Daisy in Chains (27 page)

‘To what, exactly?’

‘She thinks there’s a connection between the Wolfe case and what happened last night. She thinks her taking an interest in that couple of walkabouts could be what got them killed and, frankly, I think she has a point. Who else would want to hurt them?’

Pete looks at his nails. They need cleaning. One of the tree’s needles might do the trick.

‘OK, well, if there’s nothing else.’ Latimer turns and puts his hand on the door.

‘Actually, there is. I don’t agree that the murder last night is connected to Hamish Wolfe, but if you’re right and I’m wrong, there’s one thing you’re all forgetting. If Odi and Broon were killed for what they knew, whoever killed them will know they talked to Maggie hours before they died. She could be next. We need to keep an eye on her.’

Latimer nods. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Course, we’ll have to find her first. Are you sure she didn’t say where she was going?’

THERE IS DOUBT
about whether the plane will take off, more about whether it will be able to land. The cold spell gripping the UK seems to tighten its hold the further north she flies. Maggie spends almost the entire eighty-five minute flight staring out at a frozen, grey ocean of cloud. More than once, she wishes the plane need never have to land, that she can continue flying north, into the vast white emptiness with its promise of oblivion, but sooner than she feels ready for, a tightness in her ears tells her the plane has begun its descent.

Hamish Wolfe, who is now in a position to give her instructions, wants her to find Daisy. He wants her to track down a woman who disappeared years ago and who may not even be alive any more and he wants this, not because it will help his case, particularly. It won’t. He wants it because he and Daisy have unfinished business. For some reason, even though his entire future is on the line, he is fixating on a woman who hasn’t been in his life for nearly twenty years.

Thirty minutes late, the plane touches down on to tarmac slick with de-icing fluid before taxiing to the gate.

She can do it. Probably. She has before, more than once. The trick is to approach the problem in the right way, to ask the right questions, and the first question isn’t: how would you find someone who has disappeared? It is: how would you disappear?

The Maggie Rose step-by-step guide to disappearing:

Step one: physically remove yourself. Move away from the place you are known, from where you have friends, family, a history. Choose a new home at random, this is most important, somewhere no one will think to look for you. Move there and keep your head down, because you never know who is looking.

Aberdeen, the most northerly of important British cities, is snow-bound, but the road from the airport has been cleared. The city centre, when Maggie catches glimpses of it, looks like a silver city from
childhood dreams, as the famous mica crystals of the granite buildings gleam in the clear, northern light. She has never been to Aberdeen before, never been this far north. She reaches the ring road and heads towards a residential district on the city’s southern edge. It is already late afternoon and the light is fading.

Step two: choose a new name and change it by deed poll. The good news is that this is easier, and much less official, than you might imagine. Most people envisage a court appearance, solicitors, the signing of a formal document, inclusion on an official register, with both new name and old viewable by anyone so inclined. Whilst the change can be done with this level of formality, most people simply don’t bother.

The reality is that only around one name change in two hundred is ‘enrolled’ and thus available to searches and inspections. Most people make their own deed polls, comprising very simple forms, completed and signed by them, witnessed by two adults. Once in possession of a ‘deed poll’, official documents, such as driving licences and passports, can then be changed to your chosen new name. Of course, the Passport Office, the DVLA, the administrators of any other official documents will keep records of your old name, and if requested to do so by a court, would almost certainly reveal these details. But lay people searching for the ‘old you’ will first of all have to know the new name you are going by. And they won’t.

Maggie pulls up in a street of large, grey-stone Edwardian houses. Number 20 is two houses away on the opposite side of the road and flat 6 is probably on the first floor. She isn’t in the least bit surprised when nobody answers the doorbell. She gets back into the car.

Step three: change your job, if you can. This is particularly important for people working in the professions, which nearly all maintain registers of those entitled to practise. A professional body will allow for a change of name, but will keep records of that name change. Anyone staying in the same profession will be traceable through their professional body, even if they choose to work overseas.

Starting the engine again, Maggie drives around the corner and parks near to a row of shops. McDonald’s always has free Wi-Fi.

Step four: change your appearance. It’s a small world, wherever in it you choose to move. Changing your hairstyle and colour, swapping
spectacles for contact lenses, dressing differently, can all reduce the chances of an unexpected recognition.

On her second cup of McDonald’s coffee, Maggie has finally finished her search. She checks the car can be left in its current parking spot and sets off walking.

The first place she stops at is a dead end. So is the second, and the third. The fourth is bigger, smarter, decorated in retro-Regency style with elaborate, white-painted wooden furniture and pink tasselled lampshades. The reception desk has a stencilled portrait of Audrey Hepburn, her cigarette holder held gingerly between highly manicured nails. Each nail is a different colour and pattern. This salon offers very sophisticated manicures.

Step five: keep a low profile. Especially avoid activity that will attract the attention of the media. Staying away from social media is probably a good idea too. Remember, it’s a small world.

‘Good afternoon, that is great hair.’ The woman behind the counter is young with polished red lips and shiny black hair cut short. The very sharpness of her is at odds with the soft, feminine lines of the rest of the salon. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I’d like to book an appointment for next Saturday.’

The woman opens up a screen on her desktop computer and Maggie edges around the desk so that she can see the names that appear. Becca, Sophie, Rikki, Ashlyn. Others too. The salon employs a lot of people. All women. She sees the name she is looking for. Finally.

‘Eleven fifteen OK?’

‘That would be fine. Can I have a card in case I need to change anything?’

Step six: you have an Achilles’ heel and you mustn’t forget it. Your National Insurance number. Consisting of two prefix letters, six digits and one suffix letter, a National Insurance number is allocated at birth to every UK citizen and mailed to them shortly before their sixteenth birthday.

NI numbers are changed in only the most exceptional circumstances, which means your old name and your new will always be linked by your NI number.

Take heart, though. The existence of the link is one thing, being able
to access it quite another. No ordinary citizen has the right to request the NI number of another. If you’re hiding from an abusive husband, for example, he cannot request that HM Revenue and Customs reveal your new identity. The police might have more success, but only in exceptional circumstances after gaining a court order. So, unless you’re wanted in connection with a serious criminal offence, it is highly unlikely that a court order would be given.

The bottom line is, if you work legally, in the UK, you can always be traced, but not easily, and not without good reason.

So, that’s how you disappear. Finding the disappeared? Well, that follows on naturally.

Back in the car, now parked outside the salon, Maggie waits. Using her phone, and claiming a forgotten meeting, she cancels all four manicure appointments that she has just made.

Finding the disappeared depends upon how successfully they’ve adhered to the six-step plan. Where do most of them fall? At the first hurdle, of course. Finding the disappeared depends upon their failure to adhere to step one.

Five o’clock comes and goes, two of the employees exit the salon and walk hurriedly off to nearby bus stops or parked cars. The clock ticks round to five thirty and one more young woman leaves. Six o’clock, half past six. A tall, well-built woman with dark, shiny hair and a prominent nose leaves the building. She is wearing an emerald green coat and shiny black boots. Her make-up is perfect, but a little too heavy, as though it, too, must play a part in keeping out the northern chill. She walks with confidence, looks smart and well kept, but Aberdeen employers pay well.

The failure of step one.
Most people, when forced to choose a new place to live, simply cannot do so at random. Try it. Imagine you have to leave, suddenly, without explanation or planning. Think of where you might go. You’ll almost certainly zero in on a place of significance: the home of a friend or relative, the town where your mother was born, the seaside resort you stayed in as a child. We are homing animals. We flock to the familiar, and almost everyone who disappears deliberately, and who doesn’t have the professional help of a witness protection programme, will be traceable through their location. Of course, some will be easier to find than others.

The dark-haired woman’s face is pinched against the cold as she strides off down the street. Maggie leaves her car and crosses the road. She walks towards the young woman, who won’t know her, will have no reason to be alarmed, and only at the very last moment does she sidestep to bring them both on to a collision course. The woman, whose eyes have been down on the pavement, looks up. Those eyes are not hostile at first, certainly not scared. Just puzzled.

‘Hello, Zoe,’ says Maggie.

Now she looks scared.

‘
AND NOBODY
’
S RECOGNIZED
her? Seriously? Her face was all over the news for weeks.’ Hamish pushes his chair back and gets to his feet. In the small private interview room he seems taller than ever.

‘She’s lost a lot of weight,’ Maggie says. ‘Grown her hair, darkened it. She looks quite a lot like her older sister, Stacey, now. And you need to sit down, or the next time someone looks through the window, you’ll be cuffed again. If they don’t terminate the interview.’

He glances round at the door and rubs his wrist.

‘Zoe is a very different young woman now,’ Maggie says. ‘I liked her.’

Hamish is still standing. ‘Was it mutual?’

‘Both she and Stacey were pretty hostile at first. Wanting to know who’d sent me, what I was going to do.’

He folds his arms and leans back against the door. ‘And what are you going to do?’

It is the first time he has properly challenged her. ‘I’m going to think about it,’ she says. ‘Talk to you about it. I told them I’m working on your case. That you’re my priority, not them, or the police hunt for Zoe. Now, come and sit down, calmly, or I will bring this to a close and in future we go back to meeting in the hall during normal visiting hours.’

He takes a step towards her. ‘So what’s the story? Why did she run? Abusive boyfriend?’

‘Abusive mother.’ Maggie thinks back to Brenda’s controlling behaviour, the jumpy youngest daughter. The unmistakable signs of OCD in the house. This woman, though, wouldn’t be happy with controlling her house. She’d need to control her daughters too. ‘All three girls suffered, but Zoe always got the brunt of it.’

Hamish leans on the table towards her. ‘They didn’t think of something less extreme, like, I don’t know, reporting her to the authorities?’

She gives him a second. ‘They didn’t want to see her in prison. She’s their mum.’

He nods, reluctantly. As a doctor, he’ll have come across abuse of all forms. And the thousands of excuses the victims make for their abusers.
Mum’s a bit of a bully. Mum has a bit of a temper. She doesn’t mean it, she just doesn’t always think. She doesn’t know her own strength.

‘And you guessed this, when you met her?’ he asks.

She points at the still-vacant chair. ‘When I saw the police photographs of the red boots I knew something didn’t add up. The blood spots were exactly where women get blisters if their shoes are too tight. I never saw the blood as necessarily sinister and when I looked in Zoe’s wardrobe and realized her feet were actually nearly two sizes larger than the boots, I realized that they were probably a gift from her mother and that Zoe herself hated them.’

He sits back down, and the chair creaks beneath his weight. ‘Why would Zoe’s mother buy her boots two sizes too small?’ His face is baffled. He has no idea what women obsessed with size do to themselves. To each other. Size five boots squeezed on to size six and a half feet. Of course they were going to hurt, but Zoe was going to wear them all the same, because her domineering, controlling mother had paid good money for them, money she could ill afford, and for heaven’s sake, if Zoe lost a bit of weight then maybe the swelling in her feet would go down and they would fit.

‘There were lots of clothes in Zoe’s wardrobe that were far too small. Her mother was always bullying her to lose weight.’

Maggie closes her eyes and, for a few seconds, is back in the coffee bar in Aberdeen. ‘She didn’t like me because I was fat,’ Zoe is saying as she clings to her older sister’s hand. ‘I let her down. Embarrassed her in front of the neighbours. She was always trying to get me to lose weight but somehow, when someone’s on at you all the time, it just makes it worse.’

Maggie wants to hold her hand too.

‘She used to weigh me before I went out. If I was over what she felt I should be, she wouldn’t let me go. She phoned Kevin to say I was ill. Some days, she just wouldn’t give me food.’

‘She made her sit at the table and watch us eat.’ Stacey says. ‘Kimberly and I sneaked food to her as often as we could, but it wasn’t always easy.’