by Caz Frear
‘No.’ His eyes flare as icy serenity gives way to quiet fury. ‘No, I didn’t sleep with Maryanne Doyle. Just like I didn’t sleep with your Auntie Brona. Or Katy Keilty’s mum. Or your Irish dancing teacher. Or Cathy Hammond from the Flag. Or basically half the women you seem to think I did.’
Half? I very much doubt that. I’ll admit I was never one to discriminate when it came to accusing him – Auntie Brona still makes me boil with shame – but I know I was right about a lot of them. Just not the rank outsiders he’s been clever enough to name.
I steady my voice. ‘Then why did you lie about knowing . . .’
He grabs my hands across the table. ‘Enough, Catrina.’ I open my mouth but he puts a finger up to halt me. Another to my lips, shushing me. ‘I mean it now. Enough.’
Strong, calm, commanding. As if pacifying an angry dog.
But I won’t be pacified, not yet. ‘Because you did know her. We picked her up . . .’
He jerks his hand up and catches me by the jaw. It doesn’t hurt but the grip is tight and it stops me speaking. My skin hums underneath. To the rest of the bar it probably looks playful.
‘Is this ever going to end, Catrina? All this bullshit? You’d think you’d never put a foot wrong in your life. Can’t you accept that everyone has’ – he chooses his word carefully – ‘failings?’
‘Failings,’ I sneer. ‘MOTs fail. People make bad decisions, there’s a difference.’
He triggers the ‘M’ word. ‘Mum always forgave me, why can’t you? God knows you always followed her lead on everything else.’
Deliverance comes in the form of beautiful Xavier, incensed, and I mean Spanish incensed, about some woman claiming she gave him a twenty when he knows she gave him a ten. Dad stands up heavily, walks over to the bar, hands out, chin high, all ready to sort out the obvious misunderstanding, using nothing other than that iridescent smile and a touch of the McBride charm.
I pick up my bag and leave.
*
I should have told Dad that this isn’t about Mum. It’s not about forgiveness. It’s not about sleazy affairs or bunk-ups in the bar. It’s not about Katy Kielty’s mum or sexy students pulling pints.
It’s about murder.
It’s about the lie – the litany of lies – he told about Maryanne Doyle eighteen years ago and the fact she’s turned up dead just a short walk from his door.
But fear muzzled me, far more than his clasp on my jaw ever could. The fear of what he might unload if I kept pushing and the fear of losing him forever if I’m wrong.
Because what if he’s not who I think he is? I can’t ignore the fact I’ve spent most of my life, not exactly sure in the belief, but certainly toying with – then blocking out – the idea that Dad might have killed Maryanne Doyle in 1998. Now that’s been proved impossible, can I trust my own instincts any more than I mistrust him?
Because what if he’s not a Bad Man? What if he’s just a liar. A womaniser. A run-of-the-mill arsehole. Just an ageing matinee idol with a moody, over-inked girlfriend and a complicated TV system he can’t work out.
What if I’ve spent the past eighteen years tormenting him – tormenting myself – for what amounts to nothing more than a few grubby white lies.
9
Seven a.m.
I wake up late, late for me anyway, twisted and practically mummified in my sheets with a cold sheen of sweat coating my body and a dozen family photos scattered across the bed. I don’t recall dreaming last night, although I must have done. The experts say that you always dream. That your dreams act as safety valves through which you live out unconscious desires, free from the hindrance of consequence or the shame of taboo.
I’ve never actually dreamed of killing my dad, although I did once dream that he’d killed me.
I sit up quickly, grateful for the late hour. Wake at seven a.m. and I’m thrown straight into focusing on real things, safe things – showers, vitamins, off-milk, tube delays – whereas at five a.m., my usual rise and shine, I’ve got two hours of lying in the half-light to grapple with. Two hours of thinking about all the things I could have done better and all the people I never see. Sometimes I use the time more effectively. I read lamebrain magazines by the light of my phone, doping myself with articles like ‘Change Your Face Primer, Change your life!!’ Other times I whisper affirmations into the silence, soothing myself with sad little cheerleads – advice from just about every self-help book I’ve ever been dopey enough to buy.
I am enough.
I am more than enough.
I love and approve of myself.
I am a good person.
It’s the last one that shames me. This notion that good somehow equals protected. Anyone would think I’d spent the past two years jazz-handing my way around Disney, not wading through the relentless grime of MIT, where despicable, unthinkable things happen to good people every day. Just last year I worked a case where a sixty-two-year-old dinner-lady, well known in her local community for her charity fun-runs and history of fostering disabled children, was fatally stabbed in the head four times in broad daylight, all over a piece of dropped litter.
She’d been a good person. One of the best by all accounts. I bet she never felt the need to affirm her goodness into the silence at five in the morning.
Fat lot of good being good did her.
Alice Lapaine had been a good person too.
*
‘Right, I’ve skim-read the report and I’m giving Vickery eight out of ten for crystal ball accuracy.’ At nine thirty, Steele sweeps into the office balancing files, a bucket of coffee, a paper bag containing something greasy and the thing she calls her handbag that most people would take on a citybreak.
Parnell, moving quicker than I’d have given him credit for, grabs the coffee as it threatens to capsize. ‘Cheers, Lu,’ she says, puffing and panting, dropping everything onto the nearest desk with a heavy thwack. ‘Chaps and chapesses, listen. I’ve literally got fifteen minutes for a quick catch-up and then I’m out all day – meetings with Blake, the Press Office, the bloody Dalai Lama for all I know. I’m assuming you’ve all had a chance to read through the PM reports? Well, you better bloody have, put it that way. Benny-boy, be a love and get the photos up on the big screen.’ To Parnell. ‘Lu, you lead. I need to eat.’
Ben busies himself being technical while everyone else dives into last-minute revision in case Parnell decides to play Ask the Audience.
‘So folks, Thomas Lapaine.’ Parnell walks over to the incident board and lands a meaty paw on his picture. ‘We need to get him back under this roof again because the PM threw up something very interesting – Alice had given birth to a child at some point. The shape of the cervix and pelvis confirms it. It’s hard to say when exactly, and I’m not even sure what this means, but it’s something he neglected to mention.’
‘Well, leave me out of that discussion, please,’ says Renée. ‘I think I’ve burned my bridges there – the first time we met I told him his wife was dead, the second time I told him she’d been lying through her teeth about who she really was.’
‘Bad, huh?’ I ask.
‘As bad as you’d expect. A few tears. A lot of shouting. He threw a glass at the wall as well – his mum shooed me out then, told me I was “impudent” and that she didn’t like my tone.’ Renée grins and I know what’s coming. ‘Didn’t like my skin-tone, more like. I don’t think Mother has a very diverse social set, if you know what I mean. It was a big enough shock learning her daughter-in-law was a hundred per cent Irish.’
Emily stops chewing a hangnail, straightens up. ‘Boss, I met the IVF consultant yesterday and I saw the patient registration form they both filled out. There was nothing on there about a prior pregnancy.’
‘Maybe Thomas Lapaine had no idea,’ I suggest. ‘It could have been before they met?’
Ben points to the screen. ‘Come on, stretch-marks across the abdomen, faint ones on the breasts. He must have realised, even if it was from before.’
Our female contingent shares a pained grin. I think about hoiking up my top and parading my silvery lines right in front of his innocent little face but I settle for embarrassing him instead. ‘Ben, have you ever actually seen a naked woman? A real one, I mean, not one that lives in your laptop or on your iPhone. Ever heard of a thing called a growth spurt, or a bit of weight gain?’
‘Maybe they had a stillborn?’ says Renée. ‘You’d kind of understand him not wanting to revisit that, not when he’s only just found out his wife’s dead.’
Parnell considers this but he’s not convinced. ‘Mmmm, I can see him not volunteering the information, but he talked to us a lot about kids. You’d think it would have come up somehow if there had been a child and, well, now there wasn’t.’
Steele steps in. ‘Renée, check records – adoption, birth, deaths, everything for a child born to either Alice Lapaine or Maryanne Doyle, here and in Ireland.’
‘’Course you know what this means,’ says Renée. ‘If she’d given birth in the past, the chances are, Thomas Lapaine was the problem.’
‘Which means what?’ I ask. ‘Last time I looked there wasn’t a direct link between male infertility and homicidal tendencies.’
Renée nods. ‘No, but it’s a very emotive subject, just saying.’
‘Didn’t I say being a jaffa could tip into something nasty. Didn’t I?’ Flowers sounds elated.
Much as I know it’ll pain Parnell, he agrees. ‘Could be that Alice wanting to stop trying tipped him over the edge. Snuffed out any chance of proving to himself that he’s a real man.’ He puts a hand up, bats away my protest. ‘I’m not saying that’s what I think, Kinsella, I’m just trying to put myself in his shoes. Think how he might think.’
Truth is, there aren’t many in this room with any real idea of how an insecure man staring down the barrel of childlessness might think, certainly not Seth and Ben, who’d rather be saddled with colostomy bags than babies at this point in their lives, and definitely not MIT4’s resident stallions – Parnell, Flowers and Craig Cooke – who’ve got about a hundred kids between them.
Steele looks at her watch. ‘OK, can we move on from the contents of Thomas Lapaine’s scrotum and see what else we’ve got. I haven’t got long.’
Parnell continues. ‘Time of death. Vickery’s still being a bit cagey but we’re going to work with somewhere between one and three a.m. Cause of death is manual asphyxia, however there are virtually no signs of struggle so she was almost certainly unconscious when she was strangled, probably from this blow sustained to the front of the head – picture five.’
We’ve all seen the crime scene photos, the worst of which burn onto your brain like asphalt, but post-mortem pics allow for a bit more professional distance. Flowers flicks through the pages like a man choosing a main course – and that’s not a criticism, I can’t wait to get there myself.
‘Now – and pay attention because this is important – her skull wasn’t fractured by the blow. There’s no real damage to the brain so Vickery’s a bit on the fence about this. She says it could be classed as inconsistent with what you’d expect to see in your average beating and so it could mean that rather than being hit on the head with something in a deliberate attack, she might have just hit her head accidentally.’
‘Or a fall?’
Steele points at me, animated. I can feel myself glowing. ‘Yeah, good, Kinsella, a fall’s definitely a possibility. It fits with the mild bruising on her legs – pictures eight and nine.’ She doesn’t even have to look at the report to know the layout. ‘But as we’re dealing in “coulds” for a second, let’s imagine that the wound could have been caused by a deliberate blow. What does that tell us?’
She doesn’t give us time to answer.
‘Well, it tells us it wasn’t particularly frenzied or there’d be more damage to the brain. And then if you add that to the fact that the cuts to the throat were also very tentative, very shallow, what we seem to have is a rather reluctant, albeit, fairly determined killer.’
‘Reluctant but determined?’ says Seth, wistfully, doing that Sherlock thing that either amuses or irritates me depending on my mood. ‘Bit of an oxymoron, don’t you think?’
Parnell jumps in. ‘I think what the Boss means is he meant to kill her . . .’
‘Or she,’ says Flowers, thinking he’s hilarious. ‘Can’t discriminate this days, remember.’
Craig punches the air. ‘Right on, sister!’
Parnell explodes. ‘Shut it, everyone, this isn’t a joke.’ This jolts me, scares me a bit, even. It’s the first time I’ve heard Parnell properly lose his rag and I don’t like it. ‘Anyone finding this the slightest bit funny, I suggest they go down to the morgue and take a look at what’s lying in the fridge, OK? A young woman with her whole life ahead of her, snuffed out, and we have absolutely no idea why.’
I get what he’s doing. You have to shapeshift a little when you’re acting-up in a role, otherwise everyone thinks you’re still their mate. You’re still Papa Parnell who loves a laugh and a joke and an arse-about as much as the rest of us.
Parnell continues, calmer now. ‘What the Boss means is whoever they are, they meant to kill her, all right – the hyoid bone was fractured so we’re talking considerable force – they just seem to have taken a few gos to choose their weapon, as it were.’
‘So they’re inexperienced then rather than reluctant,’ I say.
Steele snaps. ‘Jesus! Can we just forget I said “reluctant”. Wrong choice of word, my bad. Inexperienced, yes, Kinsella. Indecisive. Shitting bricks. How am I doing? Any other oxy-wotsits I need to be aware of?’
Steele, with her first-class degree from Durham and her Masters from LSE isn’t immune to dumbing down if it buoys up the troops.
I do have one more oxymoron though, or a contradiction at least.
‘Sarge,’ I say, turning to Parnell. ‘Or is it Boss, now? Anyway, don’t you think it’s odd that the manner of death’s so jumpy but the manner of disposal’s so, well, brazen? Remember the CCTV? Our guy, or girl’ – a quick nod to Flowers – ‘stretching out their back like they’re doing flipping sun salutations, not dumping a body.’
‘Yoga,’ says Renée before Flowers asks.
‘OK,’ nods Parnell, happy to run with it. ‘So what do you think that could mean?’
‘That it’s less stressful dumping a body than actually killing someone?’
Seth gets in on the action. ‘Maybe the person on the CCTV isn’t our killer? Just someone tasked with dumping the body?’
‘Easy,’ warns Steele. ‘I don’t even want to think about that without evidence.’
Parnell raises a hand. ‘Speaking of which, we don’t have much. Forensics have a few footprints . . .’ This gets a communal groan. Footprints don’t hold a candle to fibres, or blood, or skin, or semen, unless they’re stamped across the victim’s chest and we get to play Cinderella with an actual foot. ‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t shoot the messenger.’
Renée chips in. ‘Sounds like they could be forensically aware then?’
Parnell shrugs. ‘Not necessarily. The primary crime scene could be awash with lots of lovely stuff but until we find it, we’re stuck with footprints, I’m afraid.’
I’ve got other things on my mind. ‘No semen at all then? So definitely no unprotected sex in the past seventy-two hours. Might make the “secret boyfriend” theory a bit less likely? I mean, sure, they could have been using condoms but . . .’
Parnell’s on it. ‘We’ve asked for a vaginal swab, see if they can get traces of condom lubricant. It won’t tell us anything definitive, but it’ll tell us something, at least.’
‘We can’t rule out a boyfriend based just on that,’ says Flowers. ‘Maybe they just hadn’t mattress-danced in a few days. I know, I know, folks, it’s hard to believe that I go without for any length of time, but it happens, kids.’
Parnell nods along. ‘I hear you, Pete, but there’s no other obvious signs of sexual activity
, and if there was a boyfriend, I reckon it’d have to have been a red-hot affair to lure Alice Lapaine into London, not the kind that abstains for three days. Anyway, we’ll see. Lab couldn’t give us any timescales, obviously.’
Steele mumbles into the PM report. ‘Not so reluctant to give us costs though.’
‘Talking of money,’ says Parnell. ‘What’ve we got on her transactions so far.’
‘Bank records have her in London from Thursday 19th November,’ Renée confirms.
‘Which backs up Thomas Lapaine’s story,’ I say, not in any way championing him, just stating a fact.
Renée lifts a warning finger. ‘Yeah, but hold your horses, I’m coming back to him in a minute. So she used their joint account to pay for two nights in a hotel – if you can call it a hotel – it’s a grotty little outfit off Gray’s Inn Road. Still managed to relieve her of £250 for two nights’ bed and board though. For a single room that someone on Trip Advisor called, what was it, Ben?’
Ben cranes his neck. ‘“Cold, tired and eminently depressing.”’
I can’t resist it. ‘Sounds like your last girlfriend, Seth.’
‘Cruel, Kinsella,’ he replies with a grin.
Seriously, the shifts I spent counselling Seth over his ice-queen ex – a Finnish vegan with an allergy to everything, a reluctance to give head, and in my opinion, an ill-conceived fringe.
Renée continues, half-smiling – she’d played agony-aunt too. ‘So we’ve talked to reception at the hotel and someone remembered her vaguely. Nothing out of the ordinary though. Never saw her with anyone.’
Parnell rubs his eyes. ‘And then what?’
‘Nothing. From November 19th, there’s no more credit or debit card transactions we can trace. All we’ve got are cash withdrawals from the joint account – all over central London, maxing the limit every time – £250 every four or five days but – and this is the interesting – that stops last week. Last withdrawal was 13th December. She . . .’