Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(60)
‘The first couple of times and then it became more of a, well, a thing.’
‘A thing?’
He coughs, awkwardly. ‘More of a relationship. An affair. In her mind anyway. I wanted to cool things.’
I undo my seatbelt, swivel a whole 180 so I can face him fully again. ‘And why are you telling us this?’
It’s not a pointed question. I’m genuinely confused. You see, to a Murder Detective, everything is relevant. Every hazy-eyed anecdote, every inconsequential detail, all the way down to what brand of cereal the victim liked to eat at the weekend could prove to be the shiny gold nugget that leads to a break. But to a shyster like Nate Hicks, who clearly has a rather flexible relationship with the truth, everything he reveals is on a strictly need-to-know basis. And I’m not quite understanding why he thinks we need to know this.
I get my answer, for what it’s worth.
‘I’m just trying to make sense of this dead woman thing.’
Parnell shoots me a sideways glance. ‘Aren’t we all, Mr Hicks? So any information you have, let’s hear it.’
‘Well, it’s not really information, as such.’ He shuffles to the middle of the back seat, sits forward, head parked between me and Parnell like a boulder. ‘I suppose you’d call it more a hypothesis .?.?.’
1998
Sunday 31st May
It was late Sunday evening when we first heard about Maryanne. Mum was cleaning my ears in front of the fire and Dad was trying, and failing, to teach Noel the rules of poker when the back door slammed and in flounced Jacqui, our resident doom-sayer, keen to share her latest scoop.
‘Gone. Kidnapped. Kaput.’ She shrugged, kicking off her Buffalos like she hadn’t a care, or a missing friend, in the world.
It transpired, or so the official line went, that Maryanne had gone out the night before to buy hairspray and hadn’t been home since. Jonjo Doyle and her moron brother had been searching all around the place but now the Guards had been called and the word around town was that Pat Hannon had killed her.
Gran blessed herself and told Jacqui to shut up. Said she shouldn’t be saying such wicked things when Nora Hannon wasn’t yet cold in the ground, but Jacqui stood firm, insisting the theory had legs as Maryanne had called him ‘a wankstain’ in the pub and everyone knew he’d killed his wife to collect the life insurance, so maybe he’d got a taste for it?
Maybe he needed younger blood to satisfy his insatiable murderous lust? Fresh meat, she called it.
Mum said Jacqui was banned from watching eighteen certificates from now on, and anyway, wasn’t it a bit early to be talking of anyone killing anyone? Maryanne was seventeen, for God’s sake. Hadn’t she and Auntie Brona once gone to Galway to get outfits for a wedding and not come back for two days after latching on to a punk rocker with backstage passes for the Boomtown Rats.
Gran remembered this, which surprised us all because lately Gran remembered less and less, often confusing Mum’s name with the dog’s and always asking if it was busy in town when you’d only come back from the toilet. But just the mention of Mum’s cross-county escapades seemed to ignite a momentary spark.
‘Tinkers, the pair of you. You put the heart crossways in me.’
Mum welled up at this, probably grateful for the reminder that she’d once been the child and Gran had been the carer, but then Noel killed the moment by saying he hoped Maryanne was dead and fair play to Pat Hannon if it was true. (She’d laughed at his tram-lines and Noel was always one for holding wholly disproportionate grudges.)
And all the time, Dad said nothing.
In the corner of the room, on a relic of a TV, Nick Cotton was back in EastEnders, snarling at the locals and harrassing his ‘Ma’ for cash. I instantly thought of Noel and glared at him across the hearth, channelling waves of pure poison, willing the legs of his chair to cave in so he’d fall into the fire, but most of all wishing that he’d harrass our ma for cash sometimes instead of always taking mine. But then big kids were always taking what they wanted from little kids.
Maryanne Doyle had taken my Tinkerbell and now she’d gone missing.
16
‘Well, I’m glad I’ve got a double shot eggnog latte for this one.’ Steele shakes her head, exasperated. ‘So let me get this right, his grand hypothesis is that supposed bunny-boiler Saskia French might have sent Alice Lapaine to his house to deliver a message because he’d stopped taking her calls and blocked her everywhere?’
‘It’s a bit teenage,’ I say. ‘She seemed perfectly capable of fighting her own battles to me.’
Christmas Eve. It’s not even seven a.m. and there’s already a few of us clamouring for space around Steele’s electric heater, thawing out our limbs while trying to get our heads around this mindfuck of a case.
‘Oi, budge over.’ Parnell nudges me with his hip. ‘You forget I’m older than you, Kinsella. An Arctic chill could finish me off.’ I laugh. ‘It’s true, I saw a poster in the doctor’s.’
At least Parnell’s trying to be funny. Renée and Flowers clearly haven’t had their Weetabix yet if their moods are anything to go by.
‘So what does this Saskia say about it?’ grunts Flowers.
I wouldn’t know. Parnell insisted on dropping me home on the way back from the Hickses’ last night, which left him with the happy task of wrangling with Saskia again and me to a night of ‘normal stuff’ – as coined by the woman herself.