“You went to university with the lawyer, Julia Ford. You’re still friends. Right?”
“That’s true,” said Dr. Wallace. “Julia and I have known each other a long time. We’re practically neighbors, and we play the occasional round of golf together.”
“What did you do before then?” Annie asked.
“Before playing golf?”
Annie laughed. “No, before going to medical school. You were a mature student, weren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t say I was all that mature, but I’d lived an interesting life.”
“Did you travel?”
“For a few years.”
“Where to?”
“All over. The Far East. America. South Africa. I’d get some low-paying job and support myself for a while, then move on.”
“And before that?”
“What does it matter?”
“I don’t suppose it does. Not if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t.” Dr. Wallace looked at Annie. “I had a disturbing phone call from an old friend of mine at university just an hour or two ago,” she said. “She wanted to let me know that there had been a Detective Constable Helen Baker ringing up and asking questions about me. Is that true?”
“Quite the grapevine,” said Annie.
“Is it true?”
“Okay. Look, this is a bit delicate,” Annie said, “but Julia Ford was one of the few people who knew the true identity of the woman in Mapston Hall. Lucy Payne. Her firm made the arrangements to place her there, took care of all her affairs. As I just said, we know the two of you went to university together, that you’re neighbors and friends. Did you know anything about this arrangement?”
Dr. Wallace turned back to her corpse. “No,” she said. “Why should I?”
Annie felt that she could sense a lie, or at least an evasion. There was something about the pitch of Dr. Wallace’s voice that wasn’t quite right. “I was just wondering if, you know, during the course of an evening, she might have let something slip, and that you might have done the same.”
Dr. Wallace paused in her sewing and turned to Annie. “Are you suggesting,” she said, “that Julia would break a professional confidence? Or that I would?”
“These things happen,” said Annie. “A couple of drinks. No big deal. Not the end of the world.”
“‘Not the end of the world.’ What an odd phrase to use. No, I don’t suppose it would be the end of the world.” She went back to sewing dead flesh. Annie could feel the tension rising in the room, as if the very air itself were thinning and stretching. She also felt even more nauseated by the smell.
“Well, did she?” she pressed on.
Dr. Wallace didn’t look up. “Did she what?”
“Tell you about the arrangements her firm had made for Lucy Payne?”
“What does it matter if she did?”
“Well,” said Annie. “It means… I mean… that someone else knew.”
“So?”
“Did she tell you?”
“She might have done.”
“And did you tell Maggie Forrest, for example? Or Dr. Susan Simms?”
Dr. Wallace seemed surprised. “No. Of course not. I vaguely know Susan Simms as a fellow professional, and from the occasional court appearance, but we’re hardly in the same field. I don’t know any Maggie Forrest.”
“She was the neighbor who befriended Lucy Payne and almost died at her hand.”
“More fool her. But wasn’t that a long time ago?”
“Six years. But Maggie’s disturbed. She had a strong motive for wanting Lucy dead, and no alibi. All we’re trying to find out now is whether she—”
“Knew that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne. Yes, I know where you’re going with this.”
“Karen Drew?”
“What?”
“You said Karen Drew. How did you know that?”
“I suppose I read it in the paper after the body was found, like everyone else.”
“Right,” said Annie. It was possible, of course. The body had been identified as Karen Drew’s, but she would have thought that subsequent discoveries and all the publicity given to the Chameleon case and the “House of Payne” had driven that minor detail from most people’s minds. Maggie Forrest had said she didn’t recognize Karen Drew’s name, only Lucy’s. In the eyes of the world, Annie had thought, the dead woman in the wheelchair was Lucy Payne. Clearly not.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” Dr. Wallace said.
“Can’t or won’t?”
Dr. Wallace paused in her sewing and glanced over the body at Annie. “Well, it amounts to the same thing, really, doesn’t it?”
“No, it doesn’t. Either you don’t know anything, or you’re being willfully obstructive, which I find very odd behavior in a Home Office pathologist. You’re supposed to be on our side, you know.”
Dr. Wallace stared at Annie. “What are you saying?”
“I’m asking you if you gave anyone this information, for any reason.” Annie softened her tone. “Look, Liz,” she said. “You might have had good intentions. Perhaps you knew one of the victims’ families, or someone who had been damaged by the Paynes? I can understand that. But we need to know. Did you tell anyone about Lucy Payne being registered at Mapston Hall under the name Karen Drew?”
“No.”
“Did you know about it?”
Dr. Wallace sighed, put her needle and thread down and leaned on the edge of the table. “Yes,” she said. “I knew.”
In the silence that followed, Annie felt a growing tightness in her chest. “But that means…”
“I know what it means,” said Dr. Wallace. “I’m not stupid.”
She had exchanged her needle for a scalpel and was moving away from the body on the table.
“Good to see you again, Alan,” said DI Ken Blackstone, meeting Banks at the front desk of Millgarth and escorting him through security. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“It looks as if we’ve got Hayley Daniels’s killer.” Banks explained about Jamie Murdoch’s confession and the hidden way out of the Fountain.
“Just one more to go, then,” said Blackstone. “I was sorry to hear about Kev Templeton.”
“We all were,” said Banks.
“Anyway, what can I do for you?”
“Did you get the Chameleon files out for Annie Cabbot?”
“How are you two doing, by the way?”
“Better, I think. At least we’re working together again. I’m still not sure what’s going on with her, though.”
“You’re not…?”
“No. That’s been over for a long time.”
“Anyone else?”
“Maybe. Ken, about those files?”
Blackstone laughed. “Yes, of course. Getting quite nosy in my old age, aren’t I? Sorry. The files are in my office. Most of them, anyway. There isn’t room for everything. Not if I want to sit in there, too. Why?”
“Mind if I have a look?”
“Not at all. It was your case. Partly, at any rate. Anything I can do?”
“A cup of coffee would go down a treat, Ken. Black, no sugar. And maybe a KitKat. I like the dark-chocolate ones.”
“Your diet’s terrible. Anyone ever told you? I’ll send down. Want me out of the way?”
“Not at all.”
They went into Blackstone’s office, and Banks saw immediately that he hadn’t been exaggerating. They could hardly move for boxes.
“Know where everything is?” Banks asked.
“Not exactly.” Blackstone picked up his phone and called for two coffees and a dark-chocolate KitKat. After anything in particular?”
“I got to thinking about the Kirsten Farrow case,” said Banks. “Anyway, I seemed to remember that the wounds were rather similar in both cases, and I wondered if that was what had set her off again after eighteen years. That and finding out where Lucy Payne was hiding out. It might have acted as a trigger.”