Domestic arrangements sorted, he can get on with the job.
He pushes open the iron gate and crunches his way up the path, through an avenue of frozen laurel bushes. The garden is long and narrow. Tall trees grow behind the early Georgian rectory, curving around it, sheltering it like a protective parent. There are large windows to either side of the front door and Weston feels as though he can describe, without seeing them, the elegant, spacious rooms beyond with their high, carved ceilings and limewashed walls.
There is neither bell nor knocker on the red-varnished door, just an old-fashioned brass bell that he swings to produce a deep, sonorous clanging. He waits, for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, until he hears the sound of a chain being removed, of a lock being turned.
Warm air wafts out as the door opens and a woman is standing directly in front of him, the raised step bringing her face on to a level with his.
‘Miss Rose? Maggie Rose?’
He feels that momentary loss of control at being taken by surprise. Every copper in the land has heard of Maggie Rose: defence barrister, true-crime author, pain-in-the-police-force’s-collective-arse, but few have met her. She doesn’t do interviews, has never released a photograph.
She is probably the right side of forty and slim enough to look fragile, even in the oversized white woollen sweater that reaches almost to her thighs. She has small features in a sharp, very pale face. Her eyes are blue.
So is her hair.
‘What can I do for you, Detective?’ she says.
Not just the blue rinse of a genteel elderly lady. Not just the half-hearted blue streaks that are sometimes seen amongst the crowds at the Glastonbury Festival. This is bright, turquoise-blue, waving gently to a little below her chin.
He has no idea how she knows that he’s with the police.
‘Detective Sergeant Pete Weston.’ He holds up his warrant card. ‘I was hoping to have a few minutes of your time.’
‘Come inside for a moment.’
He follows her down a pale green corridor, past panelled doors that are firmly closed. The kitchen they enter is large, painted shades of cream and pale gold.
While he’s been looking round – he’s a copper, he can’t help himself – Rose has curled into an armchair close to an Aga. Her slippers are enormous, furry boots. Blue, like her hair.
‘Have a seat.’
He sneaks a glance at the laptop on the central table as he pulls out a chair, but the screensaver has kicked in to show constantly changing scenes of Arctic wastelands: massive snowdrifts, ice formations, blue ice.
‘Can I just confirm that you are Maggie Rose?’
‘I am. Will this take long? And does politeness demand that I offer you coffee?’
‘That’s your call, Miss Rose. I’m here because I understand you had a visit from Sandra Wolfe yesterday.’
She nods her head as she speaks. ‘She came here first, from what I understand, but didn’t make herself known. By her own admission she followed me to the beach and spoke to me there.’
Maggie Rose has a measured way of speaking, of choosing each word carefully, as though addressing an audience.
‘Can I ask what was the nature of the conversation?’
‘I expect you can guess.’
‘Indulge me.’
‘She wants me to take on her son’s case, to get her beloved child – in whose innocence she genuinely believes, by the way – out of prison.’
‘What did you tell her?’
Rose blinks. Her eyelashes are dark, but he can’t see the clogging gloop of mascara. ‘May I ask you a question first?’
‘Shoot.’
‘How did you know she and I had met?’
‘We monitor the website she and a few of her friends run. There’s a chat room that’s publicly accessible. She – Sandra Wolfe, I’m talking about now – was telling another member of the group that she’d met you.’
‘Then you probably already know the answer I gave her.’
Well, she had him there. ‘She’ll try again,’ he says. ‘Sandra Wolfe is not a woman who gives up easily. Next time, she might not bother waiting on the beach, she might knock on your door. She might bring some of her friends with her. She’s a woman grieving, Miss Rose. She believes her son has been stitched up and women like that aren’t always stable.’
Rose wriggles in the armchair, pulling her heels back against her bottom. ‘So you’re here out of concern for me?’
‘I’m here because while this group of people – who, frankly, I’d like to refer to as nutters and misfits, but that’s a bit judgemental and not very PC so I’ll just call them misguided individuals – can do whatever they like in their own time, I don’t want them bothering or even frightening ordinary members of the public.’
She holds eye contact. ‘I wasn’t frightened.’
‘No, I don’t expect you were.’
‘And you’re lying to me.’