Five o’clock comes and goes, two of the employees exit the salon and walk hurriedly off to nearby bus stops or parked cars. The clock ticks round to five thirty and one more young woman leaves. Six o’clock, half past six. A tall, well-built woman with dark, shiny hair and a prominent nose leaves the building. She is wearing an emerald green coat and shiny black boots. Her make-up is perfect, but a little too heavy, as though it, too, must play a part in keeping out the northern chill. She walks with confidence, looks smart and well kept, but Aberdeen employers pay well.
The failure of step one. Most people, when forced to choose a new place to live, simply cannot do so at random. Try it. Imagine you have to leave, suddenly, without explanation or planning. Think of where you might go. You’ll almost certainly zero in on a place of significance: the home of a friend or relative, the town where your mother was born, the seaside resort you stayed in as a child. We are homing animals. We flock to the familiar, and almost everyone who disappears deliberately, and who doesn’t have the professional help of a witness protection programme, will be traceable through their location. Of course, some will be easier to find than others.
The dark-haired woman’s face is pinched against the cold as she strides off down the street. Maggie leaves her car and crosses the road. She walks towards the young woman, who won’t know her, will have no reason to be alarmed, and only at the very last moment does she sidestep to bring them both on to a collision course. The woman, whose eyes have been down on the pavement, looks up. Those eyes are not hostile at first, certainly not scared. Just puzzled.
‘Hello, Zoe,’ says Maggie.
Now she looks scared.
Chapter 61
‘AND NOBODY’S RECOGNIZED her? Seriously? Her face was all over the news for weeks.’ Hamish pushes his chair back and gets to his feet. In the small private interview room he seems taller than ever.
‘She’s lost a lot of weight,’ Maggie says. ‘Grown her hair, darkened it. She looks quite a lot like her older sister, Stacey, now. And you need to sit down, or the next time someone looks through the window, you’ll be cuffed again. If they don’t terminate the interview.’
He glances round at the door and rubs his wrist.
‘Zoe is a very different young woman now,’ Maggie says. ‘I liked her.’
Hamish is still standing. ‘Was it mutual?’
‘Both she and Stacey were pretty hostile at first. Wanting to know who’d sent me, what I was going to do.’
He folds his arms and leans back against the door. ‘And what are you going to do?’
It is the first time he has properly challenged her. ‘I’m going to think about it,’ she says. ‘Talk to you about it. I told them I’m working on your case. That you’re my priority, not them, or the police hunt for Zoe. Now, come and sit down, calmly, or I will bring this to a close and in future we go back to meeting in the hall during normal visiting hours.’
He takes a step towards her. ‘So what’s the story? Why did she run? Abusive boyfriend?’
‘Abusive mother.’ Maggie thinks back to Brenda’s controlling behaviour, the jumpy youngest daughter. The unmistakable signs of OCD in the house. This woman, though, wouldn’t be happy with controlling her house. She’d need to control her daughters too. ‘All three girls suffered, but Zoe always got the brunt of it.’
Hamish leans on the table towards her. ‘They didn’t think of something less extreme, like, I don’t know, reporting her to the authorities?’
She gives him a second. ‘They didn’t want to see her in prison. She’s their mum.’
He nods, reluctantly. As a doctor, he’ll have come across abuse of all forms. And the thousands of excuses the victims make for their abusers. Mum’s a bit of a bully. Mum has a bit of a temper. She doesn’t mean it, she just doesn’t always think. She doesn’t know her own strength.
‘And you guessed this, when you met her?’ he asks.
She points at the still-vacant chair. ‘When I saw the police photographs of the red boots I knew something didn’t add up. The blood spots were exactly where women get blisters if their shoes are too tight. I never saw the blood as necessarily sinister and when I looked in Zoe’s wardrobe and realized her feet were actually nearly two sizes larger than the boots, I realized that they were probably a gift from her mother and that Zoe herself hated them.’
He sits back down, and the chair creaks beneath his weight. ‘Why would Zoe’s mother buy her boots two sizes too small?’ His face is baffled. He has no idea what women obsessed with size do to themselves. To each other. Size five boots squeezed on to size six and a half feet. Of course they were going to hurt, but Zoe was going to wear them all the same, because her domineering, controlling mother had paid good money for them, money she could ill afford, and for heaven’s sake, if Zoe lost a bit of weight then maybe the swelling in her feet would go down and they would fit.
‘There were lots of clothes in Zoe’s wardrobe that were far too small. Her mother was always bullying her to lose weight.’