Dad did nothing, initially – discipline was always very much Mum’s domain whereas dereliction of all parental responsibility was very much his. It was only days later, when I offered him the two pounds fifty and he realised his precious football shirt hadn’t been nicked after all, but sold, by his daughter, for roughly the same price as a Big Mac, that he showed his true colours, slamming me against the kitchen wall and whispering, ‘One day you’ll push me too far, sweetheart, and it won’t end well. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.’
Of course, my sister says watered-down versions of this to my nephew all the time.
‘If I have to come up there, Finn Hadley, you’ll regret it .?.?.’
‘I won’t warn you again, young man .?.?.’
And only the other day, I overheard Flowers telling his wife, ‘She doesn’t need new Nike Air Zooms, Gill. What she needs is a boot up the fucking arse.’
So as a rule, parenthood seems to be a never-ending issuing of cheap shots, veiled threats and frayed tempers, but still I know – as sure as I knew then – that Dad was only one deep breath away from hurting me that night. And who knows, maybe I’d have deserved it? Everyone has their breaking point and I’d been pushing Dad for a long, long time.
I don’t want to think about this anymore so I tell Emily I like her bag just to make conversation. It’s black, functional and totally nondescript in every way but the five-minute anecdote about where she bought it (Zara, Cambridge, they didn’t take the security tag off and she got stopped on the way out) brings my heart-rate back to normal and chases away any residual thoughts about my dad.
Further salvation comes in the form of my ringtone. Parnell.
‘Hey Sarge?’ I fumble for the keys to the pool car.
‘All right, kiddo, how’d you get on?’
‘Nothing that helpful. Emily’s going to write it up when we get back.’
Which is news to a scowling Emily.
‘How far away are you?’
I throw the keys to Emily, signal for her to drive. ‘We’re just leaving Wandsworth now. Why? Where’s the fire?’
‘Thomas Lapaine’s coming back in. I want you with me.’
I pause – to my credit, I pause. It’s never my intention to antagonise Steele, far from it.
‘So has the Boss OK’d it? I mean, what about Renée? Or Flowers?’
‘I am the boss. Acting DI, remember? No, I want me, you and Seth to take turns with him. You heard Renée before, she’s not exactly flavour of the month with Tom Lapaine, and Flowers hasn’t got the finesse for this one. So get your skates on, I need you back here for a quick brief.’
If I knew what was good for me, I’d ’fess up to Parnell that Steele doesn’t want me too involved in this investigation. Too active at its core. She’s fine for me to lean up against Agas asking routine questions to peripheral witnesses. She didn’t even mind me being in on the first Thomas Lapaine interview when my role was simply to ‘um-hum’ sympathetically and take notes. But now he’s a proper suspect? I’m not so sure. And I run everything by her, she said. She couldn’t have been any clearer.
I consider this for all of two seconds.
‘No problem, Sarge. See you in half an hour.’
11
We get our plan together over bone-dry turkey and over-cooked veg in the staff canteen – or in ‘Santa’s Grotto’ as a sign, messily scrawled on the back of a road traffic collision report, informs us. Flowers is on charity bucket duty, lumbering between tables and bullying everyone into digging deeper, which I suppose is the point.
‘A tenner, you mean bastard! You’ve paid more for a blow-job .?.?.’
‘Tighter than a nun’s chuff, you lot.’
Above the clamour of insults and X-rated grumbling, Jim Reeves tries to raise the tone, crooning on someone’s iPod about the magic of Silver Bells, and I find myself getting a sharp pang of sentimentality for something I never knew. Christmas was never the most enchanted of times in our house. It was the only time Mum ever drank and although it was never really much – just a couple of G&Ts here and the odd glass of bubbly there – it was always enough to add that extra few degrees of heat to a marriage that somehow managed to simmer along just below boiling point for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year.
‘So we start fairly soft.’ Parnell pushes his plate away, finally admitting defeat in the war of Man vs Heinous Food. ‘Me and Seth will kick off. We’ll say we’re just following up, now that he’s had some time to digest the news about Alice/Maryanne. Has anything occurred to him that might help? How’s he coping .?.?. appreciate it was a huge shock .?.?. that sort of thing .?.?.’
The rest, as outlined by Parnell, is relatively simple. We’ll try different approaches to fox him and switch line-ups when it looks like he’s getting comfortable. Parnell’s going to do the authority thing, the wizened old hand trying to dot all the is and cross all the ts, and Seth will do the posh thing – I may have had my vowels rounded out at Lady Helen’s School for Girls, but what I know about birthday suppers at Claridge’s and boats you could write on the back of a postage stamp.
Which leaves me in the observation room, watching it all unfold on TV – primed to do the female thing, whatever the hell that means.
‘So I either glide in and wet-nurse him, if that’s what the interview needs, or I burst in like a madwoman and tear his nuts off with my teeth?’ I say, biting into a stuffing ball.
‘Exactly,’ says Parnell, only slightly alarmed. ‘Depends which way it goes .?.?.’
*
What we didn’t plan for was it going a different way entirely. Parnell and Seth barely have time to do the ‘sorry the coffee’s awful’ skit and my arse has barely hit the observation room chair before Thomas Lapaine blindsides us all with an unexpected chattiness. And not the verbal diarrhoea that suggests nervousness or guilt. He’s entirely relaxed and composed. Like he’s settled down into the confessional box for a therapeutic offload. There isn’t a speck of red left in those rich brown eyes to suggest he’s lost even an hour’s kip, never mind his wife in the most brutal of circumstances. His hair looks different too, coiffured, parted slightly to the left. He’s prepared for this visit like it’s a business lunch.
This is a different Thomas Lapaine.
Emboldened.
Betrayed.
But not lawyered-up, mercifully. And with no intention of doing so either, despite Parnell’s reading of his rights.
‘For the benefit of the tape, it is Thursday 18th December, 2016 and the time is six twenty-nine p.m. I am Acting Detective Inspector Luigi Parnell and with me is Detective Constable Seth Wakeman and—’
Lapaine leans in. ‘Thomas Lapaine. Look, I think I know why you’ve called me back here. You want to know why I cleared out the joint account. I don’t know a lot about the workings of police investigations, detectives, but I assumed you’d find out.’
Parnell does his ‘disappointed parent’ voice. He does it to me sometimes when my language gets a bit sordid or I eat M&Ms for breakfast. ‘So why didn’t you just tell us, Tom? You must realise that us finding out the hard way doesn’t exactly show you in a great light?’
A tiny lift of one shoulder. ‘You never asked.’
The fact he genuinely seems to think that’s an acceptable comeback makes me conclude that Thomas Lapaine possibly isn’t the sharpest tool in the box
Parnell leaves it though, there’s no point arguing with true idiocy. ‘So come on then, why did you clear out it out?’
Lapaine’s eyes wander but there’s nothing to look at. Just walls the colour of smog and a carpet that makes the walls look upbeat.
‘If I say it was to force her back, I suppose that doesn’t show me in a great light either?’
‘A piece of advice, Tom, I’d forget your image and concentrate on the facts from now on, OK?’