Steele rockets out of her office carrying a bulging make-up bag and plonks herself down in my chair. I sag against the wall, ready to drop.
‘Right, I’ve got twenty minutes before I need to shoot over to Kensington to charge a few nasty little scrotes with joint enterprise so a) ignore me while I put my slap on and b) cut to the chase, is the husband a viable suspect?’
Parnell has his feet up on the desk, a KFC rests on his stomach. ‘Well, it’s not a happy marriage, however he dresses it up.’
‘Do a straw poll in this station, Lu. You won’t find too many happy marriages, or too many murderers, I hope.’
‘Twenty-three years in February. Quite happy, thank you.’
Parnell looks as smug as a man can look with chicken grease on his chin.
‘Good for you,’ says Steele, applying eyeliner with the steadiest of hands. ‘But the fact the Lapaines don’t match up to the standards of Mr and Mrs Luigi Parnell doesn’t constitute reasonable suspicion. Anything else?’
‘They’d been having IVF,’ I tell her. ‘They’d just seen another consultant in London but she wanted to give up. He said he accepted it but . . .’
Flowers sticks his head above his screen. ‘A man finds out he’s a jaffa? I can see that tipping into something nasty.’ Emily Beck looks confused. ‘A jaffa, you know? Seedless.’
‘He means infertile, Emily.’ I turn back to Flowers. ‘Anyway, who says he’s a jaffa? The issue could have been hers?’
Flowers points a chewed biro at me. ‘Well, there’s your motive then?’
‘To kill her!’ I can’t keep the scorn out of my voice even though he’s a sergeant and I really should try harder. ‘Maybe to leave her, if you’re a particularly cruel bastard. But to kill her? Behave.’
Flowers grins, which throws me. Sometimes I think he hates me, from my perceived closeness to Steele to the fact I always forget to put sugar in his tea, but othertimes I wonder if he thrives on the banter.
Steele isn’t grinning though. She doesn’t have time to contour her face, profile a suspect and referee an argument in twenty minutes flat. ‘Button it, Kinsella,’ she says, ‘Lu, anything else?’
‘He doesn’t have an alibi. He was at home all night, alone.’
I unbutton it. ‘Which isn’t provable, but is completely feasible,’
Steele stops mid eye-flick. ‘Come on then, you’re obviously not convinced. Spit it out.’
I don’t feel ready but what the hell. ‘Well, look, I don’t know, Boss, what are we saying? “Something” tipped him over the edge, he killed her, and then he dumped her body twenty miles away in the middle of central London? I dunno, I’m just not feeling it.’
A quick nod. ‘Well your concerns are duly noted, but right now he’s the only possible suspect we’ve got, bar some random stranger, and it’s not feeling like that to me. We need to speak to that consultant in London – see how they came across at their appointment.’ Parnell gives Emily the nod to get on it. ‘Do you like him for this, Lu?’
In just a few words, two decades of trust, respect and gruelling late nights pass between Steele and Parnell.
Parnell sighs. ‘Honestly? Not as much as I’d like, no.’
‘Do you know what’s niggling me,’ I say to Parnell. ‘This “Alice hated London” thing.’
And her eyes, I realise then. Almond-shaped, ocean-blue.
Flowers, Barnsley born and bred, pipes up. ‘We weren’t all born within the sound of Bow Bells, Kinsella. Some folk think London’s a bit up-itself and overpriced, if your cockney ears can believe such a thing.’
‘Bow Bells? That’s East London, Sarge. I was born in Islington – makes me a northerner, like you. What I’m saying is, she hated London with a passion but they’d also lived in Sydney, Cape Town, Hong Kong, so it’s not a case of the country bumpkin being frightened of the big smoke. I mean, I can understand her not wanting to live in London, but she point-blank refused to even visit, even when he’d planned nice surprises for her.’
A ‘tsk’ from Flowers. ‘She sounds like a bloody nightmare. I’d have strangled her years ago.’
I don’t bite, nor does anyone else. It might be because the clock’s ticking on Steele’s twenty minutes, or it could be that we all quietly agree.
‘OK,’ says Steele, blotting her lips, a rich petal-pink. ‘We’ve just about managed to get her photo in the Standard this evening. We’ll try for the nationals tomorrow if we don’t get any solid sightings in London, but with any luck we should have some idea where she’s been for the past month within the next twelve to twenty-four hours.’
Flowers rubs his eyes. ‘My bet’s with a boyfriend.’
‘It’d explain the IVF change of heart,’ says Parnell.
Steele shouts over. ‘Any joy on the phone records, Benny-boy?’
‘Still waiting. And yep, I’ve said it’s urgent.’
Steele raises her voice another decibel. ‘Also, we need more photos of Alice Lapaine. Better ones, to be blunt. Press office reckons the one we’ve got is a bit dreary. They want happy, smiley ones to pull on the public’s heartstrings.’
‘I didn’t see any at the house,’ I say looking towards Parnell. ‘Not even a wedding photo.’
Parnell screws up his KFC bag, pats away the heartburn. ‘Doesn’t mean anything. I haven’t got a clue where my wedding photos are. Probably in the garage covered in mould and white spirit.’
‘Well, the husband must have some, somewhere,’ says Steele, ‘Or how about Facebook? Seth, anything from her laptop? Any photos of her cuddling bloody kittens, or whatever it is the Press Office want? Any evidence of a secret boyfriend?’
Seth shakes his head while exhaustion strips his voice of its usual public-school jollity. ‘I only had it briefly before Forensics took it, but there wasn’t much to see. She has a Facebook account but she hardly uses it. A measly sixteen friends in total, mainly from Hong Kong and Sydney. We’re obviously tracing them. Ben’s made a start.’
A raised hand from Ben Swaines. ‘She’s got a Hotmail account, but again, it looks like she rarely checks it. It’s mainly junk and online shopping receipts. Of course there could be lots of deleted stuff that I’m not seeing. Digital Forensics will obviously take a much deeper dive, but . . .’
‘But on the face of it, she wasn’t exactly Bill Gates.’ Steele sighs. ‘It’s never easy, is it? Renée – what are her friends saying? Her real three-dimensional friends.’
‘What friends?’ Renée yawns, puts a hand up in apology. I hadn’t even noticed she was here – fatigue is making us all muted, invisible. ‘I talked to a few people at the pub where she worked. They said she was very quiet, kept herself to herself. She worked eleven a.m. till three p.m. which are their busiest hours, so she just tended to crack on when she got there, no time for small talk like there would be if you were opening or closing up. They were obviously wondering where she’d disappeared to four weeks ago, but then it isn’t all that unusual in catering. They were a bit annoyed but not particularly bothered, was the impression I got.’
‘They didn’t call Thomas Lapaine?’ I ask. ‘He must have been down as her next of kin?’
‘Nope,’ replies Renée. ‘They tried her mobile a couple of times, couldn’t get through so they thought c’est-la-vie and hired someone else.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ says Steele. ‘It’s dog-eat-dog in the Shires these days.’
‘Neighbours didn’t have a lot to say either,’ Renée continues, stifling another yawn. ‘“Nice enough”, “quiet”. Same about him. The only friend Thomas Lapaine could point me to was a Debra Pulis who works in the deli on the high street. To be honest, she seemed a bit surprised to be classed as a “friend”. Alice popped in there most days and they’d chew the fat about the weather, TV, cooking, what-have-you, but she didn’t really know her.’
‘I think that’s sad,’ says Emily. ‘Imagine having no girlfriends to confide in. Nobody interested in what you’re up to.’
Imagine.
Sounds ideal to me.
While I’m not quite Alice Lapaine on the Billy-No-Mates scale, I tend to steer clear of the soul-sister sorority types. The kind who want to know everything about you, from your menstrual cycle to your relationship with your parents. Don’t get me wrong, I have a life, of sorts. I’ve got a few mates I sporadically get drunk with, there’s a couple I occasionally stay sober with, but all they know about me – all they really need to know – is that I drink anything but Chardonnay and my family aren’t close. They’ve no idea that my menstrual cycle’s patchy and I’ve wished my Dad dead.
Steele stands up abruptly, eager to get going. ‘Right, home-time, the lot of you. We’ve got fresh blood arriving in the next half hour to manage anything that comes through from the Standard so go home and get a proper night’s sleep. Maybe eat a few vegetables,’ she adds, staring at the junk-food detritus littering our desks.
‘Quick pint?’ suggests Flowers
‘Why not?’ says Parnell, heaving himself out of the chair. ‘Just the one though and then home. Man cannot live on two hours sleep in twenty-four. Not this old man, anyway.’
‘Or this young-ish man,’ says Seth, wrapping a stripy scarf around his neck – Oxford or Cambridge, I can never remember. ‘In fact, I think I’m starting to hallucinate. Is it just me, or are Emily and Ben having sex?’
Our heads snap towards the corner where Emily’s bending down sniggering at something non-work related on Ben’s PC, her chin resting on his shoulder, their hands touching as they tussle over the mouse. It’s about as intimate as anyone’s ever been within MIT4 so they may as well be having sex.
Close-knit comrades, we are – touchy-feely we are not.
Which is a shame as, after the day that I’ve had, I could really do with a hug.
*
I settle for a glass of wine. OK, two. A tepid drop of the house white when I’m paying and a nice citrusy Sancerre when it’s Flowers’ round. I think about staying out, numbing myself into a harmonious stupor, but I change my mind as soon as Emily starts talking about Fat Cats, a god-awful bar where people go to get mauled when their self-esteem’s just about hit rock bottom. While I’m not exactly a stranger to that kind of soul-crushing set-up, tonight I don’t fancy being that girl.
I don’t fancy a row with my sister either, but I can sense it’s heading that way as I trudge to Leicester Square tube with my phone glued to my ear.
‘Look, hold on a minute, Cat,’ Jacqui says, ‘I need to . . .’ She runs to the front door and shouts something about de-icer before hollering up to Finn to switch his night-light off.
Typical Jacqui, always in the middle of a domestic maelstrom. Always making you feel that your presence is one big interruption, even when it was her that called you.
‘I’m back,’ she says, breathless. ‘So, Christmas Day. Will you be here for breakfast, or just lunch? By the way, I’m not bothering with Christmas pudding this year, it’s only Ash who eats it.’
‘Er, I’m not sure, Jacqs. I wasn’t aware I’d been invited?’
She laughs, hyper and high-pitched. ‘You’re family, of course you’re invited.’
Jacqui does this. Erases all memories that don’t fit with the image of the shattered nuclear family, stoically soldiering on in the absence of the dead matriarch. I could remind her that I wasn’t there last year because two Christmases ago, Dad caught me in a grip that left an angry mottled bruise on my arm when I suggested he was glad Mum was dead. While I’m not exactly proud of my outburst, in my defence he’d just answered a text at the table – Mum’s table – from someone called Chloe and I’d instantly seen red. A chilli-hot, combustible red.
‘Look, I’ll try to come but I can’t promise. A big case has just broken.’
‘I know, Leamington Square. Noel text me.’
I try to keep the edge out of my voice. ‘Yeah, you kept that one quiet. Is he lying low, is that it? Who’s after him this time?’
‘He’s visiting his family, Cat. It’s normal this time of year.’
‘It’s normal for him to be after something.’
She ignores this, parasitic brothers don’t fit the ‘happy families’ image either. ‘Anyway, I didn’t keep anything quiet. If I’d seen you I’d have told you. You can’t be all elusive and still expect to be kept up to date on everything.’
‘Elusive? Come on, that’s not fair. You know my job’s a bit mental . . .’
‘Yeah yeah. You know Sadie, who I work with?’
‘Vaguely?’ I reply, confused where we’re heading.
‘Well, she’s got three kids and her sister’s a single mother of two, who also happens to be a firefighter, but they still manage to meet for martinis once a week, every week without fail.’
Yes, but they probably get on. ‘No point us doing that, you don’t even like gin.’
Jacqui sighs down the phone. ‘We haven’t seen or heard from you since fireworks night. That’s what, six weeks ago?’
A nice evening, I have to admit. I turned up with a hundred-shot firework called an ‘Atomic Warlord’ and Finn told everyone I was the ‘bestest’.
And Dad was in Marbella for ‘Uncle’ Frank’s sixtieth. It was the only reason I went.
‘How’s Finn?’ I ask.
There’s a pause, the kind of pause that makes my heart twist inside out. ‘He’s OK. He had a bit of a seizure last night. It scared me more than him though, he didn’t even wake up. We’re seeing the paediatric neurologist again after Christmas.’
‘I read up about them. Lots of kids grow out them as they get older.’
‘Exactly, he’ll be fine.’
Jacqui’s refusal to look worst-case scenarios in the eye usually makes me want to strangle her, but when it comes to Finn, I’m happy to play along. If I’m honest, Finn’s the only reason I still see Jacqui on a semi-occasional basis (I call it ‘semi-occasional’, she calls me ‘elusive’.) It’s not that I don’t love my sister, we’re just markedly different people, and I find it hard to stomach her blind – the bitch in me would say, ‘mercenary’ – allegiance to Dad.
‘Listen, I’d better go, Jacqs, I’m nearly at the tube.’
‘Hey wait, tell me about Leamington Square,’ she says, excitedly. ‘God, that takes me back.’
I wonder if it takes her back to drinking Bacardi breezers in the gardens and being fingered by half of St Hilda’s, or if she’s erased that part of history too. No doubt she has herself picking daffodils in a floaty gingham dress, singing sweetly to fledgling birds as they come to land on her shoulder.
I reach the tube, edge inside the brightly-lit entrance for warmth. ‘Look, I’m really going to have to go now. I’ll let you know about Christmas in a few days, is that OK?’
‘Well, no actually, it’s not. Would it hurt you to be a bit more organised, Cat?’
It’s the strict maternal tone, not the criticism, that ignites me. ‘Jesus! It’s just a few roasties and a bit of dry meat that no one likes anyway. And it’s not like you’re tight for space, your dining table could seat a UN summit.’
‘We’re not having it at mine. Dad wants to host for a change. I’m doing the cooking but he’s—’
‘Paying?’ I interrupt. ‘Good work, sis. Nicely done, as always.’
Little bitch. I regret it the second it leaves my mouth.
‘And what are your plans for Dad’s cheque this year?’ Sneeriness doesn’t suit Jacqui but I deserve it.
My plans are the same as always – half to the nurses who looked after Mum, half to the Sally Army. A few years ago I bought some Jimmy Choos and a Sat-Nav – a one-off litmus test to see if I could own anything without feeling squalid and corrupt.
I sold them both on Ebay, new and unused.
I don’t tell Jacqui this, though. I also don’t ask how a part-time florist and an IT support engineer can afford to send their son to one of north London’s leading pre-prep schools. Instead, I gloss over the dig and get back to logistics.
‘Look, if Dad’s hosting then I’m really not sure . . .’
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Cat. Please, can’t you try to . . .’
‘No, no, it’s not that,’ I say quickly, not wanting to go there. ‘It’s just that with this new case, I could be called into work any time so I could do without being all the way out in Radlett.’
Jacqui laughs. ‘Dad rented Radlett out months ago, Cat.’ Did he? ‘He’s living at the pub full-time now. We’re having Christmas lunch at the pub. Nightmare, I know.’
A prick of happiness spars with a stab of angst. It’s hard to call a winner under the effects of two large glasses of wine.
Christmas at McAuley’s Old Ale House.
Home for Christmas.
*
There’s no one in when I get back to Vauxhall, which comes as a blessed relief. It’s not that I don’t like the Dawsons, I do, I just don’t have the energy for their kids this evening – their constant demands to be turned upside down, to French-plait my hair, to sing songs from The Jungle Book for the hundredth time. I could be firmer with them, I suppose, try to shake them off on the grounds of having ‘grown-up stuff’ to do, but when you’re paying £500 a month for a small double room in Zone 1, with your own sink and toilet, you’re wise to make yourself indispensable.
My stomach bellows. I should probably make dinner.
The kitchen’s a homely bombsite as usual, as if the Dawsons were kidnapped part-way through a cook-off. Claire Dawson’s always cooking with her girls. Cooking and crafting and painting and swimming and a whole host of other ‘ings’ that mean that there wouldn’t be any need for a lodger if they’d only pick cheaper hobbies. Jacqui insists that Mum used to cook with me but I don’t remember, although I know we made jelly once. Lemon and lime jelly for a ‘tropical trifle’. We gave some to Dad but he fed it to the dog.
I sit by the fridge. Eat a bag of grated cheese like a packet of crisps.
‘Disordered eating,’ a counsellor called it. ‘Often the result of an aloof or aggressive relationship between a father and daughter.’
‘Aloof’ is definitely off-base. Dad rarely did anything that didn’t mark me out as being special, as being the only one who ever got under his skin. Sometimes that manifested itself in material things – toys, sweets, clothes as I got older, basically everything I ever asked for and plenty I didn’t.
Sometimes it manifested in the threats he’d make. The barely concealed aggression when I’d pulled one of my ‘stunts’ again.
The scratched Audi TT.
The vodka blow-out at a christening (age fourteen).
The fleeting engagement to a complete loser (I was seventeen, he was a thirty-eight-year-old ‘street poet’.)
All these things designed to goad Dad into hurting me so that everyone would see just how dangerous he could be.
I take the cheese, an on-the-turn kiwi and a can of cherry Coke and walk up the two flights to my bedroom, feeling an enormous sense of relief to be back in my ten-by-eight with just Alice Lapaine’s case notes for company and a Bowie documentary playing low on the TV. I turn it up occasionally when I know the song, looking for patterns of deceit in Thomas Lapaine’s statement as I sing along to ‘Starman’.
In my lowly experience, murder’s rarely a mystery. It’s hardly ever the subterranean labyrinth of red herrings and OMG! twists that you see on the TV and most of the time it’s depressingly straightforward – a knifing in a nightclub, a partner flipping their lid, a pimp marking his territory, each motive stark in its simplicity. But already, Alice Lapaine’s murder is making my head scratch. I’m still scratching at eleven p.m. when my phone rings. Parnell.
‘Sarge,’ I say with an involuntary smile.
‘Steele just called.’ He sounds pin-sharp and pumped-up, the complete opposite of earlier. ‘Big news, kiddo. This case just got a whole lot weirder.’
I sit up, galvanised by the thought of more brain-ache. ‘Come on then, don’t be a tease, what’s the story?’
‘A call’s come in. Some Irish fella, living in Mile End. Saw the picture in the Standard and reckons Alice Lapaine is his sister. Only she’s not Alice Lapaine. She’s a MISPER from the west coast of Ireland.
She looks familiar somehow . . .
A roar fills my head, a hellish cacophony.
‘Could it be a crank? What’s the boss think?’
‘Seems to think it’s legit. He’s coming in to give a DNA sample ASAP but he’s adamant, apparently. Same mole on her clavicle. Says she’s also got a birthmark between her shoulder blades, a bit like a bruise.’
‘And Alice Lapaine does?’
‘Maryanne Doyle does. Looks like our girl is called Maryanne Doyle.’
*
The world tips.
Everything I’ve ever known tilts to a forty-five-degree angle, taking me with it. I stutter a goodnight to Parnell then put my head between my knees, trying to breathe deeply but the shock doesn’t subside. Instead it seeps into my lungs and makes my breath even more desperate.
Maryanne Doyle. Two words, four syllables skewer every layer of my skin.
I reach under my bed for the shoebox and take out my red fluffy notepad – the place where I write the unspeakable things when my head can’t contain them.
‘Journalling,’ a counsellor called it. ‘A safe place where you give voice to your fears until you feel you can share them.’
And I write. Fast, uncensored but as methodical as I can be. This is no time for jumbled thinking.
WHAT I THOUGHT I KNEW:
In 1998, Dad was involved in the disappearance of Maryanne Doyle?
In 1998, Maryanne Doyle disappeared and Dad knew something about it??
Maryanne Doyle was never seen again – murdered???
WHAT I KNOW:
Maryanne Doyle wasn’t murdered in 1998. She was alive until yesterday.
Maryanne Doyle has been found a few hundred yards from Dad’s pub.
In 1998, Dad lied about knowing Maryanne Doyle – THIS IS FACT
So you see, some fears can never be shared. Some fears are so cataclysmic that to share them would be tantamount to suicide.
Life as I know it, obliterated.