national-insurance number or an NHS number. There is no passport issued under that name.’
‘Okay, I get the picture.’
‘Good. Now can everyone else get it? Can I phone Alan Royston and let him issue it, and the press release to the media?’
Broughton picked up the draft release from the table in front of him and read through it. ‘Should be considered dangerous?’ he exclaimed. ‘The public should not approach him? That’s prejudicial. We could get stuffed by the defence on that.’
‘They might try it. Now tell me honestly, if they did put up a defence that our warning, given in good faith in the interests of public safety, denied him a fair trial, and your wife was the judge, how far would she chuck it?’
‘As far as she could; right out of court for sure. But that doesn’t mean to say another judge would.’
‘Name one who’d be likely to. Lord Nelson?’
‘No, not even him, I’ll grant you. Okay, you can have it.’
‘And the picture?’
‘There’s hardly any point to the press release without the likeness, is there?’ He picked it up. ‘You’re calling it an artist’s impression?’
‘Absolutely. There couldn’t be a more apt description.’
‘I know nothing about painting,’ said Broughton, ‘but this has to be a unique work. It could become priceless. Imagine, an artist using her brush to identify the man who killed her.’
Forty-one
?Just one more day,’ he said, ‘and Chief Superintendent Margaret Rose becomes Mrs Margaret Steele, full- time. Does the prospect scare you?’ He tipped his glass of red wine in her direction as he sank back into his soft armchair.
‘Not a bit,’ she replied, stretched out on the couch with a tumbler of sparkling water resting on her mid- section. ‘I’ve got other things on my mind.’
Since leaving the hospital, as the fearful reality of her diagnosis had set in, there had been moments when her resolve had weakened, when a voice inside her had said, ‘
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,
