Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(20)

Lapaine says nothing. Parnell carries on. ‘You’ll also understand that I need to ask where you were last night and the early hours of this morning.’

He stares at Parnell, dead-eyed – tiredness or loathing, I’m not sure. ‘I was home. From seven thirty p.m. until I left for my walk at about eightish this morning.’

‘Ah yes, your walk. You’re committed, I’ll give you that. Pains me to walk to the car when it’s this cold.’

‘It’s not a labour of love, I assure you. I hurt my back earlier in the year and walking and swimming are the only ways I can keep active, and I find swimming so monotonous. The back and forth repetition of it.’

‘Did anyone see you this morning?’ I ask.

‘I don’t recall meeting anyone. There’s occasionally a few people following the same route in the opposite direction, but as you say, it was cold. Fairweather walkers.’

‘Can anyone verify your alibi for last night?’ says Parnell. ‘It’s an entirely routine question, I assure you.’

‘I’m not in the habit of spending evenings with anyone but my wife, I’m afraid.’

‘Did you make or receive any calls then, send any texts?’

‘No, I don’t believe I did.’ He grips the arm of the chair to steady himself but his shaky voice betrays him. ‘You can’t honestly think that I hurt my wife?’

I could quote the statistics now. I could lay it on the line just how hard he’s going to have to work to convince us that he’s not just another depressing tick in an all-too-familiar box.

I could reduce his marriage to yet another arbitrary percentage.

You had a sixty-five per cent chance of fathering a child with your wife.

There’s a sixty-three per cent chance that you killed her.

But like a good little note-taking, nodding DC, I say nothing.





6

Steele rockets out of her office carrying a bulging make-up bag and plonks herself down in my chair. I sag against the wall, ready to drop.

‘Right, I’ve got twenty minutes before I need to shoot over to Kensington to charge a few nasty little scrotes with joint enterprise so a) ignore me while I put my slap on and b) cut to the chase, is the husband a viable suspect?’

Parnell has his feet up on the desk, a KFC rests on his stomach. ‘Well, it’s not a happy marriage, however he dresses it up.’

‘Do a straw poll in this station, Lu. You won’t find too many happy marriages, or too many murderers, I hope.’

‘Twenty-three years in February. Quite happy, thank you.’

Parnell looks as smug as a man can look with chicken grease on his chin.

‘Good for you,’ says Steele, applying eyeliner with the steadiest of hands. ‘But the fact the Lapaines don’t match up to the standards of Mr and Mrs Luigi Parnell doesn’t constitute reasonable suspicion. Anything else?’

‘They’d been having IVF,’ I tell her. ‘They’d just seen another consultant in London but she wanted to give up. He said he accepted it but .?.?.’

Flowers sticks his head above his screen. ‘A man finds out he’s a jaffa? I can see that tipping into something nasty.’ Emily Beck looks confused. ‘A jaffa, you know? Seedless.’

‘He means infertile, Emily.’ I turn back to Flowers. ‘Anyway, who says he’s a jaffa? The issue could have been hers?’

Flowers points a chewed biro at me. ‘Well, there’s your motive then?’

‘To kill her!’ I can’t keep the scorn out of my voice even though he’s a sergeant and I really should try harder. ‘Maybe to leave her, if you’re a particularly cruel bastard. But to kill her? Behave.’

Flowers grins, which throws me. Sometimes I think he hates me, from my perceived closeness to Steele to the fact I always forget to put sugar in his tea, but othertimes I wonder if he thrives on the banter.

Steele isn’t grinning though. She doesn’t have time to contour her face, profile a suspect and referee an argument in twenty minutes flat. ‘Button it, Kinsella,’ she says, ‘Lu, anything else?’

‘He doesn’t have an alibi. He was at home all night, alone.’

I unbutton it. ‘Which isn’t provable, but is completely feasible,’

Steele stops mid eye-flick. ‘Come on then, you’re obviously not convinced. Spit it out.’

I don’t feel ready but what the hell. ‘Well, look, I don’t know, Boss, what are we saying? “Something” tipped him over the edge, he killed her, and then he dumped her body twenty miles away in the middle of central London? I dunno, I’m just not feeling it.’

A quick nod. ‘Well your concerns are duly noted, but right now he’s the only possible suspect we’ve got, bar some random stranger, and it’s not feeling like that to me. We need to speak to that consultant in London – see how they came across at their appointment.’ Parnell gives Emily the nod to get on it. ‘Do you like him for this, Lu?’

In just a few words, two decades of trust, respect and gruelling late nights pass between Steele and Parnell.

Parnell sighs. ‘Honestly? Not as much as I’d like, no.’

‘Do you know what’s niggling me,’ I say to Parnell. ‘This “Alice hated London” thing.’