Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(88)

It’s especially a bad idea at five a.m., when you’re alone and lying in the pitch-black silence, waiting for the orange glow of the streetlamps to bring another dark night of the soul to a close.

Good old five a.m., though.

There’s comfort to be found in consistency.

Unsurprisingly, sleep was fractured last night. Just the odd twenty-minute snatch dreaming of shadowed, wailing women emerging from dark corners to plead with me about something?

Mary Shelley had Frankenstein haunting her ‘midnight pillow’. Basically, I’d had Jacqui.

Around three a.m., I’d switched the light on and pounded out a text out to my sister. An incoherent essay full of pseudo-apologies and rambling justifications. The worst kind of grovel – ‘I’m really sorry, but .?.?.’

Thankfully I hadn’t sent it.

I hadn’t sent the one I’d written to Aiden Doyle either.



Thanks for the drink. Don’t think we should meet up again. Sorry. Cat x.

SMS 3.32 a.m.



I stir myself and drift zombie-like into the shower. The water’s warm but sparse, another thing in this house that needs fixing. Still in my towel, I mainline carbs and caffeine for half an hour, sitting on the stair where my relationship with Jacqui ended last night until I realise I’m shivering. Proper cartoon shivering. I crank the heating up and go back upstairs. Fill my room with the tinny, mindless sounds of breakfast TV.

A shower. Carbs. Caffeine. Vacuous noise. Usually a winning combination for shaking off the worst of the bad-night blues but I can’t seem to find solace today. My heart’s too heavy and my chest’s too tight and for the first time ever I think about phoning in sick.

That is, until Parnell calls.

‘Boss,’ I croak, giving myself the option depending on what he has to say. ‘You’re up early, you all right?’

His voice sounds odd, softer. ‘Better to be a lark than an owl, Kinsella, and in answer to your question, no, I’m not all right.’

I mute the TV, silencing a far-too-chipper brunette preaching about how to get a flat stomach in twelve hours. For the ‘big night’ as she calls it.

‘Why? What’s happened? You sound weird?’

What’s happened to Parnell is a tooth abscess, ‘more painful than labour’ he insists as Maggie shouts obscenities in the background. What’s happened to our case is a call from Parnell’s ‘snout’, Mrs Stevens, to say that ‘a dark woman with a suitcase’ turned up at Saskia French’s flat last night and was heard saying to someone on her phone that she’d come back the next morning when she’d found her spare key.

Which leaves me sitting outside Ophelia Mansions for nearly four hours, cursing this woman and her loose definition of the word ‘morning’, and Parnell sitting in the emergency dentist’s chair, cursing himself for not taking better care of his teeth.

Just after noon she turns up. As we climb the six flights of stairs, I give the woman with the mellow-brown skin and the cut-glass accent a two-minute version of our two-week-old case.

She doesn’t seem too moved by it.

‘Maryanne’s dead?’ She pats the pockets of her Afghan coat, shoving her handbag into my arms so she can rummage for the key. ‘Sorry, I had no idea. I’ve been in the Seychelles for the past three weeks with a client.’

Her name is Naomi Berry. She’s been working ‘with, not for’ Saskia French for several years and she has a key because when Saskia’s away, she likes Naomi to keep half an eye on things. She explains that she called by the flat last night as Saskia lets her keep her work ‘things’ here – it saves her carting them backwards and forwards between here and her respectable life as a trainee acupuncturist in Crouch End – and she was very surprised to find Saskia gone as the week between Christmas and New Year is usually highly lucrative. Clients who’ve been cooped up with their families are desperate to ‘relax’, apparently, and a wintery woodland walk or a quiet pint in the local doesn’t quite cut it.

All this before we’ve got through the bloody front door.

‘So you met Maryanne?’ I finally get a word in.

‘Briefly.’ She jangles the key triumphantly then twists it in the lock. ‘She was here for about a week before I left.’

There’s a mound of literature on the doormat, mainly junk – pizza flyers, taxi cards, letters addressed ‘to the occupier’, and there’s a sweet rank smell stifling the air. Naomi eyes me warily in the dim light – she’s clearly watched her fair share of cop shows – however it’s definitely not the sweet stench of death. Decaying fruit, I reckon. Or an unemptied bin. Naomi puts her case down and goes into the kitchen to investigate. I walk into the living room and start opening windows.

‘So what can you can tell me about Maryanne?’ I say, keeping my question nice and open.

She stands in the doorway holding the offending bin-bag out in front of her like a dead rat. Sundown in the Seychelles must seem like a very distant dream right now.

‘Nothing. Like I said, our paths didn’t cross for long. We barely spoke other than to say hello.’

I nod, leave it at that. ‘Naomi, we really need to speak with Saskia and we haven’t been able to contact her for nearly a week. Have you heard from her at all?’