There is a softening in her face that makes him think, for a second, that she might be about to smile. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
He takes the opportunity to glance up the stairs. No one on the landing. ‘Please do,’ he says. ‘But above all, don’t be tempted to have anything to do with Hamish Wolfe. I’ve looked into that man’s eyes, and trust me, there isn’t anything human there. Wolfe isn’t a man, Miss Rose. He’s a monster.’
She smiles. Properly this time. Her mouth is wider than he’d realized, her pale lips fuller. She has neat, small white teeth. ‘I’ve heard he’s quite the ladies’ man.’
‘They often are. That’s why they manage to kill so many.’
‘Do you know what, that does interest me. Not the fact that he was popular before he was arrested. He’s a good-looking man, there’s nothing remarkable in that. What fascinates me is the number of women who, by all accounts, write to him in prison. Why would they do that, do you think?’
‘All notorious killers have a fan club,’ he says.
‘Fascinating.’ She’s still smiling as she reaches for the lock. ‘That would, actually, make a very interesting book. If I had the time, which I don’t.’
‘Wolfe wouldn’t be interested in you, I’m afraid,’ Pete says.
They swap places in the doorway and he catches a whiff of the odd, chemical smell of her hair.
‘Why’s that?’
He makes a point of looking her up and down. ‘You’re about four stone short of his preferred body weight. Thank you for your time.’
The door closes before he’s taken three steps down the path. He doesn’t look back, doesn’t pause, even though his phone starts ringing when he reaches the gate. He climbs into his car, shuts out the cold, and checks his phone. It is one of his detective constables, thirty-four-year-old Liz Nuttall. He presses Accept. ‘Talk to me, Nutty.’
‘You made it out, then?’ she says. ‘How’d it go?’
‘She’s not what I was expecting, that’s for sure. Seems to be pretty cool on the Wolfe front. No real interest in engaging with Sandra Wolfe further.’
‘Could she be faking it? By the way, Latimer’s been asking for you. I told him you were at a meeting at County Hall about the schools’ drugs outreach programme.’
‘Nice one.’ Their boss, DCI Latimer, will expect no feedback from a meeting at County Hall. He makes no secret of the fact that bureaucracy bores him.
‘Listen, Nuts, do me a favour, will you? Run a check on The Rectory.’ He glances sideways at the big old house he’s just left. ‘Electoral roll, utilities, you know the sort of thing. Rose was talking to someone while I was in there but did a good job of keeping whoever it was out of sight. As though she really didn’t want me to know she wasn’t on her own.’
‘I’m not getting anything,’ says Liz, after a few moments. ‘No record of her having a partner or a lodger. No, nothing.’
Pete is still looking at the house. The windows are blank and empty. ‘There’s someone else in there,’ he says. ‘I’m sure of it.’
Chapter 4
www.CommonplaceSexism.com
HOW FAT BECAME A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
Posted 5 October 2014, by Beth Tweedy, regular contributor and self-confessed ‘bigger-than-average girl’
Zoe Sykes, Jessie Tout, Chloe Wood and Myrtle Reid were killed because they were fat. That is a fact.
Zoe, Jessie, Chloe and Myrtle were targeted on the strength of their dress size and then murdered. We still don’t know exactly how, but you can bet your life it wasn’t pleasant. Their bodies were dumped in wet, dark, underground places, from which they were never supposed to be recovered. Zoe’s still hasn’t been. This happened to these women because we’ve become a society in which body size is the last remaining bastion of prejudice. Because fatness has become so despised, we can tolerate the annihilation of it.
Hostility towards those who don’t conform to our body-image ideal has been growing steadily in the last couple of decades. Oh, I know, girls in plus-sized school tunics have always been catcalled in the street. Fatties, fat women in particular, have long been the (big) butt of comedians’ jokes, but in recent years, this fat-ism has taken a much darker turn.
We’ve seen larger women attacked in pubs and on the streets, by assailants of both sexes. Dental hygienist Tracey Keith, 22 stone, was left shaken and badly bruised by the verbal and physical attack launched upon her as she travelled home by train one night last June. Her offence? Taking up too much room on the seats. Many women tell similar tales. Fat women get refused entry into nightclubs, they’re abused in doctor’s surgeries, because, of course, their ailments have to be directly related to their body size and consequently their own fault. Fat people don’t get jobs, they don’t get interviews for jobs, they can’t even get cabs, half the time, as though their excess body weight might prove too much for the seat springs.