“Now I see why you wanted to talk to me,” she accused. “You really are trying to pin it on me.”

I shook my head. “Maggie, I’m not trying to pin it on anybody. I’m trying to find Moira’s killer.”

“If that’s true, you’d be better off back in Colcutt,” she said angrily. “Someone there had it in for her. That’s why I went over to see her, to try to persuade her to come home with me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. My antennae were quivering. I had the feeling we were really getting somewhere at last.

“Someone there wanted her dead. They’d already tried once.”

Chapter   17

I took a deep breath and said very slowly, “What do you mean, they’d already tried?”

“I don’t know how much you know about heroin addiction,” Maggie replied.

“Lay person’s knowledge only. Assume I’m ignorant.”

“OK. Coming off is hell. But once an addict is off, they often get a strange kind of confidence that one little hit wouldn’t do any harm. Like the smoker who’s been stopped for three years and fancies a fag at a party. Only with heroin addicts, that can be fatal a lot faster than with smokers. Anyway, someone at Colcutt Manor kept leaving a set of works in Moira’s room. Every couple of days, she’d come upstairs to find a nice little hit sitting there waiting for her.” Maggie stopped dead, her anger making her voice a growl.

“That is evil,” I breathed.

“So now you see why I wanted her to leave. So far, she’d just flushed the smack down the loo and shoved the syringes in the bin. But sooner or later there was going to come a time when she’d be low, when she couldn’t ring me up for reassurance, when she was going to go for it. I couldn’t stand the thought of it.”

I swallowed hard. Now for the nasty question. “So why did you leave when you did? In the middle of the night like that?”

Maggie rolled another cigarette while she pondered my question. I couldn’t help feeling she was using me as the rehearsal for the harder interrogation she knew was on the horizon. “We’d had a drink together that evening in the pub. Moira promised me that her work would be over in another two weeks and then we’d go on holiday together. She said she could hold out, and begged me not to make her choose. I gave in, God help me.