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Authors: Sharon Bolton

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BOOK: Daisy in Chains
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‘Yeah, that must be it.’ He takes a step back, then another, away from the door, away from her. ‘Thanks for coming in. I won’t forget. I owe you.’

‘The four-year-old girl.’ Maggie stands her ground, even raises her
voice. ‘The one who’s becoming important to Latimer. She’s yours, isn’t she? Which must mean he’s—’

This is not a conversation to have at volume. ‘Shacked up with my ex-wife. In my ex-house. They met at a police conference. While I was attending lectures, they were finding other ways to pass the time. It was a bit easier to deal with before he got promoted and transferred here.’

‘I’m sorry. That must be very difficult.’

He shrugs, tries to make the
it’s no big deal
face. ‘We’re being civilized.’

‘Meaning, you’re being civilized, and they’re getting away with it.’

He doesn’t want her feeling sorry for him. He walks to the door and pulls it open. ‘Why don’t you let me know if you hear from Wolfe? Or his gang of crazies.’

‘You’re genuinely worried about Hamish Wolfe and I getting together, aren’t you? That case of yours must be leakier than a sieve.’

‘That case is watertight. To be honest, it’s you I’m worried about. Wolfe is insane. If he’d tried for an insanity plea, he’d have got it, in my view, but that would have meant pleading guilty and he wasn’t going to do that. I’ve spent time with this bloke, Maggie, and I know what I’m talking about.’

She smiles suddenly. He might just have told her a joke. ‘Two thoughts for you, Peter, although I’m sure we’ll speak again before too long. The first: she’ll always love you the most, as long as you let her.’

‘My daughter?’

‘Yes. Your wife’s probably a lost cause. DCI Latimer is very good-looking and quite the charmer.’

‘Thanks. And the second?’

‘If your case against Wolfe is as watertight as you say, then there’s another reason why you’re so edgy about him. Have you considered that, on some level, you actually think he’s innocent?’

Chapter 8

DRAFT

THE BIG, BAD WOLFE?

Note: almost certainly too corny but worth keeping as a working title.

By Maggie Rose

CHAPTER 1, THE VANISHING OF ZOE SYKES

Zoe Sykes is one of our missing. Her death has been assumed, her supposed murderer caught, tried and sentenced, but we do not, and possibly never will, know what happened to her on that Friday night in June, three years ago.

Zoe was twenty-four years old and unmarried, living with her mother, Brenda (forty-nine) and younger sister, Kimberly (sixteen) in Keynsham. She worked at a tanning and beauty salon in the town centre and had a boyfriend, Kevin, of four years’ standing. As anyone would expect, Kevin was the initial principal suspect in Zoe’s murder. For good reasons, as we’ll learn.

Note: actually nothing concrete on Kevin at this stage. Will need to dig something up.

One treads carefully with a physical description of a victim, especially when it comes to the
clothes she was wearing, but when serial killers are involved, the victims nearly always conform to a type, making consideration of an individual’s ‘fit’ important. In other words, the need to examine Zoe’s physical presence outweighs the sensibilities of the easily offended.

Zoe Sykes was fat. I’m not going to pander to political correctness or feminist sensitivities by calling her large, sizeable, or plus sized. She weighed, by my best estimate, around thirteen stone, giving her a body mass index (BMI) of 32 and putting her in the obese category.

On the last night of her life that we know about, Zoe met up with four friends at a town centre flat. She was wearing a black leather jacket, a red-and-black floral print dress, black tights and red cowboy boots.

The women shared three bottles of wine before heading out, arriving at the Trout Tavern on Temple Street, Keynsham, at around half past nine.

The pub became busy and the group of five began to talk about going on to one of the town’s nightclubs. Zoe took no real part in the discussion, but that wasn’t exactly unusual. Often, Kevin would meet Zoe in the pub and walk or drive her home.

Zoe’s friends, to a woman, were unanimous in their disapproval of Kevin. He was controlling, too inclined to dictate what she wore, where she went, even how she behaved.

‘Zoe always seemed anxious,’ one friend told police. ‘As though she was looking over her shoulder all the time.’

Kevin claimed not to have met Zoe on the night of Friday, 8 June, to have been in a different pub, in a different town, until well after midnight. He
and a friend then went back to the friend’s house where, they claim, Kevin spent the night. At this point, the alibi becomes flimsier. The friend was drunk and fell asleep soon after arriving home. He cannot vouch for Kevin’s movements from midnight onwards.

Zoe was captured on three separate street cameras that night and we can therefore assume she left the pub between eleven o’clock and eleven twenty, some time before her friends. Police were unable to ascertain why Zoe left earlier and alone, and why she failed to tell any of her friends where she was going.

She was last seen at 11.45 p.m. walking in the direction of the railway station. There is, though, no evidence that she ever entered the station, bought a ticket or caught a train. We have to assume she did not.

We now enter the dead hours. The time between a disappearance taking place and it being noticed. Zoe vanished shortly before midnight. Her mother, Brenda, began looking for her at ten o’clock the next morning. We have no idea what happened to her during those ten hours.

The police version of events is that Hamish Wolfe, with murderous thoughts in mind, happened upon Zoe as she staggered in the direction of the station’s taxi rank. The two had more than a passing acquaintance already. Wolfe’s mother, Sandra, frequented the salon where Zoe worked and, more significantly, Zoe had become a patient of Wolfe’s some months earlier. Had Hamish offered her a lift, the police argue, she almost certainly would have accepted.

This is speculation, pure and simple. There is no evidence putting Hamish, or his car, in the
vicinity of Keynsham railway station that night. On the contrary, he and his mother both claim they had dinner together that night, that she drove him home afterwards. However, as no one in the restaurant can confirm this (they were especially busy that night and weren’t even asked about it until over a year later), the alibi has largely been discounted.

Should it have been? It is a fundamental principle of British law that people are assumed to be telling the truth, until evidence suggests otherwise.

According to the police and prosecution, Hamish happened upon Zoe – tired, drunk, cold – and offered her a lift. He didn’t drive her home. He took her somewhere else and murdered her. The time frame remains indeterminate partly because Zoe’s body has never been found and partly because the remains of the other three murdered women were in a state of such advanced decomposition as to make a forensic examination practically worthless. We have no idea what happened to them in the final hours of their lives.

The search for Zoe

At ten o’clock on Saturday morning, Zoe’s sister, Kimberly, mentioned to her mother that Zoe hadn’t come home the previous night. Brenda got in touch with Kevin, who told her that not only had he not seen Zoe but that, to the best of his knowledge, she hadn’t spent the night at his flat.

A detective constable visited the Sykes’s home within two hours of Brenda reporting her daughter missing. Zoe had her purse and mobile phone with her. It was a smartphone, with a tracing application, but when the police activated it, they
found it was listing the last-known location as the Trout Tavern on Friday evening. For some reason, Zoe had turned off her phone in the pub.

The hunt steps up

The next few days were spent interviewing Zoe’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Her boss at the salon described her as a conscientious and reliable employee. Kevin Walker was interviewed at length but maintained consistently that he had no idea of Zoe’s whereabouts.

The search was widened to the whole of Avon and Somerset constabulary by Monday evening. The local TV news programme carried a small piece. Nothing happened for several days.

The red boot

On Thursday, 14 June, a red cowboy boot was found on the roadside just outside the village of Cheddar in Somerset, a mere two hundred metres from the cave where Myrtle Reid’s remains were to be discovered, nearly two years later. The boot was identified by Zoe’s mother. Small bloodstains inside it suggested she’d been harmed.

At this point, the police search went national. All police forces in England and Wales were sent copies of Zoe’s photograph. Her disappearance made the national news and Brenda Sykes took part in a televised appeal for information.

Two weeks after the finding of the boot, three weeks after Zoe was last seen, the blood was confirmed as being hers. Kevin Walker was taken in for questioning, his house and garden were searched, as was Zoe’s family home.

Nothing. Zoe had pulled off as effective a vanishing trick as anyone had known. After time, as
is largely inevitable, the police search was scaled back and Zoe joined the ranks of the missing. Arguably, that’s how she should have remained. There is not a jot of evidence that Hamish Wolfe, or anyone else for that matter, killed her.

Maggie saves the draft. It is all she has found on Zoe Sykes. Without access to the police files, it is as far as she can go for now.

‘So, you’ve decided, then?’

She closes Word and opens up her email. ‘Nope.’

‘Lot of work for a case you might never take on.’

‘Just organizing my thoughts.’

‘If I were a gambler . . .’

‘You’re not.’

‘I’d be placing my bets right now. Ten to one, Hamish Wolfe will be your client before the year’s end.’

Chapter 9

THREE HUNDRED FEET
above sea level, above the hills, the quarries and the rivers, above the woods and meadows of the Somerset countryside, stands a painted-steel observation tower. Those who ascend to its octagonal platform can look directly down into the jagged cleft that is the Cheddar Gorge and watch it winding its way through the limestone mass of the Mendips.

The rusty old watchtower creaks and grumbles. Not with the wind, because today is quite still, but with impatience at the man who climbs its steps so often, but who never comes to look. The man who stands as still as the tower itself, with his eyes tight shut.

Detective Pete has stood here many times.

In spring, he can almost smell the world waking up; the rich sweetness of the soil as the worms churn it, as the buried bulbs send up their shoots. In the summer months, when the wind races across the levels, it brings with it the bitter tang of the ocean. In autumn, the trees of the nearby forest give off their own scent, a muskiness that reminds him of the scent of his ex-wife’s hair. Today, though, the air seems too cold to move and he can smell nothing but his own breath.

If Pete were wise, he’d wear gloves and a decent coat when he makes this pilgrimage to the tower in winter, but he never seems quite dressed for the time he spends here. Maybe he thinks suffering will bring him closer to Zoe, make it easier for him to sense where she is. Because Pete comes to this tower to find Zoe.

Every time he comes here, he stands with his eyes shut, telling himself that, when he opens them, he’ll be looking directly at the place where Zoe lies.

In his coat pocket, his phone trembles, letting him know a message has arrived. Taking it as a signal, Pete opens his eyes. No good. He is staring at the north cliff, at the area around Rill Cavern where Myrtle was found, and that area has been thoroughly searched.

Where are you, Zoe?

He turns, tucking his hands deep within his pockets, and looks north-east towards another limestone gorge called Burrington Combe and the cave known as Sidcot Swallet that became Jessie Tout’s grave.

No one has ever been able to explain quite how Hamish Wolfe got the body of Jessie Tout into the bottleneck hole that is Sidcot Swallet and he has yet to enlighten the world, but somehow he did it, because that’s where she was found, nearly four months after she vanished.

Not far at all from where Jessie lay is Goatchurch Cavern, a popular cave with those new to the sport. Boys from a grammar school in the north-east were exploring it in January, nearly five months after Chloe Wood vanished. A small group left the main route to explore one of the narrower passages and found a whole lot more than they’d bargained for.

Rill Cavern, Goatchurch Cavern, Sidcot Swallet. Pete’s team have spent hours staring at road maps, Ordnance Survey maps, cave maps and Google Earth, looking for patterns, for the fourth point that might indicate where Zoe is. They looked after Chloe was found, after Myrtle was found, and they looked again when Latimer arrived and imagined he was the first to have the idea.

There is no discernible pattern. Nothing to indicate where Zoe is. And sometimes Pete feels that, if he doesn’t find her, he might spend the rest of his life looking.

So Pete comes here and hopes that one day the idea will come. That one day, from his vantage point on the tower, he’ll follow the track of a lone walker – like that one just now, in the white coat and blue hat, the one climbing over shingle falls to reach the northern cliff – and realize, in a eureka moment, where Zoe is.

The climber in the white coat pauses for breath and pulls off her hat. She sweeps her hair back, twisting it into a loose knot at the back of her neck, before tugging the woollen hat back on.

Pete moves quickly. He cannot run down the forty-seven metal steps of the watchtower and he certainly can’t run down the two hundred cut into the rock face that will take him back to the road. But he will make his way down into the gorge and back up the other side again as quickly as he can because the hair he just watched being tucked into a hat was blue.

BOOK: Daisy in Chains
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