Daisy in Chains (41 page)

Sirocco stumbles a little over the names, as though they are unfamiliar to her. Maggie wants to tell her to get on with it.

There is a tiny, annoying smile on her face now.

Sirocco’s voice has fallen lower. Maggie takes a step up, so as not to miss a word.

Sirocco’s eyes lift and meet Maggie’s again. ‘What does he mean?’ she asks. ‘I don’t know where to find him. He’s never called me Guinevere before.’

The world can transform in a matter of seconds, Maggie discovers. It just has. She turns away, so that Sirocco will not see her smiling, will not guess that her heart is racing, her head singing.

‘What?’ Sirocco says, suddenly confused. ‘What is it? Do you understand it? Where are you going? Come back up.’

‘Of course I understand it,’ Maggie takes the last step down. She turns the corner, but hears with satisfaction the sound of the other woman’s footsteps.

‘You know what he means?’ Sirocco is calling out as she follows. ‘You know where he’ll be?’

‘Oh yes.’

Maggie hears the softer footstep that tells her Sirocco has reached the stone floor at the bottom of the steps.

One of the most surprising aspects of this whole business, Maggie thinks, as she takes up position in the centre of the room, is how easy it can be to persuade women to do the dumbest things. Like stepping down into the basement of someone they do not know.

With Jessie, she’d faked an injury. Jessie had been the most challenging, in fairness, because Jessie had stepped out that bright Saturday believing she was to meet a handsome doctor. She’d almost refused to go with the smartly dressed young woman who’d claimed she was Harry’s PA, and that he’d been unavoidably delayed in theatre, but would meet her later at his house.

Chloe, on the other hand had been easy. Chloe hadn’t thought to question that the quirky jewellery tycoon had both workshop and office in her basement. Myrtle had never doubted the need to waddle below ground to view the Disney collection, or that the slender, blue-haired woman leading the way was Anita Radcliffe’s daughter. And now this deluded woman is proving as stupid as the rest.

Sirocco’s flowing black form appears in the doorway as she looks nervously around. The basement is empty now, apart from the flies. The boxes of souvenirs – the women’s clothes and possessions – have long since been disposed of. Maggie is nothing if not a very careful killer. More recently, her old medical textbooks, her childhood things, have likewise been taken away. She will leave behind nothing that will link her to her former life. Or to what she has done in this one.

There is nothing in this basement room that should alarm Sirocco. From where she is standing, she cannot see the disconnected bathtub in which the bodies of three large women decomposed and drained away until their remains weighed practically nothing. Hamish had been bang on about that.

The two women stand and face each other. Sirocco looks on the verge of tears. ‘How? How come you know where Hamish is going and I don’t?’

As Maggie steps forward she feels a fleeting moment of pity for what the girl has lost. She holds out her left hand, ostensibly for the letter, really as a distraction, so that Sirocco won’t see, until too late, what Maggie has in her right hand.

The club hammer, identical to the one that killed Odi and Broon, cuts its way through the air and connects with the side of Sirocco’s head. The hard resistance of bone is more solid than Maggie expected and her arm feels a jolt of pain as Sirocco sways.

Maggie swings her arm back, ready to strike again, but Sirocco sinks to the floor, her black clothes spreading around her like a stagnant puddle. She is unlikely to be dead, not after one strike, but Maggie can waste no more time. She has somewhere else to be.

‘How do I know where Hamish is going?’ she says to the motionless form on the cellar floor. ‘I know because these letters were never meant for you, I’m afraid. You were just the postman.’

HE HAS LEFT
a trail for her. The fluorescent stones start at the cave entrance and lead her, breadcrumb style, into its depths. She doesn’t need them. She has been this way so many times, she thinks she can do it in the dark. She steps into the cave, leaving light behind – or maybe she did that a long time ago. Either way, her path is clear.

After a few yards, she picks up his scent. Not the one she remembers from so long ago, that heady mix of aftershave and shower gel and something that was so essentially male, so completely Hamish, but the new smell, the one born of prison and violence and frustration.

She likes them both.

The trickling of the water over the rocks sounds like music. The first time he brought her here, there really was music. He’d carried a battery-operated CD player in his backpack, along with a padded mat and blanket, cold champagne and glasses, and lots of candles.

‘I don’t like caves. They make me claustrophobic,’ Daisy had complained, when what she really meant was that she didn’t like climbing up the sides of steep hills to get to them. She didn’t like the constricted feeling of squeezing her too large body through tiny gaps in the walls.

‘You’ll like this one,’ he promised. ‘There’s a pool where Arthur and Guinevere’s wedding rings were thrown hundreds of years ago. The rock grew around them and all you can see now are two small rings of gold in the rock face.’

She’d gone willingly, after that, because who can resist a tale of enduring love. Or heartless betrayal. The legend could be read both ways.

Twenty years ago, he turned the cave into a fairy grotto with dozens of tiny, sparkling lights. She’d sat on the rug and watched in wonder as this beautiful man went to so much trouble for her. She’d known in that moment, for better or worse, she would love him until the day she died.

She hadn’t known then, of course, that it was going to be so very much for the worse.

The narrow rock passage sweeps down low and she must too, but she knows he is waiting on the other side.

The vaulted chamber is much darker than she remembers from that first time. He has had neither the time, nor the opportunity, to collect tea lights. All he has is a small torch and a travel rug, both of which are probably from the plane.

He is sitting, his back to the river, watching her approach.

‘Hey, gorgeous,’ he says.

She draws closer, reaches the rug and sinks down beside him. He is too pale, even in this weird absence of light, too thin. So much older than the boy she fell in love with, and yet so completely the man who has been in her head every waking moment for two decades. Only the sadness is different. The sadness at what she has become.

‘How long have you known?’ She asks the question, and yet knows the answer before he gives it.

‘Almost from the first,’ he says. ‘Someone planted that evidence. It didn’t take me long to realize you were the only one clever enough.’

Of course. He’d known that Maggie Rose and Daisy Baron were one and the same, long before that first Parkhurst visit. She would have seen any gleam of recognition in his eyes, any sudden, sharp realization of the truth. He has been playing the game for as long as she. Only he has been playing it better.

He tries to smile, doesn’t quite make it. It will cost him dear, this knowledge of what he has turned her into.

‘And the only one who hated you enough,’ she says.

He is so very, very sad. ‘Still?’ he asks her.

She shakes her head. ‘No.’

‘Well, that’s something, I guess.’

Twenty years ago, on this very spot, he’d barely been able to keep his hands off her. Now, he sits apart. She reaches out and traces her index finger along the back of his hand. He glances down at it.

‘Seriously?’ she says. ‘I was the first person you thought of? After all this time?’

His hand turns and, after a moment’s hesitation, takes hold of hers. ‘The whole cave business more or less convinced me.’ He looks around. ‘Especially when Myrtle was found in here. Then you sent my mother
those books. Did you think I’d forgotten you were called Margaret? That I never knew your middle name? The books clinched it. You never did get the hang of participles, did you? And it’s not, “
too young an age
”, it’s “
too early an age
”. How many times did I tell you that?’

She edges closer. ‘Don’t tell me you’re still a grammar fascist.’

‘What happened to Sirocco?’ he asks her.

She doesn’t reply and he sees what has happened to Sirocco.

‘You knew that,’ she says quickly. ‘You knew when you chose to involve her. When you sent her with that last letter.’

He doesn’t argue. The darkness that seeped into her all those years ago has found its way into him too.

‘The police will get to my house soon. They’ll find her. They’ll work out that I killed the other three. They’ll know you’re innocent.’

‘Jessie, Chloe, Myrtle,’ he says, as though their names are seldom off his tongue. ‘Did there need to be three?’

‘Two could be coincidence,’ she says. ‘Three makes a serial killer.’

He nods slowly and she thinks she will have to work hard to chase that sadness away. But that’s OK. They have plenty of time.

‘Odi and Broon? Did she see you coming in here? Is that why?’

Maggie is getting bored, talking about dead people. This isn’t why she came. ‘Who knows? Odi was scared of me, but then again she was scared of everything. I just don’t like loose ends.’

‘Looks like I’m a free man.’ His face brightens, but the look of levity is forced and false. ‘Although, technically, I could still be charged with stealing a plane.’

She smiles too. ‘Can’t help you with that one, I’m afraid.’

‘So, what was the plan? Leave me there to rot? When the police found that office you hired, that computer, that frigging pen with my fingerprints on it – how did you do that, by the way? – I thought that was it. That I’d have one last visit, you’d smile your little cat-like smile and I’d never see you again.’

His gaze holds hers and doesn’t falter.

‘It was the pen you signed my contract with,’ she says. ‘I just changed the ink and removed the cap. And, no, I would never have left you to rot. I thought perhaps we’d fall in love, that I’d become a prison wife,
devoted, loyal, working tirelessly for your release but never quite managing it.’