Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(8)

Close up she’s even younger and twice as pissed.

A paramedic with a slight overbite intercepts me. ‘Tamsin Black, nineteen. We’re not getting much sense, I’m afraid. Think she might have imbibed a bit more than just booze, if you catch my drift.’

I like the way he says ‘imbibed’, like a Jacobean aristocrat, so I give him a warm smile that just about stays within the boundaries of ‘crime scene appropriate’. ‘When will I be able to talk to her?’

‘You can try now, love, but I wouldn’t bother. She’s puking more than talking.’

On cue she wretches, a futile little jerk that produces little but amber-coloured bile.

I glance at the paramedic’s name badge. ‘Well, I don’t know about you, Phil, but I’m impressed she had the wherewithal to phone it in, in that state.’

Phil looks nervous, rubs his overbite. ‘Looks like she had the wherewithal to post it on Facebook too. I saw it flash up on her phone. Sorry.’

I groan inwardly. ‘Not your fault. Thanks for letting me know. I’d better try to get that deleted before her mates log on for the day.’

I start to walk over but then someone says something about a panic attack so I back off and watch while the experts try to explain the basics of diaphragmatic breathing to someone struggling with the basics of bladder control. Tamsin Black looks so listless and pale through the layers of fake tan – and so painfully young – that I have to fight the urge to stride over and take her hand. To tell her I understand and that she can talk to me. To tell her the brutal images will fade.

Essentially to lie that it gets easier.

Then I realise I’m being ‘over-empathetic’ so I walk back over to Steele and grass her up immediately. Steele does the requisite amount of eye-rolling but honestly, it’s a battle we conceded long ago. Facebook helps more cases than it ever harms so we live with it.

Parnell yawns. ‘So what’s the plan then, Boss?’

‘I need to wait for them to finish, give them permission to remove the body,’ says Steele, nodding towards the SOCOs. ‘Then I’m heading straight over to HQ to get things set up. You pair stay here for a while. House-to-House should be here soon so can you brief them, Lu? Hopefully we’ll get something from CCTV but for now we’re working on the assumption that she must have been driven here, so someone might have heard a car?’

‘Funny place to dump a body, don’t you think?’ I say. ‘There’s got to be easier places than the middle of central London.’

‘Panic maybe? Listen, Kinsella, have another crack at the witness before they whisk her off to UCH, OK? I know we can’t rely on the detail too much but at least it’ll be fresh and I want to get some sort of statement out of her before Mummy Dearest gets here and starts saying her little angel’s been through enough already.’

Exactly what my mum would have said. Once she’d ripped me a new hole for wandering around London half-cut and half-naked at half-four in the morning.

God, I miss my mum. To the rest of the world you’re just a living, growing mass of cells. Your brain fully forms and your bones start to lengthen and before you know it, you’re a card-carrying grown-up who’s expected to drive cars, pay bills and remember to buy tinfoil. But to your mum, you’ll always be a bit gormless. The girl who sneezed in her porridge and ate it anyway.

And I miss that. I miss being a half-wit and being loved for it.

Lately I’ve been obsessing about what Mum would think of twenty-six-year-old me. What she’d say if she could see me now, out of bed and being productive before lunchtime.

In all honesty, she probably wouldn’t recognise me. It’s fair to say I wasn’t the easiest of adolescents. Dad often said that it took an iron fist and a will of steel to discipline me – not that he ever tried, of course, preferring always to claim that there was no point in him disciplining me when he just couldn’t work me out. Couldn’t ‘get on my level’.

I’d worked him out though. I knew exactly what he was.

I saw the way he’d looked at Maryanne Doyle, and I saw a lot more too.

Heard a few things as well.

Not that I ever told him, or anyone else for that matter. The silence of childhood fear gradually morphed into teenage rebellion – a far more fun way to vent my hate than raking up history and throwing accusations – and lately, in recent years, we’ve slipped into a kind of venomous stalemate. A white-hot apathy.

You stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.

Mum knew I loved her, though, I’m sure of it. I certainly told her enough times. Every morning and every evening and several texts in between.

‘Luv U’, ‘Ur the best, Mum! xxx’

And apparently she can see me now. According to the same clairvoyant who mumbled clichéd statements about my heart-line, Mum’s always with me and she’s proud of me. She enjoys watching me dance apparently. It assures her I’ve moved on from her loss. I didn’t have the heart to tell the lousy charlatan who was charging me sixty pounds an hour for this heartwarming slice of hoodoo, that the only time you’ll ever find me dancing is when I’m paralytic-drunk and Mum definitely wouldn’t enjoy watching that. Who would enjoy watching their last-born child twerking in front of a rabble of baying IT consultants while trying not to vomit peach schnapps?