Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(21)

And her eyes, I realise then. Almond-shaped, ocean-blue.

Flowers, Barnsley born and bred, pipes up. ‘We weren’t all born within the sound of Bow Bells, Kinsella. Some folk think London’s a bit up-itself and overpriced, if your cockney ears can believe such a thing.’

‘Bow Bells? That’s East London, Sarge. I was born in Islington – makes me a northerner, like you. What I’m saying is, she hated London with a passion but they’d also lived in Sydney, Cape Town, Hong Kong, so it’s not a case of the country bumpkin being frightened of the big smoke. I mean, I can understand her not wanting to live in London, but she point-blank refused to even visit, even when he’d planned nice surprises for her.’

A ‘tsk’ from Flowers. ‘She sounds like a bloody nightmare. I’d have strangled her years ago.’

I don’t bite, nor does anyone else. It might be because the clock’s ticking on Steele’s twenty minutes, or it could be that we all quietly agree.

‘OK,’ says Steele, blotting her lips, a rich petal-pink. ‘We’ve just about managed to get her photo in the Standard this evening. We’ll try for the nationals tomorrow if we don’t get any solid sightings in London, but with any luck we should have some idea where she’s been for the past month within the next twelve to twenty-four hours.’

Flowers rubs his eyes. ‘My bet’s with a boyfriend.’

‘It’d explain the IVF change of heart,’ says Parnell.

Steele shouts over. ‘Any joy on the phone records, Benny-boy?’

‘Still waiting. And yep, I’ve said it’s urgent.’

Steele raises her voice another decibel. ‘Also, we need more photos of Alice Lapaine. Better ones, to be blunt. Press office reckons the one we’ve got is a bit dreary. They want happy, smiley ones to pull on the public’s heartstrings.’

‘I didn’t see any at the house,’ I say looking towards Parnell. ‘Not even a wedding photo.’

Parnell screws up his KFC bag, pats away the heartburn. ‘Doesn’t mean anything. I haven’t got a clue where my wedding photos are. Probably in the garage covered in mould and white spirit.’

‘Well, the husband must have some, somewhere,’ says Steele, ‘Or how about Facebook? Seth, anything from her laptop? Any photos of her cuddling bloody kittens, or whatever it is the Press Office want? Any evidence of a secret boyfriend?’

Seth shakes his head while exhaustion strips his voice of its usual public-school jollity. ‘I only had it briefly before Forensics took it, but there wasn’t much to see. She has a Facebook account but she hardly uses it. A measly sixteen friends in total, mainly from Hong Kong and Sydney. We’re obviously tracing them. Ben’s made a start.’

A raised hand from Ben Swaines. ‘She’s got a Hotmail account, but again, it looks like she rarely checks it. It’s mainly junk and online shopping receipts. Of course there could be lots of deleted stuff that I’m not seeing. Digital Forensics will obviously take a much deeper dive, but .?.?.’

‘But on the face of it, she wasn’t exactly Bill Gates.’ Steele sighs. ‘It’s never easy, is it? Renée – what are her friends saying? Her real three-dimensional friends.’

‘What friends?’ Renée yawns, puts a hand up in apology. I hadn’t even noticed she was here – fatigue is making us all muted, invisible. ‘I talked to a few people at the pub where she worked. They said she was very quiet, kept herself to herself. She worked eleven a.m. till three p.m. which are their busiest hours, so she just tended to crack on when she got there, no time for small talk like there would be if you were opening or closing up. They were obviously wondering where she’d disappeared to four weeks ago, but then it isn’t all that unusual in catering. They were a bit annoyed but not particularly bothered, was the impression I got.’

‘They didn’t call Thomas Lapaine?’ I ask. ‘He must have been down as her next of kin?’

‘Nope,’ replies Renée. ‘They tried her mobile a couple of times, couldn’t get through so they thought c’est-la-vie and hired someone else.’

‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ says Steele. ‘It’s dog-eat-dog in the Shires these days.’

‘Neighbours didn’t have a lot to say either,’ Renée continues, stifling another yawn. ‘“Nice enough”, “quiet”. Same about him. The only friend Thomas Lapaine could point me to was a Debra Pulis who works in the deli on the high street. To be honest, she seemed a bit surprised to be classed as a “friend”. Alice popped in there most days and they’d chew the fat about the weather, TV, cooking, what-have-you, but she didn’t really know her.’

‘I think that’s sad,’ says Emily. ‘Imagine having no girlfriends to confide in. Nobody interested in what you’re up to.’

Imagine.

Sounds ideal to me.

While I’m not quite Alice Lapaine on the Billy-No-Mates scale, I tend to steer clear of the soul-sister sorority types. The kind who want to know everything about you, from your menstrual cycle to your relationship with your parents. Don’t get me wrong, I have a life, of sorts. I’ve got a few mates I sporadically get drunk with, there’s a couple I occasionally stay sober with, but all they know about me – all they really need to know – is that I drink anything but Chardonnay and my family aren’t close. They’ve no idea that my menstrual cycle’s patchy and I’ve wished my Dad dead.