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.
Maggie Rose is climbing the northern cliff, heading for Rill Cavern.
Chapter 10
DRAFT
THE BIG, BAD WOLFE?
By Maggie Rose
CHAPTER 2, THE SHAMING OF JESSIE TOUT
At first glance, Jessica (Jessie) Tout, the second victim, could not have been more different to quiet, unassuming Zoe. Jessie was an attention seeker, a blogger and a small-time journalist, her main subject being body size. Jessie, if we are to believe what she wrote, was not ashamed of being fat.
Jessie had a day job, handling claims for an insurance company in Bristol but dreamed of making it big with her writing, of being taken on by one of the nationals. In the meantime, she wrote a column for her local newspaper, called ‘Confessions of a Fat Bird’. It was popular, by all accounts. She had over ten thousand followers on Twitter.
In her relatively small way, Jessie was becoming known. She wasn’t afraid to pitch into those she described as ‘fat-shamers’. She was controversial, combative, her blogs attracting huge, not always calm and reflective, comment streams. Her tweets were inevitably met with a torrent of abuse, hate and threats. Rarely a day went by without a spat of some sort playing out. This all happened online, of course. There is no suggestion that Jessie’s online enemies ever brought the fight into the real world.