Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(42)

Gina nods. ‘Shame you didn’t come later. You’d have got all the neighbours under one roof. Around the fireplace. Like that programme, Poirot!’

I laugh because they seem to think it’s a great gag and also because I want a favour.

‘Actually, it’d be great if you could mention it to your guests. If they’re not in, we’ll obviously leave details, but if you could encourage them to call us ASAP, it’d be much appreciated.’

They both look delighted by this, Tash Marwood especially. ‘Oh, consider it done, Detective. Anything but the strangled small-talk. I mean, who wants to discuss school fees and Brexit when you can discuss murder!’

It’s distasteful but it’s the truth.

I let it slide.

*

Tash Marwood’s not wrong. We haven’t picked a great time to go knocking and all I manage is one harassed-looking au pair with patchy English and the much-maligned Bingham – or Bingham-Waites as he corrects me – a Grade-A cretin wearing a too-short dressing gown and the gait of the perpetually pissed-off.

Bingham-Waites doesn’t recognise Alice but suggests she might be a whore visiting one John Hardwich at number six. He’s always ‘at it,’ he informs me, in a way that makes me want to go home and scrub my skin raw. Next, he suggests she could be one of Lady Muck’s skivvies – Gina Hicks can’t wipe her arse without bringing in help, apparently. In a nutshell, he has nothing to offer except cheap insults and perceived slights, and I leave his hovel of a lair hoping that someone did defecate on his front lawn. It seems like quite a fitting tribute to this hateful little man.

Emily doesn’t fare any better. There’s no answer at the Chapmans’ so no doppelganger au pair to check out, and the only interaction she has at all is with a deranged Jack Russell, scrabbling at the door of number two, desperate to get out and tear her limb from limb.

So all in all, a fairly futile playdate for the two of us. Alice Lapaine may have talked into the intercom at the gates of Keeper’s Close if we’re to take the word of a pensioner on a speeding bus as sacrosanct, or we could have just wasted the best part of two hours.

At the moment, I’m prepared to keep an open mind. I just need to stay involved in this case.

As we walk the quarter mile back to the car, Emily stresses about the team’s Secret Santa while I zone out and think about Leo Hicks, or more specifically, I think back to a party I once threw like him. It was 2006 and I was sixteen. Mum and Dad were in Cyprus and before the party I’d made sure that anything Dad held dear was conveniently displayed for the worst of the delinquents I’d invited to the house. I’d even sold his signed West Ham shirt to some scary-looking dude with ACAB – ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ – tattooed across his knuckles.

I asked for a fiver. We settled on two pounds fifty.

‘Not when his father had finished with him,’ Gina Hicks had said about Leo, and I wonder what punishment he’d faced on their return. Chores? Curfews? Confiscations?

Dad did nothing, initially – discipline was always very much Mum’s domain whereas dereliction of all parental responsibility was very much his. It was only days later, when I offered him the two pounds fifty and he realised his precious football shirt hadn’t been nicked after all, but sold, by his daughter, for roughly the same price as a Big Mac, that he showed his true colours, slamming me against the kitchen wall and whispering, ‘One day you’ll push me too far, sweetheart, and it won’t end well. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.’

Of course, my sister says watered-down versions of this to my nephew all the time.

‘If I have to come up there, Finn Hadley, you’ll regret it .?.?.’

‘I won’t warn you again, young man .?.?.’

And only the other day, I overheard Flowers telling his wife, ‘She doesn’t need new Nike Air Zooms, Gill. What she needs is a boot up the fucking arse.’

So as a rule, parenthood seems to be a never-ending issuing of cheap shots, veiled threats and frayed tempers, but still I know – as sure as I knew then – that Dad was only one deep breath away from hurting me that night. And who knows, maybe I’d have deserved it? Everyone has their breaking point and I’d been pushing Dad for a long, long time.

I don’t want to think about this anymore so I tell Emily I like her bag just to make conversation. It’s black, functional and totally nondescript in every way but the five-minute anecdote about where she bought it (Zara, Cambridge, they didn’t take the security tag off and she got stopped on the way out) brings my heart-rate back to normal and chases away any residual thoughts about my dad.

Further salvation comes in the form of my ringtone. Parnell.

‘Hey Sarge?’ I fumble for the keys to the pool car.

‘All right, kiddo, how’d you get on?’

‘Nothing that helpful. Emily’s going to write it up when we get back.’

Which is news to a scowling Emily.

‘How far away are you?’

I throw the keys to Emily, signal for her to drive. ‘We’re just leaving Wandsworth now. Why? Where’s the fire?’

‘Thomas Lapaine’s coming back in. I want you with me.’

I pause – to my credit, I pause. It’s never my intention to antagonise Steele, far from it.

‘So has the Boss OK’d it? I mean, what about Renée? Or Flowers?’