Chapter 74

CHAPTER 74

AN HOUR LATER , Marple fell into bed with her clothes still on. She barely had enough energy left to flick off her shoes. As her second sole hit the carpet, her cell phone rang. She groped the phone off the side table and looked at the screen. Dodgett again.

“Hello, Constable.”

“Any progress there?”

“The police are staking out a location on Staten Island,” said Marple. “By morning we’ll know more. Anything on Rebecca yet?”

“I’m still betting on a needle spike,” he said, “but nothing definitive yet. Rebecca was a diabetic. Used insulin. She had multiple injection sites.”

“And whoever killed her knew that,” said Marple.

“I have something else,” said Dodgett. “I pulled the last session Tran was working on after you left. She was doing some high-level voice analysis.”

“Right,” said Marple. “She was looking for a match for a woman we’d picked out. Needle in a haystack. But I’d asked her to keep trying.”

“The woman in the Union Jack mask,” said Dodgett.

“That’s right.” Marple rolled over. “Did she locate any information on her?”

“Yes. Her name is Agnes Matts. Originally from Yorkshire. Dropped out of school and more or less disappeared from society years ago, but she has family money from a string of right-wing tabloids and a medical device company.”

“Medical devices?” said Marple, sitting up. The malfunctioning ID bracelets? She switched tacks. “Do you have a picture of Matts?”

“Nothing current,” said Dodgett. “Just this.” The screen lit up with a photo of a young woman with long brown hair and a bright smile. She was wearing an open-necked shirt under a blue sweater and an orange-trimmed blazer.

“Looks like a school photo,” said Marple.

“Precisely,” said Dodgett. “St. Swithun’s, 2004. Not long after that, she lost contact with family and friends. Then a few years ago, she started showing up at fringe meetings with other Brexit nutters. That’s when she first started speaking. Hasn’t been seen without the mask since 2019.”

The screen clicked to a grainy video of the Union Jack speaker. This was different from the one Marple had watched with Tran, but the message was the same: homogeneity over diversity, tradition over change, English over bilingualism. “Don’t let this be the last generation of true Brits!” the masked woman shouted from the tiny stage as members of the audience waved homemade REGAL banners.

“Send me the link to this,” said Marple.

“Done,” said Dodgett. An email with the link pinged her inbox moments later.

“Nice work, Constable,” said Marple, rubbing her eyes. “I’m going to sleep now.”

“Right, then,” said Dodgett. “Sleep well.”

Fat chance, thought Marple.

As soon as Dodgett clicked off, Marple tapped the link he’d sent through. The video file was twenty minutes long. Marple stuck in her earbuds and sunk her head into a down pillow, as the voice of Agnes Matts bored even deeper into her brain.