Daisy in Chains(72)

Chapter 67


MAGGIE GETS OUT of her car into air so icy it feels like she’s walking through knives. She pulls the collar of her coat up as high as it will go and sets off across the square. As she circumvents the enormous Norwegian spruce tree, that smells more of drunken men’s urine than it does Scandinavian pine forests, she glances up at the window of the Crown that she has come to think of as Pete’s window. She has no idea of whether it is or it isn’t, but it comforts her a little to look up at a friend’s window.

Or the window of someone who might have been a friend, had circumstances been very different.

She walks on, as the slow, sad melody of the cathedral’s organ finds its way across the crisp square and into her heart. In front of the Georgian facade of Wells Town Hall a group of people are standing silently. Some of them hold lanterns. There are tea lights on the stone flags. The flickering of the candle flames, the stronger, more garish lights of the pub are reflected on the ripples of cellophane that have been left where Odi and Broon breathed their last.

She keeps her eyes down as she gets closer to Odi and Broon’s shrine. Slipping to the front, she lays the roses down on the cold stone.

The tall male figure, walking down her drive, might have alarmed her, had she not already seen and recognized his car.

‘What are you doing here, Pete?’ She finds a key, fits it into the lock.

He reaches the bottom of the drive but keeps his distance. ‘Where have you been? You shouldn’t be going out on your own in the dark. Not while that Facebook crap is going on.’

‘I’ve been to the square in Wells. I left some flowers in the Town Hall entrance. Again, what are you doing here?’

Slowly, he draws nearer. ‘Making sure you’re OK.’

She opens the door and turns. On the step, she is almost his height. ‘I’m OK. But you can’t just come round here. It’s a conflict of interest. You must see that.’

His eyes seem darker than she remembers them. ‘Did Latimer talk to you?’ he asks.

‘He did, actually, a few hours after Odi and Broon were killed, but it was hardly necessary. I’m working to get Hamish out of prison, you have a vested interest in keeping him where he is. If there’s ever another court case, our being friends could jeopardize it. We can’t be friends any more.’

‘Is that all we were, friends?’

She knows exactly what he’s asking her and also that she owes him something more than a curt dismissal.

‘I’ve enjoyed getting to know you, but the timing didn’t work. I’m sorry, Pete.’ She turns away before she can weaken.

You’ll regret that, says the voice that welcomes her home.





Chapter 68


‘ARE YOU GOING to be writing all night?’

Phil is pacing again. He has spent the day doing it, stopping every ten minutes or so to smoke a cigarette. The air in the cell is thick with fumes and Wolfe thinks, not for the first time, that there is a good chance that if he ever does leave this place alive, he will be riddled with lung cancer.

He looks up. ‘Nope, I’m nearly done.’ There is another half-hour until lights out. ‘Want to play cards?’

The two of them often play poker when they are locked up. Wolfe learned the game from his cellmate, but soon outstripped him. Roughly 60 per cent of the time, he lets Phil win.

Phil stops at the door and looks out. ‘It’s doing my head in,’ he complains.

Wolfe has been at Parkhurst long enough to know that, of the three hundred and sixty-five days that make up the prison year, Christmas Day is by far the hardest to get through.

On Christmas Day, everyone is thinking about what their families are doing without them. Christmas Day is when the missing and the loneliness tip the scales and come down hard on the unbearable side.

Visitors are not allowed on Christmas Day. Prisoners can neither send nor receive gifts from outside. The queue for the telephone is less good-natured than usual. Squabbles are more or less continual. The suicide rate in UK prisons peaks over Christmas.

‘Didn’t even get to talk to Sal,’ Phil moans. ‘Who you writing to, anyway? Your mum again?’

He comes close, as though he might be about to peer over Wolfe’s shoulder. Wolfe signs his name at the bottom and folds the single sheet of paper in two.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ he says.





Chapter 69





Chapter 70


THIS MORNING, THREE days after Christmas, Wolfe looks tired. He is freshly shaved and the faint smell of soap he’s brought into the interview room suggests he’s washed, but his skin looks pale, the lines on his temples deeper, and there are purple smudges running diagonally from the corner of his eyes to the centre of his cheeks. He is yawning as he’s led into the interview room and tries, unsuccessfully, to stifle it.

‘Sorry. Bad night.’ He holds his hands out to be uncuffed. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

She hasn’t come to exchange social pleasantries. ‘Did you know Pete Weston before he arrested you?’

The door closes behind the guard and they are alone. Wolfe sinks into the other chair and unfolds his long, lazy grin. ‘I was wondering when you’d work that one out.’