Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(51)

I cock an ear but my eyes stay fixed.

‘Kate Kardashian. You know, because she loves the spotlight .?.?.’

‘Yeah, I get it, Boss.’ I put a finger to my lips. ‘Ssssh, I’m trying to listen.’

It’s a short piece. Just a minute or so of Steele being impressive and of course the two faces of Maryanne Doyle/Alice Lapaine contradicting each other at every turn – carefree and cocksure as an ebony-haired teenager, downcast and diffident by a blonde thirty-five.

But it’s the last ten seconds that floor me. The panoramic sweep across Mulderrin that captures the roof of Gran’s old house, the tilting ash trees lining Duffy’s field, the tip of the crucifix standing proud on top of St Benedict’s, where prayers were said for Maryanne Doyle even though everyone was adamant she was nothing but a feckless trollop who’d gone off to find more of her kind.

It has to be stock footage they’re using. Just some producer’s poetic attempt to contrast the rolling fields of her youth with the urban squalor of her death. Because there’s no way the UK media would have descended on Mulderrin just yet. Not without any clear links between the then and the now to spur headlines.

And we have no links to give them.

There’s no official links anyway.

Because the fact that one man was in the local area for both Maryanne’s disappearance in 1998 and her murder in 2016, is a poisonous seed that’s planted so far deep inside my psyche that I’m not sure I could prise it out, even if I had the guts, or the willingness, to try.





1998

Thursday 28th May

How to be a Spy, Rule 1: Learn the habits of your target!

Dad said he was popping to Reilly’s to buy smokes but I knew he’d sneakily bought 200 on the ferry because I’d been hiding behind the Toblerone stand, waiting to jump out on Noel. I also knew he’d only smoked sixty-seven so he had 133 left and no need to buy more. (I’d been keeping count because 200 sounded like a heck of a lot and I didn’t want him getting sick like Paige Flannelly’s dad who spat blood into tissues and weighed less than her Mum.)



How to be a Spy, Rule 2: When you come up against problems, be resourceful!

Spies should usually wear black but Mum had only packed my blue flowery raincoat with the pink spotty collar so I turned it inside out and hoped for the best.



How to be a Spy, Rule 3: Only carry essential items vital to your operation and survival!

I packed my diary, a pencil, some smoky bacon crisps and a small lump of cheese, because Mum said it was good for my bones, and I set off on my secret mission, trailing Dad to the bottom of the Pot-Holey Road (because the roads around here didn’t have proper names like Oxford Street or Farringdon Road, they were called things like the Long Road Out of Town or the Road Where Pat Hannon Keeps His Cows). Dad turned right by Duffy’s gate and I had to quickly duck down in the ditch when he stopped to make a call.

good inteligance intel – dad has a phone!



How to be a Spy, Rule 4: Learn to eavesdrop!

I spied them through a gap in the hedge and she was laughing. Not giggling, like she did with boys in the Diner, but proper wet-your-pants laughing and I’m sorry, Dad wasn’t that funny. Even when he did his Homer Simpson impression or told that joke about the chicken and the frog who went to the library.

She sounded like Cynthia, Uncle Frank’s skinny wife (we didn’t call her Auntie Cynthia, Mum put her foot down about that). Dad always said Cynthia had a laugh like a crow with a machine gun and Maryanne did a little bit too. It was a nasty noise. The sound of someone being mean, not funny.



‘That sounds like blackmail to me.’ I heard Dad say.

‘Fuck sake, you’re dramatic.’

‘And you’re deluded if you think it’s going to happen.’ Dad sounded angry now.

‘You’re deluded if you think you have a choice.’



How to be a Spy, Rule 5: Store gathered information in a safe and secure place!

I took out my diary and wrote the words down:

black mail. delooded.

I didn’t have to write ‘dramatic’ down because I knew what that meant. Mum always told Jacqui she was ‘dramatic’ when she was moaning about having to be home by a certain time or whining that a boy hadn’t told her she looked pretty. I didn’t know the other two words though. I thought about asking Mum later but the bats in my tummy told me I shouldn’t.

I found Gran’s dictionary and took it up to bed instead.





13

The next day isn’t great.

‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger,’ claimed Nietzsche, or Kanye West, depending on your cultural frame of reference, but exorbitant wine consumption must be the one exception because I certainly don’t feel strengthened by last night’s two-bottle bender. I feel annihilated.

Which I suppose was my full intention.

Stave off emotional blitzkrieg by destroying myself physically.

I wake on Parnell’s sofa with a piece of Lego burrowed deep into my right hip and the memory of me calling him ‘a boring bastard’ when he stopped me going clubbing with a group of bond traders. Issuing him a silent thanks and a more audible ‘thank god’ when I find a pint of water and a packet of Nurofen on the floor beside me, I sit up and take in my surroundings. Sure enough, his living room is everything I’d imagined it to be. Styled by his wife, wrecked by his kids. Like a Lord of the Flies stage-set, only taupe and with scatter cushions. I’m not quite sure what to make of the spare toothbrush and the, God-strike-me-down-dead, clean pair of knickers on the side of the sofa, but I assume they’re Parnell’s way of telling me that we’re running late already and I don’t have time to go home for a spruce-up.