You took this innocent, trusting, nice girl and you broke her.
I think you taped something that should have remained forever private and you showed it to your mates. Then I think you duplicated that video and sold copies to sad, seedy little men all over the UK.
And you know what else I think? I think you let her find out. You didn’t even have the common sense and courtesy to keep the video well hidden. I think that’s why she left. You drove her from the university she’d won a place in, from her new friends, from the career she’d longed for since being a child.
That’s the kind interpretation of what you did to Daisy, Hamish. Others are making different, far darker, assumptions about what happened.
Tell me the truth about what happened that night, and then, maybe, I’ll look for her.
M
Maggie seals the letter. The last postal collection on Christmas Eve is 10.30 a.m. and she has missed that by a couple of hours, but she doesn’t want her letter to Hamish sitting in the house over the holiday weekend. She might be tempted to burn it. She opens the front door just as a delivery van is pulling up in the road outside.
A woman wearing a green gilet swings open the gate and crunches her way up the path. Her hands are red, dirty and cracked around the tips and nails, but there is an expectant smile on her face. Florists expect to be welcomed – how can someone get a delivery of flowers and not be pleased? – but this woman’s smile is fading as she gets close enough to see the expression on Maggie’s face.
‘Christmas delivery for you,’ she says when she’s within earshot, because she hasn’t quite lost hope that all will be as it should be, that Maggie will break out of whatever stressed daydream is keeping her in thrall and say what’s she’s supposed to say – Flowers, how lovely, thank you, so sorry to bring you out in the cold.
‘No card,’ the florist goes on. ‘Apparently you’ll know who they’re from. The sender was very specific about the arrangement, though.’
Maggie has no choice but to take the cellophane-wrapped cluster of blooms. ‘Everything all right?’ the florist asks, although clearly it is not.
‘Yes, thank you,’ says Maggie, knowing that asking questions about who sent them will get her nowhere.
The florist turns and half runs back down the path as Maggie stares at the flowers that someone has sent her for Christmas.
A single rose, fat, pink and perfect. Surrounded by daisies.
Chapter 65
MAGGIE WAKES, SOMETIME in the early hours of Christmas morning.
‘He was pretty fit when I knew him.’
When has she heard that? Hamish’s voice, but when exactly?
She switches on the light. Yes, definitely his voice, not something he wrote in a letter or an email.
Pretty fit when I knew him.
‘And this is only occurring to you now?’
Is she never to have any peace? ‘I’ve had a lot on my mind.’
Hamish had been talking about Pete and she’d assumed he’d been referring to the time of his arrest. The two men, inevitably, would have seen a lot of each other.
‘That feel right to you?’
‘No.’ Not any more, it doesn’t.
He was pretty fit when I knew him.
‘It suggests an intimacy, somehow, don’t you think? Something more than would come from sitting across a table in an interview room?’
‘Maybe.’
‘How can you judge someone’s fitness just by how they sit, stand, enter and leave the room?’
You can’t. You’ll see weight, percentage of body fat. ‘A medical doctor would be more in tune with what bodies are saying than a layman.’
‘Even so.’
Is it possible Pete and Hamish knew each other? Properly knew each other, before the arrest?
From close by in the room comes a soft, low laugh. ‘Maggie, Maggie, what are you not being told?’
Chapter 66
THE THIRD CRACKER in a row fails to snap and a heaviness sinks into the group of six people that has nothing to do with the amount of food they’ve eaten. ‘Cheap Poundland rubbish,’ Liz says, Yuletide exhaustion making her face seem thinner and paler than normal. Even her hair has lost some of its usual springiness. ‘Tell you what, we could pile them all up in the middle of the table and set fire to them. They’d spark then.’
The younger of her two sons looks up from his new tablet. ‘Yeah, Mum, can we?’
Liz glances towards the head of the table. ‘Or failing that, stick the lot down Pete’s trousers, followed by a lighted match. Might just get his attention.’
Pete starts. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘miles away.’
He spoons the last piece of soggy sponge into his mouth. There is still half of the giant sherry trifle left in the bowl and he has a horrible feeling second helpings are about to be forced upon him. ‘Delicious,’ he says, to head off the attack at the pass. ‘I now officially cannot eat another thing until New Year’s.’