Of course. She’d thought exactly the same thing. ‘Accidents happen. Things go wrong. Maybe you drove your car over a piece of glass that night.’
‘Or maybe whoever was driving my car needed to be seen. Needed to be caught on camera somewhere and had previously checked out that petrol station because it was in the right area and it had an air pump somewhat removed from the main building. We don’t even know for certain that Myrtle was in the car, just that her sock was found in the bushes some time later. Does it not have a staged feeling about it?’
A guard is making his way around the tables, encouraging stragglers to get up and head out.
‘The murders finished,’ Maggie says. ‘Once you were taken off the streets, the killings stopped.’
‘I told you it was all about me.’
She shakes her head. ‘No. An opportunistic framing, I might accept, but the idea that someone killed four women just to get you into trouble? That’s nuts.’
The guard is very close now and she stands up. Hamish doesn’t move. ‘Maggie, if this case were easy, I wouldn’t need you.’
Chapter 34
‘THERE IS A patrol car parked outside my house.’
‘Ah, you’re home. I’ll be ten minutes.’
‘No, I don’t think— Oh, for God’s sake.’
Maggie is listening to dead air. Ten minutes? Weston can’t drive from Wells in ten minutes, he has to be lurking somewhere close. Damn. She wants a bath, to curl up in bed, she needs time to get her head in order. Spending time with Wolfe has exhausted her.
‘So, you don’t need Detective Pete any more?’
‘I never did.’
‘You were starting to like him.’
Maggie locks the back door. ‘It’s gone nine o’clock. I’m cold. I’m hungry. And I know he’s only coming to ask me about today.’
The kitchen smells of intruders. It smells of their bodies, of the food they brought in their packed lunches, the cigarettes they smoked outside her back door. It smells of their curiosity, their prying into her cupboards and drawers. It smells of the comments they exchanged about her, of their snide observances and their disrespectful banter.
She hears the doorbell as she is getting out of the shower, again as she is pulling on clothes. It is being clanged for the third time when she reaches the bottom of the stairs. It has started snowing again, there are flakes in Pete’s hair, on the shoulders of his coat.
‘Any chance we can do this quickly?’ she says.
‘Depends how fast you eat?’
Balanced on one arm Pete holds a white carrier bag. She catches the scent of garlic, ginger, warm food. She should be cross at the presumption, resentful of the interruption. All she can feel is hunger. She opens the door a little wider, silently giving him permission to come in. ‘Chinese?’ she asks.
‘Thai.’ He steps inside, bringing the dark chill of the night with him.
She closes the door quickly, although not quickly enough. She can still see the cold air, lurking in corners of her hallway.
‘Cutlery in the drawer by the sink,’ she tells him, when they’re both in the warmth of the kitchen. ‘I may even have chopsticks. Don’t bother setting a place for the elephant.’
This makes him smile. He avoids the chopsticks, finding knives and forks instead, not commenting on the fact that none of them match. She rinses plates under the hot tap and finds half a bottle of white wine in the fridge.
‘So go on,’ he says. ‘Did you and Wolfe hit it off?’
‘You’d have to ask him what he thinks of me. For my part, I thought him polite. Intelligent. In good shape, physically and mentally.’
Pete lifts his eyebrows.
‘In good health, I should say. Prison life hasn’t beaten him down yet. It will, though. It gets them all in the end.’
‘He wields a lot of power on the wing. He doles out medical advice. The big men look after him, offer him protection, of sorts. And he’s a pretty physical bloke too. He can handle himself.’
‘I also found him calm.’
‘Calm?’
‘Yes. And not a medicated calm, either. He isn’t taking anything, I’m sure of it. There was none of the anxiety, the urgency I normally expect when I see people who believe they’re suffering a miscarriage of justice. He wasn’t even particularly angry. Strange as it may seem, he’s remarkably relaxed about being in prison.’
‘Does that suggest innocence to you?’
She turns back to the fridge. ‘No. No, it doesn’t.’
Pete straightens the knives and forks.
‘Did you ever consider the possibility that Wolfe was framed?’ She throws the question back over her shoulder and sees from his face that he’d known that one was coming.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It was his first and only defence. The trouble is, he never put forward a single candidate. By his own admission, and as we found out, he had no enemies.’
‘And you were prepared to believe this nice guy capable of killing four women?’
‘I can name you some very charming mass murderers.’