Daisy in Chains (35 page)

This is going nowhere. If Sirocco was the intruder, she isn’t about to admit it. ‘I don’t think it was them. But it’s quite possible that Odi and Broon knew something, or that someone thought they did. Either way, it could have got them killed.’

‘Exactly. So what was it?’

The wind is getting stronger. ‘I have no idea.’ Maggie is beginning to wonder who is doing the interrogating. ‘She didn’t tell me.’

‘You saw her, just before she was killed. You were probably the last person to see her alive.’

An alarm bell is ringing. Not a real one. An alarm in her head. ‘How do you know that?’ she asks.

‘She told you something, didn’t she?’

‘She told me nothing. I was trying to persuade her to see a hypnotist, but she refused point-blank. I thought she was scared. Sirocco, I thought you had something to tell me. This is just wasting my time and it’s freezing up here.’

Maggie twists around, to see that just one chair is higher than theirs. She catches a glimpse of the ground and is surprised by a wave of nausea. She has never suffered from vertigo, in spite of what she told Sirocco earlier, but there is something about being so high, surrounded by so much dark wind, that is throwing her off-kilter.

‘I was talking to her,’ Sirocco shouts, ‘trying to get her confidence. I knew there was something she wasn’t telling us. She’d have told me in the end, I know she would.’

‘Sirocco, you are neither the police, Hamish’s lawyer or a member of his family, it really isn’t your place to be interfering like this.’

‘What are you saying, that I got Odi and Broon killed?’

‘No, of course not.’ But how did she know that Maggie and Odi had spoken? Had Sirocco been in Wells that night?

‘Maybe you got them killed? Maybe someone saw you talking to them, figured she’d told you too much, so they had to be got rid of.’

‘If that’s the case, whoever did it will have to kill me too, and I’m still alive.’

Sirocco’s black stare deepens and Maggie can practically hear the thoughts behind them. Still alive but at the top of a Ferris wheel, on a dark night. The wind is buffeting this flimsy seat and she is suddenly very conscious of all the joints and rivets, the nuts, bolts and screws that hold this steel seat together. Salt air, sea spray, rain – all have a corrosive effect on metal. How sound is this seat, the structure beneath it? How stupid has she been, agreeing to get on board?

‘Maybe you killed them,’ Sirocco hisses. ‘Maybe you’re the killer, and you realized they knew too much. You were the last person to see them alive. You knew where they were. You gave them food, maybe it was drugged. Maybe you didn’t go home, maybe you waited till they were asleep and slit their throats.’

This woman may not be entirely sane. Even more alarming is the fact that the wheel seems to have stopped turning. Maggie finds a fixed point on the horizon, the light on a radio mast. She is right. They aren’t moving any more.

‘I was at home, nearly forty miles away, when the bodies were discovered. I called Detective Sergeant Pete Weston on my landline, so there will be a trace of that call. A woman police constable knocked on my door while I was talking to Sergeant Weston.’

‘You had time to get back. They were killed hours before they were found.’

How does she know this?

‘The contents of their stomachs were examined during the post-mortems,’ Maggie says. ‘Traces of any drugs would have been present. The pathologist found nothing but alcohol – and they bought that themselves. The police found a Tesco receipt in Odi’s purse.’

This last is a lie. The last she heard, the police have no idea where the rum came from, but the wheel has definitely stopped moving and this woman is growing increasingly agitated.

‘Sirocco, if you really care about getting Hamish released, then we have to work together. Cooperating with me will achieve much more than flinging wild accusations around. Why has this ride stopped?’ Maggie peers over the side, trying to see something below that can explain the cessation of the ride. The boarding platform, some fifty feet below, is empty.

The seat, which is almost certainly not designed for strong winter winds, rocks on its axis. There is a reason why fairgrounds and amusement parks close in winter. Wind and ice play merry hell with safety. When she looks back at Sirocco the woman has another of her maddening smiles plastered across her face.

‘Bear stopped it,’ she says. ‘He won’t start it again until he sees my signal.’

‘Whatever the signal is, give it now,’ Maggie says. ‘I won’t ask you again.’

She waits. Three, five seconds. Enough. Forcing herself to move, because movement of any sort at this height feels unwise, she tugs off one glove and finds her phone.

Sirocco lunges towards her. Maggie pulls back and the seat swings. She feels a moment of paralysing fear when she realizes she is staring directly at the ground, then the seat rights itself and her phone is tugged from her hand.

‘Give me that back.’

Sirocco stretches out her right arm, dangling the phone in mid-air. Her mismatched eyebrows lift as she opens her fingers.

Maggie grips the seat and peers down. There is no one on the ground close enough to hear her shout, and shouting will make her look as though she is panicking.

‘Every second we are up here increases the trouble you will be in when we get down,’ she says. ‘Tell Bear to start the wheel again now.’

‘What do you really want with Hamish?’

‘We can talk when we’re back on the ground.’

‘He’s in love with me, you know. When he gets out, we’re going to be together.’

‘Good for you. In which case, you should be doing everything you can to cooperate with his lawyer, instead of putting her life at risk like this.’

‘That stupid woman, his mother, she doesn’t know anything. I visit him all the time. He writes to me.’

‘Then you should know that the only chance he has of getting out of prison alive is if I can find new evidence. I cannot do that stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel. You are being very foolish and making me extremely angry.’

‘You say you’re his lawyer.’

‘I am his lawyer. Get us down from here now.’

‘You say that, but you’ve done nothing. He’s no closer to getting out than he was before. You can’t do it, can you? You’re just stringing him along, making him like you, keeping him to yourself.’

‘Be reasonable. I’ve only been working on his case for a few weeks. The police had months and months.’

‘Tell me what you’ve done. Tell me what you’ve found out.’

‘Absolutely not. That is confidential to my client. Ask him about it, if you’re so close.’

‘I will. I’ll ask him next time I see him.’

‘Good. I’m glad that’s settled. Can we go down now?’

Sirocco takes hold of the safety bar with one hand and, for a split second, Maggie thinks she is going to force it open. Instead, she keeps her other hand on the back of the seat and starts swinging.

The chairs are designed to rock, it is part of the thrill of the ride, but usually on a warm summer’s day. Rocking in the dead of night, in the midst of a strong wind and on equipment that might not be entirely sound, is another matter altogether.

‘What did Odi tell you?’

This again? It is hard to speak, rather than gasp. ‘Nothing. I wanted her to try hypnosis. She refused and became frightened.’

Not as frightened as Maggie is right now.

‘I think you’re right,’ Maggie says. ‘I think she did know something, but she didn’t tell me.’

‘Who then? Who did she tell?’

‘Broon, possibly, but he’s dead too.’

‘Who else?’

‘There was no one else.’

The wheel is moving again. Is she sure? Yes. Oh, thank God. They are no longer at the crest of the wheel, but coming back down the other side. Several people, including one large figure wearing a reflective coat are gathered on the platform below. The seat descends further and she can see the shiny white stripes on a uniformed peaked cap. A police officer is looking up at them.

At her side, Sirocco actually growls with frustration.

‘I bloody well told you. That lot are mental.’ Pete is waiting for her when she has given her statement. He takes her arm and she thinks other people seem to be deciding her movements this evening. Sirocco persuading her, against her better judgement, to get on to the Ferris wheel, the police constable sent by Pete leading her to a patrol car, the detective who took her statement. And now Pete, steering her out of the back door of the police station. If they keep it up, she may lose the ability to direct her own actions.

‘What will happen to her?’

‘Sirocco, aka, Sarah Smith?’ Pete holds open the door and she steps outside. His car is parked near by. ‘We’ll probably charge her with assault under the Offences Against the Person Act. That would mean magistrates’ court tomorrow, probably Minehead. There’s a good chance she’ll be released on bail, though, so you might want to think about a restraining order. In you jump.’

‘I need to find my own car. I expect it’s still at the fairground.’

‘It’s at your house. I had someone drive it round. Are you going to keep me out here all night?’

She sinks down. The driver’s seat groans as he joins her and starts the engine.

‘What if I need to talk to her again?’

‘You don’t.’ He is intent on the road, driving too fast, the way police officers invariably do. ‘We ran her fingerprints as a matter of course. Turns out they were the ones on that paper rose that we couldn’t trace before. Looks like she was the one who came into your house that night, leaving billets-doux under the table.’

This is not good news. ‘Her fingerprints on the rose establish a link between her and Hamish. They both touched it.’

‘She may have stolen it from Sandra Wolfe, but that seems less likely. I’m going to contact Parkhurst in the morning, see if there’s any record of Sirocco visiting Wolfe.’

‘You think she killed Odi and Broon, don’t you?’

‘It’s not impossible. How would she know you’d spoken to them unless she was in Wells that night?’

‘Could a woman have done that? She isn’t particularly big or strong.’

‘She took them by surprise, in the middle of the night. They’d have been dopey, sluggish, even without the rum they’d drunk. Sneak up behind, grab Broon by his hair. Odi would have been easier. Yeah, I’d say it was possible.’

‘Why, though? If she’s on Hamish’s side, why get rid of the one person who could testify in his favour?’

‘There was no way Odi could testify for Wolfe. She was a completely unreliable witness, a good distance away, on a dark night. Wolfe, being guilty, would know her testimony counted for nothing, but thought he could use it to his advantage. By having her killed, he suddenly makes her much more important. Now, we’re all asking what she knew.’

‘Sounds a bit far-fetched to me.’

He wouldn’t be the first dangerous prisoner to use someone on the outside to construct an elaborate defence though, would he?’

‘Who are you thinking of?’

‘Keith Bellucci and Vanessa Carlton.’

Before his execution, Bellucci was one of the Woodland Stranglers, two brothers who abducted, raped and murdered young women in woods above St Louis in the 1970s.

‘Remind me,’ she says.

‘Carlton met Bellucci while he was on death row. He persuaded her to kill another woman, in the same way he’d killed several, and sprinkle her dead body with his sperm. This was before DNA, so only his blood type could be identified.’

‘The plan being that the police would find a fresh body, killed in exactly the same way, apparently by the same perpetrator and conclude they’d got the wrong man locked up. Did it work?’

‘Fortunately not. Carlton made a mess of it, the victim got away and she got caught. The romance didn’t survive her imprisonment.’

Maggie is still reeling from the news that Sirocco might have been telling the truth when she claimed she was in contact with Hamish. And yet he has denied knowing her. Which of them is lying?

Pete says, ‘If Wolfe’s defence team – which I guess is you – can establish a connection between the Wolfe murders and what happened to Odi and Broon, then doubt has to be cast on his conviction. You don’t need me to tell you that, and Wolfe certainly doesn’t.’

‘So are you going to charge Sirocco with murder?’

‘No evidence as yet. We’re searching her flat as we speak. I’m going round there after I drop you off.’

‘Can I come?’

‘No, you bloody well can’t. Oh, while I think of it: Daisy Baron is not on the medical register, so she’s not currently practising as a doctor in the UK. Tracking her further isn’t going to be that easy after all.’

‘I’m honestly not sure why people are fixating on Daisy. It was twenty years ago. She’s irrelevant.’

They drive in silence for some seconds.

‘Hold on,’ Maggie says, ‘if Sirocco killed Odi and Broon at Hamish’s instigation, what was all that about tonight? I’m on his side. Why would she attack me?’

‘That engine is not firing on all cylinders. She doesn’t necessarily see you as someone essential to Hamish. In her twisted brain, she’s all he needs. No, you’re the opposition, with your wacky blue hair and your cute-as-a-china-doll face, and your unlimited access to him in prison. You’re the love rival.’

‘
He loves me
,
scrawled in fake blood under my kitchen table?’

‘Exactly.’

‘I can’t believe Hamish had Odi and Broon killed. I just can’t.’

He shakes his head. ‘Oh, Maggie. I really hoped you were smarter than that.’

NEXT MORNING, THE
phone wakes her. Maggie knows it is Pete before she looks at the screen.

‘Don’t say I never give you good news.’

‘What?’

‘I got through to Parkhurst first thing. Deputy Governor did me a favour. There is no record of a Sirocco Silverwood or Sarah Smith ever visiting Wolfe in prison. He checked phone logs as well, and email traffic. He mainly contacts you and his mum, never Ms Smith. The relationship is a fantasy on Sirocco’s part. That doesn’t make her any less dangerous, by the way.’

A weight has fallen away. ‘So she didn’t get the rose from him?’