The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [133]
Re the DVD. It never occurred to me to destroy it. Am I still anxious about it? No. If I’m honest, I’m rather proud of it. I even wish Bagley could see it. It might help him to understand why I’m so jubilant about taking MacKenzie on a second time. As a wise man once said: “Winning is everything.”
You’ve been a good friend, Alan, and I hope I’ve set your mind at rest. In passing, if I ever do kill MacKenzie I won’t bother to hide his body. There’ll be no point if I can hack him to death in the hall with a blunt axe and plead self-defence. Maybe I should have done it when I had the chance!
With my love and thanks,
Connie
23
I DIDN’T KNOW THEN if Madeleine kept her appointment with Inspector Bagley. If she did, he never referred to it. He fell into the habit of dropping in unexpectedly, both at Barton House and Barton Farm, sometimes making two or three visits in a day. He usually found me working at my computer, but invariably missed Jess, who was out in her fields, bringing in a late harvest after one of the wettest summers for years.
On several occasions she discovered his car in her drive and the man himself poking around in her outhouses, but she took it all in good part, even though he didn’t have a search warrant. She told him he was welcome any time, and suggested he keep checking the back garden so that he could satisfy himself the only bones there were beef bones. Her dogs lost their suspicion of him once they learnt the sound of his engine, but he never lost his suspicion of them.
I, too, remained wary around them. Some phobias aren’t susceptible to logic. I could cope with one dog at a time but the four en masse still alarmed me. It was clear they missed Bertie. Outside, they patrolled their wire enclosure looking for him, and, inside, sat by doors, watching for his return. Jess said they’d do it for a month before they forgot him, but Bagley didn’t believe her.
“They’re not waiting for the other dog to return,” he told me one morning, “they’re trying to get out.” He was standing behind me, reading what was on my computer screen, a complicated paragraph on post-traumatic stress statistics. “You haven’t got very far with that, Ms. Burns. You’ve only added one sentence since last night.”
I clicked “save” and pushed my chair back, narrowly missing his foot. “It would go a lot faster if you didn’t keep coming in and breaking my train of thought,” I told him mildly. “Can’t you ring the doorbell once in a while? At least give me a chance to pretend I’m out.”
“You said I could walk in whenever I felt like it.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to take up residence here.”
“Then shut your back door, Ms. Burns. It’s an open invitation to anyone to enter.” He offered me a cigarette. “After what happened, I’m surprised you’re so unconcerned about unwanted visitors.”
It was a variation on a question he’d asked a hundred times already. I accepted a light. “I’m not unconcerned,” I answered patiently, “but the alternative is to turn this place into a prison. Is that what you want me to do? I thought modern policing was all about persuading victims to get back to normal as fast as possible.”
“But this isn’t normality for you, Ms. Burns. Normality was checking the locks on the doors and windows every two hours.”
“And a fat lot of good it did me,” I pointed out. “It raised my stress levels, and MacKenzie got in anyway.” I fingered the panic alarm round my neck. “In any case, I now have