Chapter fifty-two
It was while Maggie was cooking that she realised her mistake. The thought of Christmas Day and the presents she had bought triggered the memory. She had left evidence that could tie her to Alex Taylor. If they searched Alex’s home and found the Christmas card she sent, even though she hadn’t signed it, they might deduce that the written message was about the painting.
Simple mistakes like this could trip her up.
Especially in view of how much she’d accomplished. The killing of Amy Abbott had been no easy feat. When she’d woken strapped down on a theatre table the idea to kill her there and then was put on hold as a new idea began to form. To keep her alive would set in motion another way to destroy Alex Taylor. Keeping her alive for several days had been the real challenge. When her screams got too loud, Maggie had taped her mouth. Not for fear of her being heard, but the noise had been driving her mad.
In the end she’d become delirious, and with death imminent it had been easy to dispose of her in the hospital grounds. In her wildest dreams Maggie could not have foreseen that the nurse would still be able to talk. When she whispered, ‘You said you’d help me,’ she had of course been directing those last words to Maggie.
Now this memory was spoiled, the outcome no longer satisfying. She had ruined it by trying to be too clever. She had wanted Alex to live, to be destroyed. Now she had to change the ending.
The tomato sauce in the large pan began to bubble and she quickly lowered the heat. The pasta was ready, but she couldn’t eat it now. Her appetite had gone with the thought of what she must do. The fragrant red liquid bubbling away was too red and too thin to look like blood, but she thought of it as blood as she imagined Alex Taylor dead.
Maggie wrung her hands in rage and frustration. Giving her the painting had been a mistake. She had wanted Alex to one day learn the meaning of the present, but now realised she had given the police evidence to question her.
She could say Dr Taylor had fallen in love with her version and had all but begged Maggie to get her one. She had taken pity on the woman and had agreed. She had not mentioned it when questioned, because she saw no point. But it was a chance she was not prepared to take. Once they started looking into her, they would start questioning staff about her movements that night, and her alibi would start to unravel. Like the fact that she had taken over midway through an operation to deliver twins, because her junior registrar was unable to cope. When she was bleeped by switchboard to attend the emergency department, she had said she couldn’t, because she was in the middle of an operation. What she didn’t want known was that her whereabouts were unaccounted for during the first part of the operation. She had to act quickly before Alex Taylor was set free.
Dylan moved close to the covered plate of pasta, chancing his luck to steal an exposed strand poking out from under the lid. Maggie watched the rat as its naked hands and long teeth gripped hold of the strand and dragged it away. Its round black eyes looked at her innocently, and while her feelings of hatred for Alex Taylor grew like a giant fist inside, she forgot that she quite loved the brown rat. Without hesitation she picked up the large pot of boiling red liquid and poured it all over him.
The rat squealed and shook itself violently to shake off the burning liquid. Its bulbous eyes turned white, and blindly and in agony it could find no relief as it skidded repeatedly on the wet surface. Maggie’s heart was beating faster and the rat was squealing louder, and unable to think over the noise or turn away from the desperate creature she snatched it up and flung it hard against the kitchen wall. The rat fell to the floor and twitched for a few pitiful seconds, and then lay still.
For the first time since Oliver died Maggie Fielding cried.
‘It’s all their fault, Maggs,’ he’d said, naming each of them. ‘All their fault that I lost the part.’
He had taken her out to dinner and told her that his agent had dropped him and that he had lost the best part he was ever likely to have. None of it was his fault, he explained. These women targeted him.
Under the influence of alcohol and the reassurances she gave that he was not to blame, he told her about Alex Taylor. He told how the woman led him on all day and then rejected him. ‘I’m a man, Maggs, not a saint. What was I to do? It was her fault that I went with a stupid tart. If she hadn’t got me all fired up I wouldn’t have needed to. It was only a release, Maggs. I just needed a release.’
Maggie refrained from asking him why he had gone back to Bath six months ago to seek release with yet another woman, this time leaving his seed behind. She’d found out about the nurse from the text messages he’d received. It was easy enough to track her down once Maggie moved to Bath.
She also refrained from telling him that she had been aware for some time of his need for other women – the pink business card she’d found, Unwind with Lillian, advertising the woman selling her wares.
‘It was all their fault, Maggs,’ he repeated again and again throughout the evening, and Maggie had wanted to believe him, until she went back to his place. Until he told her of his plans.
*
Nathan Bell wore a tailored jacket over his green A & E tunic and trousers. He and Greg both carried torches because the overhead fluorescent strip lights along the hundred-foot corridor were dim, their encasements coated with dirt, and barely lit the way.
They were standing roughly beneath the main theatre block, and Nathan pointed out the old disused lift shaft that used to carry staff and equipment down to the underground area. On the first and second floor above them the lift shaft had been walled up, and most people had no knowledge of its existence behind the plaster.
They looked in the lift and saw it was stacked with old bedside lockers, a couple of geriatric armchairs and a dismantled, old-style hospital bed with a brown rubber mattress. The disused lift had been used as a dumping site.
Miles of cable and pipes were attached to the low ceiling. Batting aside cobwebs and passing more abandoned equipment, they continued their search. The fragile hope Greg had felt earlier upon entering the underground area was diminishing fast. They hadn’t found anywhere so far that resembled a theatre, and he wished he’d thought to ask Nathan to bring the floor plans.
At the end of the second corridor they reached a junction. Greg gave a nod to Nathan indicating that he would take the left. Ten minutes later they had returned to the junction and slowly and despondently headed back the way they had come. Their search was over, and unsuccessful.