Daisy in Chains (38 page)

Pete looks over at Maggie’s car. For a second, they seem to make eye contact. Then the investigators appear in the doorway once more, this time carrying the office desk, wrapped in a protective covering. It goes into the van, as does the chair. The carpet will come next, anything moveable from the kitchen and toilet, even the light fittings and blinds.

‘We have to talk to Latimer,’ Liz says again. ‘As soon as you get back.’

‘I know. We will.’

Pete is momentarily distracted by the sight of the grey carpet being carried out. Then the head of the investigation team heads over and Pete winds down the window, letting in a blast of cold air. The technician holds up a clear plastic evidence bag. ‘Little bonus surprise for you, Pete.’

In the bag is a pen. A cheap, plastic biro, without its lid. Blue ink. The technician leans in, as though trying to soak up some of the warmth from the car.

‘Tucked between the edge of the carpet and the skirting board,’ he says. ‘Of course, it might be nothing to do with the last occupant. It could have been there for years. But pens tend to have fingerprints. Especially ones that have been forgotten about.’

LATIMER NODS HIS
head, his eyes on the neatly written notes in front of him. He points a pencil at Pete. ‘So, if I understand it correctly, we have a city the size of Bristol, not to mention Bath and their various suburbs, small towns and villages, and this woman homes in on a crucial piece of evidence on the strength of a hunch? Did Wolfe tell her where to look?’

‘Well, whoever rented and furnished the office in the first place would have a head start when it comes to finding it again,’ says Pete.

‘No fingerprints, hairs on the carpet? Anything to tie it to Wolfe?’

‘Not so far, sir,’ Liz tells him. ‘But the team are still looking.’

Latimer sighs, then spins his computer screen round so that Pete and Liz can see it. ‘Guys,’ he says. ‘Do you ever think there’s maybe something not quite right about this Maggie Rose character?’

Pete glances sideways at Liz as he pulls his chair closer. Latimer has been looking at Maggie’s website. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks.

‘The whole blue hair business, for one thing. I mean, who dyes their hair blue?’

‘What women do with their hair is a mystery to me,’ says Pete. ‘I think it’s a mystery to most blokes, to be honest.’

‘Exactly. So you’re not asking the questions you should be asking. Liz, on the other hand, I would have expected more from.’

Liz opens her eyes a little wider. ‘OK, sir,’ she says. ‘What should we be asking?’

‘When people dye their hair unnatural colours, it’s for a reason, usually a desire to be noticed. I mean, everyone notices bright turquoise hair, don’t they?’

‘I guess.’ Pete can’t look at Liz any more.

‘And yet Maggie Rose is a recluse. She doesn’t do interviews, she never appears in court. No pictures on her website. Hardly anybody meets her unless she’s working directly with them. Why would someone
who makes a point of avoiding attention dye her hair such a noticeable colour?’

‘I give up, sir,’ says Liz. ‘Why?’

In response, Latimer stands up and walks to the window. ‘When I was a kid, I was fascinated by magicians,’ he says. ‘Even the cheesy, crap ones you get at parties. I really wanted to know how they did their tricks and I could never spot it. And then, when I got older, I read books about magic. No real magician will reveal his secrets, but what they all seem to have in common is the use of distraction.’

A short silence.

‘Distraction is the magician’s way of diverting the audience’s attention from what he doesn’t want them to see,’ Liz says.

Latimer turns back to them. ‘Exactly. So, what I’m asking myself is, if the wacky hair and the sapphire eyes and the bright-coloured clothes are a distraction, what is it that she doesn’t want us to see?’

Liz and Pete look at each other. She gives him a small, almost imperceptible nod. He turns back to his boss.

‘Sir,’ he says, ‘we’ve got something to tell you.’

PROPERTY OF AVON AND SOMERSET POLICE. Ref: 544/45.2 Hamish Wolfe.

WOLFE IS RELAXING
, lowering his heartbeat, settling his breathing, the way he once did before a difficult operation, before a long run, before taking the plane up. He has a towel around his neck, so anyone glancing in will think he’s just finished one of his exercise sessions. He glances at his watch, even though he’s told himself he mustn’t and swears that he won’t do it again. He knows exactly what the time is. Calm is what he needs to be right now.

A shadow blocks the doorway. One of the guards is looking in.

‘Guv.’ Wolfe nods his head, once. Just enough for politeness.

‘Dismantling the grotto are we, lads?’

The paper chains have all been taken down and lie in coiled heaps like copulating snakes on Phil’s bunk.

‘Twelfth night, Guv,’ Wolfe says. ‘Unlucky to keep them up any longer.’

‘Twelve what?’

‘Twelfth of January,’ Phil pipes up. ‘The date you’re supposed to take your Christmas decorations down or the bad pixies will come and get you. Or something like that.’

Wolfe doesn’t let himself smile. The screws don’t like smiling inmates. It always makes them think they’re missing something. Which, of course, they usually are.

‘Yeah, well. Make sure they go in the bin. Frigging things are a fire hazard.’

The guard leaves, his footsteps clipping down the corridor, the door closing in his wake. Wolfe gets up and opens it again before pressing one hand against his trouser pocket to feel the reassuring hard lump of steel in there.

Across the corridor Mr Sahid is watching him. Sahid looks at his watch. His eyebrows rise. Wolfe lets his head drop, maintaining eye contact, then lifts it again.

Sahid throws back his head and yells something in Arabic.

A second later, two men appear from nearby cells. In a movement so slick, so coordinated, it looks rehearsed, they vault over the rail and drop. Immediately a whistle blows and shouts are heard. A guard comes racing. Inmates crowd out of their cells.

Wolfe turns to find Phil directly behind him. He bends his head to let his cellmate hang several coils of paper chain around his neck.

‘Good luck, mate,’ Phil tells him.

The two men, who are young and very fit, who have never drunk alcohol in their lives and who have trained at a special gym for Muslim men since they were sixteen years old, haven’t dropped far. Landing on the net that prevents the upper corridors from being used as suicide launching pads, they are now using it to stage an impromptu circus act.

Wolfe, still draped in paper chains, makes his way along the corridor, peering over the railing, as though seeking a vantage point for the entertainment below. Men are yelling encouragement, guards are insisting that everyone goes back to their cells right now. The men ignore them. This is fun enough to risk a cuff on the back of the head.

The two men are holding hands and leaping high into the air. One of them somersaults over the other. As he lands, one foot goes through the net and the crowd applauds as though it’s just seen the best stunt ever.

Wolfe reaches the door. Men are pouring in from the next hallway and it will be locked soon. Already the cry of ‘lockdown’ is sounding along the block and that is the signal for the fighting to start. Wolfe picks up his pace. He is running by the time he gets to the end of the second corridor. This door is locked but Wolfe hasn’t wasted his time in the metal fabrication workshop. The key he’s fashioned over several weeks won’t win any design prizes but it’s been tried and tested and doesn’t fail him now.

When he arrives at the gym Wolfe throws the towel over the security camera just as he does every time fight club takes place. Any guard seeing the camera black out at this time of day will assume a malfunction. He will investigate, but not while a full-scale riot is taking place in one of the blocks. Wolfe has about five minutes, by his own calculation, and that should be enough.

Time enough to cut through the black masking tape holding together
the steel frame of the five-a-side goalposts, so that the pieces fall apart where Wolfe has previously sawn through them; also in the metal fabrication workshop. He now has six, six-feet-long tubes and three shorter tubes of just over a foot long. The longer tubes have small, black eyelets screwed into them at eighteen-inch intervals. Wolfe took a risk, attaching the eyelets in advance, but it has paid off. No one has spotted them and their being pre-attached will save valuable time. When he gets outside he will slot the long poles together, using four clamps made from doubled-over aluminium cans. These he has been storing in the canvas bag that, even in the dim light of the gym, is still the blue of Maggie’s hair.

Also in the bag are the nuts and bolts that will fix the three shorter poles to the two, assembled, longer ones and hold them in position.

The steps of the ladder are made from reinforced wire netting, cut from the football nets that Wolfe found in the canvas bag. Alone in their cell at night, he and Phil have cut and twisted the netting into ten, very strong, lengths of wire rope and these he will fasten on to the eyelets of the poles to form steps. For the past two weeks, the ‘steps’ have been hidden inside the paper chains that have adorned their cell. The discarded paper lies scattered around the gym floor now like a snowstorm seen by someone on psychedelic drugs.

With Phil’s help, and with a number of other prisoners and guards who owe him favours turning a blind eye, Wolfe has fashioned a ladder capable of getting him to the top of the outer fence and down the other side. His heart is pumping hard now, but this happens a lot to a man who is in peak physical condition and he needs the rush of adrenalin he knows it will bring.

He runs from the gym.

‘
WHAT IS THIS,
a movie trailer?’ Latimer leans closer to Sunday’s laptop. At the windows, Liz is pulling down blinds so that the four officers can better see the frozen image that has appeared on the screen. ‘A home movie?’ There is something about the photography, maybe the lack of light, the positioning of the furniture in the room, that has an amateurish feel to it.

‘We found the videotape under her bath in the en suite,’ says Sunday. ‘Given that we were there, at her invitation, investigating a trespass, it should be admissible. I copied it there and then, which wasn’t easy, but I managed to get the right equipment biked over. The cover is a copy too, but pretty close to the original. Once I got back to the station, I transferred it on to our hard drive.’

Latimer lifts the fake video cassette that Sunday has mocked up. It is plain, the sort bought in multi-packs to store home movies. The date on it is 15 January 1996. A title has been handwritten.

Daisy in Chains.

‘Where’s the original?’ Latimer asks.

‘Back under the bath,’ Pete tells him.

‘So, how did she get hold of it?’ Latimer says.

‘Just what we asked ourselves,’ Pete says. ‘One possibility is that Wolfe told her where to find it.’

‘Except Hamish has always insisted there was only ever one copy made,’ says Liz, ‘and that Daisy took it with her when she left Oxford.’

‘He’s a liar, we know that already,’ says Latimer, but his face says he is less sure of himself. ‘Play it,’ he says.

Sunday clicks on the Play arrow and Latimer, Pete, Sunday and Liz are looking at a small, simply furnished room. The desk and computer, the books on the shelves, the single bed, all suggest a student bedroom. The lights are kept low, but there must be a dozen or more candles dotted around the room. The counterpane on the bed is dark red, speckled
with something white. Petals. There are flowers in the room, several vases of them, all containing the same flower.

In the centre of the picture stand a man and a woman, kissing. The woman’s hands are on the man’s shoulders, one drifts lower to rest on the small of his back. The man is wearing jeans and has his back to the camera. He appears tall, broad shouldered, with dark hair that curls down past the nape of his neck. He holds the woman by the head, his hands tangling in long, dark hair. The woman is naked.

‘That’s Wolfe,’ whispers Latimer.

Wolfe, a much younger Wolfe, has moved behind the woman now. A good head taller, he nuzzles the side of her hair as he runs his hands the length of her ample body, over her large breasts, her pillow of a stomach.

‘And Daisy Baron,’ says Pete. ‘We found her in yearbook photographs of Hamish and his Magdalen set.’

‘He’s positioning her for the camera,’ Latimer says.

Pete nods. The woman – Daisy – a girl really, hardly more than eighteen, doesn’t know the camera is there. There is no hint of self-consciousness about the way she leans into her boyfriend, parts her thighs to let him touch her.

‘What’s she got on her head?’ Latimer asks.

‘Flowers,’ says Liz, whose face is looking pinched. ‘He’s made her a daisy chain.’

Pete can see the thought process taking place in Latimer’s head, the same that went through his own when he first saw the video.
Daisy in Chains.
Daisy chains.