Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(74)

Protecting Jacqui, or protecting Dad?

The latter’s too dire to contemplate so I quickly file it under ‘no go’ in the locked box in my brain – the place where I stash the taboo stuff, emotions I can’t bring myself to cope with.

‘So why the secret meeting in Duffy’s field. Why didn’t you go to her house? Have a quiet word in the Diner?’

Eyes wide. ‘Are you joking? If I’d gone to the house, Jonjo Doyle would have put her in hospital, and I’d have been in the next bed. And I didn’t go to the Diner because’ – he blows out his cheeks, thinks for a minute – ‘well, I don’t why, to be honest, it was eighteen fucking years ago, I can’t remember every last detail. I saw her having a cheeky smoke in the field one day as I was passing and I took my chance, that’s all.’

I know that’s not true. He was meeting her there. I know it on a bone-deep, intuitive level but if being a Detective’s taught me anything, it’s that it’s not worth fighting over points you can’t prove.

I nod slowly. ‘OK, so that’s why you were threatening her. But you accused her of threatening you. You said the word ‘blackmail”.’

He lets out a laugh, a quick scornful breath. ‘Christ, did I really say that? It was hardly blackmail. It was just a seventeen-year-old girl thinking she was the Mata Hari of Mulderrin and wanting me to know about it.’

Which explains nothing. My face tells him as much.

He pulls in a bit closer, every bit the cosy raconteur with the juicy anecdote, not the man teetering on the edge of ‘suspect’. ‘So I said exactly what your mum told me to say, right. “Stay away from Jacqui or we’ll tell the Guards about your dirty little habit.”’ He pauses, gives me a look that I can’t quite read. ‘And then she – Maryanne – says, “Well maybe you should stay away from Tina McGinn, or I’ll tell your wife about your dirty little habit.”’

I’ll process that anger later. ‘Right, so she was blackmailing you?’

He flicks a hand, dismissive. ‘Well, she was trying, bless her, but there was absolutely nothing going on between me and Tina McGinn and she knew it. She was just a barmaid in Grogan’s who’d flirt with her own shadow and she must have seen us having the craic a few times. Tina knew your mum, for God’s sake, it was all bullshit.’ My face says ‘yeah yeah’ but I keep it buttoned. ‘So anyway, I said to Maryanne, “You can put an announcement in the parish newsletter for all I care, darling, just stay away from my daughter, OK.” Best thing you can do with people like her, just call their bluff.’ Another pause. ‘And that was that, really. She piped down after that.’

He grinds out his cigarette. Story concluded.

And they all lived miserably ever after.

I feel like I’m floundering, losing leverage. I need to pull myself up, draw myself back level but I can’t find anything to hook on to. Plausible lie after plausible lie, Dad’s dismantling everything I’ve ever believed, and even if I don’t believe half of what he’s telling me, there isn’t a lot I can say. The only two people who can contradict him are dead.

And so I ask the unthinkable.

‘Where were you last Monday night, Dad?’

His head jerks back, utter confusion. ‘What?’

‘The night Maryanne was killed. Jacqui said you were supposed to be staying at hers but that you cancelled and that’s really unlike you. She reckons she couldn’t get hold of you all evening as well, your phone was off.’ I swallow quickly, keep going. ‘So what came up, Dad? What was so life-or-death that you couldn’t put your “precious” kids first?’’

Confusion contorts into anger. Panic and anger. ‘Where are you going with this?’

I lean back, lengthening the distance between us. ‘I’ll tell you exactly where I’m going. A girl blackmails you, threatens you, whatever you want to call it. She goes missing, you lie about knowing her to the Guards, and then eighteen years later she turns up dead, less than five minutes from your door and around the same time that you go inexplicably off-the-radar.’

I’m going with conspiracy over coincidence. Sod Parnell and his ‘rare breed’.

‘Did you hurt her, Dad?’

The words burst out of me, flailing and unfettered, and in that moment I know it’s over. Any hopes for the future, all nostalgia for the past, obliterated with one unutterable accusation.

‘What the fuck is this?’ His face slowly twists in pure undiluted disgust. ‘I mean, who the fuck are you?’ He bangs the side of his head. ‘You’re not right up here, sweetheart. Your mind’s diseased. You’re a disease.’

It takes a second to realise I’m crying.

When I was little, Dad used to say he’d rather go blind than see his baby girl cry. No sooner would my knee hit the concrete or my dummy hit the floor than he was scooping me up, making it all better, stemming the flow with kisses and wild promises.

I want him to stem the flow now. To make it all better with just one rock solid alibi.

‘Just tell me where you were.’ I press my fingers into my eyes. ‘Tell me where you were last Monday night and I’ll stop all this, I promise. We can start again. Have a proper relationship. No more fighting .?.?.’

Something flickers in his eyes, something like longing. But it’s just that; a mere flicker.