She had been tempted, once so strongly that she had been standing at the door, with her car keys in her hand. And then her baby had kicked inside her, and her strength of will had returned.
She had never seen the child, having refused to look at the ultrasound images of her, and yet in her mind she had a face, not newly born but a couple of years old, with reddish hair like hers, and Stevie’s eyes and smile. She had a name, too, one that Maggie was keeping to herself, for good luck, until after she had given birth.
But even with her determination renewed in her mind, she had wondered whether she was right to keep her husband in the dark. She was afraid that she was thinking like a senior police officer, keeping him out of the decision-making process because, strictly speaking, he did not need to know. Over supper, delayed until he had come home from work after nine o’clock, she had almost blurted it out. Indeed she would have, had she not realised how tired he looked, and that although his body was with her, his mind was totally preoccupied by his manhunt.
And so, instead, she had let him eat, and unwind; she had topped up his glass before it was empty, and she had waited until he was hers again. By that time she knew that her weaknesses were selfish, and that she had to keep her secret, if for no other reason than that she would not have been able to bear the look on his face had she revealed it.
‘I can see that.’ He grinned at her. ‘I tell you, tomorrow’s been a long time coming for me. I know you delayed your departure to give yourself as much time off as possible after the birth, but I wish you’d gone a month ago. You’ve been growing a child inside you and running a city-centre police division at one and the same time. Even for you, love, that’s a big ask.’
‘Well, now you can be happy, okay?’
‘Now I can start to be; but just stopping work isn’t going to be enough. I know you: you’ll find substitutes for the office. I’ll come in at night and find that you’ve spent the bloody day at Sainsbury’s in Cameron Toll, or that you’ve been rearranging the furniture, or that you’ve painted the downstairs toilet.’
He pointed a finger at her. ‘Well, none of that’s going to happen. This is DI Steele, Stevie boy, talking to you, and he’s telling you that, for the first time in your adult life, you are going to have a proper rest for the next eleven weeks, or at least until that wee one decides to put in an appearance.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ she drawled, hiding her astonishment that he seemed to be beating her to the punch. ‘And how’s that going to happen?’
‘We’re getting a domestic,’ he announced. ‘Ray Wilding has a cousin. He’s in the navy, and he’s going on a six-month tour of duty in the Indian Ocean. His wife worked on the assembly line in a factory in Livingston until a month ago when she was made redundant. She’s looking for a part-time job, at least for as long as her man’s away, and she doesn’t mind what it is. Where she worked, she was in a sterile area, and Ray says that their house is like that too. He says it’s so clean he feels guilty even having a pee in their toilet. She’s coming to see us on Saturday morning.’
‘She is, is she?’
‘Yes, and no arguments.’
Maggie propped herself up on an elbow. ‘DI Steele,’ she said, ‘Stevie boy: my long-term mission in life is to make you happy. If that will do the job, I will see this woman, however grudgingly. If I like her, she’s on, until her sailor gets home from the sea. What’s her name?’
‘Margot; Margot Wilding. Mrs Ray says you and she will get on fine.’
‘We’ll see. Want another refill?’ She made to get up, but he told her not to be so bloody silly and fetched the bottle himself from the sideboard. ‘Are you ready to talk about it now?’ she asked, as he laid his replenished glass on a side table and slumped back into his chair.
‘Just about,’ he answered. ‘What a day we’ve had. That man Boras! The word “sinister” could have been invented for him. No wonder Brian Mackie arm-twisted the fiscal to release his daughter’s body so we could get him out of town. Trouble comes off the man in waves, and with that fucking city slicker of a PR man behind him, there’s no telling what bother he might have caused in the media.’
‘A million, eh? I’ll bet your phones were busy.’
‘Oh, they were, but it could have been worse. At least big Tarvil got a laugh out of it. He had a call from a psychic in London who claimed that she’d induced a vision by placing her hands on the telly during the press conference. She told him that we were looking for a criminal so clever, so devious and so influential that she makes Jack the Ripper seem like a shoplifter.’
‘She?’
‘That was what was wrong with her picture. We’re looking for a man. When Tarvil told her that, she said that sometimes the visions aren’t entirely clear and could he put her name in for the reward anyway?’
Maggie was surprised to find that she was still capable of spontaneous laughter. ‘Priceless,’ she chortled. ‘Did he ask her whether she reads crime books or writes them?’
‘No, he hung up. She won’t be in the big prize draw. Nor will anyone else the way it’s looking: we have a suspect.’
‘I know, Brian Mackie told me. That’s great.’
‘It is and it isn’t,’ said Stevie, hesitantly. ‘We’ve made a lot of progress today, but we’re still short of a clear-up. Thanks to a nice girl called Amy, we know for sure that the two female victims were acquainted. More than that, we know that they had a boyfriend in common, a man who lived with Zrinka in Edinburgh for a while, and then after she broke up with him, moved on to Stacey Gavin, until she also showed him the way down the road. That’s where we’re focused: on him.’
‘Well? That is great, isn’t it?’
‘On the surface, it seems that way. It’s not what I expected, that’s all. I was sure we really did have a serial murderer on our hands. That’s why I feel just a bit uncomfortable. Still, my discomfort may well be irrelevant. So, the killer seems to have had a thing about art, and about female artists. So what? I’m forced to ask myself. The shootings, those of the women that is, look ritualistic, and maybe they were.
‘Yet that doesn’t mean to say that there wasn’t a very simple motive behind them, one of the oldest in the book, namely, the hellacious fury of a cast-off lover. Both women had affairs with this man, both dumped him. The likeliest scenario facing us at this moment, indeed the only scenario, is that he took his revenge by stalking them and killing them, with Harry Paul, Zrinka’s new man, thrown in as a bonus.’
Maggie frowned. ‘He hid the boy’s body, didn’t he?’
‘Yes; in the bushes.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘To keep us confused, maybe; to buy himself extra getaway time, maybe. We’ll ask him when we find him.’
‘Do that, but as one detective to another, think about this: what if both girls dumped him because they found out something about him?’
Stevie looked thoughtful as he picked up his glass and took a sip. ‘Then we’ll have to look into that too. But if that was the case, why kill Harry?’
‘Because he was there? Or was he afraid that the boy knew whatever it was too? Do you have a name for this suspect?’
‘We do. He’s called Dominic Padstow: only he isn’t, and that’s why he really has become our top target.
‘That’s the name Zrinka and Stacey knew him by. We’ve run every conceivable check on him. With Gregor Broughton’s authority, we’ve consulted the Department of Work and Pensions, the passport service and every public body and agency where he should be listed. But he isn’t. There is no Dominic Padstow anywhere. He doesn’t exist.’
‘Maybe he’s a foreign national.’
‘Amy says no. She’s met him, and she says that he was British; she was at Zrinka’s once, just after she and Padstow had got back from a weekend trip to Amsterdam. When she got there, they were still unpacking and some of their stuff was lying on Zrinka’s desk. She remembers quite clearly, she says, seeing two UK passports there.’