Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(111)



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 IVF 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.

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