Daisy in Chains(70)
She gets up without looking at him, picks up her bag, fastens her coat. Only when she is turning to knock on the door for release does she look back. Hamish is staring at the tabletop. The lines of his face have fallen. He looks older, beaten. For the first time, she realizes, he has let the mask slip.
He lifts his head a fraction and their eyes meet. Eyes gleam. A tear starts to fall, then another. Then too many to stop.
She turns, bangs on the door and sets off along the corridor. Only when she is back in the cold, salt air, does she slow down. Still the tears flow.
They are hers, not his.
Chapter 62
Sent via the emailaprisoner service
From: Maggie Rose
To: Hamish Wolfe
Date: 23.12.2015
Subject: Daisy
I simply do not understand, given everything else facing you, why you are fixating on a woman who hasn’t been in your life for nearly twenty years.
Daisy is an irrelevance, Hamish. If you can’t see that, I’m not sure I can help you.
I’m sorry I left abruptly just now. When I say I hope you have a good Christmas, please believe I mean it sincerely. I’ll be in touch after the weekend.
Best wishes,
Maggie
Sent from my iPhone
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
From the office of
MAGGIE ROSE
The Rectory, Norton Stown, Somerset
Thursday, 24 December 2015
No, Hamish, let me tell you something about Daisy.
She was eighteen, little more than a child, away from home for the very first time, at a university where the pressure to succeed is enormous. She was a young woman seriously self-conscious about her weight (fat women always are), a woman who’d been teased and bullied and despised from the age she first became conscious that body-size was even a thing.
She would not have believed her luck when she attracted the attention of a man like you. At the same time that she fell completely in love with you, she told herself it was too good to be true. She braced herself for the inevitable rejection. She steeled herself to deal with the sight of you moving on to prettier, worthier girls. She never imagined how bad it was going to be.
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.