‘We’re sorry about the intrusion, Mr Lapaine,’ says Parnell. ‘However, your wife’s personal effects are crucial to our investigation. You mentioned to DC Akwa, the officer you met this morning, that you hadn’t seen your wife for nearly four weeks, but that this wasn’t a cause for concern. Can you tell us when you last had any sort of contact with her?’
‘December 5th. Two weeks ago. It was my birthday.’ He takes a sip of scotch – not the kind of slug I’d be taking in his position – then drops to the armchair opposite Parnell. ‘Although, strictly speaking, I didn’t have contact with her. She left a message to say “happy birthday” on our home phone.’
‘You weren’t in?’ I say gently.
‘No,’ he says, barely a whisper. ‘I always have dinner with my mother on my birthday. Claridge’s. It’s become something of a tradition.’
‘Didn’t she try your mobile?’ asks Parnell
‘I’m guessing she wanted to get away with leaving a message. She knew I’d be out, you see.’ He answers before we can ask. ‘Look, Alice was quite complex. Sometimes she just wanted to be alone and I respected that. We respected each other.’
Parnell nods. ‘You told DC Akwa that Alice had a history of disappearing for short periods.’
‘I’m not sure I put it exactly like that. Alice liked her own space, that’s all. There’s a little cottage in Hove she liked to rent sometimes. I told the detective that.’
‘An officer took a statement from the landlady just half an hour ago and she says that Alice hadn’t booked the cottage in well over a year.’
He shrugs. ‘There’s a place near Paignton, too. She just liked a week by the sea occasionally, I can’t always get away because of work and .?.?.’
Parnell narrows his eyes. ‘So you weren’t concerned that she was gone for longer than a week this time?’
‘No. I knew to let her get things out of her system.’
‘What things?’ asks Parnell, verging on testy.
Lapaine picks up the bottle again and swills the liquid around, momentarily mesmerised. He could be formulating his lie or he could be locked in his own private hell, contemplating how the dice might have rolled if he’d been home when Alice had called, but when he looks up again, he looks sharper. Hardened.
‘Life, Sergeant. Don’t you ever want to run away and be by yourself? Step out of the daily grind once in a while?’
‘Absolutely.’ Parnell nods emphatically. ‘Where do I sign? But I’d tell my wife where I was going, when I’d be back and how often she could expect to hear from me.’
He gives Parnell a sardonic look. ‘Well, that rather defeats the object of going it alone, wouldn’t you say? If your every move can be monitored?’
Parnell stands up and walks across to the window, throwing me a look of ‘I can’t get a handle on this one.’ In fairness, Parnell isn’t exactly known for his lack of empathy – he’s the kind of guy who always tries to find common ground, whether it’s discussing the ‘pop charts’ with Ben or short skirts with a suspected rapist, anything to get the other person talking. But I can see he’s struggling with Thomas Lapaine and this curiously modern marriage. Maggie Parnell classes her monthly cut and blow dry as precious time away.
I put my notepad down, take over. ‘Mr Lapaine, believe me, I understand the need to go it alone sometimes but four weeks is a long time. Didn’t you once think about calling her?’
‘I did a couple of times, she didn’t answer, I didn’t leave a message .?.?.’ He shakes his head, his own inadequacy dawning on him. ‘I should have been firmer, shouldn’t I? I should have kept calling her and insisting she come home but .?.?.’ His voice cracks and the tears come. Not exactly a flood but the trickle seems genuine.
I leave it a respectful few seconds before jumping back a few beats. ‘How did she sound on the answering machine, the evening she called? Normal?’
He pushes his hands into his eyes. ‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘We’ll want to listen to that message,’ says Parnell, sitting back down.
‘You can’t. I wiped it.’
Parnell’s knee jigs. ‘Sounds a tiny bit callous, if you don’t mind me saying? Your wife leaves a message, the first time you’ve heard her voice in two weeks, and you wipe it?’
‘I was angry.’ He realises what he’s said, removes the edge from his voice. ‘I was annoyed that she hadn’t tried my mobile.’
‘But you said you respected her need for personal space?’
Lightning quick. ‘Respected, yes. I didn’t say I liked it.’
Parnell concedes the point and moves on. ‘Mr Lapaine, obviously we’ll be going through your wife’s personal effects, her online activity etc., but it would save a lot of time if you could give us the names of all the people your wife knew in London, who she might have visited or stayed with. In particular, anyone in the Wandsworth area.’
‘There’s no one. No one at all.’ There’s something about his face, not so much flummoxed as dumbfounded, that makes me inclined to believe him – inclined to believe there’s no one he knows about anyway. ‘I just don’t understand it. I assumed she’d gone to the coast like before. She loved being by the sea, whereas she hated London. Absolutely hated it.’
‘A city full of rats and chancers,’ Mum used to call it. She couldn’t flee London quick enough for the bourgeois mystique of Radlett.
‘Seriously, Alice never went to London. Ever. I booked a dinner for our anniversary once, at the Landau – she loved the chef, Michel Roux, you see. We used to watch him on that show. God, what’s it called?’
‘Masterchef,’ offers Parnell. I raise my eyebrows.
‘Yes, yes, that’s it,’ he replies, animated, eager to open up for the first time. ‘I had it all planned out. Cocktails in the bar, dinner in the restaurant, a suite at the Langham.’ He pauses, screwing his face up in fresh confusion. ‘But she just wouldn’t go. Refused point-blank. Said it was a waste of money, she didn’t like the crowds, or the tube, or fancy restaurants for that matter, which was news to me, as we’d eaten in plenty when we lived overseas. And the waste of money comment, well, that was just nonsense. God knows how much she spent on food every week, buying rare ingredients for recipes she’d seen on the TV.’ He lets out a brittle laugh. ‘Do you know what she said in the end? “Buy Roux’s cookbook instead and I’ll make dinner at home.” Can you believe that?’
Keen to keep him in full-flow, I say. ‘Mr Lapaine, how did you and Alice meet?’
‘Please, call me Thomas, Tom even. We met in Brighton, late 2001. Alice lived there and I was on a Stop-the-War march. I think she liked that I was principled.’ A shy smile. ‘I just fancied her rotten.’
I scan the room for a wedding photo but there’s none. None of them at all, in fact. Just one small photo on the windowsill of an older couple sagging in the heat standing next to two camels.
‘And when did you marry?’
‘In 2003,’ he says, twisting his wedding ring. ‘Young by today’s standards, I suppose.’
Parnell interjects. ‘You mentioned earlier that you lived overseas?’
He nods. ‘Yes, we lived in Brighton for a while after we married, but then I got a job offer in Sydney and after that, Perth. Then Hong Kong for quite a while. Cape Town, for nine months.’ Parnell opens his mouth but Lapaine second-guesses the question. ‘I know a lot about boats.’
‘When did you come back to the UK?’ I ask
He slumps back in his chair, exhausted. ‘In 2010. My parents were getting older. My father was struggling with the business and he was keen for me to take over. It just felt like time to come home. Alice wasn’t keen at first, but we wanted to start a family and she understood that it would be nice to have grandparents close by – Alice’s mother died when she was a teenager and she never knew her father – so we agreed to move near to my parents. I said she could choose the house, that was the deal. She chose here.’
He sweeps a hand towards the shimmering river, presenting it like Alice’s own personal masterpiece.
‘The location obviously made it rather expensive so we haven’t done much to the house, but it’s quiet and it’s by water and that’s all she wanted.’ He thinks on this, briefly. ‘Sums Alice up really – “quiet and always by water”.’