Daisy in Chains(102)

Sirocco pulls the letter open and leans back, to catch the overhead light.

Sirocco begins, and then looks up, almost triumphantly at Maggie. Maggie nods at her to go on.




Sirocco stumbles a little over the names, as though they are unfamiliar to her. Maggie wants to tell her to get on with it.




There is a tiny, annoying smile on her face now.




Sirocco’s voice has fallen lower. Maggie takes a step up, so as not to miss a word.





Sirocco’s eyes lift and meet Maggie’s again. ‘What does he mean?’ she asks. ‘I don’t know where to find him. He’s never called me Guinevere before.’

The world can transform in a matter of seconds, Maggie discovers. It just has. She turns away, so that Sirocco will not see her smiling, will not guess that her heart is racing, her head singing.

‘What?’ Sirocco says, suddenly confused. ‘What is it? Do you understand it? Where are you going? Come back up.’

‘Of course I understand it,’ Maggie takes the last step down. She turns the corner, but hears with satisfaction the sound of the other woman’s footsteps.

‘You know what he means?’ Sirocco is calling out as she follows. ‘You know where he’ll be?’

‘Oh yes.’

Maggie hears the softer footstep that tells her Sirocco has reached the stone floor at the bottom of the steps.

One of the most surprising aspects of this whole business, Maggie thinks, as she takes up position in the centre of the room, is how easy it can be to persuade women to do the dumbest things. Like stepping down into the basement of someone they do not know.

With Jessie, she’d faked an injury. Jessie had been the most challenging, in fairness, because Jessie had stepped out that bright Saturday believing she was to meet a handsome doctor. She’d almost refused to go with the smartly dressed young woman who’d claimed she was Harry’s PA, and that he’d been unavoidably delayed in theatre, but would meet her later at his house.

Chloe, on the other hand had been easy. Chloe hadn’t thought to question that the quirky jewellery tycoon had both workshop and office in her basement. Myrtle had never doubted the need to waddle below ground to view the Disney collection, or that the slender, blue-haired woman leading the way was Anita Radcliffe’s daughter. And now this deluded woman is proving as stupid as the rest.

Sirocco’s flowing black form appears in the doorway as she looks nervously around. The basement is empty now, apart from the flies. The boxes of souvenirs – the women’s clothes and possessions – have long since been disposed of. Maggie is nothing if not a very careful killer. More recently, her old medical textbooks, her childhood things, have likewise been taken away. She will leave behind nothing that will link her to her former life. Or to what she has done in this one.

There is nothing in this basement room that should alarm Sirocco. From where she is standing, she cannot see the disconnected bathtub in which the bodies of three large women decomposed and drained away until their remains weighed practically nothing. Hamish had been bang on about that.

The two women stand and face each other. Sirocco looks on the verge of tears. ‘How? How come you know where Hamish is going and I don’t?’

As Maggie steps forward she feels a fleeting moment of pity for what the girl has lost. She holds out her left hand, ostensibly for the letter, really as a distraction, so that Sirocco won’t see, until too late, what Maggie has in her right hand.

The club hammer, identical to the one that killed Odi and Broon, cuts its way through the air and connects with the side of Sirocco’s head. The hard resistance of bone is more solid than Maggie expected and her arm feels a jolt of pain as Sirocco sways.

Maggie swings her arm back, ready to strike again, but Sirocco sinks to the floor, her black clothes spreading around her like a stagnant puddle. She is unlikely to be dead, not after one strike, but Maggie can waste no more time. She has somewhere else to be.

‘How do I know where Hamish is going?’ she says to the motionless form on the cellar floor. ‘I know because these letters were never meant for you, I’m afraid. You were just the postman.’





Chapter 102


HE HAS LEFT a trail for her. The fluorescent stones start at the cave entrance and lead her, breadcrumb style, into its depths. She doesn’t need them. She has been this way so many times, she thinks she can do it in the dark. She steps into the cave, leaving light behind – or maybe she did that a long time ago. Either way, her path is clear.

After a few yards, she picks up his scent. Not the one she remembers from so long ago, that heady mix of aftershave and shower gel and something that was so essentially male, so completely Hamish, but the new smell, the one born of prison and violence and frustration.

She likes them both.

The trickling of the water over the rocks sounds like music. The first time he brought her here, there really was music. He’d carried a battery-operated CD player in his backpack, along with a padded mat and blanket, cold champagne and glasses, and lots of candles.

‘I don’t like caves. They make me claustrophobic,’ Daisy had complained, when what she really meant was that she didn’t like climbing up the sides of steep hills to get to them. She didn’t like the constricted feeling of squeezing her too large body through tiny gaps in the walls.