A Date With Death

by Mark Roberts

  Norma Maguire leaned over the left-hand arm of her wheelchair and retched, but all that came up was a ball of wind and a string of phlegm.

  Clay took out her iPhone and dialled.

  ‘Sergeant Harris, can you come to Interview Suite 1, please.’

  ‘Sit up, Ms Maguire,’ said Hendricks.

  ‘Do you mean, the evidence makes you hideous?’ asked Clay.

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant at all.’

  Norma Maguire took a series of short, shallow breaths.

  ‘The only mirror in your house is in the basement,’ said Hendricks. ‘Would you say you had particularly low self-esteem?’

  She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and looked down at her lap.

  ‘I have a hideous face. I can’t bear the sight of myself.’

  ‘Your face isn’t hideous,’ said Clay.

  ‘My face is twisted. I have the eyes of a dog. My nose is pig-like. My hair is like black straw. My ears stick out at odd angles. Both sides of my face are at war with each other and it’s reflected in my whole being. My skin is riddled with deep pockmarks from the years of chronic acne I had when I was a girl. I am hideous. I am vile. I am an abomination.’

  Her breath came and went in shallow waves, and her chin was wet with saliva.

  Norma Maguire looked up at Clay as if she was waiting for her to say something else. After many silent moments, Norma Maguire asked, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking about your mother’s picture, when she played Jocasta at the Everyman.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Was it when you were a child?’ Clay waited. ‘When were you told you were hideous?’

  ‘She told me I was hideous and she was the most beautiful woman in the world.’

  ‘Your mother said that to you? Was it said to you over and over, a form of brainwashing?’

  ‘Mother said it every day, but she had no need to. I’ve got eyes. I told me.’

  ‘Right now, I want to talk about your victims, Ms Maguire. Was Sandra O’Day hideous? How would you describe her?’

  ‘Young and beautiful.’

  ‘How would you describe Annie Boyd from the pictures she sent to you?’

  ‘Young and beautiful.’

  ‘How would you describe Amanda Winton from the pictures she sent to you?’

  ‘Young and beautiful. Why are you torturing me?’

  ‘Just answer the questions, Ms Maguire. How would you describe Fran? Day in, day out, in your office for little chats. How would you describe Fran?’

  ‘Young and… very… very beautiful.’

  ‘Is she young and very, very beautiful and alive? Answer my question,’ said Clay. ‘Or is she young and very, very beautiful and dead?’

  ‘Young and very, very beautiful and I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you love Fran?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then show that love. Have mercy on her.’

  ‘She… She had no mercy on me. Walking out on me like she did.’

  ‘You only claim to love her. If you really loved Francesca Christie, you’d tell us where she is,’ said Clay. ‘Or is it too late?’

  128

  1.59 pm

  In Interview Suite 3, Cole looked at the row of framed photographs from the wall of Norma Maguire’s office, and drank in the musty smell from the scrapbooks found in her loft.

  Cole picked up the portrait in which Richard Ezra sat at Norma Maguire’s side, smiling the smile of the coerced, and a thought that appeared from nowhere turned his marrow to frozen sleet. He picked up the portrait in which Francesca Christie was at Norma Maguire’s side and noticed that the glass wasn’t as firmly in the frame as the picture in which Richard Ezra featured.

  He carried them to the table, placed the portraits on either side of the scrapbooks, took out his iPhone and called Mr Doherty’s direct number.

  On the third ring, Mr Doherty picked up.

  ‘Brian Doherty, how can I help you?’

  ‘Mr Doherty, it’s DC Cole, Trinity Road police station.’

  Cole could feel the energy rising in Mr Doherty, could see him sitting up straight in his seat as he asked, ‘Is it true? Norma Maguire’s in police custody?’

  ‘Yes, it’s true…’

  ‘Francesca…’

  ‘I can’t comment.’

  ‘Jesus. I saw the van taking all those things away from Maguire Holdings.’

  Cole looked at the same things around him and counted quietly to three.

  ‘Thank you for sending Richard Ezra’s address book back to me so promptly.’ Cole heard the sound of a man almost choking on his own curiosity.

  ‘Why are you calling me?’

  ‘Richard Ezra. Could you find out for me the date he travelled to Florence and the date his wife was murdered?’

  ‘I don’t have to find out. I know those dates.’

  Cole took a pad and pen from his pocket and scribbled down the information as Mr Doherty said, ‘They travelled to Florence on 4th July, 2019. Sarah was murdered on 8th July, 2019. Richard returned to England on 14th July, 2019, and Sarah’s body was repatriated on 21st July, 2019.’ There was a brief pause. ‘Are those dates suddenly relevant, DC Cole?’

  ‘I’m grateful for the information, Mr Doherty, but please don’t attach any significance or make a connection between this phone call and the fact that Norma Maguire is in police custody at the moment.’

  ‘Is there anything else, DC Cole?’

  ‘No.’

  The line went dead; the petulance of a man who didn’t like being told what to do or not to do.

  As Cole wrote the dates out legibly, he turned to PC Marsh and WPC Wallace as they ploughed through the receipts and invoices. ‘Are they all ordered chronologically?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied PC Marsh.

  ‘So it wouldn’t be too hard to go back and find these dates.’

  He passed the dates from July 2019 to WPC Wallace.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ she asked.

  ‘Receipts for travel to Florence from any airport in England on and around those dates.’

  ‘No problem.’

  He turned over the latest staff portrait and counted eight small metal clips on the inside of the frame that kept the hardboard back and photograph in place. Cole unpicked the clips and lifted away the frame.

  He looked down at the back of the group portrait and saw a smaller rectangle face down against it. The smaller photograph was older than the big portrait and bore the yellow discolouration of time.

  Both photographs had the same single word written on their backs.

  Family.

  The word on the large picture was in an adult hand and the word on the smaller photograph was a child’s handwriting.

  Cole took a pair of latex gloves from the box and snapped them on to his hands.

  He took the edges of the old photograph between his index fingers and thumbs and turned it over.

  It was a picture of a mother and her newborn baby.

  129

  2.08 pm

  Clay stood at the back wall of Interview Suite 1, staring at Edgar McKee as he fidgeted on the seat next to his solicitor.

  Hendricks faced him across the table and slid two pieces of paper from an A4 envelope. He placed the top sheet in front of McKee and asked, ‘Do you know what that is, Mr McKee?’

  ‘I suggest you look at it, Mr McKee,’ said his solicitor.

  McKee looked down.

  ‘Answer the question. What is it?’ Clay served from the back line.

  ‘It’s a DNA profile, a series of broad and narrow bands.’

  ‘Do you know whose DNA it is?’ asked Hendricks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s Annie Boyd’s. It was taken from a hair follicle found on a brush in her bedroom. It was found after her body had been dumped on the mud at the bottom of the River Mersey. It was found after her parents had been told that their daughter’s corpse had been discovered. Look at that picture very
closely, look at the bands, look at the narrow bands, look at the broad bands, look at the spacing between them. It’s a genetic fingerprint. It’s what Annie Boyd was made of.’

  Clay watched Hendricks sitting back and Edgar McKee staring down at Annie Boyd’s DNA profile. He placed the second sheet next to the first one.

  ‘Compare and contrast, Mr McKee. Not that there’s anything to contrast.’

  McKee’s solicitor looked closely at the profiles and looked up at Hendricks. He whispered in McKee’s ear and, after a few moments of deeply troubled thought, McKee nodded.

  ‘Remember what we agreed, Mr McKee?’

  Clay walked to the table and sat next to Hendricks.

  ‘Mr McKee acknowledges that the DNA from the hair follicle found on his hairnet in the abattoir does belong to Annie Boyd. He believes he can explain how this came to be.

  ‘Mr McKee would like an assurance that his co-operation will be taken into account when it comes to sentencing.’

  ‘We can convey that to the judiciary,’ said Clay. ‘Look at me. Where is Francesca Christie?’

  He looked as if there were a pair of wasps hovering close up to his face, their beating wings brushing against the pupils of his eyeballs.

  ‘The last time I saw Francesca Christie she was chained up in the basement of Norma Maguire’s house. If she’s not there now, Norma must’ve moved her somewhere else because she was spooked. I haven’t spoken to her since I’ve been in custody, so I don’t fucking know.’

  ‘When did you last speak to her?’

  ‘Half an hour before I came in to Trinity Road police station.’

  ‘Did you tell her you were coming here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I was going to wash my hands of her, let her take the full rap for what she did. I was going to get away with my part. Wren was my way out of the shit. Along with the absolute lack of evidence pointing in my direction on the phone and laptop. All the evidence pointed her way. I was going to get away with it and drop Norma in the shit.’

  ‘What was the content of your last conversation with Norma?’

  ‘It was brief, very brief. I asked her why the money hadn’t been paid into my bank account. She told me she wasn’t happy with the quality of my work. Then she hung up on me.’

  Clay took an envelope from her pocket and pulled a set of old photographs from it.

  ‘Who is Norma to you?’ asked Clay.

  ‘She’s fuck all to me.’

  Clay turned the top photograph round.

  ‘We found these from a search of Norma’s office. They were behind framed portraits of her staff teams down the years. In the picture you’re looking at, Norma’s five years old or thereabouts. Who’s the little boy in the picture with her?’

  ‘No more pictures.’

  ‘Who’s the little boy in this picture?’ She laid down a photograph of a little boy with red curly hair, on his own in a large garden. ‘That looks like the back of Norma Maguire’s house,’ said Clay.

  She placed a photograph of the same little boy, slightly older and with his hair cut short, smiling up at his mother.

  ‘That’s Catriona West,’ said Clay. ‘I recognise her from her publicity shots and stills from TV and films. Her stage name was Cecily Levin.’

  She spread the photographs out. A boy’s journey from a toddler to a young child.

  ‘All of a sudden, when the boy turns five, the pictures stop. I want to know two things from you, Edgar. What was your part in these killings? And what happened when you were five?’

  He pushed the pictures together and said, ‘Take them away from me.’

  Deeply buried pain surfaced in his eyes.

  ‘If you want us to cut some slack with you, Edgar, you need to start talking now. Do you still want a reduced sentence? Or have you changed your mind in the last minute or so?’

  He sat up and drew a huge breath.

  ‘I swear I am not, not, not a murderer. Norma Maguire is my sister. I tracked her down when I tried to track down my mother. My sister has my inheritance. My sister is a murderer. Norma Maguire killed Sandra O’Day, Annie Boyd and Amanda Winton. Norma Maguire was going to kill Francesca Christie and Sally Haydn. I’ll tell you everything straight but you’ve got to understand I’m not the killer, she is. After she killed them, strangled them… I…’

  ‘Go on, Mr McKee.’

  McKee looked into Clay’s eyes.

  ‘She paid me to skin them.’

  ‘I don’t think for one moment you did it just for money,’ said Clay. ‘Your relationship with women, it’s bizarre. Why did you make yourself a party to your sister’s crimes?’

  After a deep silence, he muttered.

  ‘I caught the word living and dead,’ said Clay. ‘Could you repeat what you’ve just said so that your meaning is completely clear.’

  He turned his chair at an angle, spoke into the empty spaces in the room.

  ‘I have no power over living women. The only power I have is over dead females. It’s the only way I have of asserting myself. When I was a child… I saw… things that have stayed with me. Now. And forever. In her bedroom, my mother made me watch her with men. Fucking her as she stared at her own reflection in the mirror. Every time I become aroused, I see those pictures and it makes me useless. I knew what it was like to skin cows. I wanted to know what it was like to skin a dead woman. It felt… it made me feel powerful.’

  He turned his chair round and faced Clay.

  ‘That’s very interesting, Mr McKee. If you know enough to understand that she killed these women, then surely you must know why she did these terrible things?’

  Edgar McKee looked at his solicitor, who poured a glass of water for him. As he drank down the water, his Adam’s apple bulged and his hands shook.

  ‘It goes back a long way. She was five, younger maybe. She made me watch her.’

  ‘She made you watch her do what?’

  ‘She found a cat in the back garden. It couldn’t move. It’d broken its leg. Its leg was sticking out at a weird angle. She told me she was being kind and putting it out of its misery. She told me to watch the cat and not to move or else. She went to the kitchen. She came back. She had a carving knife in her hand.’

  130

  2.32 pm

  Walking up the stairs to the incident room, Clay felt her iPhone ring out in her jacket pocket.

  She saw MARGARET CHRISTIE on display as she connected and took a deep breath as she stopped on a turn in the staircase.

  ‘Margaret?’ Clay hung her name in mid-air.

  ‘Norma Maguire, DCI Clay.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She called to the house when it was established that Francesca had gone missing. When she arrived, my sister walked into the kitchen holding Francesca’s favourite childhood toy. A doll called Kizzy. I got upset…’ Francesca’s mother took in a string of short breaths, the battling down of tears.

  ‘Take your time, Margaret.’

  Clay heard Francesca’s aunt speaking in the background but couldn’t make out what she was saying. A moment passed and then another, and then Clay felt the transfer of the conversation from hand to hand.

  ‘DCI Clay, I’m Francesca’s auntie. I placed the doll down on the kitchen table while Norma Maguire was in the room. I followed my sister out of the room because she was upset and told Norma Maguire to let herself out of the house. When we returned to the kitchen, we didn’t realise it at first but we both had the same feeling that something was horribly wrong. Francesca’s Kizzy doll was gone. The bitch stole Francesca’s doll.’

  ‘Are you one hundred per cent certain about this?’ asked Clay.

  ‘We’re certain. Please ask Norma Maguire about it. Shame on her.’

  Clay waited.

  ‘Have you a picture of Francesca as a child with the doll?’

  Francesca’s aunt relayed the question to her sister.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Francesca’s aunt.

&nbs
p; ‘Send it to my iPhone, please,’ said Clay. ‘Thank you for calling. And I’m sorry I couldn’t give you positive news.’

  She called Riley.

  ‘Gina, I’m going to send you a photograph of a doll. Please go to Norma Maguire’s house and find that doll. It’s called Kizzy.’

  131

  3.01 pm

  Clay looked at Edgar McKee and was reminded of a rapidly deflating, man-sized, man-shaped balloon.

  ‘Where were you when Sandra O’Day was abducted and killed?’

  ‘I was in Holland.’

  ‘No you weren’t. You flew out to Holland but on 31st July you came back to Liverpool via Gare du Nord in Paris to King’s Cross and London Euston. You went back in the opposite direction on Friday 6th August. You were in England between 31st July and 6th August.’

  McKee’s eyes shifted and met Clay’s.

  She pulled up the images she had made of the receipts on her iPhone and showed him four pictures.

  ‘All found in Norma Maguire’s office.’

  ‘If the receipts were in her filing cabinet, it stands to reason that she was the one who made the journeys.’

  ‘I’ve just had a call from security in Gare du Nord. They confirmed it. They processed your passport on 31st July.’

  Edgar McKee looked at his solicitor and whispered in his ear for what felt like a long time.

  ‘Mr McKee, repeat to DCI Clay what you’ve just said to me.’

  In the turn of a moment, Edgar McKee looked like his final thread of self had been snapped into two jagged pieces.

  ‘I didn’t commit the murders. I have never committed murder in my life.’

  ‘Are you referring to the murders of Sandra O’Day, Annie Boyd and Amanda Winton, Mr McKee?’

  He nodded.

  ‘If you didn’t kill those women, who did?’

  ‘Ask Norma Maguire about it.’

  ‘You know Norma Maguire?’

  He looked at the clock and muttered, ‘Christ.’

  ‘You know her? Yes or no? It’s not a hard question.’

  ‘Yes, I know her.’

  Edgar McKee looked up at the clock and smiled the smile of a man with a trump card tucked neatly into his sleeve.