by Caz Frear
Parnell turns to Renée. ‘We’ve checked the Hickses’ and Saskia’s names with Thomas Lapaine, right?’
Steele steamrollers on, Renée doesn’t get a look-in. ‘Oh, don’t talk to me about Thomas frigging Lapaine. He’s about as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest. Knows nothing about his wife apart from what she wanted him to know.’ Parnell gives a duty-bound harrumph but it’s jovial, mischievous. ‘We’re still keeping tabs on him though. Seth’s been stalking his “paramour”, Abigail Shawcroft, on Facebook and he reckons Lapaine might have given her the heave-ho. She’s been posting all these cryptic quotes about heartbreak and self-reliance: “Let your tears water the seeds of your future happiness”, that sort of crap. So if he has dumped her, she’s definitely worth a re-interview, see if we can crack that alibi. Renée, sit her down for a woman-to-woman, OK?’ Renée nods.
‘You know what’s bugging me,’ I say, keen to shift the focus – Thomas Lapaine isn’t our guy, I’m almost sure of it. She went back to using her using her original name when she came to London. That’s certainly how Saskia and the other girl at the flat knew her. Why would she do that?
‘Going back to her roots.’ says Renée.
Steele points at her. ‘Aha, which brings me to Mulderrin.’ A heat sweeps through me, entirely unwelcome. ‘Who fancies a trip after Christmas?’ she says, all smiles. ‘I’m still not convinced there’s anything there but as we’re hardly drowning in leads, I think we need to get over there to get a sense of things ourselves. And you never know, maybe Alice, Maryanne, whoever, had been in contact with someone from her past and they’d been keeping it secret? If we get in front of them, there’s more chance of dragging it out, right? But if there’s nothing to drag out, if we get nothing, then fine. We can officially downgrade it as a line of enquiry.’
‘I’ll go.’ My voice sounds funny. For a second I wonder if it was even me who said it.
‘Bingo. Well done, Kinsella.’
Steele claps her hands together like it’s the perfect answer she was looking for and in truth, it probably was. For all her ‘as long as you report to me’ declarations, I suspect she’d still prefer me on the fringes, chasing flimsy leads in other countries rather than drilling too close to the centre of the case.
If only she knew.
Steele stands up. Class dismissed. ‘OK, I think that’s it, folks. Thanks for coming in at hideous o’clock but as you know, I’m tied up with Blake from eight thirty so needs must and all that. See what you can get done today – Nate Hicks’ alibi is priority but have a bit of a general dig into him as well – and then for God’s sake, have a Merry bloody Christmas. We’ll get your flight sorted for Monday, Cat.’ To her credit she waits until everyone’s left the room and walked a few paces out of earshot. ‘So make sure you call Dolores – Dr Allen – to see if you can shift your afternoon slot to earlier, OK? Don’t think you’re getting out of it that easily.’
*
I go back to my desk and spend the morning acting like the thought of Mulderrin hasn’t flayed a thick layer of skin from my bones. For four hours straight I flit around the office like a worker bee high on pollen – making tea, chatting theories, powering through paperwork and swearing at spreadsheets. I even think about calling my sister back just to have my mind stuffed full of benign festive fluff, but I haven’t quite decided what I’m doing for Christmas Day and I’m not ready to have that fight yet.
As usual I turn to Parnell to neutralise my angst.
‘So did you make it back for your concert last night?’
‘I did.’ He leans over, offers me a homemade mince pie. ‘Raced all the way back to north London, even did a dodgy u-turn on Stroud Green Road, and do you know what their very important roles were?’ I sense we’re not talking top billing here. ‘Curious sheep,’ he says, laughing. ‘That’s exactly what it said in the programme – Joe and James Parnell: Curious sheep.
And I bet you died of pride anyway. The year I was Mary, Dad had to drive ‘something’ to Manchester at the last minute.
I laugh along. ‘What were they curious about?’
‘God knows? The Angel of the Lord appearing, I think, but bless them, they’re not born thespians. Joe was more of a fidgety sheep and James had his back to the audience the whole time.’
‘A cantankerous sheep?’
‘’Bout right,’ he says, chuckling again.
With my emotions temporarily quietened, I call Aiden Doyle. Just a quick courtesy call to say I’m going to be asking questions around Mulderrin. I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed when the answerphone clicks in and I end up leaving a long, garbled explanation about when and who and why and the cost of last-minute flights, along with my hopes that he has a Bearable Christmas, if not a Happy Christmas, in the light of Maryanne and his dad not being well blah blah blah. I’m still rambling on as the answer machine cuts out.
Parnell eyes me strangely. I put the phone down quickly and distract him with a question.
‘Any more possible sightings, Boss? Recent or the “Lost Years”?’
Parnell picks up a stack of papers, jerks them at me. ‘Plenty of them, nothing that exciting though. Craig and Ben are out all day following up but I’m not holding my breath based on any of the call details. No one’s said they saw her with anyone, and there’s only a few who are absolutely sure it was her.’
I leaf through them anyway, all sixty-seven of them. I’m practically comatose and thinking about lunch when my phone rings. It’s the front desk.
‘Kinsella.’
‘Lady downstairs asking for you, pet.’
There’s a drunk man singing in the background. I think I can just make out that Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny cock.
Oh, the magic of working Christmas Eve.
‘Does this lady have a name?’ I say – or holler, based on Parnell’s reactions.
The front desk clerk raises his voice again. ‘She does, and she told me, but we’ve got a D&D down here – quite the Dean Martin, can you hear him? – so I couldn’t hear her properly, pet, sorry.’
‘No worries, I’ll be down in a jiffy.’
With any luck I’ll catch the next verse.
17
For a second I don’t recognise her. She’s wearing a khaki funnel coat zipped up to her nose and her hair’s scraped back tight, not swishing around her shoulders in all its usual caramel and honey-blonde loveliness. The frown-line gives her away though. That, and the expensive shopping bags arranged neatly around her feet like pets – Liberty, Symthson, Penhaligon, Cos. She’s staring into space – completely oblivious to the shit-faced chanteur in the snowman onesie, now adding another charge to his sheet by belting out a racist version of ‘Deck the Halls’, peppered with the odd shout of ‘No Surrender to the IRA’. She startles when she sees me, as if she’s forgotten where she is and why she’s here.
‘Mrs Hicks.’
She stands up quickly and the pull-down chair snaps back against the wall, making her jump. She apologises, gathers up her bags, flustered.
‘Gina, please. I’m so sorry to drop in like this, are you busy?’
I swipe my pass and push the door. ‘Of course not, come through.’
I try the squishy room first – I’ve got a feeling this could be a squishy room conversation – but there’s an engaged sign slapped across and a horrible keening noise coming from inside. Some pour soul on the rough end of something. I show her into one of the main interview rooms and resist the urge to thank her for instantly making the room smell nicer.
She takes her coat off. Turns down an offer of tea.
‘So what can I do for you, Gina?’ My mind’s throwing out a hundred hypotheses, the main one being that she’s not a complete imbecile and she knows it shouldn’t have taken her husband ten minutes to steward us safely out of the main gates last night, and if she can’t get answers from him, she wants answers from me. ‘I assume you weren’t just passing?’ I say, nudging the Smythson ba
g with my boot. ‘Or is there any chance that’s for me? I’d die for one of their notebooks.’
She glances down. ‘Oh these.’ Again, that slight sense of disorientation. ‘Have it. I’m serious. I’ve bought them enough already, more than they deserve.’ She actually lifts up the bag and offers it to me. I shake my head, a little embarrassed. ‘I just needed an excuse to come into town. To come here.’
I say nothing and study her face. It’s less remarkable than I’d built it up to be. Attractive but in a commonplace sort of way. The lighting in these rooms are a great leveller.
She lets out a deep breath. ‘I knew her, you see. Alice.’ She pauses, rephrases. ‘Well, I didn’t know her, not really. Our paths crossed in the past – briefly but intensely, you might say.’
Not what I was expecting. There’s a pulsing at the top of my head. A frontal lobe reminder that now’s the time to use my good judgement and go and get Parnell.
But she asked to speak to me specifically.
I don’t want to panic her before we’ve even got going.
It’s also for this reason that I hold back the words, ‘lying to a police officer’, although I do let her know that I need to record everything and then I caution her, in my least cautionary voice possible.
‘God, I don’t know where to start.’ She arches her head right back. I hear the tension crunching through her neck. ‘I just tried to do a good thing and now I’m caught up in all this. I’m so sorry I lied, I truly am. I just . . .’
‘Just start at the beginning,’ I say, my voice as soft as a coo. ‘It’s fine, you’re doing the right thing, Gina.’
‘OK.’ She lays her palms flat on the table, steadies herself like it’s a business pitch. ‘About four years ago, Nate and I were in a bad place. Really bad. We’d been having IVF and it just wasn’t happening and well, it was tearing us apart. I think it’s because we’d both had kids with other people.’ My face says it all. ‘Oh right, sorry, Leo’s mine, Amber’s Nate’s. I mean, Amber was only four when we got together and Leo was only seven so we very much consider them our own.’ She gives a sad little sniff. ‘Nate’s wife died a year after Amber was born, you see. An undetected heart defect.’ Suddenly, her features harden. ‘And my ex is a complete waster who’s never bothered with Leo so it was perfect, we became an instant little family.’
‘But it’s natural to want children together.’
She lowers her gaze, nods at the table. ‘And we just assumed we would. Took it for granted, as you do. And when it didn’t happen . . . well, it’s cruel and it’s not logical, but when you’ve made a baby with someone else, but you can’t make a baby with your current partner, it kind of does something. It makes you view them differently, view your relationship differently. It did us, anyway, I can’t speak for everyone. But we ended up resenting each other, I suppose. It was just an incredibly bad time. Anyway, Nate ended up burying himself in work, which means burying himself in client dinners, and I was on my own night after night with my grief.’ Her eyes will me to understand. ‘I know it sounds dramatic, but that’s what it felt like, grief.’
‘I understand,’ I say, as soothing as I can. ‘And Alice, where does she come in?’
A deep sigh. ‘So, as I say, Nate buried himself in work, I buried myself in the internet. IVF forums. Support forums, that sort of thing. It was just a way to pass the time at first but then you start to recognise certain names, the regular posters, and you forge friendships in a weird type of way.’
‘And you met Alice on one of these forums?’
Another nod. ‘You end up talking about all sorts, really. It’s not all tales of woe, you find yourself chatting about what’s on TV, restaurants, husbands, everything. And I’d been chatting to Alice quite a bit and one day I just mentioned how I’d been to Hampton Court and how nice it was to have such a magnificent palace not too far away, and she said, “Oh, we must live fairly close then” and it turns out we did – she was Thames Ditton, right? Anyway, it went from there, really. We started chatting offline and arranged to meet up. It wasn’t a big deal, we just said we’d grab a coffee next time I was down her way or if she was around mine . . .’
‘So she gave you the impression she made regular trips into London?’
She gives a small shrug. ‘I suppose so, yes.’
I note this down. ‘OK, so you met up?’
‘Yes, just a few times. Once when I had to pop down her way to buy some hockey stuff for Amber, and then a couple of times at the café near me. The Donatella Caffé, except it wasn’t called that then. I forget the name.’
‘So what did she tell you about herself?’
She leans in, gossipy. ‘Well, this is it, I ended up doing most of the talking. She seemed quite shy in person and I knew quickly that we weren’t going to become best buddies but what I do remember though, is that she and her husband had only been trying for a year or so and she was still young, but she was really, really distressed that it hadn’t happened for them.’ She lets out a shrill laugh. ‘Here was I in my early forties, and we’d been trying for years, and yet it was me that ended up counselling her.’
‘Sounds frustrating.’
‘It was. It was intense. That’s why I phased her out, really. Made excuses not to meet up and so on. She didn’t seem that bothered. And then that sort of coincided with Nate and I getting back on track and well, you’ve seen where that led.’
‘You got your happy ending.’
She smiles. ‘I suppose I did, didn’t I? Doesn’t always feel like that when they’re doing a poo on the floor in John Lewis or wanting to play picnics at three in the morning.’
I laugh. She’s good company. I can see why Alice opened up to her.
‘Seriously, it’s so much harder when you’re that bit older.’ She sizes me up. ‘What are you, mid-twenties? Well, don’t leave it too late would be my advice. You just don’t have the energy. I was twenty-eight when I had Leo – whole different ball game.’
I smile. ‘I’ll bear it in mind. So you hadn’t seen Alice since then, until when?’
She looks rocked by the memory. ‘About a month ago, maybe a bit less. She just turned up out of the blue. Ambushed me. Not at the house but as I was coming up to the main gates. I had the twins in the buggy. Honestly I’ll never forget her face when she saw them.’
‘Did you feel threatened?’
She’s quick to respond. ‘No, no, nothing like that. She just looked . . . despairing. I know it’s stupid but I felt awful. Almost like I’d let her down. I know it sounds ridiculous.’
‘How did she know where you lived?’
A tiny vexed shake of the head. ‘She’d actually waited in the café on the main road – a few times, she told me – assuming I’d go past at some point and then she followed me.’
‘And what did she want?’
‘I’ll tell you what I wanted, Detective Kinsella.’
‘Cat, please.’
‘I wanted to get her away from my road, Cat. Nate was due back any minute and he didn’t know anything about my forum “adventures” and I wanted to keep it that way.’ Those pleading eyes again. ‘The whole IVF thing had nearly broken us. It was such an awful, awful time and I didn’t want it all coming back up again.’
I nod an understanding that I think is part-genuine.
She goes on. ‘So I left the twins with Leo – I said I’d left my card in Waitrose and had to go back – and I drove us to King George’s Park. She was in a dreadful state, she looked awful.’
‘Awful, how?’
‘Not scruffy exactly, but worn out. Definitely not how I remembered her. Like she’d kind of given up on life, I suppose.’
‘So what did she want?’ I repeat.
She gives me a flat stare. ‘Money. She said she’d left her husband, that the IVF had finally broken them, and that she needed some time to figure out what she was doing but she couldn’t support herself. It was all a bit pathetic to be honest.’
Which fit
s, although there’s something I’m struggling to get my head around.
‘She needs money so she runs to someone she met for a few coffees, four years ago?’
Her eyes widen in agreement. ‘I know! It’s mad, isn’t it? But she said she remembered how kind I’d been to her back then, how supportive, and how I was probably the only person who’d understand because Nate and I had nearly reached a similar point. She said she didn’t have any close family or friends she could turn to.’
Which fits.
‘I just felt so sorry for her. And I felt guilty. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through it but I felt so wretched that she’d seen me with the twins. I know how it feels to see other people have what you want so badly. And with me being ten years older, it must have seemed doubly unfair.’
‘So did you give her any money?’
‘I had sixty pounds in my purse and I gave her that. But I told her, and it was the truth, that I couldn’t give her any more. Nate’s not particularly stingy or controlling around money, but I couldn’t explain away a big chunk of cash, even if I’d wanted to.’
‘And she was OK with this?’
‘Yes, she wasn’t being aggressive, if that’s what you’re thinking. She said she completely understood, and then she said she might have to consider going back to her husband, at least for a while, but that she was certain he was having an affair and it was all so humiliating.’ Her eyes are on the cusp of watery. ‘That pressed a nerve, you could say. Leo’s father, if you can use the term, cheated on me and I stayed with him because I thought I had no other option at the time, and that’s exactly the word for it: humiliating.’