Page 83 of Making a Killing

Fawley gives a wry smile then turns to Bradley. ‘Sorry, we should have said, Dr Gow is our resident profiler.’

Bradley nods her gratitude; there isn’t even a parallel universe in which Marcia Tate would notice that someone might feel excluded, never mind do something about it.

Fawley looks thoughtful now. ‘The fact that she had a daughter would also explain something else that’s been nagging at me: i.e. how Daisy managed to slip so seamlessly into a whole new life without anyone apparently noticing. Turns out Madigan had the one thing TV crime dramas always forget: all the right paperwork.’

‘Her family would have noticed, though, surely?’ says Bradley, trying not to look too new-girl keen. ‘You can hardly wing the sudden acquisition of an eight-year-old child.’

‘You’re right, of course. But Madigan had no brothers or sisters, and by the summer of 2016 her father was dead and her mother was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and only had a few weeks to live.’

‘Friends, then?’

‘Well, she might have deliberately avoided them – after all, she’d been in England a while so she may have lost touch with a lot of them by then in any case. The Gardaí haven’t been able to track Madigan down in the Galway area either, even though she told her colleagues in Oxford that’s where she was going, so I suspect that was just another smokescreen.’

They reach Fawley’s car and stop.

‘There’s something else – one of my DCs has raised thepossibility that our unidentified victim might actually be Kate Madigan. We have a record of Sabrina arriving on June 14th but she was alone. It’s possible Kate followed her a few days later.’

Asante lets out a long breath. ‘Well, I suppose she could have. Though wasn’t Madigan a redhead? Our vic’s hair is dark brown. And I don’t remember anything in the PM about it being dyed.’

Fawley nods. ‘You’re right. But Kate Madigan may not actuallybea redhead – she could have been dyeing her hair back in 2016 and only reverted to her natural colour more recently.’

Asante nods. ‘True. And I guess we should be able to establish whether she ever had a dental implant, assuming we can track her down.’

‘Her or one of her relatives,’ offers Bradley, ‘in which case we could run the DNA.’

Fawley makes a wry face. ‘Either would work for me, frankly. And in the meantime, we’re trying to establish whether Kate did indeed travel to the UK or is still in Ireland.’

He digs about in his pocket and extracts his car keys. ‘I have to get back to Oxford tonight for a meeting, but I’ll be in Gloucester tomorrow morning to catch up with the rest of the team.’

Which is either ballsy or naive, Bradley can’t be quite sure which. Tate wouldn’t be that blasé about the optics, that’s for sure. Fawley must sense something because he gives her a half-smile. ‘I’m sure you and DS Asante have everything under control.’

‘Absolutely, sir,’ says Bradley. ‘Leave it with us.’

‘Good.’ He smiles, opens the car door, and is gone.

Bradley raises an eyebrow. ‘He makes a little go a long way, doesn’t he? Your DCI Fawley?’

Asante grins. ‘So you noticed?’

‘Quite the strong, silent type.’

Yet more Mr bloody Darcy, she thinks now, worried – toolate – that she sounded like a simpering schoolgirl, but Asante just laughs. ‘They say that in Oxford too.’

***

MY SHADOW JOURNAL

Paying attention to your dreams

We’ve talked before about dreams, and how they can give you a route into your Shadow. Sigmund Freud set a lot of store by dreams, believing that they reveal our innermost anxieties. He believed that dreaming of losing your teeth signifies a fear of ageing, for example, while dreaming of flying can indicate sexual desire. He also considered dreams to be indicators of forbidden or repressed childhood impulses, or unconscious longings.

‘The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul’

Carl Jung

Carl Jung also believed dreams can reveal important and hidden aspects of the psyche. Because we suppress or deny our Shadow in our waking lives, one of the few places where it can be seen clearly is in our dreams, where the conscious mind is no longer in control. That’s why recording and engaging with your dreams is central to Shadow Journalling.

Today’s exercise

---