‘I WANT TO talk about Jessie, Chloe and Myrtle. How do you know how they died?’ Maggie watches Wolfe’s face carefully. Normally, she can spot lies in an instant. It’s nothing to do with the eyes, accomplished liars get very good at controlling their eyes when they’re spinning yarns, but every liar she’s ever known has taken a deeper than average breath before the lie comes out.
‘I don’t.’ He holds her stare. ‘How could I? I didn’t kill them.’
No lie that she can see, but she’s only just got started. ‘My first visit, you were very specific about how they met their deaths. You talked about them being lured into a cave, having their throats slit, being left alone in the cold and the dark, to bleed out. But by the time the three bodies were found, they were largely bone. The post-mortems didn’t come to any conclusions about how the victims died. So, back to my question, how do you know?’
He smiles, a careful, tight smile that doesn’t reveal his teeth. Only his guile. His breathing hasn’t changed. ‘I guessed.’
‘You guessed?’
He lets his forearms rest on the table. ‘Yeah, it’s easy. Let’s try it again. Whoever took them into the caves – and I’m not saying it was me – lured them with some sort of story. Maybe tales of a remarkable rock feature. Personally, I’d have plumped for the romantic angle. Perhaps he offered to show them the place where Arthur and Guinevere’s wedding rings are encased in limestone.’
‘Arthur and Guinevere?’
He’s still smiling, everything about his body language is upbeat. ‘Perfectly plausible. Glastonbury is generally agreed to be the site of Camelot. I can see that appealing to young impressionable women, especially the jeweller. So he leads them to where he wants them to be and he says, “Over there, just where I’m shining my torch, there’s a bit of a slope, so you have to watch your step, lean over a bit” – can you see what he’s doing, Maggie? He’s getting them off balance – then he comes in behind, maybe puts one hand on a shoulder, as though to steady them. He’s being super gallant. He gives them the torch, to free up his other hand. Maybe he wraps that hand around their hair, he figures he can step up the romance factor, and women like that, don’t they? It’s an intimate, alpha-male gesture, reminiscent of cavemen. He makes sure he’s got a nice firm grip then, just as she says, “Where, Hamish, I can’t see anything?” he bangs her head hard against the rock.’
Maggie pushes back against her chair, feels it slide along the floor an inch. Her eyes flick to the nearest officer on duty. He’s on a raised platform, some ten yards away. When she looks at Wolfe again, he is licking some invisible substance off the tip of his thumb. She doesn’t think he’s taken his eyes off her.
‘Is that how you did it?’ she says.
‘I’m guessing, not confessing.’ He leans forward again, more than matching her faint-hearted retreat, reducing the distance between them. ‘The first blow would be unlikely to kill her, so he has to strike again. If he has some medical knowledge – again, I’m just speculating – he’ll know that a hard object, like solid rock, slamming repeatedly into the temporal lobe would kill someone pretty quickly.’
If she becomes his lawyer she’ll be able to record their conversations. For now, she has to remember as best she can. But storing information away is hard when your body has become too hot. When you can feel bubbles of sweat forming on the underside of your skin.
‘There was significant head damage referenced on one of the post-mortem reports.’ She wishes she could take off her jacket, but that would send all the wrong signals. ‘Jessie, from memory. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you? You’ll have read it. And the pathologist couldn’t say conclusively whether the damage was incurred post-or ante-mortem. So, given that Jessie’s body was found at the bottom of a fairly steep slope, her skull could have sustained that damage when her body was thrown down it.’
He nods. ‘True. So how would you have done it?’
‘How would I kill three women?’
‘Yeah. Say you want to kill three women, who are bigger and probably stronger than you. You want to lure them into a cave and then kill them, how would you do it?’
‘Firstly, it would be impossible. Second, I wouldn’t want to. And third, I’m not here to entertain you.’
He grins properly, showing those white, rather sharp teeth of his. ‘Doesn’t it strike you, Maggie, that it would take some awesome powers of persuasion to get a woman you hardly know into a cave?’ he says. ‘Even with the promise of mythological jewellery.’
‘I agree. It would take someone exceptionally personable and persuasive. In that sense, you were a gift for the prosecution.’