Daisy in Chains (39 page)

‘Shit,’ Latimer says. He looks at his watch. ‘We haven’t time for this. Fast-forward it.’

As the computer flicks through the frames, the four officers see an odd, speeded-up version of a couple having sex. It reminds Pete of ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines on the pier when he was a kid. Cards attached to a circular frame, shown quickly to give the impression of movement. They watch Wolfe put a garland of flowers, another frigging daisy chain, around the girl’s neck, see him leading her to the bed, bending over her, lying on top of her. They see her plump thighs wrap around his waist.

The footage, run at normal speed, might last twenty-five, thirty minutes. This is no fervent, soon-over student fumbling, Wolfe is putting on a show for the camera. The team flick through it in five minutes.

It’s over. Wolfe lies flat on the narrow bed, Daisy by his side, cuddled up against him. The flowers, crumpled and bruised, are on Wolfe’s head. He’s grinning, one arm flung up over the pillow, the other around his girlfriend.

‘Not what we’ve been led to believe,’ says Latimer.

‘Nope,’ says Pete. ‘No chains. No S & M. Nobody dies. Just a young couple in love.’

‘You’d be very pissed off, though, if you thought your boyfriend had shared it with the world,’ says Liz. ‘If you thought he’d just been using you.’

Latimer nods his head. ‘OK, what else?’

MAGGIE WANDERS FROM
room to room, checking door and window locks, thinking of the signs that precede a great storm. The swell on the ocean gets higher, the waves more rapid. At the same time, clouds flee from the sky, barometers hold steady and the wind drops.

Nothing has happened for hours now. This is the calm before.

The house is empty. Even the voice in her head has fallen silent. She can feel the other’s presence though, knows she is close, just out of sight. The doorbell clangs. The sound scares her, even though she has been expecting it.

Pete isn’t alone. They will probably never be alone again. The brief friendship bloomed like a day-lily, a flash of colour in a dull yard, shrivelled and dead by the time the sun came up again. At his side is the young male constable that she has seen before. Sunny, she thinks; maybe Sydney. She doesn’t care and won’t ask. The time for pretending is over.

They follow her down the hall to her study. She has already placed two chairs in front of her desk.

The younger man is excited, but nervous too. This young police officer is slightly afraid of her. Pete looks sad. Maggie wishes she could tell him that, to an extent, she shares his sadness but that would hardly be appropriate any more.

‘We wanted to share this with you as soon as possible,’ he says. ‘We agreed there’s nothing to be gained by you not having the information as soon as us.’

They have found something in the abandoned office. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

‘The computer is definitely the one used to make contact with the three victims.’

She has rarely heard Pete speak so formally, so like a police spokesman on the evening news.

‘Our investigators found the conversations that Hamish Wolfe had with Jessie Tout, Chloe Wood and Myrtle Reid. They’re double-checking times and dates, IP addresses, all the technical stuff, but there seems little doubt.’

‘We’d really love to know how you managed to find it so quickly when we couldn’t.’ The constable has a stain on the collar of his shirt. He looks tired.

‘I looked.’ Maggie returns the young man’s stare. ‘You didn’t. Not really.’

The constable’s face says he’s registered Maggie’s aggression, and is up for a fight – to a point. He says, ‘We wondered if perhaps your client gave you some idea where to look.’

‘Why on earth would he do something so stupid? And all you’ve found is the computer that was used to make contact with the women. You haven’t found anything to link it to Hamish.’

‘Actually, we have,’ the constable begins, before Pete silences him with a look.

‘There was a pen,’ Pete says. ‘A biro, hidden away beneath the carpet. It has Hamish’s prints on it.’

Maggie stares back at him for a second. ‘It proves nothing,’ she says, although she knows that, in the eyes of the world, it will prove a great deal. ‘If someone broke into Hamish’s house to steal evidence, they could easily have found a pen.’

The constable sneers. Maggie’s hand reaches out for a paperweight and clasps it tight. The sneer fades.

‘Just three women?’ asks Maggie.

Pete frowns. ‘You mean, did we find any trace of Zoe?’

‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’

‘Nothing,’ says the constable. ‘In fact, the first activity we found dates to after Zoe’s disappearance.’

‘I thought so. I don’t think Zoe’s disappearance had anything to do with the three murders,’ Maggie says. ‘I think it may have been entirely unconnected, except that it gave the killer the idea. A fat girl vanished, presumed dead. Hamish supposedly had a history with fat girls. The real killer decided to make other fat girls disappear, and direct the blame towards him by planting evidence.’

Pete sighs. ‘Maggie, this conspiracy theory is going nowhere.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you and Hamish were friends before his arrest?’

He flushes. ‘We weren’t friends.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that your ex-wife, who left you for your boss, just six months before Jessie was murdered, is a very similar size to Hamish’s supposed three victims?’

He gives an odd, twisted smile. ‘Are you serious?’

Maggie turns to the constable. ‘If anything happens to me, Detective, if I vanish suddenly, or have a freakish accident, I do hope you’ll remember this conversation.’

The man laughs, but glances sideways at his sergeant. Pete reaches into his coat pocket. He pulls out a clear plastic wallet, with several loose sheets of notepaper inside and puts them on the desk in front of Maggie.

‘They’re just copies,’ he says. ‘The originals are at the station.’

‘What are they?’ Maggie sees the heading on the stationery and can feel fibres in her body start to tighten.
HMP Isle of Wight.

‘Please read them. They’re in date order. We’ll wait.’

She wants to refuse, to tell them to leave the letters, that she’ll get to them in her own time. She knows they won’t agree.

Aware that she has no choice, she unfolds the first letter.

Hamish’s handwriting. She reads it through to the end. The second letter talks about how the world sees him as a monster and how only the woman he loves can redeem him. The third is more whimsical, poetic even, deeply moving in its sadness. She recognizes his turn of phrase, his sense of humour, his imagination. The raw eroticism of the Christmas letter stabs her in the gut. There is no doubt that he wrote these letters. Five of them in total, the most recent sent just a week or so ago. Hamish has been writing love letters. And not to her.

She has a sense of a great weight above her head, a weight that will fall soon, crushing her entirely.

‘Who is the recipient?’ She hears her own voice sounding old and worn out. Hamish sees no one but his mother and herself. He told her that. She believed him.

Pete says, ‘I suggest you read the replies.’

There are more letters. The next batch is in a different handwriting, harder to read. No address.

She can’t read this drivel. She skips to the end.

There are more. One is enough. ‘Are these genuine?’ she asks, although she knows they must be. ‘Who sent them?’

‘All letters sent into and out of Parkhurst are copied,’ Pete explains. ‘We applied for a warrant to examine Wolfe’s correspondence – after we found the originals from him in Sarah Smith’s flat. Remember Sarah Smith? You know her as Sirocco.’

‘These letters were sent to Sirocco?’ Maggie manages. ‘To and from Sirocco?’

‘That’s right.’

Sirocco? That weird, needy, clingy girl? Hamish in love with Sirocco?

‘Are you OK, Miss Rose?’ the constable says. ‘Can I get you a glass of water?’

If that man speaks to her again, she will hit him. ‘You told me she never visited. You checked. She was lying.’

‘Actually, she wasn’t,’ Pete says. ‘She just didn’t give her own name. She used the name Sophie Wolfe, pretending to be Hamish’s sister.’

‘That’s impossible. She’d need ID.’

‘She had it,’ Pete tells her. ‘She used Sophie’s old passport and had a new one issued with her photograph. She looked sufficiently like her for the Passport Office to be fooled. We spotted it the minute we checked the visitor’s schedule. We’ll add it to the charges she’s facing, of course.’

‘She would have needed Wolfe’s help to do that,’ says the constable. ‘He probably told her where she’d find the passport, how to sneak in to his parents’ house. They’ve been conspiring together.’

Maggie has an urge to get up, to bang her fists against a hard surface. She clasps the seat with one hand. ‘Sirocco killed Odi and Broon. She tried to kill me.’

‘Yes, that’s another thing,’ says Pete. ‘We have absolutely no evidence to connect her with the murder in Wells Market Square. Which means we can’t charge her. The only charge that will stick at the moment is that of threatening behaviour towards you. I’m afraid she was granted bail this afternoon.’

‘You’re kidding me?’

They get to their feet.

‘She’s been told to come nowhere near you,’ says Pete. ‘But as we know, she is a bit unstable. You might want to keep your doors locked. Obviously, if you’re concerned at any time, you should dial 999.’

Pete glances back as he leaves the room and his eyes settle on the pile of letters. ‘You can keep those.’

‘
HE DOESN
’
T LOVE
her.’

‘If you say so.’

‘He can’t love her. Have you seen her? He’s been using her.’

‘So he loves you, but he’s using her, is that right? And yet, she’s the one who got the letters.’

Maggie pulls herself out of the bath and feels cold again immediately. She finds a gown and slippers. She is shaking, she is so cold. She leaves the steam-drenched bathroom and the temperature drops by a degree or more.

‘He loves me. He said so.’

‘Actually, that’s not what he said. He said, he
loved
– note the use of the past tense—’

‘Enough!’

‘Look at me.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘It’s time. Look at me.’

Her feet dragging like a sulky child, Maggie steps across the carpet to the full-length, free-standing mirror in the corner. The lights in her bedroom are always kept low, and the steam has stolen out from the bathroom to coat the surface of the mirror. She can see nothing of her reflection but a hazy shape.

In spite of the cold, Maggie lets her robe slip to the carpet. She can just about make out her tiny frame in the steamed-up mirror. She hasn’t weighed more than nine stone for years, but in recent weeks the weight has fallen off her. She was eight stone six pounds this morning. She’ll have gained two pounds, roughly, during the course of the day. She always knows, to half a pound, how much she weighs.

She pulls loose her hair and fluffs it up around her head. She can just about see the pale blue curls and the paler face.

A slender body, a perfect oval face, and bright blue hair. That is the reflection hiding itself from her right now.