by Caz Frear
I look confused. ‘Well, with all due respect, I thought that would be obvious? I’m assuming your wife told you about our first visit?’ They nod tentatively. ‘We need to understand why a murdered woman, who was staying at a property you own, was also spotted on this road – well, at the gates to this road – and in a café just down the way on a couple of different occasions.’
I leave out the word ‘possibly’. It always spoils the fun.
Nate opens his mouth but Gina cuts in, sounding dazed. Like she’s woken up in a dream where everything’s back-to-front. ‘You think we knew this woman? I told you when you came before, I’ve never seen her before in my life.’
‘Well, yes, but you can see why we’re making the connection, surely? A witness has stated . . .’
Nate makes himself bigger, the classic macho wide-legged stance. ‘What fucking witness?’
Leo Hicks isn’t the only one going through a geezer phase, it seems.
Parnell picks up on this. ‘Could you watch your mouth please, Mr Hicks. There’s no need for gutter language. The identity of our witness doesn’t concern you.’
He doesn’t back down but shortens his stance. ‘Oh, yes it does, if you’re going to come into my house and accuse my wife of being a liar.’
‘I never said I don’t believe your wife. Maybe it’s you that recognises her?’
‘I don’t, as I told the officer who returned with the photo late last week. Not that I needed a photo, it’s been all over the news.’
A realisation dawns on Gina. ‘God, we won’t be on the news, will we? There won’t be journalists on the close? I mean, I’d love to help, I really would. It’s terrible what’s happened to that poor woman, but honestly, this is just ridiculous. We haven’t the faintest idea who she is.’
Nate looks at his wife. ‘Of course we won’t be on the news. This is wanton exploration, that’s all. There’s no credible witness. It’s what they call a fishing expedition.’
I step into his personal space but keep my tone light. ‘And under what we call the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, we can request to see your phone records at any time, Mr Hicks. How do you feel about that?’
He gives me a thin-lipped smile. ‘Not a problem, Detective . . . I’m sorry, I forget your last name. I can get them for you now if you’d like? I’m sure I can download a fully itemised bill online. How many copies would you like?’
Parnell stands up, quicker and smoother than I’ve seen in a long time – less clicky. ‘We’ll retrieve them ourselves, Mr Hicks, if we decide we need to, but thank you.’ He nods towards Gina. ‘Thank you both for your time, we’ll see ourselves out.’
*
‘The smug fuck,’ I say. ‘“Excuse my gutter language.”’
We sit in the car on the pebbled driveway – partly just to unnerve the Hickses, partly so Parnell can have a blast of his e-cig before driving back. He’s gone for Green Tea and Menthol this time, and mixed with the quintessential blend of takeaway fried chicken and pine-scented air-freshener that always seems to hang heavy in Parnell’s car, I start to miss the scents of middle-class Christmas fairly quickly. I’d wind the window down if there wasn’t a chill outside that could bring a tear to a glass eye.
‘Could it be pure coincidence?’ I ask.
Parnell drums the steering wheel with his spare hand. ‘What, that she was living in their flat and a completely unconnected looky-likey turns up at the gates here?’ He stares through the windscreen, marvels at a grey squirrel attacking a bird feeder. ‘Could be,’ he says, eventually. ‘I’m actually part of a rare breed who believes coincidences can happen.’
I’m not sure if I am. Conspiracy out-glams coincidence by a country mile.
Still, I’m a pragmatist.
‘The kind of lawyers the Hickses can afford will get a hard-on at the word “coincidence” though, that’s our problem.’
‘Exactly,’ says Parnell. ‘So do you know what we do?’
‘Give up? Plant evidence?’
Parnell turns his body to face me, the seatbelt strains across his bulk. ‘Are you a James Bond fan, Kinsella?’
The seriousness of his tone tickles me. ‘Not really. I went through a bit of a spy phase when I was little but it was more Danger Mouse than 007. Why?’
‘But you’ve heard of Goldfinger, though? Tell me you’ve heard of Goldfinger?’
I do a little Shirley Bassey which Parnell takes to mean ‘yes’.
‘Well, after he comes across Bond for the third time, Goldfinger says – and bear with me, my Latvian accent isn’t the best. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”’
I think about this, nod sagely. ‘So we find coincidence number three, and when we do, we consider the Hickses to be the enemy.’ Parnell joins me in the sage nodding. ‘We might find it in the phone records?’
Parnell puts his e-cig down, holds up two fingers. ‘One, that wouldn’t be a coincidence, that would be us blatantly catching them out in a lie, and two, we won’t find anything, he was far too relaxed.’ Suddenly his head juts forward and he squints into the distance. ‘Although, hold up. Speak of the devil.’
I follow his line of sight and see Nate Hicks jogging towards the car. Parnell gives the accelerator a rev for pure devilment and the jog turns into a lumbering sprint.
‘What does he want?’
‘You didn’t forget your glasses again, kiddo?’ I glare at Parnell but it’s a fair question. It happens all the time; pub toilets, train journeys, witnesses’ homes. I live in fear of leaving them at a crime scene.
Parnell winds down the window. I scowl at the cold and in doing so scowl at Nate Hicks, who’s only wearing a thin rugby shirt, making him either rock-hard or panicked.
‘Can we talk?’ he says, ‘Quickly.’
I look back to the kitchen window. Gina Hicks is framed in early-evening light, nursing a cut knee as one of the toddlers sits on the sink. ‘I assume you know your wife can see you?’
‘I said I was checking you could get out the main gate. The sensor plays up occasionally so it’s not a complete lie.’
I didn’t exactly lie, I just didn’t tell the truth.
‘Hop in,’ says Parnell.
He gets in the back, looking completely incongruous. Nate Hicks strikes me as the type of guy who always likes to be at the wheel, metaphorically or otherwise, and there’s something satisfying about the sight of him scrunched up in the back of Parnell’s Citroen C4.
‘I’m sorry I was a bit aggressive back there,’ he says.
I’ve an urge to tell him he wasn’t aggressive at all, just a pompous oaf, but it’s only a thirty second drive up to the main gates so there’s not much time for small talk.
I shift around in my seat. ‘You know, if you have something to tell us about “the dead woman”, your wife is going to find out anyway, and we don’t generally take statements from the backs of cars.’
‘No, no, it’s not about her. Well, not really.’ He drags his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking out at all angles in small fuzzy tufts. ‘God, this is all so embarrassing. I swear I don’t know who this Alice/Maryanne, woman is. Really, I don’t.’ He pauses. ‘But I do know what Saskia is. I’ve known for a while now. By pure accident. Despite what my wife thinks, I do listen sometimes and I did check in on the flat . . .’ It’s paining him to go further.
Parnell let’s out a knowing ‘Ah’ and pulls up on a verge, a little to the side of the main gate. A BMW squeezes through and the female driver gives a confused wave to Nate Hicks. He looks mortified which makes me toasty warm inside.
‘So you’ve known your tenant is a prostitute for a while?’ I say, acting like I’m just getting it all straight in my head. ‘But you didn’t see fit to tell your wife?’
It’s obvious where this is heading but it’s fun watching him squirm.
‘No, I didn’t. I couldn’t, we . . . I don’t know how it . . . I’ve never done anything . .
.’
Parnell hasn’t got time for bluster, he’s got the twins’ carol concert tonight. ‘Shall I help you, Mr Hicks? You had sex with Saskia French, yes?’
He looks at us both, all hunched-up shoulders and hangdog eyes. In his stripy rugby top and cheeks reddened by the cold – or shame – he resembles an overgrown schoolboy. I turn back to the front to hide my disdain.
‘Was it a financial arrangement?’ asks Parnell.
‘The first couple of times and then it became more of a, well, a thing.’
‘A thing?’
He coughs, awkwardly. ‘More of a relationship. An affair. In her mind anyway. I wanted to cool things.’
I undo my seatbelt, swivel a whole 180 so I can face him fully again. ‘And why are you telling us this?’
It’s not a pointed question. I’m genuinely confused. You see, to a Murder Detective, everything is relevant. Every hazy-eyed anecdote, every inconsequential detail, all the way down to what brand of cereal the victim liked to eat at the weekend could prove to be the shiny gold nugget that leads to a break. But to a shyster like Nate Hicks, who clearly has a rather flexible relationship with the truth, everything he reveals is on a strictly need-to-know basis. And I’m not quite understanding why he thinks we need to know this.
I get my answer, for what it’s worth.
‘I’m just trying to make sense of this dead woman thing.’
Parnell shoots me a sideways glance. ‘Aren’t we all, Mr Hicks? So any information you have, let’s hear it.’
‘Well, it’s not really information, as such.’ He shuffles to the middle of the back seat, sits forward, head parked between me and Parnell like a boulder. ‘I suppose you’d call it more a hypothesis . . .’
1998
Sunday 31st May
It was late Sunday evening when we first heard about Maryanne. Mum was cleaning my ears in front of the fire and Dad was trying, and failing, to teach Noel the rules of poker when the back door slammed and in flounced Jacqui, our resident doom-sayer, keen to share her latest scoop.
‘Gone. Kidnapped. Kaput.’ She shrugged, kicking off her Buffalos like she hadn’t a care, or a missing friend, in the world.
It transpired, or so the official line went, that Maryanne had gone out the night before to buy hairspray and hadn’t been home since. Jonjo Doyle and her moron brother had been searching all around the place but now the Guards had been called and the word around town was that Pat Hannon had killed her.
Gran blessed herself and told Jacqui to shut up. Said she shouldn’t be saying such wicked things when Nora Hannon wasn’t yet cold in the ground, but Jacqui stood firm, insisting the theory had legs as Maryanne had called him ‘a wankstain’ in the pub and everyone knew he’d killed his wife to collect the life insurance, so maybe he’d got a taste for it?
Maybe he needed younger blood to satisfy his insatiable murderous lust? Fresh meat, she called it.
Mum said Jacqui was banned from watching eighteen certificates from now on, and anyway, wasn’t it a bit early to be talking of anyone killing anyone? Maryanne was seventeen, for God’s sake. Hadn’t she and Auntie Brona once gone to Galway to get outfits for a wedding and not come back for two days after latching on to a punk rocker with backstage passes for the Boomtown Rats.
Gran remembered this, which surprised us all because lately Gran remembered less and less, often confusing Mum’s name with the dog’s and always asking if it was busy in town when you’d only come back from the toilet. But just the mention of Mum’s cross-county escapades seemed to ignite a momentary spark.
‘Tinkers, the pair of you. You put the heart crossways in me.’
Mum welled up at this, probably grateful for the reminder that she’d once been the child and Gran had been the carer, but then Noel killed the moment by saying he hoped Maryanne was dead and fair play to Pat Hannon if it was true. (She’d laughed at his tram-lines and Noel was always one for holding wholly disproportionate grudges.)
And all the time, Dad said nothing.
In the corner of the room, on a relic of a TV, Nick Cotton was back in EastEnders, snarling at the locals and harrassing his ‘Ma’ for cash. I instantly thought of Noel and glared at him across the hearth, channelling waves of pure poison, willing the legs of his chair to cave in so he’d fall into the fire, but most of all wishing that he’d harrass our ma for cash sometimes instead of always taking mine. But then big kids were always taking what they wanted from little kids.
Maryanne Doyle had taken my Tinkerbell and now she’d gone missing.
16
‘Well, I’m glad I’ve got a double shot eggnog latte for this one.’ Steele shakes her head, exasperated. ‘So let me get this right, his grand hypothesis is that supposed bunny-boiler Saskia French might have sent Alice Lapaine to his house to deliver a message because he’d stopped taking her calls and blocked her everywhere?’
‘It’s a bit teenage,’ I say. ‘She seemed perfectly capable of fighting her own battles to me.’
Christmas Eve. It’s not even seven a.m. and there’s already a few of us clamouring for space around Steele’s electric heater, thawing out our limbs while trying to get our heads around this mindfuck of a case.
‘Oi, budge over.’ Parnell nudges me with his hip. ‘You forget I’m older than you, Kinsella. An Arctic chill could finish me off.’ I laugh. ‘It’s true, I saw a poster in the doctor’s.’
At least Parnell’s trying to be funny. Renée and Flowers clearly haven’t had their Weetabix yet if their moods are anything to go by.
‘So what does this Saskia say about it?’ grunts Flowers.
I wouldn’t know. Parnell insisted on dropping me home on the way back from the Hickses’ last night, which left him with the happy task of wrangling with Saskia again and me to a night of ‘normal stuff’ – as coined by the woman herself.
Washing. Tidying. Microwaving. Dodging phone calls from my sister.
Starting to write out Christmas cards before deciding it’s nearly Christmas anyway and what’s the point.
With the exception of Parnell, of course. My work-dad gets a card depicting a glittery robin perched on an equally glittery branch. He’s already moaning that he’s covered in the bloody stuff.
‘What did Saskia say?’ repeats Parnell, blowing hot breath into his glittery hands. ‘Well, in between saying that Forensics were “taking fucking liberties” and stressing about having to pack to go to her parents’ today, she confirmed, yes, they were having an affair but no, she didn’t send anyone to the house.’
‘Alice could have gone to the Hickses’ under her own steam?’ I suggest. ‘Maybe she found out about the affair with Saskia and decided to blackmail Nate Hicks. We know she needed money.’
‘Which gives him motive to kill her,’ says Flowers, stating the bleeding obvious.
Steele doesn’t look too excited. ‘Yeah, OK, maybe it does, but it’s just that – a maybe. We’ve got no proof whatsoever that Maryanne had any knowledge of Saskia and Nate’s affair. And also, why blackmail him? There can’t have been a shortage of married men frequenting that flat with guilty consciences and deep pockets. Why pick on the lover of your newfound flatmate? Doesn’t make sense.”
‘Maybe Saskia put her up to it and they were going to share the spoils?’ I say.
‘Another “maybe” but that one sits a bit better.’ Steele chews her lip, twists the holder on her coffee cup. ‘Devil’s advocate, but what do we think about Saskia French as a suspect. She didn’t report her missing, that’s dodgy, surely?’
Parnell’s open to it. ‘We said we couldn’t completely rule out a woman. And she’s statuesque enough.’
‘Alibi?’ croaks Renée.
‘Another Home Alone,’ I say. ‘Damn these early morning murders, eh.’ I give up trying to claim my patch of heat and plonk myself in the corner instead. ‘What’s her motive, though?’
Steele’s not bothered about motive. Means, opportunity and watertight forensics are her Holy Trinity. As
long as she’s got the who, the when and the how, she’s happy to leave it to the psychiatrists to impress everybody with the why.
Parnell’s a big fan of motive, though. He likes things tidy. ‘Wouldn’t be the first fight in a brothel to turn nasty. And as they’re usually over money or men, that obviously brings us back to Nate Hicks.’
I have to say it. ‘I’m not convinced she was working in that flat, you know. No semen, no condom residue.’ I look to Parnell. ‘And do you remember, Saskia said she assumed she saw her clients off the premises, so we haven’t even got a confirmed sighting of her with a punter.’
Steele sweeps her eyes across us, deadly serious. ‘While we’re on the subject of confirmed sightings, how definite are we that it was Alice on the Hickses’ road, because we’re basing an awful lot of hypotheses around it, m’dears.’
‘It’s not a foolproof ID at the gates,’ I admit. ‘But we’ve definitely got her in the café down the road and it’s just too much coincidence to be anyone else, surely?’
‘Mmmm,’ says Steele. It’s a long ‘Mmmm.’ One that says there’s a big gulf between a coincidence and a murder conviction. ‘Right, let’s stop hypothesising for a minute and look at the latest facts. I’ve had it off-the-record from Forensics that Saskia French’s flat is unlikely to be the primary crime scene, nothing obvious flagged up. We’re going to have to wait until after Christmas for Maryanne’s clothes, bedding etc., but who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky there – I think we’re due some luck, don’t you?’ Steele drapes another cardigan over her shoulders, scowls at the heater. ‘So what else? Tox screen’s come back, nothing exciting there, either. Craig and Ben went over to Silks last night – bless Benny-boy, all those near-naked honeys, Christmas really did come early – anyway, the bar-staff recognised Saskia but not Maryanne, and they don’t have CCTV for the night Saskia says she met Maryanne as they only keep the tapes for twenty-one days. We’ve got the rest though so that will keep someone busy after Christmas, Emily or Ben probably. Oh, and there’s still nothing on the car.’