Sweet Little Lies: The most gripping suspense thriller you’ll read this year

by Caz Frear

  We’re not exactly on ‘Mo’ terms but it’s got the right air of casual.

  Vickery cranes round, addresses Steele, ignores me. ‘What I reckon is that she certainly wasn’t killed here. There isn’t enough blood to suggest an attack took place here and the faint lividity is patchy which confirms she’s definitely been moved. Unfortunately, what this also means is that without knowing the conditions of the primary crime scene, it’s very hard for me to estimate exact time of death.’

  ‘Educated guess?’ says Parnell.

  Vickery lets out a well-practised sigh then gently prods the woman’s jaw as we all peer closer. ‘As you can see, rigor is in its very early stages. There’s a little stiffening around the facial muscles that would suggest two to three hours perhaps, but it all depends on whether she’s been outside from the get-go or whether she was kept indoors for a while and then dumped. Rectal temperature is thirty-four degrees, but again this doesn’t tell me anything definitive unless I know where she’s been. Stomach contents should narrow it down a bit. And lividity is still quite faint which suggests we’re looking at less than four to five hours.’

  ‘Cause of death?’ says Steele, sarcastically hopeful.

  Vickery gives a wry smile. I’m not sure she’s capable of any other type. Every facial expression seems to be undercut with either contempt or bemusement.

  ‘Take your pick. We have a nasty wound to the front of the head. Possible petechial haemorrhaging which might explain the circular contusion around the neck, but I won’t be able to get a proper look until we clean up the slashes to her throat – which incidentally, I don’t believe will be the cause of death. They’re nasty but a bit too shallow. No way they’ve gone through to the larynx.’

  ‘Hesitation marks?’ I suggest. ‘Someone trying to pluck up the courage?’

  A begrudging nod. ‘Possibly. Or could be old-fashioned torture.’

  ‘Possibly’ and ‘could’. The watchwords of every crime scene.

  Steele sighs. ‘I’ll take a guess on cause of death for now, Mo. Educated or wild-as-you-like.’

  ‘As you wish, but I won’t be held to anything.’

  As if we’d dare. Even Steele treads carefully around Mo Vickery, which is pretty telling given that, rumour has it, Steele once told a Deputy Assistant Commissioner to ‘take a chill pill’.

  Vickery steps outside the tent and Parnell and Steele swiftly follow, instantly gulping in the Arctic air. Something keeps me rooted though and for what seems like a moment but can only be a few heartbeats, it’s just me and her – this blood-drenched everywoman in her sensible winter coat and low-heeled Chelsea boots.

  I move when the tone of Steele’s cough reminds me Vickery’s patience isn’t so much thin as emaciated.

  ‘My guess would be she was strangled,’ Vickery’s saying as I join them. ‘Struck on the head with a blunt instrument, then strangled while subdued. I say subdued because people fight like hell when they’re being strangled and there doesn’t appear to be any obvious defensive wounds. Also’ – she hinges forward at the hips, a yoga pose I recognise for stretching out the spine – ‘this girl has long nails so I’d expect to see marks on her palms if she was conscious at the point of death. Clenching is very common during strangulation.’

  ‘She could have been tied up, drugged?’ offers Parnell.

  Vickery hinges up, loses her balance slightly. We pretend not to notice. ‘Drugged, possibly. Tied up, unlikely. There’s no obvious marks to the wrists but I’ll know more once I get her on the table.’

  The thought of taking her to the morgue seems to deflate Parnell, as if keeping her here under the pre-dawn stars and the promise of a new day makes her somehow less dead. Similarly deflated, and conscious we’ll soon have an audience – a few bathroom lights are already flickering along the west of the square – I go to speak to the witness.

  Close up she’s even younger and twice as pissed.

  A paramedic with a slight overbite intercepts me. ‘Tamsin Black, nineteen. We’re not getting much sense, I’m afraid. Think she might have imbibed a bit more than just booze, if you catch my drift.’

  I like the way he says ‘imbibed’, like a Jacobean aristocrat, so I give him a warm smile that just about stays within the boundaries of ‘crime scene appropriate’. ‘When will I be able to talk to her?’

  ‘You can try now, love, but I wouldn’t bother. She’s puking more than talking.’

  On cue she wretches, a futile little jerk that produces little but amber-coloured bile.

  I glance at the paramedic’s name badge. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, Phil, but I’m impressed she had the wherewithal to phone it in, in that state.’

  Phil looks nervous, rubs his overbite. ‘Looks like she had the wherewithal to post it on Facebook too. I saw it flash up on her phone. Sorry.’

  I groan inwardly. ‘Not your fault. Thanks for letting me know. I’d better try to get that deleted before her mates log on for the day.’

  I start to walk over but then someone says something about a panic attack so I back off and watch while the experts try to explain the basics of diaphragmatic breathing to someone struggling with the basics of bladder control. Tamsin Black looks so listless and pale through the layers of fake tan – and so painfully young – that I have to fight the urge to stride over and take her hand. To tell her I understand and that she can talk to me. To tell her the brutal images will fade.

  Essentially to lie that it gets easier.

  Then I realise I’m being ‘over-empathetic’ so I walk back over to Steele and grass her up immediately. Steele does the requisite amount of eye-rolling but honestly, it’s a battle we conceded long ago. Facebook helps more cases than it ever harms so we live with it.

  Parnell yawns. ‘So what’s the plan then, Boss?’

  ‘I need to wait for them to finish, give them permission to remove the body,’ says Steele, nodding towards the SOCOs. ‘Then I’m heading straight over to HQ to get things set up. You pair stay here for a while. House-to-House should be here soon so can you brief them, Lu? Hopefully we’ll get something from CCTV but for now we’re working on the assumption that she must have been driven here, so someone might have heard a car?’

  ‘Funny place to dump a body, don’t you think?’ I say. ‘There’s got to be easier places than the middle of central London.’

  ‘Panic maybe? Listen, Kinsella, have another crack at the witness before they whisk her off to UCH, OK? I know we can’t rely on the detail too much but at least it’ll be fresh and I want to get some sort of statement out of her before Mummy Dearest gets here and starts saying her little angel’s been through enough already.’

  Exactly what my mum would have said. Once she’d ripped me a new hole for wandering around London half-cut and half-naked at half-four in the morning.

  God, I miss my mum. To the rest of the world you’re just a living, growing mass of cells. Your brain fully forms and your bones start to lengthen and before you know it, you’re a card-carrying grown-up who’s expected to drive cars, pay bills and remember to buy tinfoil. But to your mum, you’ll always be a bit gormless. The girl who sneezed in her porridge and ate it anyway.

  And I miss that. I miss being a half-wit and being loved for it.

  Lately I’ve been obsessing about what Mum would think of twenty-six-year-old me. What she’d say if she could see me now, out of bed and being productive before lunchtime.

  In all honesty, she probably wouldn’t recognise me. It’s fair to say I wasn’t the easiest of adolescents. Dad often said that it took an iron fist and a will of steel to discipline me – not that he ever tried, of course, preferring always to claim that there was no point in him disciplining me when he just couldn’t work me out. Couldn’t ‘get on my level’.

  I’d worked him out though. I knew exactly what he was.

  I saw the way he’d looked at Maryanne Doyle, and I saw a lot more too.

  Heard a few things as well.

  Not that I ever tol
d him, or anyone else for that matter. The silence of childhood fear gradually morphed into teenage rebellion – a far more fun way to vent my hate than raking up history and throwing accusations – and lately, in recent years, we’ve slipped into a kind of venomous stalemate. A white-hot apathy.

  You stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.

  Mum knew I loved her, though, I’m sure of it. I certainly told her enough times. Every morning and every evening and several texts in between.

  ‘Luv U’, ‘Ur the best, Mum! xxx’

  And apparently she can see me now. According to the same clairvoyant who mumbled clichéd statements about my heart-line, Mum’s always with me and she’s proud of me. She enjoys watching me dance apparently. It assures her I’ve moved on from her loss. I didn’t have the heart to tell the lousy charlatan who was charging me sixty pounds an hour for this heartwarming slice of hoodoo, that the only time you’ll ever find me dancing is when I’m paralytic-drunk and Mum definitely wouldn’t enjoy watching that. Who would enjoy watching their last-born child twerking in front of a rabble of baying IT consultants while trying not to vomit peach schnapps?

  Mother’s Day 2013.

  They haven’t got any easier or any less shambolic.

  ‘You look bloody shattered, girl.’ As if reading my mind, Steele comes over all quasi-maternal, laying a hand on my arm. ‘Initial briefing at one p.m., OK, but in the meantime, go home and get a few hours shut-eye. That’s an order, both of you.’ She says ‘both’ but she’s looking at me. ‘I mean it. Stay here for an hour, tops . . .’

  We stay three hours.

  Three hours where we learn very little.

  I speak to the witness again but you couldn’t exactly call it a statement, just a few random proclamations of ‘So much blood’ like a bizarrely reimagined Lady Macbeth, and repeated requests for her mum. As instructed, Parnell briefs the House-to-House crew – a team of six men and women dedicated to fighting crime with questionnaires and clipboards – and we even do a bit ourselves, flashing our IDs at confused-looking people with morning breath and sticky-up hair. It yields zilch though. A whole load of ‘nothings’ and one dubious ‘maybe’ which doesn’t really fit with our timeline anyway.

  After three hours of spreading hysteria, Parnell announces that he’s going home to have sex, bacon and a Radox bath. He doesn’t mind in what order.

  I don’t announce where I’m going.

  3

  McAuley’s Old Ale House. Maccers for short.

  My dad’s pub.

  Home.

  Home right now is a ten-by-eight in the eaves of the Dawson family residence in Vauxhall, where I’ve got my own sink and toilet, two shelves for my food, and the gnawing guilt of knowing a child was evicted from her bedroom in favour of £500 a month because Claire Dawson lost her job and they needed a lodger.

  Home, from the age of eight, was a five-bedroomed detached new-build in Radlett. A ‘cul-de-sac’, Mum had proudly announced, as if a dead end was something to aspire to. I’d had to look up what it meant.

  But to me, my real home, the place where I was formed and where I was at my most happy, will always be McAuley’s Old Ale House.

  As I was just a child when we left the pub, my sister Jacqui insists that the only life I’ve ever known has been one of en-suite shower rooms and Sky TV, but she couldn’t be more wrong. I remember every madcap minute we lived above McAuley’s. The peeling paint and the knock-off furniture. Dad cashing up while Mum was mopping down. I was so bloody content there. A proper little pub kid, rushing down the stairs on Saturday morning, gathering up the coins that people had dropped the night before, nicking crisps, skimming pints. Learning the word ‘cunt’ and how to play snooker.

  It’s changed, though. Duck-egg blue, no longer brick-and-pollution-coloured. ‘Aspirational’, I bet Jacqui calls it, meaning hipsters drinking whisky sours out of jam jars. Less ‘boozer’, more ‘gastro-pub’. When we lived here in the Nineties, you either microwaved it or you battered it; if you were being particularly cosmopolitan, you might have put a sprig of parsley with it, but now there’s a chalked sign outside offering ‘Potted Prawns, with apple and radish’ and ‘Slow Cooked Porchetta’. Not a deep-fat fryer in sight.

  There’s a few lights on but it’s too early to be open so I walk around the back and up the fire escape to what we used to illogically call the front door.

  What am I doing? Why have I come? It’s not even ten a.m., Dad probably won’t be here.

  The sound of my steps on the fire escape reverberate in the way they always used to and the door opens before I get a chance to look for the bell. But it isn’t Dad standing there, it’s the cut-price version. The man whose bitter failure to be Dad left him skulking off to Spain to pull pints in a strip-club. Or at least so I thought.

  My brother Noel stands in the doorway, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with thick, scabby fingers. We’ve got the same cupid’s bow and the same allergy to shellfish but apart from that we could be strangers. We certainly try to be. He’s chunkier than the last time I saw him, with ridiculous pumped up arms that haven’t quite got the right ratio of muscle to fat. He leans his bulk against the doorframe and the squashed fat of his biceps turns from pink to puce as we stare each other out.

  I break the silence first. ‘Well, if it isn’t the prodigal son returned. What are you doing here?’ The question’s entirely rhetorical as I know it’ll be about money. ‘Is Dad here?’

  ‘’Fraid not,’ he says, heavy on the ‘t’. He doesn’t so much invite me in as walk away from the door and the sight of him retreating tempts me to do the same.

  Curiosity wins out though and I step inside.

  The hall smells of frying. Pork on the cusp of charcoal. I follow Noel into the kitchen and wait while he prods sausages around a pan, swearing at a space-age hob that has more functions than a cockpit. I look around but there’s nothing to recognise. Not one single memory evoked. There’s no hand-sketched growth-chart on the back wall by the bin. No sandwich toaster shaped like a cow. No stain from where I split my chin and dripped blood on the welcome mat. Nothing to say I ever lived here at all. It’s all clean lines and brushed steel.

  It reminds me of the morgue.

  I talk to Noel’s sun-damaged back. ‘So when did you arrive?’

  There’s a black hold-all on the floor with its contents spilling out. There isn’t enough to suggest a long stay but with Noel you’d never know. You travel light when you’re doing a midnight flit.

  ‘A while ago.’ Ever cagey.

  ‘You’re obviously not big news, Noel, I hadn’t heard.’

  He smirks and spears a sausage, brandishing it across the floor like a weapon. The fat drips onto the tiles, pooling like petrol.

  ‘Still doing that veggie bollocks? Or was that Jacqui?’

  Jacqui. For about four months in 2001. And it was only veal.

  I push the fork away. ‘So why’d you come here then, not Radlett? Hertfordshire not gangster enough for you?’

  ‘Radlett?’ He looks confused, which confuses me. ‘God, you really aren’t a regular visitor, are you? I mean, Dad said it’d been six months since he’d last seen you but I thought he was exaggerating, getting his months mixed up. I should be calling you the prodigal daughter, really. At least I’ve got the excuse I’m in a different country. Where are you living these days?’

  ‘Why do you want to know? Planning to burgle me again while you’re back?’ I pull a mock-contrite face. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, that wasn’t you, was it? It was pure coincidence that a mate of yours found out my address and knew exactly where to find Mum’s jewellery without disturbing anything else.’

  He barely flinches. Doesn’t deny or defend himself. Just rummages in a cupboard, tutting at the lack of brown sauce.

  Eventually he sits down at the table. ‘Dad seemed pretty upset, you know – about not seeing you in ages. Bit slack of you, really . . .’

  Shit-stirring is Noel’s favourite pastime. His
undisputed key skill.

  ‘Yeah well, I was pretty upset about him bringing that bimbo to Finn’s sixth birthday party. How long had he known her? A fortnight?’

  He nods. ‘Oh yeah, I forgot, Dad’s supposed to live like a monk. From what I heard, Jacqui wasn’t the least bit bothered so what it had to do with you . . .’

  ‘’Course Jacqui wasn’t bothered, Dad was paying for the party. A private room at the Rainforest Café. Very nice.’

  ‘I know. I saw the photos.’ He trickles ketchup over his blackened breakfast in thin, jagged lines. Slashes across a throat – shallow but nasty. ‘Didn’t see many of you, mind. Sulking in the toilets, were you?’

  I really don’t know why I’m getting into this with him.

  ‘A body’s been found on Leamington Square,’ I say, cranking a major gearshift. ‘A woman. A young-ish woman.’

  Clearly I don’t know she’s young-ish, except on some wispy, intuitive level.

  Noel shrugs, he couldn’t be less interested.

  I shake my head, ask again, ‘So what are you doing here then? Are you broke? In the shit with someone bigger than you?’

  He doesn’t look up, just keeps working away at his breakfast. ‘You know, given you haven’t seen Dad in six months, it rather precipitates the more pertinent question of what you’re doing here, little sister, not what I’m doing here.’

  Precipitates. Pertinent. A barbed reminder of an intelligence gone to waste. Noel’s convinced that if he’d had the same private education as me, he’d have found a cure for cancer by now, or at least bought a Porsche, and the very fact he hasn’t is always somehow laid at my door. For coming along seven years later. For my schooling falling in line with Dad’s money.

  Money that was never really explained, or questioned.

  ‘I told you why I’m here, were you even listening? A woman’s body’s been found up the road from here.’

  He pauses, a piece of white toast hangs in mid-air. ‘And that’s what you came to tell Dad?’

  My mouth’s dry. I need a glass of water. I spot tumblers through a frosted glass cabinet but there’s no way I’m helping myself. This is a stranger’s home.