‘There’s no point denying it, Gina. We can get his DNA from a hairbrush, a toothbrush, he doesn’t have to be here. Leo is Maryanne’s child.’ I square my shoulders, ready for the denial but she just looks at me, relaxed and resigned, like she’s almost wondering what took us so long.
I’m wondering what took us so long. Now I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it. The same ocean-blue eyes, the same charcoal black hair. He’s a fraction different around the mouth maybe. Thinner lips, a slightly more tapered chin – inherited from whoever his father was, I suppose – but overall, the likeness is unmistakeable. His cheekbones rival Aiden’s.
A Doyle through and through.
‘Leo’s my child.’ Her declaration rings out across the empty visiting room. ‘I raised him. I nurtured him. I’m the one who stayed with him in hospital when he had bronchitis as a baby. I’m the one who sang to him, taught him the days of the week, how to tie his laces. I’m the only mother he’s ever known. That woman, the one who spat him out into the world, she didn’t want him. She chose designer clothes and fancy handbags over him. She doesn’t get to turn up years later laying claim to a child she literally held for two minutes.’ A brittle laugh. ‘She held on to the brown envelope a lot longer, I can tell you.’
‘Why did you keep him? Why didn’t you sell him on?’
She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, lungs filling up with air while her head fills with precious memories. ‘He was just so beautiful. So perfect. I couldn’t understand how she could give him up but she did’ – she clicks her fingers – ‘just like that. She just shoved him into my arms like he was a pair of shoes in the wrong size and started counting out the money.’
‘And your dad let you keep him? That baby was worth a lot of money to him.’
She shrugs. ‘Maryanne had shown her true colours by then, suggesting he turn the whole thing into a production line. He knew there was more to be made so he said “yes”. I think he felt guilty.’
‘Guilty?’ I’m not sure it’s an emotion Patrick Mackie understands but I guess Gina knows him better than me. Even monsters can have hidden depths.
‘I’d been working for him for ten years by then. Ten years,’ she says, reinforcing the point. ‘I was still only twenty-eight. I think he knew working for him had stripped me of any life. I just wanted something to love, something that wasn’t business, a hint of a normal life. So I told him straight out that if he loved me, he’d let me take Maryanne’s baby.’
‘But you could have had your own baby?’ As soon as I say it, I realise that this might not be true. We know about her fertility issues and was IVF even so prevalent in the 1990s?
‘Taking an unwanted child was easier,’ she says simply. ‘My life was hectic enough with all the studying and working for Dad. Being pregnant would have been a nightmare – or that’s how I saw it then. Anyway, because of who I was, men hardly ever came near me. And spotty Med students weren’t really my type either.’
‘You didn’t get your normal life though, did you? You carried on with your dad’s business long after Leo.’
She corrects me quickly. ‘I carried on working at the flat, supervising the girls, delivering the babies. I stopped being involved in . . . everything else.’
‘By everything else, you mean the drugs, the prostitution rings, the major frauds?’
The look of pure malice could be for me, or for herself. Odds on, it’s the latter.
She shakes her head. ‘I never wanted to be part of all that. Never. And that’s part of the reason why having a child made sense. I knew Dad would let me step away from the more dangerous aspects if I was a mother.’ She leans forward onto the table, exhausted, broken. ‘Deep down, all I’d ever wanted was a proper career, a family, decent friends. And I finally got it when I met Nate. He was respectable.’
‘So Nate could have been anyone really? He was just your passport to a normal life.’
She doesn’t look offended by the suggestion. ‘You could put it like that, I suppose. He had a young child so it was certainly a passport to a readymade nuclear family. Leo. Amber. One boy. One girl. It was perfect. And I think I did love him, in a way. I liked that he’d been brought up well. He knew all the best restaurants, all the best schools, where to ski, what wine to pair with what meal. He was part of the scene that I wanted to be part of so I made myself love him. But it turns out he wanted to be part of my Dad’s scene even more.’
‘Not so respectable.’
‘He was corruptible.’ Her eyes bore into mine. ‘Most people are, given the right set of circumstances.’
There’s no way Gina Hicks knows anything about me or Dad – how could she? – and yet her words sound heavy and loaded.
She carries on, chin propped on one hand. ‘I recognised Nate’s greed the first time I met him, but that was good, I knew it meant he’d accept who my dad was, where I’d come from.’
I nod. ‘Nate fronts some of your dad’s businesses, we know that.’
She doesn’t argue. ‘I was OK with that. Listen, I said I wanted more of a normal life, not that I wanted to completely disown my previous one.’ She shrugs again. ‘Whatever Dad and Nate got up to was fine with me, I just didn’t want to hear about it. And then when Dad fled the UK, it got easier anyway. We were happy. Things were good.’
‘Until Maryanne came back, asking about her baby.’
Her voice is hot. ‘Until my Dad came back and got his claws into Leo. Filling his head with all this talk of succession, about taking over the family business. And Leo idolises him, that’s the worst part! Thinks he’s this great big legend and wants to be just like him. He’d do anything to impress him. It kills me to watch.’
I try a theory out for size. It’s been bubbling and forming since two a.m. this morning.
‘Was Leo at the house, Gina? Did he see you push Maryanne? Is that why you wanted him out of the country, to keep him out of all of this?’
She sits up, says nothing for a while. There isn’t a sound in the room but I wait out the silence, determined she’ll break first.
She does after a huge sigh.
‘Not bad, but not a hundred per cent. He wasn’t there at the time. He didn’t see what happened. He came home shortly afterwards, though, while I was waiting for Dad. He wasn’t supposed to, he was supposed to be at rugby practice but it was raining and he was already getting over a nasty cough. He had the Vienna performance to think of.’
‘And he saw Maryanne.’
‘She saw him, that was the problem.’ She pauses, rolls her eyes. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, do you honestly think Leo had any idea who she was? He’s a teenage boy, Detective. He doesn’t register anyone unless they’re half-naked or carrying some sort of sports equipment. But she knew though. She knew straight away.’ Her face sours. ‘Touching, isn’t it?’
I picture Leo Hicks walking into that house. His hair blackened a shade darker by the rain, the sculpted spikes dampening into curls. And those tell-tale blue eyes staring straight into the eyes of the woman on the floor. The woman who gave birth to him.
Of course Maryanne knew and it was the reason she had to die.
If Gina didn’t have the balls to do it, daddy dearest would, and she knew this. She as good as killed Maryanne when she called Patrick Mackie, asking for his help.
‘I tried to do everything right by Leo. He was my perfect boy. Private school, extra-curricular everything, educational holidays, piano lessons.’ Even now, she can’t help but puff up with pride. ‘He’s so incredibly gifted, you know? He sat grade eight on his sixteenth birthday.’
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say so I say nothing. I feel a quiver of something though. Things quickly falling into place.
‘And it was all fine until my dad came back.’ She looks straight at me, defiant. ‘You have no idea how it feels to be scared of your father.’ I blink away something. A laugh? A tear? ‘To feel like he defines you and that no matter what you do and how hard you try, you’ll never escape what he is. That maybe you’re as bad as he is, deep down? I didn’t want that for Leo. I had to get him away, out of the country, away from my dad’s poison.’
I don’t have the heart to tell her I think it’s too late. That Leo is no longer Maryanne’s baby or her perfect boy.
Leo Hicks is Patrick Mackie’s boy now.
He was the second he helped his grandad dispose of Maryanne’s body.
Maybe even helped murder her?
The shallow slash-marks to her throat – hesitation marks, Vickery suggested. Someone trying to work up the courage. An inexperienced killer, the whole team had agreed. Not the shaky work of one of the UK’s most wanted criminals.
But can we prove it?
Will we ever be able to prove that Leo Hicks unwittingly killed his own birth mother?
*
From the car park I call Richard Little – the piano teacher whose car was stolen and used to dispose of Maryanne’s body. He confirms he has a pupil called Leo Hicks. He’s been rather worried about him, in fact. He was supposed to be back in lessons from 17th January and he hasn’t heard from anyone, neither Leo or his parents. No one appears to want to take his calls.
He also unwittingly confirms that Leo knew he’d be in Malta at the time his car was stolen. He explains they’d talked about Malta in their last lesson, a few weeks before Christmas. Leo had been to Valetta with his parents when he was younger and he told him it was a beautiful place. Such a cultured young man, he gushes. So talented.
I let the gushing praise burn out then thank him for his time, tell him he’s been very helpful
Which he has, I suppose.
His confirmation is hardly cast-iron evidence but at least it’s something. Something to build a case from if Leo Hicks is ever caught.
With a heavy heart and the rumblings of a migraine, I call HQ and ask for Forensics to be sent back over to the Hickses’ to seize all of Leo’s shoes. You never know, we might get lucky with a footprint, although we haven’t been too big on luck lately, and I strongly suspect Leo’s clothes would have been destroyed within minutes anyway.
Patrick Mackie doesn’t like loose ends, you see.