Pete thinks. ‘She’d have said something, I’m sure. What is it, it’s not—’
‘Blood? No we don’t think so. Although almost certainly intended to give that impression. Probably just a thick red marker pen. We need to get some shots.’
The SOCO slides out, leaving Pete staring up at the writing on the underside of Maggie’s kitchen table. Just three words.
HE LOVES ME.
Chapter 33
THE NOISE LEVELS IN THE VISITING HALL have picked up and Maggie and Wolfe have had to lean closer to hear each other.
It has to be her.
She wishes she had something to drink. ‘OK, then, give me something to work with. Tell me who might have killed those women.’
Wolfe shakes his head. ‘I have no more idea than you.’
‘Explain the trace evidence, your car being used to transport Myrtle Reid’s body, the Facebook posting from your computer.’
His bruised hands lift from the table. ‘Someone got into my house. Accept that one, simple fact, and all else becomes easy to explain.’
Someone got into his house. Took his car keys, maybe had another set made. Picked up a few dog hairs. Used his computer.
‘Who had keys, apart from you?’
‘My mother, cleaner, fiancée. Personally, I don’t suspect any of them, but by all means check them out.’
‘Did any of them report their keys missing at any time? Did you lose yours for any period?’
‘Afraid not. I do keep a spare set in the house, but I don’t remember them ever going missing. Not that I would check them every day.’
‘This intruder, if he or she exists, also accessed your computer. Presumably it’s password protected?’
He pulls a face. ‘It is, but I was never that careful about logging out when I went to work in the morning. I’d quite often come home to find it still on. Once in the house, accessing the computer would have been easy.’
‘OK, I admit it’s possible. But who would go to such lengths to frame you for murder?’
She’s struck a chord. ‘Exactly. It has to be about me. If the killer simply wanted a scapegoat, he wouldn’t choose me. He’d pick someone much less able to fight back. Someone not too bright, maybe educationally subnormal. Someone with a troubled background.’
She lets her face betray just a hint of scepticism. ‘Someone wanted to hurt you, specifically?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you have any enemies?’
‘Thousands. Do you see the stuff posted about me on Twitter?’
‘I mean before. Patients who felt let down? Medical secretaries or nurses you’ve had fired?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’ve never had a malpractice lawsuit filed. Never had to formally reprimand a junior colleague. People usually cooperate pretty well with me.’
‘Does the name Sirocco Silverwood mean anything to you?’
His brow lifts. ‘Is she a character in a young adult novel?’
‘She’s real. She claims you and she have a bond.’
His face says he’s unimpressed. ‘A lot of women write to me, quite a few of them seem to think we’re in some sort of relationship. I don’t keep their letters, I’m afraid.’ He stops, still thinking. ‘Actually, I think Mum might have mentioned someone of that name. Is she a member of that support group?’
‘She is. Have you met her?’
He shakes his head. ‘Nope.’
‘Tell me about Fat Club.’
His head is suddenly very still. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘A woman scorned has a long memory. Rumour has it you’ve done some unspeakable things in your time.’
His eyes have a way of turning dull when he’s angry. ‘Luring a woman to a cave and slitting her throat is unspeakable. Letting her bleed out in the pitch-dark on a cold, stone floor is unspeakable. I’ve heard those rumours too, and let me tell you, having consensual sex with a fellow student is pretty much OK in my book. Whatever her dress size happens to be.’
His assurance annoys her. She didn’t want to find him desperate, pathetic even, but his calm feels wrong too. ‘You made video recordings. Without the girls’ knowledge.’ She waits for him to deny it. The porn business was only ever rumoured. His stare remains impassive.
‘You and your mates pretended to like those girls, you probably plied them with cheap wine to make the job a bit easier. You thought this was funny. You passed the tapes around your mates, so that you could all gawp at women’s bodies and laugh at how hideously ugly they were.’
Wolfe slaps one hand down on the table. Not loud, but sharply enough to draw a few extra glances. Some of their neighbours have given up all pretence of having a conversation of their own.
‘Point of order, Maggie,’ he says. ‘Don’t suggest I got women drunk in order to have sex with them. Students drink. They drink and they have sex and rape doesn’t come into it. And, you know what, even if these sad old rumours were true – and I’m not saying they are – it’s a big leap from behaving like a twat at medical school to murdering four women.’
Maggie waits. It’s good that he’s angry. When people get angry they let things slip.
‘Ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen. Start to wrap it up, please.’
Wolfe seems to droop a little. ‘I guess it’s make-your-mind-up-time, Lawyer Rose. Can you and I do business together?’
Maggie holds up her hands. It is a gesture of hopelessness. ‘You’ve given me nothing. Someone broke into your house and stole your car. Not impossible in itself but impossible to prove. Someone was trying to frame you for the murders but you have no idea who…’
He leans forward. ‘Has it occurred to you yet that Detective Sergeant Weston’s conversation with the attendant at that particular station was a remarkable stroke of luck?’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Wouldn’t you think, Maggie, that a man with murder on his mind, a man with a woman tied up and terrified in the boot of his car, would check his tyre pressure before he left his house?’
Of course. She’d thought exactly the same thing. ‘Accidents happen. Things go wrong. Maybe you drove your car over a piece of glass that night.’
‘Or maybe whoever was driving my car needed to be seen. Needed to be caught on camera somewhere and had previously checked out that petrol station because it was in the right area and it had an air pump somewhat removed from the main building. We don’t even know for certain that Myrtle was in the car, just that her sock was found in the bushes some time later. Does it not have a staged feeling about it?’
A guard is making his way around the tables, encouraging stragglers to get up and head out.
‘The murders finished,’ Maggie says. ‘Once you were taken off the streets, the killings stopped.’
‘I told you it was all about me.’
She shakes her head. ‘No. An opportunistic framing, I might accept, but the idea that someone killed four women just to get you into trouble? That’s nuts.’
The guard is very close now and she stands up. Hamish doesn’t move. ‘Maggie, if this case were easy, I wouldn’t need you.’
Chapter 34
‘THERE IS A PATROL car parked outside my house.’
‘Ah, you’re home. I’ll be ten minutes.’
‘No, I don’t think— Oh, for God’s sake.’
Maggie is listening to dead air. Ten minutes? Weston can’t drive from Wells in ten minutes, he has to be lurking somewhere close. Damn. She wants a bath, to curl up in bed, she needs time to get her head in order. Spending time with Wolfe has exhausted her.
‘So, you don’t need Detective Pete any more?’
‘I never did.’
‘You were starting to like him.’
Maggie locks the back door. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock. I’m cold. I’m hungry. And I know he’s only coming to ask me about today.’
The kitchen smells of intruders. It smells of their bodies, of the food they brought in their packed lunches, the cigarettes they
smoked outside her back door. It smells of their curiosity, their prying into her cupboards and drawers. It smells of the comments they exchanged about her, of their snide observances and their disrespectful banter.
She hears the doorbell as she is getting out of the shower, again as she is pulling on clothes. It is being clanged for the third time when she reaches the bottom of the stairs. It has started snowing again, there are flakes in Pete’s hair, on the shoulders of his coat.
‘Any chance we can do this quickly?’ she says.
‘Depends how fast you eat?’
Balanced on one arm Pete holds a white carrier bag. She catches the scent of garlic, ginger, warm food. She should be cross at the presumption, resentful of the interruption. All she can feel is hunger. She opens the door a little wider, silently giving him permission to come in. ‘Chinese?’ she asks.
‘Thai.’ He steps inside, bringing the dark chill of the night with him.
She closes the door quickly, although not quickly enough. She can still see the cold air, lurking in corners of her hallway.
‘Cutlery in the drawer by the sink,’ she tells him, when they’re both in the warmth of the kitchen. ‘I may even have chopsticks. Don’t bother setting a place for the elephant.’
This makes him smile. He avoids the chopsticks, finding knives and forks instead, not commenting on the fact that none of them match. She rinses plates under the hot tap and finds half a bottle of white wine in the fridge.
‘So go on,’ he says. ‘Did you and Wolfe hit it off?’
‘You’d have to ask him what he thinks of me. For my part, I thought him polite. Intelligent. In good shape, physically and mentally.’
Pete lifts his eyebrows.
‘In good health, I should say. Prison life hasn’t beaten him down yet. It will, though. It gets them all in the end.’
‘He wields a lot of power on the wing. He doles out medical advice. The big men look after him, offer him protection, of sorts. And he’s a pretty physical bloke too. He can handle himself.’
‘I also found him calm.’
‘Calm?’
‘Yes. And not a medicated calm, either. He isn’t taking anything, I’m sure of it. There was none of the anxiety, the urgency I normally expect when I see people who believe they’re suffering a miscarriage of justice. He wasn’t even particularly angry. Strange as it may seem, he’s remarkably relaxed about being in prison.’
‘Does that suggest innocence to you?’
She turns back to the fridge. ‘No. No, it doesn’t.’
Pete straightens the knives and forks.
‘Did you ever consider the possibility that Wolfe was framed?’ She throws the question back over her shoulder and sees from his face that he’d known that one was coming.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It was his first and only defence. The trouble is, he never put forward a single candidate. By his own admission, and as we found out, he had no enemies.’
‘And you were prepared to believe this nice guy capable of killing four women?’
‘I can name you some very charming mass murderers.’
She pours wine, the friendly gurgling softening the mood. He takes lids off food containers. They sit down and she feels a moment of regret that she and Pete Weston will never be friends.
‘Will you admit, though, that it’s possible?’ she says. ‘Let’s say his cleaning lady works with headphones, listening to music. If she’s upstairs, hoovering, there’s every chance someone could come in downstairs, find a spare set of keys, get them copied, and return them the following week.’
‘It’s also possible his mother, being a domineering, jealous type with serious control issues, decided he’d be easier to keep tabs on if he was behind bars. Possible, just not that likely.’
‘Tell me how the conversation between you and the pump attendant came up?’
He fixes her with a stare, just long enough to let her know he’s registered the abrupt change of direction, knows he’s being interrogated. ‘I use that place a lot. I usually exchange a few pleasantries with Ahmed. He asked me how the case was going, I told him we were pursuing several lines of enquiry. He said, Tell me sumfink, Pete, that girl what went missin’, was she wearing a blue coat, like? I said, Might have been, why? He said, Wait here a minute, and disappeared out back. Would you prefer beef or chicken? Or a bit of both?’
‘Both, I think. Thank you, this looks very nice. So, go on. The coat?’
‘He’d noticed the BMW with the oddly behaving driver and then, when Myrtle’s disappearance was on the news, he checked the CCTV footage. He was umming and aahing about whether to call it in or not, when I turned up for my tankful of unleaded.’
‘And that was the lead that took you straight to Hamish. The dog DNA and the carpet fibres established a link between him and Jessie. Case just about closed.’
He has a mouthful of food, but he nods his agreement.
‘Did it never strike you as being rather too much of a lucky break? I mean, the case is going nowhere – no offence – and then, out of the blue, the killer is caught on camera, in your favourite petrol station.’
He is hungrier than she, piling food into his mouth, talking between mouthfuls. ‘Pure luck caught the Yorkshire Ripper.’
‘There is no dedicated parking at Hamish Wolfe’s house. No drives, no garages along that whole road. Everyone parks in the street, but there’s a lot of competition for spaces. He regularly had to park some distance from his house.’
‘Yeah, he mentioned that.’
‘So, someone with a copy of his car keys could borrow the car for the night and fill the tyres up with air in a petrol station they’d already established was frequented by the lead detective on the case. You have no proof that the hooded figure seen on film is actually Hamish Wolfe.’
‘Other than that he was driving Hamish’s car, you’re right, we don’t. But we also don’t have anyone else who might have done it.’
‘You never found the computer that most of the Facebook postings were sent from, did you?’
Pete’s plate is empty. He picks up the beef carton. ‘No. Facebook were cooperative, but when we got on to BT to link the IP address to an actual location, we drew a blank.’
‘Because whoever owned that computer had put enough technical blocks in place to prevent it being traced?’
‘I seem to remember routing through Eastern Europe being mentioned at some point. It didn’t matter. We figured one posting from Wolfe’s own computer was enough.’
She pushes food around on her plate and sips at her wine. ‘So.’ She looks round her kitchen. ‘Find anything interesting today?’
He did. She can tell from the way the light leaps in his eyes. He found something in her house. Her fork clatters against her plate.
‘What did you find?’
He picks up his phone and turns it to show her a photograph. Wooden boards. Words, written in red ink, chalked angrily, in harsh capital letters.
HE LOVES ME.
It means nothing. This has nothing to do with her, with her house. Then.
‘Oh!’ She pushes back the chair and falls to her knees.
‘Can I assume it’s not your work?’ He’s crouched down, peering under the table at her.
She reaches up and rubs. The wood is rough on the underside, unsanded, and will fill her hands with splinters, but she spits on her fingers and tries again.
‘Hang on.’ Pete is moving closer.
She can scratch the offending words away, peel away the fibres of the wood with her nails.
‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Pete’s hands are under her shoulders, pulling her out. ‘There’s sandpaper in my coat pocket. I had a feeling you’d want to get rid of it. The crime scene guys have everything they need and I can do it before I go.’
‘Thank you.’ She lets him help her to her feet. ‘I’m OK, thank you. I’m sorry, finish your food.’
Pete sits and picks up his fork without taking his eyes from her.
&nbs
p; ‘What does it mean?’ he asks her.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re pretty upset for something that has no meaning.’
Distress makes her snap at him. ‘They could have written a recipe for chocolate brownies and I’d be upset. Someone did this while I was asleep. Where else did they go?’
‘Impossible to say. No fingerprints in the house other than yours. You have a very good cleaning lady.’
‘I don’t have a cleaner of either sex.’
‘Tell me the truth now: when you saw it, who was the first person that came into your head?’
She shakes her head. ‘It’s stupid.’
‘Go on.’
‘Sirocco. You know, that woman I was telling you about? She kept going on about how she and Hamish were soulmates. I thought she was harmless enough, but possibly a bit unhinged. And as you pointed out yourself, that lot know where I live.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘No, they were all odd, but she was the only one claiming he loved her. And she could have got that paper rose from Sandra. Did you find prints on it?’
‘Nothing conclusive. A few partials that could be Wolfe’s, but paper is very difficult to get clear prints off. Another that definitely isn’t Wolfe’s or yours, but didn’t come up on our system.’
‘I mentioned it today, when I met him. I should have pressed.’
He picks up his fork, holds it in mid-air. ‘You were telling me the truth when you said you live here alone.’
‘Of course I was.’
‘Do we know each other well enough, yet?’
For a second, she has no idea what he means. Then she remembers. He wants to know whom she talks to, when she thinks she’s alone. She says, ‘You’ll think me nuts.’
He has a nice smile, she decides. Kinder, less complicated than that of Wolfe. ‘You have blue hair,’ he says. ‘I thought you were nuts the second I laid eyes on you.’
What difference can it make? ‘I had a twin. A sister. She died.’
His smile fades. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago. I never knew her, not really. Except I do. I know her as well as I know myself and I feel her loss every day. There are times when, without her, I feel like half a person.’
Daisy in Chains Page 14