Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(36)

Ben points to the screen. ‘Come on, stretch-marks across the abdomen, faint ones on the breasts. He must have realised, even if it was from before.’

Our female contingent shares a pained grin. I think about hoiking up my top and parading my silvery lines right in front of his innocent little face but I settle for embarrassing him instead. ‘Ben, have you ever actually seen a naked woman? A real one, I mean, not one that lives in your laptop or on your iPhone. Ever heard of a thing called a growth spurt, or a bit of weight gain?’

‘Maybe they had a stillborn?’ says Renée. ‘You’d kind of understand him not wanting to revisit that, not when he’s only just found out his wife’s dead.’

Parnell considers this but he’s not convinced. ‘Mmmm, I can see him not volunteering the information, but he talked to us a lot about kids. You’d think it would have come up somehow if there had been a child and, well, now there wasn’t.’

Steele steps in. ‘Renée, check records – adoption, birth, deaths, everything for a child born to either Alice Lapaine or Maryanne Doyle, here and in Ireland.’

‘’Course you know what this means,’ says Renée. ‘If she’d given birth in the past, the chances are, Thomas Lapaine was the problem.’

‘Which means what?’ I ask. ‘Last time I looked there wasn’t a direct link between male infertility and homicidal tendencies.’

Renée nods. ‘No, but it’s a very emotive subject, just saying.’

‘Didn’t I say being a jaffa could tip into something nasty. Didn’t I?’ Flowers sounds elated.

Much as I know it’ll pain Parnell, he agrees. ‘Could be that Alice wanting to stop trying tipped him over the edge. Snuffed out any chance of proving to himself that he’s a real man.’ He puts a hand up, bats away my protest. ‘I’m not saying that’s what I think, Kinsella, I’m just trying to put myself in his shoes. Think how he might think.’

Truth is, there aren’t many in this room with any real idea of how an insecure man staring down the barrel of childlessness might think, certainly not Seth and Ben, who’d rather be saddled with colostomy bags than babies at this point in their lives, and definitely not MIT4’s resident stallions – Parnell, Flowers and Craig Cooke – who’ve got about a hundred kids between them.

Steele looks at her watch. ‘OK, can we move on from the contents of Thomas Lapaine’s scrotum and see what else we’ve got. I haven’t got long.’

Parnell continues. ‘Time of death. Vickery’s still being a bit cagey but we’re going to work with somewhere between one and three a.m. Cause of death is manual asphyxia, however there are virtually no signs of struggle so she was almost certainly unconscious when she was strangled, probably from this blow sustained to the front of the head – picture five.’

We’ve all seen the crime scene photos, the worst of which burn onto your brain like asphalt, but post-mortem pics allow for a bit more professional distance. Flowers flicks through the pages like a man choosing a main course – and that’s not a criticism, I can’t wait to get there myself.

‘Now – and pay attention because this is important – her skull wasn’t fractured by the blow. There’s no real damage to the brain so Vickery’s a bit on the fence about this. She says it could be classed as inconsistent with what you’d expect to see in your average beating and so it could mean that rather than being hit on the head with something in a deliberate attack, she might have just hit her head accidentally.’

‘Or a fall?’

Steele points at me, animated. I can feel myself glowing. ‘Yeah, good, Kinsella, a fall’s definitely a possibility. It fits with the mild bruising on her legs – pictures eight and nine.’ She doesn’t even have to look at the report to know the layout. ‘But as we’re dealing in “coulds” for a second, let’s imagine that the wound could have been caused by a deliberate blow. What does that tell us?’

She doesn’t give us time to answer.

‘Well, it tells us it wasn’t particularly frenzied or there’d be more damage to the brain. And then if you add that to the fact that the cuts to the throat were also very tentative, very shallow, what we seem to have is a rather reluctant, albeit, fairly determined killer.’

‘Reluctant but determined?’ says Seth, wistfully, doing that Sherlock thing that either amuses or irritates me depending on my mood. ‘Bit of an oxymoron, don’t you think?’

Parnell jumps in. ‘I think what the Boss means is he meant to kill her .?.?.’

‘Or she,’ says Flowers, thinking he’s hilarious. ‘Can’t discriminate this days, remember.’

Craig punches the air. ‘Right on, sister!’

Parnell explodes. ‘Shut it, everyone, this isn’t a joke.’ This jolts me, scares me a bit, even. It’s the first time I’ve heard Parnell properly lose his rag and I don’t like it. ‘Anyone finding this the slightest bit funny, I suggest they go down to the morgue and take a look at what’s lying in the fridge, OK? A young woman with her whole life ahead of her, snuffed out, and we have absolutely no idea why.’

I get what he’s doing. You have to shapeshift a little when you’re acting-up in a role, otherwise everyone thinks you’re still their mate. You’re still Papa Parnell who loves a laugh and a joke and an arse-about as much as the rest of us.