Sweet Little Lies (Cat Kinsella #1)(9)

Mother’s Day 2013.

They haven’t got any easier or any less shambolic.

‘You look bloody shattered, girl.’ As if reading my mind, Steele comes over all quasi-maternal, laying a hand on my arm. ‘Initial briefing at one p.m., OK, but in the meantime, go home and get a few hours shut-eye. That’s an order, both of you.’ She says ‘both’ but she’s looking at me. ‘I mean it. Stay here for an hour, tops .?.?.’

We stay three hours.

Three hours where we learn very little.

I speak to the witness again but you couldn’t exactly call it a statement, just a few random proclamations of ‘So much blood’ like a bizarrely reimagined Lady Macbeth, and repeated requests for her mum. As instructed, Parnell briefs the House-to-House crew – a team of six men and women dedicated to fighting crime with questionnaires and clipboards – and we even do a bit ourselves, flashing our IDs at confused-looking people with morning breath and sticky-up hair. It yields zilch though. A whole load of ‘nothings’ and one dubious ‘maybe’ which doesn’t really fit with our timeline anyway.

After three hours of spreading hysteria, Parnell announces that he’s going home to have sex, bacon and a Radox bath. He doesn’t mind in what order.

I don’t announce where I’m going.





3

McAuley’s Old Ale House. Maccers for short.

My dad’s pub.

Home.

Home right now is a ten-by-eight in the eaves of the Dawson family residence in Vauxhall, where I’ve got my own sink and toilet, two shelves for my food, and the gnawing guilt of knowing a child was evicted from her bedroom in favour of ￡500 a month because Claire Dawson lost her job and they needed a lodger.

Home, from the age of eight, was a five-bedroomed detached new-build in Radlett. A ‘cul-de-sac’, Mum had proudly announced, as if a dead end was something to aspire to. I’d had to look up what it meant.

But to me, my real home, the place where I was formed and where I was at my most happy, will always be McAuley’s Old Ale House.

As I was just a child when we left the pub, my sister Jacqui insists that the only life I’ve ever known has been one of en-suite shower rooms and Sky TV, but she couldn’t be more wrong. I remember every madcap minute we lived above McAuley’s. The peeling paint and the knock-off furniture. Dad cashing up while Mum was mopping down. I was so bloody content there. A proper little pub kid, rushing down the stairs on Saturday morning, gathering up the coins that people had dropped the night before, nicking crisps, skimming pints. Learning the word ‘cunt’ and how to play snooker.

It’s changed, though. Duck-egg blue, no longer brick-and-pollution-coloured. ‘Aspirational’, I bet Jacqui calls it, meaning hipsters drinking whisky sours out of jam jars. Less ‘boozer’, more ‘gastro-pub’. When we lived here in the Nineties, you either microwaved it or you battered it; if you were being particularly cosmopolitan, you might have put a sprig of parsley with it, but now there’s a chalked sign outside offering ‘Potted Prawns, with apple and radish’ and ‘Slow Cooked Porchetta’. Not a deep-fat fryer in sight.

There’s a few lights on but it’s too early to be open so I walk around the back and up the fire escape to what we used to illogically call the front door.

What am I doing? Why have I come? It’s not even ten a.m., Dad probably won’t be here.

The sound of my steps on the fire escape reverberate in the way they always used to and the door opens before I get a chance to look for the bell. But it isn’t Dad standing there, it’s the cut-price version. The man whose bitter failure to be Dad left him skulking off to Spain to pull pints in a strip-club. Or at least so I thought.

My brother Noel stands in the doorway, rubbing sleep out of his eyes with thick, scabby fingers. We’ve got the same cupid’s bow and the same allergy to shellfish but apart from that we could be strangers. We certainly try to be. He’s chunkier than the last time I saw him, with ridiculous pumped up arms that haven’t quite got the right ratio of muscle to fat. He leans his bulk against the doorframe and the squashed fat of his biceps turns from pink to puce as we stare each other out.

I break the silence first. ‘Well, if it isn’t the prodigal son returned. What are you doing here?’ The question’s entirely rhetorical as I know it’ll be about money. ‘Is Dad here?’

‘’Fraid not,’ he says, heavy on the ‘t’. He doesn’t so much invite me in as walk away from the door and the sight of him retreating tempts me to do the same.

Curiosity wins out though and I step inside.

The hall smells of frying. Pork on the cusp of charcoal. I follow Noel into the kitchen and wait while he prods sausages around a pan, swearing at a space-age hob that has more functions than a cockpit. I look around but there’s nothing to recognise. Not one single memory evoked. There’s no hand-sketched growth-chart on the back wall by the bin. No sandwich toaster shaped like a cow. No stain from where I split my chin and dripped blood on the welcome mat. Nothing to say I ever lived here at all. It’s all clean lines and brushed steel.

It reminds me of the morgue.

I talk to Noel’s sun-damaged back. ‘So when did you arrive?’

There’s a black hold-all on the floor with its contents spilling out. There isn’t enough to suggest a long stay but with Noel you’d never know. You travel light when you’re doing a midnight flit.