Free Deadline for Murder by Val McDermid Page B

beautiful, but her milk-white skin and her pale green eyes, which had always reminded Lindsay disconcertingly of gooseberries, had been carefully made up to show her to her best advantage.
    The woman who was moving across the room towards Lindsay looked like a grotesque caricature of that Jackie Mitchell. She had put on weight, and her pasty face looked bloated and puffy. Her hair had lost its shine and was tied back untidily with an elastic band. The prison-issue denim overalls made her figure look lumpy, with hips out of proportion to the rest of her. Her eyes looked dull, and there were dark bruises underneath them. She barely seemed to notice Lindsay's presence as she slumped into the chair and reached for the cigarettes.
    "Hello, Jackie," Lindsay said quietly.
    "Thanks for coming," Jackie said, not sounding particularly grateful. "Claire said she'd try to find you. I wish she'd been able to get you sooner."
    "I'm sorry too," Lindsay said. "But at least I'm here now. I don't know what exactly I can achieve, but I'll do everything I can to get you out of here." There was an awkward pause.
    "You do know I didn't do it, don't you?" Jackie suddenly demanded fiercely, challenging Lindsay with a defiant glare.
    "If you'd been going to kill Alison, I don't think that's the way you'd have chosen," said Lindsay.
    Jackie gave a harsh bark of laughter. "Damn right. If I'd killed Alison, I'd have made bloody sure I didn't get caught. She wasn't worth serving a life sentence for. But I don't have to tell you that. You know better than anyone what she was like, don't you?"
    "I have very vivid memories of what Alison was like, yes."
    "I know, I know. She told me she'd had you on her hook. Told me that's why you had to do a runner to London. Told me you were scared of what she could do to you. I thought to myself then that if she could put the frighteners on someone as tough as you, I didn't have a cat's chance." Lindsay listened, appalled, to Jackie's words.
    "But that's not true," she protested. "I went to London because of Cordelia, not Alison. I'd finished with her long before I even met Cordelia. She was just trying to scare you, Jackie. I called her bluff, you see. I was the one that got away, and she didn't like that."
    Jackie's face crumpled, and Lindsay thought she was on the point of tears. Instead, she crushed out her cigarette and lit another immediately. Lindsay noticed her nails were bitten to the quick. "The bitch," Jackie said bitterly, sucking the smoke deep into her lungs. "My God, she deserved to die."
    "Want to tell me about it?"
    "I still don't understand how it happened. I hadn't even thought about being unfaithful to Claire until I did so. I suppose we were in a bit of a rut, but it was a rut I liked. It was comfortable, it was home. Then Alison started planting her poison. It was all very subtle, just the odd sentence here and there, all calculated to make me start wondering if we were as solid as I thought." Jackie rubbed her eyes. "God, I was gullible."
    Lindsay nodded. "She was good at that. I've seen her do it to other people."
    "But I fell for it. And then I fell for Alison. We'd gone out for a meal one night after I'd been working at the Clarion . We got royally pissed, or at least I thought we did. Looking back on it, I think I got royally pissed and Alison stayed sober. We went back to her place, lights down low, Mary Coughlan on the stereo, another little drink. Next thing I know, we're undressing each other and it's hands everywhere. And that was that. I was hooked." Jackie stared bleakly at the wall, trapped by the memory.
    "She was like a drug," Lindsay said, caught in the memory of her own affair. "I couldn't get enough of her. It was as if the act fueled the appetite."
    "That's it, that's exactly it. Sex with Alison was like living your fantasies. In a funny kind of way, I was almost glad when Claire found out. I thought that her knowing would break the spell, that I'd be able to escape Alison. But it