Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(23)

‘Listen, I’d better go, Jacqs, I’m nearly at the tube.’

‘Hey wait, tell me about Leamington Square,’ she says, excitedly. ‘God, that takes me back.’

I wonder if it takes her back to drinking Bacardi breezers in the gardens and being fingered by half of St Hilda’s, or if she’s erased that part of history too. No doubt she has herself picking daffodils in a floaty gingham dress, singing sweetly to fledgling birds as they come to land on her shoulder.

I reach the tube, edge inside the brightly-lit entrance for warmth. ‘Look, I’m really going to have to go now. I’ll let you know about Christmas in a few days, is that OK?’

‘Well, no actually, it’s not. Would it hurt you to be a bit more organised, Cat?’

It’s the strict maternal tone, not the criticism, that ignites me. ‘Jesus! It’s just a few roasties and a bit of dry meat that no one likes anyway. And it’s not like you’re tight for space, your dining table could seat a UN summit.’

‘We’re not having it at mine. Dad wants to host for a change. I’m doing the cooking but he’s—’

‘Paying?’ I interrupt. ‘Good work, sis. Nicely done, as always.’

Little bitch. I regret it the second it leaves my mouth.

‘And what are your plans for Dad’s cheque this year?’ Sneeriness doesn’t suit Jacqui but I deserve it.

My plans are the same as always – half to the nurses who looked after Mum, half to the Sally Army. A few years ago I bought some Jimmy Choos and a Sat-Nav – a one-off litmus test to see if I could own anything without feeling squalid and corrupt.

I sold them both on Ebay, new and unused.

I don’t tell Jacqui this, though. I also don’t ask how a part-time florist and an IT support engineer can afford to send their son to one of north London’s leading pre-prep schools. Instead, I gloss over the dig and get back to logistics.

‘Look, if Dad’s hosting then I’m really not sure .?.?.’

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Cat. Please, can’t you try to .?.?.’

‘No, no, it’s not that,’ I say quickly, not wanting to go there. ‘It’s just that with this new case, I could be called into work any time so I could do without being all the way out in Radlett.’

Jacqui laughs. ‘Dad rented Radlett out months ago, Cat.’ Did he? ‘He’s living at the pub full-time now. We’re having Christmas lunch at the pub. Nightmare, I know.’

A prick of happiness spars with a stab of angst. It’s hard to call a winner under the effects of two large glasses of wine.

Christmas at McAuley’s Old Ale House.

Home for Christmas.

*

There’s no one in when I get back to Vauxhall, which comes as a blessed relief. It’s not that I don’t like the Dawsons, I do, I just don’t have the energy for their kids this evening – their constant demands to be turned upside down, to French-plait my hair, to sing songs from The Jungle Book for the hundredth time. I could be firmer with them, I suppose, try to shake them off on the grounds of having ‘grown-up stuff’ to do, but when you’re paying ￡500 a month for a small double room in Zone 1, with your own sink and toilet, you’re wise to make yourself indispensable.

My stomach bellows. I should probably make dinner.

The kitchen’s a homely bombsite as usual, as if the Dawsons were kidnapped part-way through a cook-off. Claire Dawson’s always cooking with her girls. Cooking and crafting and painting and swimming and a whole host of other ‘ings’ that mean that there wouldn’t be any need for a lodger if they’d only pick cheaper hobbies. Jacqui insists that Mum used to cook with me but I don’t remember, although I know we made jelly once. Lemon and lime jelly for a ‘tropical trifle’. We gave some to Dad but he fed it to the dog.

I sit by the fridge. Eat a bag of grated cheese like a packet of crisps.

‘Disordered eating,’ a counsellor called it. ‘Often the result of an aloof or aggressive relationship between a father and daughter.’

‘Aloof’ is definitely off-base. Dad rarely did anything that didn’t mark me out as being special, as being the only one who ever got under his skin. Sometimes that manifested itself in material things – toys, sweets, clothes as I got older, basically everything I ever asked for and plenty I didn’t.

Sometimes it manifested in the threats he’d make. The barely concealed aggression when I’d pulled one of my ‘stunts’ again.

The scratched Audi TT.

The vodka blow-out at a christening (age fourteen).

The fleeting engagement to a complete loser (I was seventeen, he was a thirty-eight-year-old ‘street poet’.)

All these things designed to goad Dad into hurting me so that everyone would see just how dangerous he could be.

I take the cheese, an on-the-turn kiwi and a can of cherry Coke and walk up the two flights to my bedroom, feeling an enormous sense of relief to be back in my ten-by-eight with just Alice Lapaine’s case notes for company and a Bowie documentary playing low on the TV. I turn it up occasionally when I know the song, looking for patterns of deceit in Thomas Lapaine’s statement as I sing along to ‘Starman’.

In my lowly experience, murder’s rarely a mystery. It’s hardly ever the subterranean labyrinth of red herrings and OMG! twists that you see on the TV and most of the time it’s depressingly straightforward – a knifing in a nightclub, a partner flipping their lid, a pimp marking his territory, each motive stark in its simplicity. But already, Alice Lapaine’s murder is making my head scratch. I’m still scratching at eleven p.m. when my phone rings. Parnell.