Page 104 of The Psychopath Next Door

I was actually slightly relieved. Will fraud was a long way from murder. Sure, it was a despicable crime and it was exactly the kind of thing I could imagine a psychopath – who saw other people as inferior and who had no conscience, no feelings of guilt – doing. But it was a financial crime, not a violent one. I wondered briefly if Fiona was planning to try to con me and Emma, though we would be unusual targets. We were far from rich. We were just a normal family living in suburbia. Why on earth was I on the list Lucy had mentioned? Or maybe Lucy, being a solid-gold psychopath herself – manipulative and cold-blooded, famous for her cruelty – had been lying. I found it reassuring to think this.

‘Dad? Hello? Are you listening?’

‘Sorry. I was deep in thought.’

‘Okay, well, please concentrate. Listen to this.Woodfield’s partner in crime, Maisie Smith—’

‘Smith. That’s where she borrowed the surname from.’

‘Maisie Smith died by suicide in her cell shortly after her arrest, leaving a full written confession for the attempted murder of Dinah Uxbridge. In the letter, she said she had acted alone and that Woodfield was not involved in giving Mrs Uxbridge thallium and attemptingto poison her. Despite the protestations of Mrs Uxbridge’s remaining family, who believe Woodfield was a full and active participant in the scheme, the Crown Prosecution Service decided only to charge her for the lesser crime of will fraud in light of Smith’s confession.’

Dylan looked up from his phone. ‘There’s a quote from Dinah Uxbridge’s niece here.I understand the CPS doesn’t want to spend money on a trial, but as far as I’m concerned this is a gross miscarriage of justice. I believe Fiona Woodfield and Maisie Smith worked together to attempt to poison my aunt because, even when she’d changed her will, they couldn’t wait for her to die of natural causes. Also, Aunt Dinah was so strong she might even have outlived Maisie Smith.’

‘Why would she say that?’ I asked. Fiona would only have been in her mid-thirties then, and I assumed her partner would’ve been about the same.

We were stopped at a traffic light, in a queue of cars, so Dylan held his screen up for me to see. There was a woman on the screen in late middle age. Short, grey hair, probably in her mid-sixties. Quite attractive, with charisma shining out of the photo. The female equivalent of a silver fox. Silver vixen?

‘Who’s that?’ I asked, expecting him to say it was Dinah Uxbridge, the victim.

‘That’s Maisie Smith.’

I did a double take. ‘What? Are you sure?’ She must have been at least thirty years older than Fiona.

‘Hold on. There’s another piece here about Fiona and Maisie,’ Dylan said. ‘At the time they were arrested, Fiona was thirty-five and Maisie was sixty-four. It says here that the couple met when Maisie lived in Australia when she was in her mid-forties.’

‘Wait. So twenty years before? That means—’

‘Fiona would have been a teenager. If it was twenty years earlier, she would have been fifteen.’

But it could have been even earlier. She could have been thirteen or fourteen. Barely older than Rose. And an older woman had come along ...

‘She groomed her,’ I said.

I thought I might actually be sick.

‘Have you ever seen ... anything like that between them?’ I asked.

‘What? Like Fiona touching Rose?’ He grimaced. ‘No. Whatever she is, I’m sure she’s not a paedo. This isn’t about that, is it? It’s about training her, like I said. Like Lucy said.’

Lucy’s exact words came back to me.

Fiona told me she was going to take Rose under her wing, that she recognised the same thing in her that we have.

‘But the article you read out, it describes Fiona and Maisie as a couple. And Fiona told your mum that her girlfriend had died.’

‘I guess they must have got together once Fiona was grown-up.’

‘But that’s still grooming, isn’t it?’

Teenagers today were taught all about this stuff. When I was a kid I was warned about strangers in cars with puppies and candy. Now, they were told to be careful of online predators and catfish and strangers who lurked not in playgrounds and near schools but in multiplayer games and on social media.

Was Fiona something more old-fashioned than what we warned our digital-native children about? Not a stranger on the internet, but the stranger next door. Who we had allowed into our lives; trusted. And we had let her groom our daughter – in the same way it appeared Fiona had been groomed.

‘Is there any more?’ I asked, afraid of what Dylan might find next.

‘No. Just a final statement from this niece. She says if it were up to her, Fiona would be locked up for the rest of her life. Oh God, listen. This is a quote from her.’

My knuckles were white on the wheel.

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