The house is empty. Even the voice in her head has fallen silent. She can feel the other’s presence though, knows she is close, just out of sight. The doorbell clangs. The sound scares her, even though she has been expecting it.
Pete isn’t alone. They will probably never be alone again. The brief friendship bloomed like a day-lily, a flash of colour in a dull yard, shrivelled and dead by the time the sun came up again. At his side is the young male constable that she has seen before. Sunny, she thinks; maybe Sydney. She doesn’t care and won’t ask. The time for pretending is over.
They follow her down the hall to her study. She has already placed two chairs in front of her desk.
The younger man is excited, but nervous too. This young police officer is slightly afraid of her. Pete looks sad. Maggie wishes she could tell him that, to an extent, she shares his sadness but that would hardly be appropriate any more.
‘We wanted to share this with you as soon as possible,’ he says. ‘We agreed there’s nothing to be gained by you not having the information as soon as us.’
They have found something in the abandoned office. ‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘The computer is definitely the one used to make contact with the three victims.’
She has rarely heard Pete speak so formally, so like a police spokesman on the evening news.
‘Our investigators found the conversations that Hamish Wolfe had with Jessie Tout, Chloe Wood and Myrtle Reid. They’re double-checking times and dates, IP addresses, all the technical stuff, but there seems little doubt.’
‘We’d really love to know how you managed to find it so quickly when we couldn’t.’ The constable has a stain on the collar of his shirt. He looks tired.
‘I looked.’ Maggie returns the young man’s stare. ‘You didn’t. Not really.’
The constable’s face says he’s registered Maggie’s aggression, and is up for a fight – to a point. He says, ‘We wondered if perhaps your client gave you some idea where to look.’
‘Why on earth would he do something so stupid? And all you’ve found is the computer that was used to make contact with the women. You haven’t found anything to link it to Hamish.’
‘Actually, we have,’ the constable begins, before Pete silences him with a look.
‘There was a pen,’ Pete says. ‘A biro, hidden away beneath the carpet. It has Hamish’s prints on it.’
Maggie stares back at him for a second. ‘It proves nothing,’ she says, although she knows that, in the eyes of the world, it will prove a great deal. ‘If someone broke into Hamish’s house to steal evidence, they could easily have found a pen.’
The constable sneers. Maggie’s hand reaches out for a paperweight and clasps it tight. The sneer fades.
‘Just three women?’ asks Maggie.
Pete frowns. ‘You mean, did we find any trace of Zoe?’
‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’
‘Nothing,’ says the constable. ‘In fact, the first activity we found dates to after Zoe’s disappearance.’
‘I thought so. I don’t think Zoe’s disappearance had anything to do with the three murders,’ Maggie says. ‘I think it may have been entirely unconnected, except that it gave the killer the idea. A fat girl vanished, presumed dead. Hamish supposedly had a history with fat girls. The real killer decided to make other fat girls disappear, and direct the blame towards him by planting evidence.’
Pete sighs. ‘Maggie, this conspiracy theory is going nowhere.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that you and Hamish were friends before his arrest?’
He flushes. ‘We weren’t friends.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that your ex-wife, who left you for your boss, just six months before Jessie was murdered, is a very similar size to Hamish’s supposed three victims?’
He gives an odd, twisted smile. ‘Are you serious?’
Maggie turns to the constable. ‘If anything happens to me, Detective, if I vanish suddenly, or have a freakish accident, I do hope you’ll remember this conversation.’
The man laughs, but glances sideways at his sergeant. Pete reaches into his coat pocket. He pulls out a clear plastic wallet, with several loose sheets of notepaper inside and puts them on the desk in front of Maggie.
‘They’re just copies,’ he says. ‘The originals are at the station.’
‘What are they?’ Maggie sees the heading on the stationery and can feel fibres in her body start to tighten. HMP Isle of Wight.
‘Please read them. They’re in date order. We’ll wait.’
She wants to refuse, to tell them to leave the letters, that she’ll get to them in her own time. She knows they won’t agree.
Aware that she has no choice, she unfolds the first letter.