‘Did anyone see you this morning?’ I ask.
‘I don’t recall meeting anyone. There’s occasionally a few people following the same route in the opposite direction, but as you say, it was cold. Fairweather walkers.’
‘Can anyone verify your alibi for last night?’ says Parnell. ‘It’s an entirely routine question, I assure you.’
‘I’m not in the habit of spending evenings with anyone but my wife, I’m afraid.’
‘Did you make or receive any calls then, send any texts?’
‘No, I don’t believe I did.’ He grips the arm of the chair to steady himself but his shaky voice betrays him. ‘You can’t honestly think that I hurt my wife?’
I could quote the statistics now. I could lay it on the line just how hard he’s going to have to work to convince us that he’s not just another depressing tick in an all-too-familiar box.
I could reduce his marriage to yet another arbitrary percentage.
You had a sixty-five per cent chance of fathering a child with your wife.
There’s a sixty-three per cent chance that you killed her.
But like a good little note-taking, nodding DC, I say nothing.
6
Steele rockets out of her office carrying a bulging make-up bag and plonks herself down in my chair. I sag against the wall, ready to drop.
‘Right, I’ve got twenty minutes before I need to shoot over to Kensington to charge a few nasty little scrotes with joint enterprise so a) ignore me while I put my slap on and b) cut to the chase, is the husband a viable suspect?’
Parnell has his feet up on the desk, a KFC rests on his stomach. ‘Well, it’s not a happy marriage, however he dresses it up.’
‘Do a straw poll in this station, Lu. You won’t find too many happy marriages, or too many murderers, I hope.’
‘Twenty-three years in February. Quite happy, thank you.’
Parnell looks as smug as a man can look with chicken grease on his chin.
‘Good for you,’ says Steele, applying eyeliner with the steadiest of hands. ‘But the fact the Lapaines don’t match up to the standards of Mr and Mrs Luigi Parnell doesn’t constitute reasonable suspicion. Anything else?’
‘They’d been having IVF,’ I tell her. ‘They’d just seen another consultant in London but she wanted to give up. He said he accepted it but .?.?.’
Flowers sticks his head above his screen. ‘A man finds out he’s a jaffa? I can see that tipping into something nasty.’ Emily Beck looks confused. ‘A jaffa, you know? Seedless.’
‘He means infertile, Emily.’ I turn back to Flowers. ‘Anyway, who says he’s a jaffa? The issue could have been hers?’
Flowers points a chewed biro at me. ‘Well, there’s your motive then?’
‘To kill her!’ I can’t keep the scorn out of my voice even though he’s a sergeant and I really should try harder. ‘Maybe to leave her, if you’re a particularly cruel bastard. But to kill her? Behave.’
Flowers grins, which throws me. Sometimes I think he hates me, from my perceived closeness to Steele to the fact I always forget to put sugar in his tea, but othertimes I wonder if he thrives on the banter.
Steele isn’t grinning though. She doesn’t have time to contour her face, profile a suspect and referee an argument in twenty minutes flat. ‘Button it, Kinsella,’ she says, ‘Lu, anything else?’
‘He doesn’t have an alibi. He was at home all night, alone.’
I unbutton it. ‘Which isn’t provable, but is completely feasible,’
Steele stops mid eye-flick. ‘Come on then, you’re obviously not convinced. Spit it out.’
I don’t feel ready but what the hell. ‘Well, look, I don’t know, Boss, what are we saying? “Something” tipped him over the edge, he killed her, and then he dumped her body twenty miles away in the middle of central London? I dunno, I’m just not feeling it.’
A quick nod. ‘Well your concerns are duly noted, but right now he’s the only possible suspect we’ve got, bar some random stranger, and it’s not feeling like that to me. We need to speak to that consultant in London – see how they came across at their appointment.’ Parnell gives Emily the nod to get on it. ‘Do you like him for this, Lu?’
In just a few words, two decades of trust, respect and gruelling late nights pass between Steele and Parnell.
Parnell sighs. ‘Honestly? Not as much as I’d like, no.’
‘Do you know what’s niggling me,’ I say to Parnell. ‘This “Alice hated London” thing.’
And her eyes, I realise then. Almond-shaped, ocean-blue.
Flowers, Barnsley born and bred, pipes up. ‘We weren’t all born within the sound of Bow Bells, Kinsella. Some folk think London’s a bit up-itself and overpriced, if your cockney ears can believe such a thing.’
‘Bow Bells? That’s East London, Sarge. I was born in Islington – makes me a northerner, like you. What I’m saying is, she hated London with a passion but they’d also lived in Sydney, Cape Town, Hong Kong, so it’s not a case of the country bumpkin being frightened of the big smoke. I mean, I can understand her not wanting to live in London, but she point-blank refused to even visit, even when he’d planned nice surprises for her.’
A ‘tsk’ from Flowers. ‘She sounds like a bloody nightmare. I’d have strangled her years ago.’
I don’t bite, nor does anyone else. It might be because the clock’s ticking on Steele’s twenty minutes, or it could be that we all quietly agree.
‘OK,’ says Steele, blotting her lips, a rich petal-pink. ‘We’ve just about managed to get her photo in the Standard this evening. We’ll try for the nationals tomorrow if we don’t get any solid sightings in London, but with any luck we should have some idea where she’s been for the past month within the next twelve to twenty-four hours.’
Flowers rubs his eyes. ‘My bet’s with a boyfriend.’
‘It’d explain the IVF change of heart,’ says Parnell.
Steele shouts over. ‘Any joy on the phone records, Benny-boy?’
‘Still waiting. And yep, I’ve said it’s urgent.’
Steele raises her voice another decibel. ‘Also, we need more photos of Alice Lapaine. Better ones, to be blunt. Press office reckons the one we’ve got is a bit dreary. They want happy, smiley ones to pull on the public’s heartstrings.’
‘I didn’t see any at the house,’ I say looking towards Parnell. ‘Not even a wedding photo.’
Parnell screws up his KFC bag, pats away the heartburn. ‘Doesn’t mean anything. I haven’t got a clue where my wedding photos are. Probably in the garage covered in mould and white spirit.’
‘Well, the husband must have some, somewhere,’ says Steele, ‘Or how about Facebook? Seth, anything from her laptop? Any photos of her cuddling bloody kittens, or whatever it is the Press Office want? Any evidence of a secret boyfriend?’
Seth shakes his head while exhaustion strips his voice of its usual public-school jollity. ‘I only had it briefly before Forensics took it, but there wasn’t much to see. She has a Facebook account but she hardly uses it. A measly sixteen friends in total, mainly from Hong Kong and Sydney. We’re obviously tracing them. Ben’s made a start.’
A raised hand from Ben Swaines. ‘She’s got a Hotmail account, but again, it looks like she rarely checks it. It’s mainly junk and online shopping receipts. Of course there could be lots of deleted stuff that I’m not seeing. Digital Forensics will obviously take a much deeper dive, but .?.?.’