First Published: 2018
This new case for Maggie starts when the caretaker of a school discovers a couple of eleven-year-old children climbing the ladder to the wall of an extension that is being built.
Then the boy falls to his death. When the police come, the caretaker, Alan, says that the girl pushed the boy.
Poppy, the girl, won’t say a word. Her mother, Julia, is at home, getting ready to take her two children to school, and she doesn’t know that Poppy sneaked out of the house that morning. The police come to tell her that Poppy is in the school and needs her. On the way there, she is told that a boy, Benji, has died when Poppy was with him, and the police need to question Poppy.
Julia is about to enter the room where Poppy is when she feels panicky and hesitates. Then she sees another mother coming out of an office with Maggie, who has been assigned as the boy’s mother’s FLO. The mother is Imogen, and Julia recognises her straightaway. Imogen used to bully Julia when they were both at school, and Julia’s life was a nightmare at school because of Imogen. Julia told the teachers, but nobody believed her, and after she left school, Julia fought the trauma of being bullied and mistreated. When she met her husband, Ewan, she finally realised that she was also beautiful and wonderful, and Ewan is the only person she has told about the hell Imogen made her experience.
Maggie is Imogen’s Flo, and she is partnered with a new officer, Jamie Byford, who is not very friendly or cooperative. Anna Renshaw, Maggie’s boss, tries to question Poppy, but the girl refuses to talk, so she tells her parents to bring her to the station the next day. The caretaker, Alan, has changed his statement, telling the police that the fall was an accident. The thing is that Alan has a secret. One of the school governors, Gus, uses the school’s old pavilion as a brothel, and Alan found himself involved, making sure that the pavilion was not disturbed. Alan doesn’t get any money from this, but Gus has him under his thumb, and now that the police is snooping around the school, Gus threatens him if he doesn’t keep the police from the pavilion. Alan curses himself for letting himself dragged into this matter.
When Anna and DC Karl Burton question Poppy with her parents present, the girl claims that it was Benji’s idea to climb onto the wall, and he even had a key. She also says that Benji slipped, and she tried to help but couldn’t reach him. There is something weird going on here, and Julia’s husband, Ewan, is a weird one. From what we have seen so far, he is prone to violent outbursts and I wonder if he treats Julia right. On Facebook the police discover some messages about Benji’s death, and someone claims that Poppy is as violent as her family. It is also strange that Julia didn’t know that Poppy had play dates with Benji, who is the son of the woman she has hated for years. The police discover that Owen took Poppy to these play dates, and I wonder if there is something going on between Ewan and Imogen. Imogen’s mother tells Maggie that her daughter encouraged Benji to be friends with Poppy, and I think there’s more to this than meets the eye. Why did Ewan hide these playdates from Julia? And did Poppy kill Benji? What happened between them? Why do these two children sneak out of their homes early in the morning to go to the school and climb onto this wall?
Maggie’s personal life is a rollercoaster. Since her sister, Lou, discovered the affair Maggie had with Lou’s late fiancé at 17, she has stopped talking to her completely. It has been seven months, and now Maggie has no connection with her family. Lou and the children moved closer to Lou and Maggie’s parents, and her parents have also sided with Lou and has stopped talking to Maggie as well. Maggie tried hard to talk to Lou, but after a while, Lou changed her number, so Maggie doesn’t even know how to contact her.
On a positive note Maggie and Bill Umpire are now in a relationship, and even though Maggie knows that she has been difficult to deal with because of her family problems, Bill has been very patient. Maggie tells Bill that since they started, she has been very happy. The only thing is that the weekend Bill has his children, they can’t see each other because his ex, Sarah, doesn’t want the children to be with Maggie. In a few days Maggie is turning 30, and she and Bill were supposed to spend the weekend in Brighton, but then Sarah refuses to have the children because she claims it is not fair to disrupt the children’s routine. Yet, she thinks that it is time they met Maggie. So now Maggie is nervous, afraid of what Bill’s children will think of her.
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