When You Are Mine(25)
‘I told her not to get too close, but she was holding out her arms, saying she could feel the wind beneath her wings. One minute she was there and the next she had gone.’
Goodall, a police constable, used a lower path to reach her body, sustaining hand injuries and suffering from hypothermia. He stayed with Miss Croker until coastguard and lifeboat crews arrived.
In a statement read out at the inquest, Miss Croker’s mother, Lydia, described her daughter as someone who lived life to the full. ‘She was my beautiful, thoughtful, kind-hearted first-born and I miss her every day.’
Coroner Ressler concluded, ‘This is a very sad and tragic case. My heart goes out to the Croker family, who have lost a loving daughter in a terrible accident.’
I read a dozen more articles. None of them calls into question the findings of the inquest, yet Dylan Holstein said that her family had doubts. He came to me looking for dirt on Goodall and now he’s dead, which is either a terrible coincidence, or a warning that I should leave this alone.
I’m about to close the page down, when I type another search. Holstein knew that I was Edward McCarthy’s daughter, something I’ve worked hard to keep secret. The page refreshes and I begin reading a newspaper feature written eight months ago. It focuses on the Hope Island development, my father’s latest property venture. Three local councillors have been accused of taking more than a million pounds in bribes to approve the rezoning of the former industrial site near Canning Town. One of the men, the chair of the local development committee, was found dead in the garage of his home when detectives arrived to question him.
My father is quoted in the article, pledging to cooperate fully with any investigation and denying any wrongdoing. A sidebar, published beside the main feature, details the potted history of Edward McCarthy, mentioning his two marriages and only daughter, but not my name.
It is two in the morning and my coffee has grown cold. I rub my eyes and turn off the computer.
My father’s birthday is tomorrow – by which I mean today. Now I have a reason to go.
12
‘We should have hired a limo,’ says Henry.
‘Or at least had your car washed,’ I reply, peering through the smeared windscreen. A fallen leaf, trapped beneath the wiper blades, has been there since last autumn.
We are waiting in a procession of prestige cars that are lined up at the pillared gates where security guards are checking registration numbers and IDs. Bulked up with shaven heads, they look like ex-boxers or ex-cons. Nearby a camera crew has set up beside a broadcast van and a pretty TV reporter is doing a piece to camera, touching her hair when the wind blows it across her face. And further down the lane, a handful of freelance photographers are perched on stepladders, aiming long lenses over the wall into the estate. Paparazzi.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ asks Henry.
‘You didn’t have to come.’
‘Are you kidding me! I wouldn’t miss this for the world – a chance to meet the famous Edward McCarthy – the enigma, the riddle, the gangster.’
‘Don’t call him a gangster.’
‘That’s what you call him.’
‘I’m allowed. And I’m really only here to see my uncles.’
‘Who are known criminals.’
‘They spent time in prison. That doesn’t mean they’re—’
‘Old lags?’
I give him a dirty look.
‘I’m joking, OK?’
Someone raps hard on my window, startling me. I think it’s going to be a security guard, but it’s Martyn Fairbairn, the detective I met at Bankside Pier.
I lower the window.
Fairbairn looks bemused rather than annoyed. ‘We meet again. Mind telling me what you’re doing here?’
‘I’ve been invited.’
His eyes squint and then widen again as the penny drops.
‘You’re related,’ he says, surprised. ‘A niece?’
‘Daughter.’
‘Wow! I wouldn’t have picked that.’
I want to explain that I haven’t spoken to my father in years, but that’s going to sound disingenuous when I’m showing up to his birthday party.
Fairbairn crosses his arms and cups his cheek in the attitude of a man nursing a toothache. I notice the police cars parked opposite the gates. A photographer is taking pictures of number plates. They will trace the vehicles and put names to faces.
‘Does this have anything to do with Dylan Holstein’s murder?’ I ask.
‘You tell me.’
The queue is moving ahead of us. A security guard spots Fairbairn and comes swaggering towards us. The detective steps back and raises his hands, saying, ‘It’s cool. We’re old friends.’ And then to me. ‘Enjoy the party.’
I hand over my licence and the guard consults a tablet, flicking at the screen. He’s wearing an earpiece and has a microphone attached to his wrist.
‘How very James Bond,’ says Henry, who is enjoying this.
We are waved through and follow the car ahead along the crushed gravel driveway, where men with glow-sticks are waving drivers into parking spots. Ahead of us, a rambling house with a steepled outline is visible above the treetops. Once the car has stopped, I zip up my boots and check my make-up in the mirror. Henry is waiting for me, admiring the whitewashed seventeenth-century manor house, which has nine chimneys and a porte cochère covered in ivy. Although I never lived here, I know the house once belonged to Robert Baldlock, one of the wealthiest men in England, who started his career as a smuggler before moving into brewing and gambling and finally property speculation. My father likes that story because it parallels his own career.