Daisy in Chains (29 page)

‘She’ll be used to pressure. She won’t scare easily.’

‘I know.’

Something in his voice makes Liz give him a good long look. She wrinkles her nose before turning back to the sink. ‘What happened to Odi and Broon wasn’t your fault, Pete,’ she says.

Pete joins her at the sink and picks up a clean tea towel.

‘It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t mine, it wasn’t anyone’s fault except the psycho who held the knife.’

Pete glances round. ‘They were practically under my window, Liz. If I’d cranked it open a notch I could have heard them snoring.’

She gives him a sharp look. ‘You could not have anticipated that. No one could.’

‘We should have done.’

‘Rubbish.’ She gives him another smile. ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Enough shop talk. Let’s finish this lot and get drunk.’

MAGGIE GETS OUT
of her car into air so icy it feels like she’s walking through knives. She pulls the collar of her coat up as high as it will go and sets off across the square. As she circumvents the enormous Norwegian spruce tree, that smells more of drunken men’s urine than it does Scandinavian pine forests, she glances up at the window of the Crown that she has come to think of as Pete’s window. She has no idea of whether it is or it isn’t, but it comforts her a little to look up at a friend’s window.

Or the window of someone who might have been a friend, had circumstances been very different.

She walks on, as the slow, sad melody of the cathedral’s organ finds its way across the crisp square and into her heart. In front of the Georgian facade of Wells Town Hall a group of people are standing silently. Some of them hold lanterns. There are tea lights on the stone flags. The flickering of the candle flames, the stronger, more garish lights of the pub are reflected on the ripples of cellophane that have been left where Odi and Broon breathed their last.

She keeps her eyes down as she gets closer to Odi and Broon’s shrine. Slipping to the front, she lays the roses down on the cold stone.

The tall male figure, walking down her drive, might have alarmed her, had she not already seen and recognized his car.

‘What are you doing here, Pete?’ She finds a key, fits it into the lock.

He reaches the bottom of the drive but keeps his distance. ‘Where have you been? You shouldn’t be going out on your own in the dark. Not while that Facebook crap is going on.’

‘I’ve been to the square in Wells. I left some flowers in the Town Hall entrance. Again, what are you doing here?’

Slowly, he draws nearer. ‘Making sure you’re OK.’

She opens the door and turns. On the step, she is almost his height.
‘I’m OK. But you can’t just come round here. It’s a conflict of interest. You must see that.’

His eyes seem darker than she remembers them. ‘Did Latimer talk to you?’ he asks.

‘He did, actually, a few hours after Odi and Broon were killed, but it was hardly necessary. I’m working to get Hamish out of prison, you have a vested interest in keeping him where he is. If there’s ever another court case, our being friends could jeopardize it. We can’t be friends any more.’

‘Is that all we were, friends?’

She knows exactly what he’s asking her and also that she owes him something more than a curt dismissal.

‘I’ve enjoyed getting to know you, but the timing didn’t work. I’m sorry, Pete.’ She turns away before she can weaken.

You’ll regret that,
says the voice that welcomes her home.

‘
ARE YOU GOING
to be writing all night?’

Phil is pacing again. He has spent the day doing it, stopping every ten minutes or so to smoke a cigarette. The air in the cell is thick with fumes and Wolfe thinks, not for the first time, that there is a good chance that if he ever does leave this place alive, he will be riddled with lung cancer.

He looks up. ‘Nope, I’m nearly done.’ There is another half-hour until lights out. ‘Want to play cards?’

The two of them often play poker when they are locked up. Wolfe learned the game from his cellmate, but soon outstripped him. Roughly 60 per cent of the time, he lets Phil win.

Phil stops at the door and looks out. ‘It’s doing my head in,’ he complains.

Wolfe has been at Parkhurst long enough to know that, of the three hundred and sixty-five days that make up the prison year, Christmas Day is by far the hardest to get through.

On Christmas Day, everyone is thinking about what their families are doing without them. Christmas Day is when the missing and the loneliness tip the scales and come down hard on the unbearable side.

Visitors are not allowed on Christmas Day. Prisoners can neither send nor receive gifts from outside. The queue for the telephone is less good-natured than usual. Squabbles are more or less continual. The suicide rate in UK prisons peaks over Christmas.

‘Didn’t even get to talk to Sal,’ Phil moans. ‘Who you writing to, anyway? Your mum again?’

He comes close, as though he might be about to peer over Wolfe’s shoulder. Wolfe signs his name at the bottom and folds the single sheet of paper in two.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ he says.

THIS MORNING, THREE
days after Christmas, Wolfe looks tired. He is freshly shaved and the faint smell of soap he’s brought into the interview room suggests he’s washed, but his skin looks pale, the lines on his temples deeper, and there are purple smudges running diagonally from the corner of his eyes to the centre of his cheeks. He is yawning as he’s led into the interview room and tries, unsuccessfully, to stifle it.

‘Sorry. Bad night.’ He holds his hands out to be uncuffed. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

She hasn’t come to exchange social pleasantries. ‘Did you know Pete Weston before he arrested you?’

The door closes behind the guard and they are alone. Wolfe sinks into the other chair and unfolds his long, lazy grin. ‘I was wondering when you’d work that one out.’

Today, his self-possession is annoying. A man in his position has no business being smug. ‘I have quite enough exercising my brain, thank you, without your withholding information.’

The amusement leaves his mouth, not his eyes.

‘How?’ she asks. ‘How did you know him?’

‘First answer me this. Is he trying to get close to you? Personally, I mean.’

‘He’s asked me much the same thing about you.’

Wolfe looks around, at the small, square, dull room, empty apart from the table and chairs. ‘He has a little more room to manoeuvre than I do.’

‘Yes, I think he’s interested. But he’s not long gone through a bad break-up. I think he’s vulnerable to any half-decent woman who’ll talk to him right now.’

Somewhere, not too far away, is the sound of someone yelling. It has an authoritative ring about it, she thinks it’s probably a guard.

‘Are you pretending to like him to get information? Because if you are, I’m fine with it.’

‘Maybe I’m not pretending. Maybe I do like him.’

Wolfe laughs, and this line of conversation has gone far enough.

‘How do you know him?’

Now he looks almost bored. ‘Perfectly commonplace circumstances. We played football for Keynsham Athletic first team for three seasons. I played left midfield, he was centre back. Sports teams usually socialize after matches, so I got to know him.’

Wolfe and Weston had practically been mates. That made a massive difference. ‘He should have told me that,’ she admits.

‘Of course he should. Sports teams. Shared changing rooms. Skin and hair left lying around on towels. The opportunities to collect someone else’s DNA are multitude. All he had to do was find a towel the same as mine and swap them.’

He has been building up to this for some time, she realizes now. Waiting for the right moment.

‘Daisy the Dalmatian went to matches with me sometimes. Lots of the guys used to pet her.’

Daisy’s hairs on one of the bodies. How easy would it be, to run a hand over a friendly dog’s head and then later, when you were alone, to look down at the short, fine, black and white hairs on the sleeve of your coat?

‘We gave each other lifts to away matches. I can’t specifically remember Pete being in my car, but it has to be a possibility.’

The car carpet fibres, also found on Jessie’s body
. Can I stick my bag in your boot, Hamish?

‘Hold on, wait a minute. He wouldn’t be allowed to work on the case if you and he were friends. He’d have been taken off it immediately.’

Hamish gives her a slow, single nod. ‘Which is exactly what happened. After the arrest, he took a back seat while all the evidence was gathered and sorted. I’m sure he was still involved, but he and I didn’t come into contact. I didn’t see him from the night of the arrest to my first day in court. A woman called Liz Nuttall took the lead on interviewing me.’

‘Could he have got into your house?’ She says it without thinking, because this is nonsense.

‘Somebody did. Somebody accessed my computer and borrowed my car.’

At the end of the corridor a heavy metal door slams shut. Footsteps are heard hurrying towards them.

‘Did this come up at the time? I can’t remember seeing anything on the file.’

‘Of course I mentioned it. But the reaction I got was the same one you’re about to give me.’

‘Why?’

‘Exactly. What possible motive could Weston have for wanting to frame me?’

Actually, that was the easy bit. ‘He was panicking. The case was going nowhere. He needed an arrest. Because of everything you’d just told me, he homed in on his football team and, for reasons that are probably only apparent to him, you fitted the bill.’

Wolfe nods at her to go on, like a school teacher guiding a slow pupil. ‘And the problem with that theory is . . .’

‘Too risky. Once the killer struck again, it would be obvious he’d arrested the wrong man.’

‘Unless . . .?’

Unless, Pete himself is the kill—

‘That’s ridiculous. Why on earth would—’

Wolfe lifts up his hands. ‘Why would I? Why would anyone?’

The footsteps in the corridor slow and then stop. There is a brief conversation between the guard outside and the newcomer. Then a new pair of eyes peer in at them.

‘You have a history with fat women.’ Maggie doesn’t look up. She is used to prison guards coming to gawp at her.

Wolfe, who hasn’t turned around, waits until he hears the window in the door closing again. ‘My ex-fiancée is one of the skinniest women you’ll ever meet. Ask my mother for photographs of me with Nancy, who I was seeing for nearly five years before I met Claire. She’d be drowned by size twelve clothes. I like my women lean.’

‘Daisy?’

Again, that closed, reluctant look on his face when Daisy Baron’s name comes up. ‘Daisy was the exception. I fell in love with Daisy in spite of how she looked, not because of it. Had we carried on seeing each other, I’d probably have been on at her to slim down a bit, like the jerk I was in those days.’

‘You never told her that, did you?’

‘What, that I wanted her to lose weight? Christ, no. You didn’t mess with Daisy. I’d have been a bit more—’

‘That you were in love with her. You never told her that.’

That look again. Closed. Sad. Secret. ‘No. I should have done. Maybe if I had, things would have turned out differently.’

There is more noise outside.

‘Maggie?’

‘Sorry. This racket is distracting. Is there something going on outside?’

‘Something will be kicking off somewhere. It happens. Don’t worry. The cons can’t get down here without keys. You may have to wait a while before they let you out.’

There is movement on the floor above them as well and she is being too easily distracted. ‘Where were we?’

‘I was giving you the best alternative suspect you could hope for and you were worryingly unmoved by it.’

She makes herself focus. ‘OK, I get that Pete could have framed you, and I get that it could just have been a combination of circumstance and chance that he chose you out of the whole football team, but what you haven’t told me is why Pete killed three women. Especially given that he’s killed no others in the two years since you were arrested.’

‘None that you know of.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Maybe he got a bit cleverer. Maybe he targeted women who weren’t so easily missed. Lot of homeless women in and around Bristol. Maybe he got better at hiding the bodies as well.’

‘And what was his motive?’

‘Ah, glad you mentioned it. Has he told you when his marriage broke up?’

She has to think about that. ‘Not specifically. Long enough for him to have moved out, not long enough for the divorce to be close to finalizing.’

‘He found out Annabelle was shagging one of his colleagues in January 2013, six months before Jessie disappeared. Two months before the Facebook conversation with the fictional Harry began. The whole team knew about it, Maggie. Pete wears his heart on his sleeve. Especially when he’s had a few.’

Is that true? She remembers Pete’s outburst at the police station about his daughter. His coming round to her house half drunk on Christmas Day. ‘Lots of marriages break up. Especially police marriages.’