The Maggie Murders (21 page)

Well, it had certainly improved
his sex drive!

Her mind fluttered back to Derek.
She had quite fancied him at first… silly, really. She had then fallen deeply
in love with him, but not the type of love that got the young WPCs giggling as
they joked about his ‘black mamba’, or even the desire she’d seen in that young
journalist’s eyes. Maybe it was why she got to thinking about having a son,
because by the end it was a much deeper love she had felt for Derek. His
resignation from the police had devastated her and for a time she had
considered joining him; a selfish gesture when you were the breadwinner for the
family.

It was her memory of that first
failure and her later conviction that the case was not finished that had made
her so determined to be seconded to this murder. She’d warned the Super the
night before and had bent his ear for at least ten minutes about her theory. It
had been probably to shut her up that Osborne had agreed to let her tag along
with him on the off-chance that another murder might follow on the heels of the
Conservative leadership election.

 She could still remember the
look of incredulity on D.I. Spilsbury’s face when she had first made the
connection with the nursery rhyme during the Baker murder:

‘Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a
tub, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker…’

‘So do you think we should put
out an alert to all candlestick-makers if Maggie decides to call another
election?’ had been Spilsbury’s scoffing retort.

But now the candlestick-maker was
dead.

****

Jez Carberry towelled his lean
and toned body in the shower room just off his office. The gym membership had
certainly paid off he thought as he gave a narcissistic look at himself in the
wall’s mirrored surface. At his age there was little danger of running to fat,
but he liked the look of hunger on her face whenever they were together.

Having bought an expensive canal
side apartment in Exeter, he had saved himself some of the money it had cost
him by using it as both a home and his business address. Chez Jez as he liked
to style it was his way of showing the world that he had made it, or was
certainly well up the ladder of success.

In many ways it was like sharing
a flat at university. His two hirsute staff hunched in front of their computers
with take-away cartons and comics littering the floor were not a million miles
away from the boys he’d studied with at UEA, in either the looks or
conversational department. Both Luke and Stuart sported longish hair, and
always wore jeans with T-shirts that advertised various combinations of metal
bands: Def Leopard, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Saxon, AC/DC and Rush being among
the favourites– occasionally he felt tempted to cry ‘Snap’ when the bands on
both his software designers matched, but usually he was just relieved when a
favourite T-Shirt had been changed after a week or two.

At times he’d even been driven to
giving new tops to them in a bid to freshen the often stale air of JAC Games
Ltd (the A stood for Adam – his middle name); even so he would not have swapped
his staff for all the perfumes of Arabia. What they lacked in personal hygiene,
they made up for in genius. It was their dedication and application to game
design which had seen the projected figures on his business plan leap off the
charts. Under his direction they’d cornered the market in real time strategy
games for home computers.

‘Superpower!’ had been the
release that had propelled them to a front page cover on ‘PC Gamer’ and had
made JAC Games a lucrative return on their investment. Players had to manage
not only the military budget of a Superpower, but also finesse its economic
development, build alliances and fight wars via client states to gain world
supremacy in this turn based strategy game.  Players could choose to control
the USA, USSR, China or the UK in their quest for total power.

 The back room of the shop from
which they used to work, had now been given over to its proper purpose as a
storage facility and the front of the premises gave them an outlet to sell and
trade computer games on Exeter High St, manned by another couple of
metal-heads. Though to be honest, that revenue stream was now all but redundant
given the fact they now had six titles being distributed both nationally and
internationally.

 At this moment though, it was
his personal turn based strategy game with Mags that mattered. He knew now that
this was most certainly the endgame. She’d made the opening gambit three years’
ago and now he was about to take her king. After his last move he had a feeling
it was now going to be mate in one.

****

Connie’s gaze had become attuned
to the azure waters of the Mediterranean and her skin had acclimatised to the
unseasonal warmth of the Spanish sun. Even with Christmas approaching, it was
still clement enough to sit outside. She knew many people still wanted her
banged up in a tiny cell and denied all but the basic staples of life. These
were the same people who would happily welcome back hanging and who might not
flinch at stoning for adultery. To be honest it was the latter which had caused
most people to censure her and been the cause of her enforced exile in Majorca.

She sipped her coffee listlessly
as she awaited Carlos to return from the hypermarket. Tamping one of the dirt
cheap cigarettes on the plastic table top of the sea front café, she was about
to turn away from the newspaper carelessly discarded by the English pensioners
in search of winter sun, when she caught sight of her photograph under the
lurid headline.

‘Maggie Murders Mount – Has the
Sexmouth Slayer been Stitched Up?’

Having made a deliberate attempt
to cut herself off from all news back home after her trial, Connie had still
sensed there was something in the air. She kept herself apart from most of the
ex-pat community and shunned most of the holiday hotspots, but news of the
leadership election had filtered through to her sub-consciousness and part of
her had half hoped to hear of another murder. She may have been acquitted by a
jury of her peers and yet the General Public in all its wisdom had never
forgiven her.

She went over to the table and
flicked through the tabloid. There was a box out on Calum’s murder which
included details of her trial and acquittal. Inevitably the focus had been on
her sex life. As with the court case she had been painted as a heartless whore
and ruthless bitch. Even her defence barrister had seemed uncomfortable with
her alibi. The fact that she had loved Calum deeply and missed him each day
with a searing sense of regret was never mentioned. The fact that she was
appalled by his death and had nursed him back to something resembling health
after his dreadful experiences in the Falklands didn’t get a look in.

To the outside world she was the
bad girl. Even her father had finally cut her off. The fact that he had been so
opposed to her marrying Calum in the first place was now replaced by his
contempt for the way in which he regarded her as having betrayed him. Like the
public he perceived her as a tramp and hadn’t spoken to her since the trial.
She still felt he didn’t believe in her innocence and knew that most of the
people she had once counted as friends believed her to be guilty.

Her own legal team had even
advised her to try and make a deal. They hadn’t put much effort into finding
witnesses to prove her alibi. It was a combination of luck and the brave
testimony of an undergraduate who had worked that summer as a part time
chambermaid at the Royal Standard Hotel, which had got her off a life sentence
in some lesbian hell hole. The nineteen year old Geology student from Newham
had come forward in Connie’s defence, when she saw reports of the case on the
national news. Given the sensational coverage of the case in the Media, Yvette
could just as easily have been watching the reports in Outer Mongolia as Inner
London.

The fact that the police had
missed Yvette’s statement in their enquiries was one of the many blunders in
the Crown’s case against Connie. The seasonal nature of the work and the cash
in hand payment culture at the hotel had meant that there had been no accurate
rota of who had been working there on the night of the murder. Having found a
better paid job at another hotel, closer to her university in Exeter, the young
geologist hadn’t known at the time the importance of what she had witnessed on
her last Friday shift at the Royal Standard; whilst the police hadn’t been
overly concerned about establishing an alibi for their prime suspect.

 Yvette Fielding had held up well
under cross examination and verified that there had been a man in Connie’s room
there that night; but the fact that Connie hadn’t known the name of the man she
slept with that night and could not even be sure of his description had become
another damning plank in the Prosecution’s case and an easy piece of leverage
for the tabloids to besmirch her character with. Yet Connie had wanted sex and
not a relationship – she had Calum at home who gave her intimacy, he just
couldn’t give her the physical side and why should she have to spend the rest
of her life as celibate as a Catholic priest? They hadn’t taken any vows before
God when they’d married in the registry office and so she had felt no need to
go for the ‘in sickness and in health’ crap. Although if that referred to the
amount of care and attention she had nursed him with, she felt the very saints
and angels in whom she didn’t believe should be singing hallelujahs to her!

Yvette’s corroboration that the
man had existed and her repeated assertion that she had seen Connie leave the
following morning had sowed the first seeds of doubt in the jury’s mind. These
doubts undoubtedly flourished when the overdressed mini cab driver, who was the
Prosecution’s star witness, broke down under cross examination and was revealed
as a man of very peachable character with a string of minor convictions.
Without Byrne’s perjured testimony, there was only circumstantial evidence left
against her; although very convincing circumstantial evidence.

 Fortunately, any seeds of doubts
in the jurors’ minds must have germinated into sunflowers given an equally
unimpressive performance in the witness box from the Prosecution’s next
witness; the overly florid and increasingly rotund Chief Inspector who had arrested
her, or former Chief Inspector she had learnt in court, as the man had now
wisely retired. At least her very expensive lawyer had partly redeemed his
handsome fee by digging up the dirt on Spilsbury. The story about him allegedly
assaulting a school teacher in his quest for the truth had been uncovered and
this added further weight to the defence’s case that the police had done more
than a little leaning on witnesses to get a conviction. For once the focus had
been taken away from her own moral shortcomings.

Even then, it was an anxious wait
for her in the cell beneath the courthouse. She wouldn’t be the first person to
suffer a miscarriage of justice, but unlike the Guildford Four she was unlikely
to be the centre of a campaign to get her released. A life sentence would take
her well into her dotage and the idea of prison filled her with horror. She
knew the saying that if you had survived public school you could survive prison;
however she very much doubted whether her privileged schooling in Cheltenham
had been in the minds of whoever had coined that particular saying. Her cut
glass accent was more likely going to get her cut with glass if they locked her
up with council estate junkies and state schooled drugs mules.

After her acquittal it had been
impossible to remain living in Exmouth. Even though the damage to their home
had now been put right she could feel every stare, gawp and glance as she went
about her daily life. Her friends and colleagues had not stuck by her and she
had no family in the town. The one friend whom she thought would understand her
hadn’t even turned up at her trial and no longer answered her calls. Much of
the money that she had supposedly murdered Calum for had been spent on securing
her own freedom. In desperation, she had raised some cash and tried to repair
some damage to her reputation by agreeing to sell her story to The News of the
World, although the fee would have been far higher if she’d complied with their
suggestion of posing topless for the accompanying photo shoot. Naturally she’d
refused; she did have a shred of dignity left.

Well that was until the article
came out, she didn’t recognise the person named as Connie Baker, or any of the
words she was quoted as saying in Britain’s bestselling Sunday paper and any hope
she might have had of being quoted sympathetically had gone.  They’d found an
old photo of her dressed as a tart at one of the charity events she used to
attend and surrounded it with photos of six of her lovers. ‘The Queen of Tarts
Confesses!’ was the banner headline they’d run it under. The only confession
had been her attempt at explaining why she went with other men. Unfortunately
for her, The News of the Screws lived up to its nickname and delivered the
guilty verdict on her that the jury had been unable to reach.

Having holidayed often in the
Balearics, she decided they would be the best place for a bolthole. Selling up
in England gave her enough to buy a finca on the less touristy side of Majorca
and another two bedroom apartment to rent out in Palma Nova. With her savings
and the income from the holiday let, she figured she’d be able to survive if
not in the lap of luxury, at least comfortably.

She looked up as Carlos returned
with the shopping. He’d been teaching her Spanish and helping her get the other
villa let. In many ways he reminded her of Calum before the accident. She left
the paper lying on the table and went to help him load up the car. Sometimes it
was best to leave the past behind. Perhaps this year she’d finally find the
gift of peace which had eluded her for the last six Christmases?