a house in Acton, but she can’t resist slowly driving past Aimee’s Notting Hill home a couple more times first. A magpie swoops down in front of the van, and Maggie pulls over and salutes before it flies out of view.
“One for sorrow, two for joy,” she mutters, then takes a noisy sip from her flask of coffee, while quietly observing the scene just ahead. The blue-and-white police tape is still flapping in the wind, sealing off the building, but the police vans and the press are gone. She supposes that they have found everything they need for now; everything that she left for them to find, including the lighter gel, the poorly cleaned bloodstains, the body.
She remembers the first time she visited the house with such fondness. He’d shot himself in the head, the real Ben Bailey. Suicide. He’d lost his job and was quite upset about it. Bits of blood and brains were still on the wall when Maggie was contracted to clear out his possessions, but she didn’t mind that. It wasn’t her job to clean up, only to get rid. She had only recently started the business, which was probably why she got the job: she imagined most people would have turned it down because it was too gruesome and gory. But Maggie had never been afraid of ghosts, at least not dead ones. She had a strange feeling as soon as she stepped inside, as if it were meant to be. Ben didn’t have any real family waiting to argue over his prized possessions. He didn’t have many of those either.
She took her time going through his things, learning all about the man he had been. She found his passport, driver’s license, bank statements, and utility bills. Identity fraud is so easy when you work in Maggie’s business, everything was right there, just inviting her to play God and bring the dead man back to life. She fell for the house he lived in, as well as the idea of him. Not how the house was back then, but how she knew it could be, with a little work. Some people just can’t see the potential in things, but she could, Maggie had always been good at that. Just look at the potential she saw in Aimee as a child. She was right about Aimee, and she knew that she was right about Ben too.
Maggie knew that Ben Bailey would make the perfect pretend boyfriend, and then the perfect pretend husband for Aimee the actress, so she wasn’t going to let a little thing such as his being dead get in the way. All she had to do was find the right person to play his part, and she didn’t have to look very far.
Fifty-two
I don’t know how anyone can sleep inside a prison cell. It is never quiet. Even in my dreams I hear the murmurs, shouts, and sometimes screams of strangers beyond the gray walls. It’s even noisier when I find myself alone inside my head. The familiar cast of my bad dreams delivered a stellar performance this evening. A standing ovation of insomnia was the only suitable response to the story on the stage of my mind. I won’t get the part in the Fincher movie now, that’s for sure. I’ve lost everything and everyone.
I feel stiff, so I stand and stretch a little, getting a whiff of my own body odor as I raise my arms. The small frosted-glass window in the cell is open just a fraction. As I lean my face against the bars in front of it to gulp the fresh air, I spot a magpie on the lawn outside. I salute the bird, unable to remember when or why I started doing such an odd, superstitious thing.
As Hilary predicted, she has been allowed out for various classes, and to exercise in the yard, but I have been confined to my cell while I wait to be successfully added to the system. I appreciate I haven’t been here long, but I think it’s safe to say that the system is broken. If it weren’t for my cellmate’s generosity, I still wouldn’t have had anything to eat or drink, but luckily Hilary seems to have a never-ending supply of tinned beans and cartons of Ribena. I normally avoid sugary drinks, but I daren’t risk the water coming out of the tap. I’ve already been ill, and having to go to the toilet with nothing but a thin curtain to