From: Avon and Somerset Police, Detective Sergeant Peter Weston To: Maggie Rose Date: 6.1.2016
Subject: Result!
Daisy Baron enrolled at Newcastle University in 1997 and graduated in 2001. Four years instead of the usual five, but she was given credits for having done her first year at another medical school, according to the very nice Mrs George in the records office.
So, if she’s dead, Wolfe didn’t kill her. Not at Oxford anyway.
You’re welcome!
P
‘Listen! Can you hear that?’
Maggie closes down her email program and gets up from her desk. The house is silent. As is the street outside. ‘What?’ she says, with ill-disguised impatience.
‘The baying of hounds.’
‘Oh, very funny.’ She walks into the next room, although she knows by now that she will be followed wherever she goes.
‘Detective Pete is not a man to be underestimated.’
‘The trail will go cold. Daisy didn’t leave Newcastle.’
‘He won’t give up.’
‘He’s gone as far as he can. He has to operate within the law.’
Maggie hears a soft laugh.
‘Unlike us.’
Chapter 87
‘WHY?’ PETE ALMOST moans down the line. ‘Why on earth are you seeing that lot again?’
Maggie turns off the main road. The huge, wire-meshed gates of the caravan park are closed, but Bear, in a quilted coat that makes him look even bigger, is waiting to open them.
Maggie says, ‘What part of “we can’t see each other any more” did you not understand? Oh, how extraordinary.’
Where there should be the unrelenting blackness of the winter night sky, there is colour, movement, neon lights racing in wild, abandoned shapes and leaving glowing, rainbow trails behind them.
‘I’m not seeing you, I’m talking to you on the phone. What’s extraordinary? And you haven’t answered my first question.’
She drives into the park and pulls up at the barrier. In the rear-view mirror, she can see Bear closing the gates again behind her. He ambles back towards the car and she wonders whether she need offer him a lift to the clubhouse. It would be rude to make him walk in her wake, but she doesn’t want the huge, unsavoury mass of him in her car, breathing the same air, leaving behind traces that she will never be able to see, let alone clean away. He draws level with the driver’s door and she cannot avoid lowering the window a few inches.
‘Treats tonight.’ He leers down at her, like the oil-secreting uncle who thinks cheap sweets will make up for his unseemly presence.
‘Do you need a lift down?’ Politeness, social conventions are surely the heaviest chains of all.
‘Waiting for Mike. I’ll see you down there.’
Pete is still on the line. ‘Maggie, what’s going on? Why are you there and what’s extraordinary?’
‘They’ve got the fairground going.’ She drives along the road that runs parallel to the beach, the one that takes her through the painted fences, the flimsy chalets, the sturdier caravans, and sees none of them. They are thrown into shadow by the baubles whirling and spinning ahead of her. The fairground, eerie and empty on her last visit, is lit and active. The Ferris wheel is turning, as is a merry-go-round. She can see the impaled horses like plaster kebabs rising and falling. Lights flash from the waltzer, from the dodgem cars, from the side-stalls. The crashing of the waves is drowned by several different tracks of rock music. If there are people on the rides, she can’t see them. Everything seems to be taking place without human participation.
‘In this weather? In the dark? Seriously, Maggie, why are you there?’
‘Three reasons.’ The spinning lights have become a little mesmerizing. ‘One: you lot have failed, dismally, to find out who broke into my house before Christmas, so I’m going to ask a few questions of my own.’
‘Look, I’m at least an hour away. Can you just sit in your car and do a crossword puzzle till I get there?’
‘They won’t talk to me if you’re here. And it’s years since I’ve been on a carousel.’
‘Jesus wept. And the other reasons?’
‘Sorry?’ She is distracted by the sight of Sandra Wolfe, bundled up against the cold in the doorway of the social building.
‘You said you had three reasons.’
‘Oh yes. Well, there’s a chance Odi confided in somebody in this group about what she saw in the Gorge that night. Also, I think whoever killed her and Broon will be here. And that could well be the person who framed Hamish.’
‘Oh, give me strength. Maggie—’
‘Think about it. Serial murderers are notoriously narcissistic. While the hunt is on, they’re completely at the centre of things, but once someone else is caught, all that excitement goes away. Whoever framed Hamish can’t kill again without giving the game away, so the only way of keeping the buzz going is to get involved with the group that’s trying to free him.’