by Caz Frear
‘I can understand that. I’m sensing it didn’t, though?’
He swills the foam around at the bottom of his pint. ‘It was just plain weird, hearing him talk about “Alice”. And the way he described her too – quiet, passive. I nearly said, “Who? Motormouth Maryanne?” a few times.’ He takes a sad little breath. ‘I dunno, I just came away feeling further away from her – Maryanne, that is. I mean, this Alice woman, I don’t know her at all, and I can’t grieve for someone I didn’t even know.’ He rubs at his face. ‘God, I’m talking some existential shite this evening, aren’t I?’
He’s talking sweet, perfect sense to me. I hope my face shows it.
‘He’s going back to Sydney,’ he adds.
My investigative ears prick up. ‘He is? When? Soon?’
‘Soon-ish. Well, that’s what he reckons, anyway. Said he wishes they’d never left, they were happy there apparently. I said he shouldn’t rush into anything. I said it’s easy to make the wrong decision when you’re raw, but he just looked at me as if to say, “Who are you to tell me what I should do?” And he’s right. Who am I? I don’t know him. I didn’t know “Alice”. We’re all just strangers to each other.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. There is one reason I’m glad I met him, you know. He told me about all the places they lived overseas, and how he’d met her in Brighton.’ I smile encouragingly although I don’t know where he’s headed. ‘And it made me think – she always wanted to be by the coast, didn’t she? And he said that himself – that this Thames Ditton place was a massive compromise for her, but at least she was by the river. So I’m thinking that must mean she’d been happy growing up in Mulderrin, right? I mean, we were only a mile’s walk from the Atlantic fucking ocean. Just made me feel better to think she hadn’t completely forgotten where she came from, even if life at home was shite a lot of the time.’
Speaking of. ‘How is your dad?’
‘Ah sure, not good, Cat, not good.’ He looks out the window again. I follow his gaze but I’m not looking at Nelson’s Column or the skeletal, rider-less horse standing on top of the Fourth Plinth. I’m looking at his reflection. His faraway, sad expression.
‘If there’s anything I can do?’ It’s woefully inadequate but it’s all I can think to say.
He brightens quickly. ‘You could let me take you out for dinner sometime. Sometime soon,’ he adds, quickly. ‘Or I could cook you dinner? If you’ve got a particular fondness for cheese and ham toasties or microwaved pizza, I’m your man.’
‘How about cheese and beans toasties?’
He rolls his eyes. ‘Fuck’s sake. There’s always one who goes off-menu, isn’t there?’
I like him. I really like him.
*
My moonstruck spell is broken by the hypothermic heap waiting on my doorstep when I get home. I didn’t even know she knew my address. I’ve always kept things deliberately vague.
Lesson sorely learned. This is what happens when you don’t answer your phone.
‘Jacqs, what are doing here, it’s freezing? How long have you been there?’
She doesn’t answer but the colour of her nose tells me it’s been a while. I open the front door, half-hoping to hear noise, but realistically, it’s good that the Dawsons still aren’t back.
They really don’t need to see this.
I walk inside, slip off my coat and hang it at the bottom of the bannister. Jacqui doesn’t follow. ‘Are you coming in then?’ Her eyes bore into me. ‘Look, I’m shutting the door, Jacqs, so make up your mind.’
She steps into the hall and looks around, baffled by the framed artwork and expensive Turkish rugs. I’m about to ask what her problem is but then it dawns on me. She thinks this is all mine. That I’m renting this whole place. It doesn’t occur to her that some people live in ten by eight attic rooms and have two shelves assigned for their food.
‘Tea?’ I say, heading towards the kitchen. ‘You look like you could do with a hot drink.’
‘Fucking tea?’
They’re only two words, not even a coherent statement, let alone a sentence, but these two words sound truer than anything Jacqui’s said in a long time. She’s hardly sworn in years.
‘OK, do you want some fucking tea?’ I know it’s a mistake as soon as I say it.
She steps towards me. ‘Why do you do it, Cat?’ Under the hall light I see it’s not just her nose that’s red, she’s been crying. ‘Why do you have to make everything so unbearable? Can’t you accept people for what they are?’
I drop heavily onto the bottom stair. This isn’t going to be a cosy kitchen type of chat. ‘By people, I take it you mean Dad. What’s he been saying?’
Her face twists in indignation. ‘Nothing! That’s the whole point. He won’t answer my calls. He won’t answer the door. I even asked for him in the pub on Sunday night but they said he wasn’t around, even though I could clearly see the lights on upstairs.’
‘Maybe he . . .’
‘Maybe he what, Cat? Maybe he’s decided daughters are too much hassle and he’s cut me off too. What exactly did you say to him on Christmas night?’
I’m too tired for this, too unprepared. I’ve dreamed of having this conversation with Jacqui – for her to spar with me, face things head-on – but just this once I wish she’d stick her head right back in the sand.
‘We had a disagreement, that’s all, nothing for you to . . .’
‘Fuck off, Cat. You and Dad don’t “disagree”, you destroy each other.’ So she does notice. ‘I knew you were both in the kitchen, on Christmas night. I said to Ash, “oh here we go,” but when I didn’t hear any shouting, I thought maybe you were talking – you know, talking like normal people. Next thing I know, the door slams and Dad’s walking into the living room and ordering us to leave.’ She pounds her chest with a gloved fist. ‘Us! Me, Ash and Finn. So Ash says he’s drunk too much to drive and that a taxi back to Edgware will cost a fortune on Christmas night and Dad just whips out two twenties and says, “Now get out of my house please, I’ve already asked you nicely.”’
I can hardly believe it. ‘He kicked out Finn?’
‘Well, not exactly,’ she admits. ‘He did say we could leave Finn where he was, but I was livid, Cat. I said, if we’re not welcome nor’s Finn, so then I had to wake Finn up, put him in the taxi in his PJs.’
There isn’t an affirmation self-congratulatory enough, or a vat of wine big enough, to stop me feeling awful about this until the day I die. I push my fingers deep into my sockets to try to blur the image of a confused and sleepy Finn, shivering in his dinosaur PJs.
‘I’m so sorry. Really, I am.’ I want to take her hand but I know she’ll swipe it away. ‘He shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I don’t understand why he did. Can you see now that he’s an arsehole?’
Her voice is firm. ‘I can see that he must have been massively upset about something.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, stop sugar-coating him.’
She kneels down, eye-to-eye. ‘What, like how you sugar-coat Mum? Canonise her, even. I loved her too, Cat, but she wasn’t perfect.’
‘So? Who is?’ I snap back.
Jacqui cranes her neck closer. ‘Have you ever wondered why an angel like Mum would stay with such a supposed “arsehole” as Dad?’
Yes, many times. I’ve come up with, in no particular order – love, money, stability, religion, habit, fear of the unknown and low self-esteem. But I’m not about to share these.
Instead I say, ‘Your point is?’
‘Well, just that Dad can’t be all bad. Not if the holier-than-thou Ellen McBride loved him.’
I catch fire. ‘Show some fucking respect, Jacqs, that’s Mum you’re talking about.’
‘And she had her faults, Cat. She could be so moody sometimes, remember? Nothing was ever good enough. Even the way she drew the curtains could make you feel like you’d somehow disappointed her when she was in one of her sulks.’
‘At least
she made us feel safe.’
She jerks her head back, bewildered. ‘I literally don’t know what you mean by that? Dad’s always made me feel safe. God, I don’t know where we’d be if . . .’
‘You’re talking about money, Jacqs.’
A nasty expression. ‘Oh, and you’re not?’
This sideswipes me. Money?
Jacqui takes my silence as confirmation of something, she almost looks pleased. ‘I had a feeling it was about that,’ she says, nodding to herself, ‘But I wanted to hear it from you. I told Dad not to mention it, I said you’d kick off, I told him, but obviously he wanted to be straight with you.’ She looks around again, gives a haughty little sniff. ‘I mean, you’re obviously doing OK, and we’re going to need that loft-conversion if we have another baby. And we said it should be a loan but Dad insisted . . .’
A loan.
A fucking loft conversion.
That’s what she thinks this is about?
Rage rips through me like a forest fire. I try counting to ten, focusing on my breathing, thinking about Aiden Doyle and the shards of possibility there.
But, of course, there are no possibilities. There never can be. Because he is Maryanne Doyle’s brother and my father is . . .
What?
‘Do you really want to know, Jacqs?’ I stand up. ‘Do you really want to know what this is about, and what I think Dad’s capable of?’ The flat look on her face says ‘we’ve been here before’ and it only serves to pour petrol on the ravaging blaze. ‘Wait there.’
I fly up the stairs before reason sets in and pull the shoebox out from under my bed.
Underneath the family photos that Mum took in Mulderrin and the red fluffy notepad where I write the unspeakable things, something glitters, as good as new.
I haven’t taken it out for years. A stupid, supernatural fear of what it could unleash, maybe? But then hell was unleashed the minute that desk clerk walked into our squad room and said, ‘A body. A woman. Leamington Square.’
I fly back down the stairs, resolute.
‘This.’ I hold the Tinkerbell pendant between my thumb and my forefinger. Jacqui doesn’t blink. ‘Do you remember this?’
Her head moves up and down, then side to side, as if to say, ‘Yes, I remember. No, I don’t have the faintest idea why you’re showing it to me.’
‘I found this in the boot of Dad’s car in Mulderrin. It was the day we were leaving and I was helping him clear all the crap out.’ Jacqui’s chin retreats into her neck – she knows this is bad but she doesn’t know why. ‘I gave this to Maryanne Doyle the day before she went missing. She said it was gorgeous and that it matched her belly-button ring, and because she was so bloody pretty and I was so bloody gormless, I said she could have it.’
She starts backing down the hall, more wary of me than of what this could mean about Dad. I can hear her later;
‘Seriously, Ash, she’s not well. She’s finally flipped. I was frightened.’
Her hand is on the door-catch and I realise she’s going to leave without saying a single solitary word, leaving me with no choice but to spell it out it out to her. No sugar-coating. No filtering.
No-holds-barred.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying? I gave it to Maryanne Doyle, Jacqs. She put it in her pocket and I didn’t see it again. So how did it end up in the boot of Dad’s car? What was Maryanne Doyle doing in the boot of Dad’s car?’
24
I’ve never subscribed to the cult of New Year’s Eve. Never grasped the fascination. All that reflecting on the past and hoping for the future always strikes me as a profoundly bad idea when you’ve been poisoning your body for seven days straight, and your nervous system’s shot to pieces by marathon-style boozing and energy-sapping grub.
It’s especially a bad idea at five a.m., when you’re alone and lying in the pitch-black silence, waiting for the orange glow of the streetlamps to bring another dark night of the soul to a close.
Good old five a.m., though.
There’s comfort to be found in consistency.
Unsurprisingly, sleep was fractured last night. Just the odd twenty-minute snatch dreaming of shadowed, wailing women emerging from dark corners to plead with me about something?
Mary Shelley had Frankenstein haunting her ‘midnight pillow’. Basically, I’d had Jacqui.
Around three a.m., I’d switched the light on and pounded out a text out to my sister. An incoherent essay full of pseudo-apologies and rambling justifications. The worst kind of grovel – ‘I’m really sorry, but . . .’
Thankfully I hadn’t sent it.
I hadn’t sent the one I’d written to Aiden Doyle either.
Thanks for the drink. Don’t think we should meet up again. Sorry. Cat x.
SMS 3.32 a.m.
I stir myself and drift zombie-like into the shower. The water’s warm but sparse, another thing in this house that needs fixing. Still in my towel, I mainline carbs and caffeine for half an hour, sitting on the stair where my relationship with Jacqui ended last night until I realise I’m shivering. Proper cartoon shivering. I crank the heating up and go back upstairs. Fill my room with the tinny, mindless sounds of breakfast TV.
A shower. Carbs. Caffeine. Vacuous noise. Usually a winning combination for shaking off the worst of the bad-night blues but I can’t seem to find solace today. My heart’s too heavy and my chest’s too tight and for the first time ever I think about phoning in sick.
That is, until Parnell calls.
‘Boss,’ I croak, giving myself the option depending on what he has to say. ‘You’re up early, you all right?’
His voice sounds odd, softer. ‘Better to be a lark than an owl, Kinsella, and in answer to your question, no, I’m not all right.’
I mute the TV, silencing a far-too-chipper brunette preaching about how to get a flat stomach in twelve hours. For the ‘big night’ as she calls it.
‘Why? What’s happened? You sound weird?’
What’s happened to Parnell is a tooth abscess, ‘more painful than labour’ he insists as Maggie shouts obscenities in the background. What’s happened to our case is a call from Parnell’s ‘snout’, Mrs Stevens, to say that ‘a dark woman with a suitcase’ turned up at Saskia French’s flat last night and was heard saying to someone on her phone that she’d come back the next morning when she’d found her spare key.
Which leaves me sitting outside Ophelia Mansions for nearly four hours, cursing this woman and her loose definition of the word ‘morning’, and Parnell sitting in the emergency dentist’s chair, cursing himself for not taking better care of his teeth.
Just after noon she turns up. As we climb the six flights of stairs, I give the woman with the mellow-brown skin and the cut-glass accent a two-minute version of our two-week-old case.
She doesn’t seem too moved by it.
‘Maryanne’s dead?’ She pats the pockets of her Afghan coat, shoving her handbag into my arms so she can rummage for the key. ‘Sorry, I had no idea. I’ve been in the Seychelles for the past three weeks with a client.’
Her name is Naomi Berry. She’s been working ‘with, not for’ Saskia French for several years and she has a key because when Saskia’s away, she likes Naomi to keep half an eye on things. She explains that she called by the flat last night as Saskia lets her keep her work ‘things’ here – it saves her carting them backwards and forwards between here and her respectable life as a trainee acupuncturist in Crouch End – and she was very surprised to find Saskia gone as the week between Christmas and New Year is usually highly lucrative. Clients who’ve been cooped up with their families are desperate to ‘relax’, apparently, and a wintery woodland walk or a quiet pint in the local doesn’t quite cut it.
All this before we’ve got through the bloody front door.
‘So you met Maryanne?’ I finally get a word in.
‘Briefly.’ She jangles the key triumphantly then twists it in the lock. ‘She was here for about a week before I left.’
There’s a mound of literature on the doormat, mainly junk – pizza flyers, taxi cards, letters addressed ‘to the occupier’, and there’s a sweet rank smell stifling the air. Naomi eyes me warily in the dim light – she’s clearly watched her fair share of cop shows – however it’s definitely not the sweet stench of death. Decaying fruit, I reckon. Or an unemptied bin. Naomi puts her case down and goes into the kitchen to investigate. I walk into the living room and start opening windows.
‘So what can you can tell me about Maryanne?’ I say, keeping my question nice and open.
She stands in the doorway holding the offending bin-bag out in front of her like a dead rat. Sundown in the Seychelles must seem like a very distant dream right now.
‘Nothing. Like I said, our paths didn’t cross for long. We barely spoke other than to say hello.’
I nod, leave it at that. ‘Naomi, we really need to speak with Saskia and we haven’t been able to contact her for nearly a week. Have you heard from her at all?’
‘No, but then she knows not to call when I’m holidaying with a client. They tend to want the full “girlfriend experience” and they don’t appreciate your phone going off every two seconds. It rather reminds them of what you are.’ She pauses, pouting. ‘Saskia could be away with a client I suppose?’
I shake my head. ‘She said she was going to her parents. I don’t suppose you know their address, or have a contact number?’
Her lip curls slightly. I’m not sure if it’s the bin-bag or the question. ‘Her parents? As far as I’m aware she never knew her father and her mother died well over a year ago. She was very distressed about it even though they hadn’t spoken in years.’
OK.
I relieve her of the bin-bag, offer to ferry it down the six flights. There’s no thank you, just a tight smile that suggests I’m probably better suited to the chore anyway. On my way down, I put a call in to HQ and get a message to Steele, through Renée, that it looks like there’s no parents in Somerset, or any other rural cider-drinking county for that matter, and therefore we have the very real possibility that Saskia French has done a bunk. Then I call Parnell who I tell the exact same thing.