Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(25)

*

We didn’t watch Spice World that night, or any night after. Every time I asked, Dad said he had to meet a man about Something Important and that Jacqui would watch it with me instead, but she never did. Jacqui only ever wanted to watch Friends or The X Files (or ‘her own reflection,’ Gran would say when she’d think we couldn’t hear her).

Dad must have been meeting a man about Something Very Important as he didn’t come home until gone two, not once. I’d hear the bing-bongs ring out on Gran’s grandfather clock.

He did bring me back a pack of cheese and onion Taytos though, to make me feel better.

Nothing says sorry like a pack of cheese and onion crisps.





7

The next day, our cosy little crack squad turns into a full-scale jamboree with twice the number of people chasing up leads and striding about looking determined. I spend my time intermittently throwing up in the toilets and smiling at new faces, intently staring at my laptop in the short bursts in between, desperate to avoid direct eye contact with Parnell and Steele. Luckily they’ve both been squirrelled away in Steele’s office all morning alongside Chief Superintendent Blake and a couple of other Big Knobs – I know they’re Big Knobs because Steele told me to use the decent mugs when she sent me to make coffee. It’s the only interaction we’ve had all day.

Around three this morning, I’d entered an almost altered sense of consciousness where I convinced myself that I had the backbone to walk into Steele’s office at nine a.m. sharp and come clean on everything I knew about Maryanne Doyle. It was the right thing to do, I’d reasoned, burning with a righteous professionalism I never knew I had; in fact it was the only thing to do if I ever wanted to face myself in the mirror again, and crucially it was the timing of my epiphany that sealed it.

Three a.m., known as ‘Dead Time’ – the hour when the barrier between the living and the dead lifts and the ghosts start to move between realms.

So it was Mum telling me to come clean, basically. Or so I’d believed until the marijuana haze wore off and the clarity of daybreak returned me to a far more basic instinct – self-preservation – and a far more pragmatic perspective.

What exactly do I know anyway? That my Dad definitely didn’t kill Maryanne Doyle in 1998, but that he’d lied about knowing her?

It’s barely a line of enquiry, never mind a smoking gun.

‘So what are we calling her then?’ Flowers sticks a photo of Maryanne Doyle to the incident board, wholesome and dewy with those cushiony pink lips and blue eyes twinkling like helium stars. ‘It’s going to get bloody confusing now. Is she Alice or Maryanne?’

‘Hard to believe it’s the same person,’ says Craig, shaking his head. ‘I mean, I’m sure we all looked different in the Nineties – you wouldn’t have called me The Famine back then for a start, I was a bit of a porker, if you must know – but this Alice, Maryanne, whatever we’re calling her, she looks completely different. Like the life’s been sucked out of her.’

Renée gives a sideways glance. ‘I think it’s called age, Craig. Stress. Modern life.’

‘Stress?!’ says Flowers. ‘Living on a private island and cooking scampi and chips in the local a few times a week?’

I exchange a ‘dickhead’ look with Renée who passes it on to Ben.

‘Well, I think we should go with Maryanne,’ says Seth, ‘inside these four walls anyway. If that’s who she was born, that’s what we should call her.’

‘No.’ It bursts out of me, loud and vehement. ‘She changed her name to Alice so that’s how she wanted to be known. We owe her that courtesy, surely?’

Kinsella’s my Mum’s maiden name, you see. I was born a McBride but I changed it to Kinsella after she died. A memorial to the only person I’ve ever really trusted and an irrefutable ‘fuck you’ to my dad.

Although, I am starting to trust Parnell, I think. It isn’t anything he’s done as such. We haven’t been in any life-or-death situations together, unless you count the time we arrested a suspect outside a supermarket who tried to attack us with a frozen leg of lamb. It’s just his presence I trust, his relentless steadiness.

It shores me up, somehow. Makes me steadier.

Seth shrugs a ‘whatever’ and looks towards Steele’s office where the Chief Super and the Big Knobs are filing out. Steele’s in the centre and Parnell walks behind in his best shirt-and-tie combo, the tie bobbing on his hillock of a stomach. If it wasn’t for his nose hair, I’d say he looked cute. The Big Knobs leave but Blake stays behind, smouldering by the back wall like an aftershave model. Not yet forty, Chief Superintendent Russell Blake’s the poster boy for the Met’s High Potential Development Scheme. A politician through and through, all PR, Policy and sharp Prada suits.

This is pure rumour, of course. I’ve never actually spoken to the man, although I did once hand him a napkin in the staff canteen.

Steele bangs a desk with a stapler and we all come to heel.

‘Right, folks, I trust you’ve all made friends and I don’t need to make introductions. Couple of things – firstly, I just want to extend a big thanks to Chief Superintendent Blake for’ – she looks around the room – ‘giving us the extra resources because clearly this case has just got a lot bigger.’ Blake gives a sombre nod. ‘Secondly, because it’s now bigger, I’m going to be taking on more of a co-ordinator role – the brains of the operation, if you like – and DS Parnell will be stepping up to Acting Detective Inspector, so all roads lead back to him, OK?’