by Caz Frear
And police testimony means choosing between coming clean – aka career suicide – or taking my chances and lying on the stand.
Committing perjury.
I have to persuade her to tell the truth.
I stand up and walk out. Seth asks where I’m off to so I say ‘bad stomach’ which shuts him down pronto, and I walk down the corridor to the interview room, feeling like it’s the longest mile when it actually can’t be more than twenty steps. I knock on the door and ask to speak to Parnell. He acts like it’s fine and dandy, an almost expected interruption, but when we come face-to-face, his is thunderous, his language distinctly un-Parnell.
‘Fuck’s sake, Kinsella.’ The ‘F’ word from Parnell rocks me and I actually feel tears prick the back of my throat. ‘If you’re after permission to go home, you could have just asked Flowers, you know? He is a sergeant. He does have authority. She was just starting to drop the “no comments” as well. Jesus!’
‘I know. I’ve been watching it in the other room.’ I square my shoulders, lengthen my spine – try to make myself as big as possible. ‘Boss, I want to come in. She might have dropped the “no comments” but she’s not responding to you and Renée, you can see it in her body language. I think I might be able to get through to her, though.’
‘Oh yes? And what makes you Clarice Starling all of a sudden?’ He’s tetchy, not buying it. ‘Anyway, we’ve got enough to charge her without a confession. It’s not ideal but we’ve worked with less.’
Here goes.
‘Seriously? You’ve got enough to charge her with assault, possibly, if Forensics can come up with something to prove she was pushed down the stairs, because Saskia’s statement alone won’t do it, she said she couldn’t see properly. And Gina’s right about Saskia’s character. She’ll be torn to pieces if this goes to trial. As for the murder, you’ve got zilch, and you don’t think she’s got the stomach for it anyway, nor do I. But we both know she knows who did it. She’s just not going to give it up unless she feels she has to.’
And she has to. She absolutely has to.
Seth walks past, shooting me a funny look which thankfully Parnell doesn’t notice. Parnell’s too busy digesting the fact he’s being lectured to by a twenty-six-year-old DC.
‘Look, Boss, it makes sense,’ I say, trying to sound level-headed. ‘I’ve spent the most time with her, I know what buttons to press. Think about it, I’ve been there for every interaction she’s had and it was me she asked for when she came to the station that day.’
‘To tell you a pack of lies, which could mean she thinks you’re gullible.’
His words sting but to be fair, I’m punching below the belt too, implying he and Renée aren’t nailing this. ‘Or it could mean she finds me easy to talk to, compassionate. But, hey, if she thinks I’m gullible, then great. In trying to trick me, she might end up tricking herself. Anything’s worth a shot, surely?’
He doesn’t answer, just walks back into the room and proposes a fifteen-minute break. I assume it’s so he can call the Crime Scene Manager to talk trajectories and get some definitive proof that Maryanne was pushed down the stairs, but it appears I’m wrong.
And it appears I’m in.
While Gina’s taken to use the bathroom, Parnell calls me in and explains to Whiteley that I’ll be taking Renée’s place. Whiteley gives a detached shrug – one inexpensively dressed police officer is much the same as another to him. Renée, completely devoid of any ego, is equally indifferent.
When Gina comes back into the room, she tries to mirror Whiteley’s ‘whatever’ stance but there’s a tiny shift in her demeanour. Not softer, but less pinched. She obviously sees a friendly face in me. Or maybe a stooge? It doesn’t really matter, though, I can work with either.
‘Hello again.’ She sits down, her posture slightly less rigid than before. ‘Were you out celebrating New Year last night, you look like you might have been?’
Parnell’s eyes flick to the tape. The last thing he wants is some barrister on a six-figure retainer claiming the interview was flawed because one of the officers was hungover. Thankfully I haven’t switched it on yet.
I smile. ‘I’m fine thanks, Gina. Had to rush my make-up this morning, that’s all.’
‘Lucky you. I’m still wearing yesterday’s.’
I grant her one more smile before the tape goes on and I open up the case-file. I take out a number of the post-mortem photos and lay them across the table. Whiteley rests his chin in one hand, casting an expressionless glance over the macabre jigsaw.
‘Are these supposed to shock me?’ says Gina, flatly. ‘I don’t mean to sound callous but I was a doctor for fifteen years before I had the twins, mainly general practice but a little time in A&E too, so I’m afraid I’m really not that squeamish.’
‘It’s different when you know the person, surely?’ I say.
‘No comment.’
Here we go again.
‘It’s different when you caused those injuries?’
A look to the ceiling. ‘No comment.’
‘But then, which of these injuries did you cause, Gina?’ I hold up the head shot, point out the deep laceration across the front of Maryanne’s hairless head. ‘I mean, we’re pretty sure you – or your stairs – caused this, but what about this?’ A chest shot this time, a red-blue bruise, possibly knee-shaped between the ribs. ‘Or how about this?’ Finally, Maryanne’s throat – the fingertip bruising, the superficial slashes.
‘No comment.’
‘Was it Nate?’ I say, picking up the pace. ‘Word is, he’s a bit of a “yes” man, but would he kill for you, Gina. Is he that devoted? Or that dependant on you? You and your father’s money?’
‘Fucking Nate.’
It’s not the swearing that startles me, it’s the pure, unfiltered contempt. I take a second to work out how to use this to our advantage but Parnell’s ahead of me, keen to keep prodding the wound while it’s still gaping raw.
‘You and Maryanne fought,’ he states. ‘She fell or you pushed her and then you panicked. You asked Nate to sort it, didn’t you?’
‘No comment.’
He keeps going. ‘Or maybe you didn’t ask him? Maybe Nate got rid of Maryanne of his own accord?
‘No comment.’
‘Are you scared of Nate, Gina? Of what he’s done?’
She sighs. ‘No comment.’
Same old, same old, but there’s a weariness creeping in.
‘Look,’ I tell her. ‘All we need is one fibre or one skin cell to match the trace we’ve got off Maryanne’s body and Nate’s going away, Gina. It’ll be better for you, for your children, if you talk to us – if the truth comes from you.’
At the mention of her children, she draws a sharp breath and closes her eyes.
I now know exactly how to play this.
I start clearing away the photos. ‘You know, you can follow Mr Whiteley’s advice if you want, but my Inspector’s going to charge you anyway, and then do you know where your “no comments” will get you?’ The threat in my voice forces her eyes open. ‘The Old Bailey – Court One, maybe. Media speculation. Strangers judging you, calling you a monster and a bitch on Twitter. And not just for your part in Maryanne’s death, but for what you did all those years ago, all those babies you sold.’ She blinks hard, more a twitch than a blink. ‘Oh yeah, that will all have to come out. Whenever you do finally get out of prison, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about catering for Christmas drinks again. You’ll be a pariah.’
Whiteley clears his throat but I don’t give him the chance. Not when Gina’s looking so horrifically spellbound.
‘You’re not a bad person, Gina. You’ve done some really bad things but you’re not a bad person, I genuinely believe that.’ I nod sideways towards Parnell. ‘My Inspector here thinks you’re nothing but a liar. He thinks you told me a pack of lies when you came in to see me on Christmas Eve, and in the main he’s right, most of it was lies, all that stuff about meeting Maryanne on the IV
F forum. But the thing is I’ve checked your medical records – your IVF struggle wasn’t a lie, was it? Nine rounds! Must have been very gruelling. I can’t imagine how much the twins must mean to you. Well, it’s obvious all your kids mean the world to you.’
She gives me a long hard stare before leaning over to Whiteley. They whisper back and forth for a few seconds before the conflab ends with a solemn nod from Gina and a ‘on-your-head-be-it’ shrug from her brief.
There’s a palpable silence before Whiteley says, ‘My client admits that there was an altercation at her home with the deceased, Maryanne Doyle. Maryanne fell down the stairs and injured herself but she left the house, walking wounded. She has no idea what happened to her after that.’
I shake my head, disappointed. Inside I’m screaming.
‘I’m afraid that’s not good enough, Gina. You’ve only admitted to what we already know. To quote the popular phrase, “we’ll see you in court”.’
I stand up, willing Parnell to join me. Willing Gina to start panicking and pour forth.
Parnell’s knees have barely had time to click before my second wish comes true.
‘I offered her money but she just wouldn’t go,’ Gina says, looking up at me. There’s amazement in her voice, a twisted wonder at the fact not all problems can be solved with money. ‘That’s all I wanted, for her to go away, to stop talking about the ba—’ she cringes, can’t say it – ‘to stop talking about what we’d done, all the things that went on back then. But she just wouldn’t shut up so I told her. I told her the truth, that I didn’t know where . . .’ She can’t finish that sentence either. ‘She went completely berserk. She said she was going to come back the next day and the day after and that she’d tell my children what I’d done with her child.’ Her lip curls. ‘She wasn’t so worried about her child back then, not when she was earning good money. I pointed that out to her and she went for me, well, we went for each other, really. We were both pushing each other.’
All the cringes and the half-finished sentences will have to be filled in at some point. Hours of fact-checking and tedious substantiation always follow even the most detailed of confessions, but right now it will do if it moves us on to the main event.
I sit back down. ‘The fall didn’t kill her, Gina. Who did?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes you do.’ I lean in. ‘Think about this very carefully. What happened with Maryanne happened because you didn’t want your kids knowing what you’d done – well, if this goes to trial, they’ll know everything. And so will everyone else, all their friends, their friends’ parents, their teachers. Every dirty little detail. The baby-factory, the trafficking, the pimping. They’ll hear about Kristen too. Your kids will find out about what happened to Kristen.’
The look on Gina’s face tells me two things – one, that she’s unravelling, two, that Kristen’s probably dead.
The look on Parnell’s face reminds me of another thing. I wasn’t supposed to be here last night. I’m not supposed to know about Kristen.
I push on.
‘Can you live with your kids hating you, Gina? Thinking you’re a monster? Reading every gruesome detail in the papers, online. Can you really run that risk?’
‘Don’t listen to them,’ warns Whiteley, although his heart’s not really in it. He knows he’s lost control. ‘They’re simply trying to intimidate you.’
Gina’s head shakes continuously, side to side. ‘But I can’t run that risk. And he wouldn’t want me to.’
‘He?’ says Parnell. ‘Nate?’
She looks at me, ignores Parnell. ‘If he admits to it, there’s no trial, no details, no media?’
Not quite.
‘If there’s guilty pleas all round, it’ll move straight to sentencing and a lot less detail will be out there in the public domain. Your kids will definitely be less exposed, I can promise you that.’
‘He’d want me to do this.’ She whispers this more to herself, than us. ‘He wouldn’t want the kids suffering, he wouldn’t . . .’
‘So it was Nate?’ I say, my breath coming quickly.
‘Fucking Nate.’ That vicious spit again. ‘Do you really think he’s got the balls to do something like this? I was shaken up after Maryanne fell, I didn’t know what else to do. She was moving, sort of, but she’d hit her head badly, there was a lot of blood. I just froze.’
‘And?’
‘And? And who else does a girl turn to when she’s in trouble?’
29
‘She had a problem, where else would she turn?’
Gina’s words verbatim.
Patrick Mackie sits across from us, radiating calm and contentment, as chilled as a man sitting on a deckchair watching the sun rise over the Serengeti. His illness has ravaged him, no doubt – he used to be good-looking in his day, according to Parnell – and close up, under the glare of the single light that hangs over the table, the six-to-twelve months prognosis strikes me as somewhat ambitious. But there’s a steeliness to him, a mental strength that seems to prop up his ailing body and it’s fair to say he looks like a man who has no trouble sleeping. Maybe that’s what happens when you only have a limited number of sleeps left.
Or when you don’t have a conscience.
‘So were you in the house?’ asks Parnell. ‘Did you see what happened, how things went down.’
He shakes his head. ‘No, I was out with the twins, minding my own business. I don’t go far, obviously, but at the end of the day, who in a kids’ playground is gonna recognise me and it was dark by then. You didn’t recognise me in broad bloody daylight.’ He points at Parnell, exploding into a chuckle which inevitably tips over into a dry, violent cough. ‘Anyway,’ he says, wiping his mouth, ‘There I was spinning Max and Mia on the roundabout – loves of my bloody life, them two. Getting to spend time with them was worth all the risk of coming back, even now. They really ground you, little kids, don’t they?’
‘I wonder if the little kids you sold into god-knows-what ever went to a playground or had a spin on a roundabout. Do you ever wonder about that?’ asks Parnell.
I don’t know what twisted evil leads him to shrug, ‘No, not really’ but when he clocks my face, he feels the need to explain. ‘Look, I did what I did, love. No point dwelling on it. Take that as a bit of advice from a dying old man.’
The cough starts again. I could offer him more water but I stare at him dispassionately, warmed by the thought of him drawing his last breath in this dark, depressing room.
‘So there you were playing dear old grandad in the playground and what?’ asks Parnell, once the hacking dies down.
‘Gina calls me up, explains what’s happened. And I think, Maryanne Doyle, now there’s a blast from the past. Cocky little Irish mare with a right gob on her.’
This surprises me. ‘Do you remember every foot soldier you ever employed, Mr Mackie?
‘Foot soldier? Are you having a laugh? She came up with the plan. She was a right piece of work. And I was hardly likely to forget her, anyway – little bitch did a runner from the flat with a stash of coke and around four grand. I don’t forget those sort of things.’
‘You must have been delighted to hear that same “little bitch” was currently lying on your daughter’s floor, half-conscious.’
He waves a hand, bone-thin and veiny. ‘Oh do me a favour, love. Over ten grams of coke and a few thousand quid? Yeah, maybe if I’d got hold of her at the time, I might have taught her a small lesson in respect. But nearly twenty years later? What I did had nothing to do with all that. I was just helping my daughter, like any good father would. There was no way Gina was going to prison, not over that little tramp.’
‘But she is going to prison, Patrick.’ I drop the Mr Mackie, it’s too deferential for this piece of dog shit. ‘Whether Maryanne’s fall was an accident or not, Gina played a key role in a child trafficking operation.’
He points a finger at me. ‘She made sure those babies were born healthy, that’s all she d
id. And she only did that because I told her to. I controlled that girl, I can see that now. I should never have brought her into the business but like I said, no point dwelling on things.’
Parnell’s voice is low and steady. ‘Forget what Gina did. Tell us exactly what you did to Maryanne.’
He pauses for a few seconds, playing with us, savouring the game. ‘Oh, what the fuck,’ he says eventually, smiling broadly. ‘I suppose I might as well. There’s not a lot you can do to me now, is there? I’ll be dead by next Christmas.’
And the world will be a brighter place for it.
‘I knocked her out first,’ he says, flippantly, looking at me, then Parnell. ‘Couldn’t be bothered with all the kicking and scratching and it’s not like she took much knocking, she was barely conscious by the time I got there. Then I got her into the garage. I was going to cut her throat at first – I was knackered, wasn’t sure if I’d have the strength to strangle her – but then I didn’t want any more blood to deal with, there was enough back in the house.’ He throws his hands up. ‘So that’s it really, I strangled her. And then I waited a good while – until, God, half-three, four in the morning – and then I headed up to north London, dumped her by her precious fucking gardens. Made sure folk got the message loud and clear.’
‘Folk?’
‘Anyone who’d passed through that flat with even a half a mind to open their mouth.’
‘A big risk though,’ I say. ‘Dumping her in the middle of central London?’
He shrugs. ‘Not at that time of day, not really, not around there. And when you’re dying, nothing feels that risky, love, trust me.’
Parnell reads my mind. ‘Mr Mackie, no offence, but I’m finding it hard to believe you did this all by yourself. You’re dying, you’re very weak. How did you get Maryanne into the garage? Into the car, for that matter? Gina?’
‘No!’ he says, voice raised and pissed off. ‘As soon as I got back I told her to take the little ones and go to a hotel for the night. She didn’t know what I was going to do. Is that absolutely clear? My daughter had nothing to do with this.’