpings are about to be forced upon him. ‘Delicious,’ he says, to head off the attack at the pass. ‘I now officially cannot eat another thing until New Year’s.’
Liz’s mother fiddles with her waistband. ‘I always say Christmas pudding is too heavy after a big meal.’
Christmas pudding is Pete’s favourite dessert. He hasn’t eaten a mouthful since Annabelle left him.
Liz’s dad nods at Pete, his pale blue eyes going from his daughter’s last-minute guest to the remains of the meal. ‘What do you say to that, young man?’
‘Delicious,’ Pete repeats, thinking next year, he doesn’t care how many invitations from well-meaning colleagues and mates he gets, he is not spending Christmas Day in someone else’s house. Minding his manners all day isn’t too bad, but the endless expectations of gratitude are soul-destroying. And having to drive himself home means he can’t even get drunk. He sneaks a look at his watch. Another two hours, at least, before he can make his excuses.
‘Do you know who killed the tramps yet?’ Liz’s dad asks.
‘Brian, that’s enough,’ says her mum. ‘Now, I suppose—’
Liz jumps up. ‘Stay where you are, Mum. You too, Dad. Pete and I will wash up. Kids, take your grandparents into the other room and entertain them.’
There is a subdued moan from one of the kids.
‘And they do not consider watching you on your iPads to be entertainment.’
Pete gathers an armful of dishes and follows Liz into the kitchen. They run water, scrape food into bins, load the dishwasher and try to organize the chaos that is a Christmas kitchen. Pete looks at the closed door. ‘This room soundproof?’ he asks.
Liz shakes her head. ‘Not remotely.’ She drops her voice. ‘And little pigs have very big ears – not to mention their grandparents.’
‘Understood.’
They work without speaking for several minutes, listening to the sounds of the TV and the boys on their iPads.
‘You could phone her.’ Liz is at the sink, her back to him, when she breaks the silence.
‘Tricky. Latimer has told me to stay away.’
She gives him a quizzical look over her shoulder.
‘Give Maggie Rose a wide berth for a week or two, maybe longer, were his exact words. He’s probably said the same thing to her.’
Liz frowns and smiles at the same time, one of the expressions he likes most to see on her face. ‘How’s she holding up, do you think?’
Pete lifts a stack of plates. ‘Keeping busy, from what I hear. Not often at home. When she is, she rarely comes out. Situation normal.’
‘She’ll be used to pressure. She won’t scare easily.’
‘I know.’
Something in his voice makes Liz give him a good long look. Sh
e wrinkles her nose before turning back to the sink. ‘What happened to Odi and Broon wasn’t your fault, Pete,’ she says.
Pete joins her at the sink and picks up a clean tea towel.
‘It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t mine, it wasn’t anyone’s fault except the psycho who held the knife.’
Pete glances round. ‘They were practically under my window, Liz. If I’d cranked it open a notch I could have heard them snoring.’
She gives him a sharp look. ‘You could not have anticipated that. No one could.’
‘We should have done.’
‘Rubbish.’ She gives him another smile. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Enough shop talk. Let’s finish this lot and get drunk.’
Chapter 67
MAGGIE GETS OUT of her car into air so icy it feels like she’s walking through knives. She pulls the collar of her coat up as high as it will go and sets off across the square. As she circumvents the enormous Norwegian spruce tree, that smells more of drunken men’s urine than it does Scandinavian pine forests, she glances up at the window of the Crown that she has come to think of as Pete’s window. She has no idea of whether it is or it isn’t, but it comforts her a little to look up at a friend’s window.
Or the window of someone who might have been a friend, had circumstances been very different.
She walks on, as the slow, sad melody of the cathedral’s organ finds its way across the crisp square and into her heart. In front of the Georgian facade of Wells Town Hall a group of people are standing silently. Some of them hold lanterns. There are tea lights on the stone flags. The flickering of the candle flames, the stronger, more garish lights of the pub are reflected on the ripples of cellophane that have been left where Odi and Broon breathed their last.
She keeps her eyes down as she gets closer to Odi and Broon’s shrine. Slipping to the front, she lays the roses down on the cold stone.
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