Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(5)

DC Seth Wakeman looks up from a textbook, surreptitiously brushing pie crumbs off his jumper. ‘No idea, Sarge.’

‘Nor me,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll Google it.’

Parnell looks pseudo-disgusted and swivels back to the TV, muttering something about private-school educations and Google being the death of independent thinking. DC Renée Akwa laughs and offers me a crisp. I mindlessly grab a fistful even though I’m not keen on the flavour and it’s only been an hour since we stank out the squad room with a garlicky pizza.

Awesome Renée Akwa. Twenty-five years a DC and as constant as the sun. I’d have sneered at that once, back when I had notions of progression but it’s amazing what a flip-out in a prostitute’s bedsit can do to pour concrete on your glass ceiling.

I squint at my screen, too lethargic to reach for my glasses. ‘So St Lawrence is the patron saint of chefs. St Michael’s the patron saint of coppers, if you’re interested. He’s the patron saint of the sick and the suffering too.’

Parnell doesn’t rise to it, choosing to nag Seth instead. ‘Here, Einstein, are you ready for another test? Fat lot of use Google will be when you’re trying to remember “Revisions to PACE Code G” for your boards next month.’

Seth groans, pretends to hang himself with a strip of tinsel, and the laugh that breaks out goes some way to dissolving the twisted ball of angst I’ve been ferrying around since I left Dr Allen’s introspection chamber earlier this evening. Later, as Parnell argues with Chris Tarrant that the Nile is definitely longer than the Amazon, and Seth gives us his rugby-club’s slightly un-PC rendition of the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’, the urge to do a Miss Havisham, to bolt the doors and stop the clocks and cocoon the four of us in our cosy-as-fleece squad room forever, overwhelms me.

And then a desk clerk clutching a Lemsip spoils everything.

‘Luigi, you’re wanted,’ he croaks from the doorway. I struggle to hear the details as they huddle together – Parnell’s shot-putter bulk blocks out all soundwaves – but I get the gist.

A body. A woman. Leamington Square, by the entrance to the gardens. Just at the back of Exmouth Market.

It looks suspicious. Islington plod have secured the scene. DCI Steele has been notified.

Exmouth Market.

Not strictly our patch, but when the other two on-call Murder teams are up to their eyeballs in bodies and you’re just sitting around eating crap and procrastinating about paperwork, you don’t start quoting boundaries and grid references. I don’t anyway. Parnell gives it a try.

And with a creeping sense of unease that strips away all the notions of sanctuary I held just two minutes ago, I think to myself that it is my patch really. In the umbilical sense, at least.

I spent the first eight years of my life there.

Last I heard, my dad was back there, running our old pub.

Mixing with his old crew again.

Living the Bad Life.

*

At ten p.m. every evening, as punctual as a Swiss clock, Dad would excuse himself from whatever bar-room brawl he’d been refereeing and walk the few hundred yards up to Leamington Square Gardens to smoke his solitary cigarette of the day. Whether he was dodging Mum – an evangelical ex-smoker – or whether he did it for reasons of solitude and sanity, I never really knew, but I’d watch him most nights from my window, quickly throwing down whatever book I’d been reading by the light of my Glow-Worm as soon as I heard his steps crunching across the gravel. Eventually he’d become just a dot in the distance, a flash of a phone or the flare of a lighter, but I felt comforted by it somehow. Happy that he had five minutes’ peace.

He took me with him once. I was only six. Mum was at Auntie Carmel’s so Dad warned me it was ‘a special treat’ which generally meant ‘secret’, along with everything else that happened when Dad was left in charge (crisps for dinner, a very loose diktat on brushing teeth, and illegal poker nights in the back room with the men Mum didn’t like). It was the first time I’d been to the gardens at night – I’d been there often during the day, playing shops in the bandstand, hopscotch on the path – and after we’d been there a while and we’d chatted about Toy Story and my new puffa jacket, Dad asked me if I was frightened being out so late. He said most kids my age would crap themselves and start bawling to go home.

I told him I wasn’t scared of anything when he was with me and he’d ruffled my curls and said that was right.

Tonight I feel scared though, and even with Parnell at my side, as solid as the plane trees that line the perimeter of Leamington Square, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that no good will come of being back here.

Not quite a sense of doom, but one of nagging disquiet.

As soon as we’re parked up by the outer cordon, I walk over to Parnell’s side and let his genial grumpiness soothe me.

‘Forty lousy minutes and it’d have been changeover. Some other sod’s problem, and a hot shower and a cuddle with the wife for me. Jinxed we are, Kinsella, bloody jinxed.’

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ I lie. ‘No one to cuddle up to or switch the hot water on. Might as well be freezing my arse off with you.’

If I say this enough times, I might convince myself. Then I might also be able to convince myself to tell Parnell and Steele that I grew up less than a football pitch away from here. That my dad runs a pub so close you can hear the jukebox on a warm summer’s day when the main doors are open. That I lived above that pub until I was eight years old.