He nods, stares at the hand where his wedding ring used to live. ‘I assumed if she had no access to money then she’d have to come back, and I desperately wanted her home for Christmas.’ If there’s a tiny swell of sympathy for the melancholy contained within this statement, it’s soon extinguished. ‘Mother was asking questions already, you see, and she’d have asked a whole lot more if it was just me turning up for Buck’s Fizz and Classic FM on Christmas morning.’ He lets out a cruel snort. ‘Ten a.m. on the dot, don’t be late now.’
There’s an acidity to his voice. A mockery of all that he and Alice were. Their traditions, their in-jokes, their shared frustration at not being able to stay in bed eating Quality Street because they had to gather around the radio at ‘Mother’s’ every sodding Christmas morning. All of that seems risible now, tainted even, by the words Maryanne Doyle and the revelation that his wife was not who he thought.
We can use this anger though. The martyrdom stuff gets you nowhere. As long as this stays on the right side of demonisation, this could be good.
‘And what about when she didn’t come back?’ says Parnell, crossing his arms. ‘Weren’t you concerned about how she’d survive? Weren’t you worried when she didn’t call to ask what the hell you were playing it? Didn’t you call her?’
‘I did, actually.’ Which his phone records bear out. ‘But no, I wasn’t overly worried when she didn’t ask “what the hell I was playing at” because I thought I knew my wife, Detective, and I thought that wasn’t her style. However, it turns out I didn’t know my wife, Maryanne Doyle, quite as well as I thought I did.’ He spits her name out like a germ.
Parnell changes tack. ‘How much was in your joint account, out of interest?’
‘Not a huge amount. ￡10,000 or so, maybe a bit more. Most of our money is tied up in the business. I was hoping the money in the joint account would see us to the end of the tax year.’
Parnell does a mental calculation. ‘So you had more than one reason to track her down then? She was going through nearly ￡500 a week.’
A tiny shrug.
‘How is business?’ asks Seth without the slightest hint of edge. They could be a couple of hedge-funders nursing a single malt at Annabel’s.
‘How is any small business doing, Detective? It’s been a turbulent few years. The uncertainty over Brexit certainly isn’t helping, but we stay afloat, if you pardon the dreadful pun.’
Seth smiles, shyly. ‘Do you know, it’s always been a dream of mine to own a boat. My Grandparents had a Fairline Mirage 29. They bought in the mid-Eighties, brand new. It was blue and white. Absolutely stunning.’
‘A mid-Eighties Mirage?’ Lapaine looks impressed. ‘That would have been one of the last Mirage MK11s. The blue and white colour scheme is quite rare too.’
Parnell pretends to look annoyed. ‘Er, ahoy there, shipmates! If could we knock the nautical stuff on the head and get back to business.’ Seth looks chastised. They’ve played it well. ‘So Tom, bearing in mind we can request to see your business accounts like that’ – a quick snap of his fingers – ‘would it be fair to say your business is failing?’
‘I wouldn’t say “failing”, no. “Troubled” would be more accurate.’ He crosses his arms, mirroring Parnell. ‘Can I ask what exactly this has got to with anything, because if you’ve found a way that I financially benefit from my wife’s death, then honestly, I’d be grateful if you’d share it.’
Parnell leans forward. ‘Well, it’s just that viewed from the outside, I see a marriage that was troubled, despite the picture you tried to paint last time. A business that was troubled – your own admission, remember. And frankly, an ability to conceive a child that was – I don’t think we can really use the word “troubled” here – it was failing.’ He thinks for a second then corrects himself. ‘Well, it wasn’t failing. It had failed, past tense.’
I wince at the cruelty of the statement and decide it’s probably time to switch places. Big Bad Parnell’s unlikely to get anything more from him now. He’s got him rattled. Emasculated. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but I might have to build him back up before we hit him with the phantom baby or he might shut down entirely.
Or worse still, lawyer-up.
I swipe a slick of clear lip-gloss across my mouth and push my hair behind my ears, showing off my simple stud earrings. Feminine, uncomplicated and unthreatening.
I knock.
‘Excuse me, Inspector, can I have a word?’
Parnell pretends to look peeved again and walks out. We leave the door slightly open and stand in the corridor, earnestly discussing Parnell’s acid reflux in serious, hushed tones until Thomas Lapaine practically dislocates his neck craning to see what’s going on.
After a few minutes I go in, give him news of the fresh line-up.
‘Everything OK?’ I say, blithely. Seth and Lapaine break off from some chummy chat, presumably about boats. ‘Unfortunately, Acting Detective Inspector Parnell has been called away unexpectedly. Really sorry about that, Tom, but it happens.’ I sit down, dump a pile of papers on the table and pull my chair up close. ‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to put up with me instead. So .?.?.’ I turn to Seth then back to Lapaine, smiling. ‘Where’d we get to?’
Seth’s all casual. ‘Oh we’d just cleared up that business about the joint account.’
‘Ah right, OK.’ I say, nodding. ‘You know, my dad did it to me once. I had a bit of a blow-out, island-hopping across Greece one summer and he only went and cancelled my allowance, stopped my credit card. It worked though. I was back the next day.’
‘Unlike Alice,’ Lapaine says, coldly. Reporting a fact, not lamenting a loss.
‘Unlike Alice.’ I leave it there for a few seconds then turn to Seth again. ‘Did you ask about the phone numbers?’
Lapaine sits up, confused. ‘What phone numbers?’
‘We hadn’t got to the phone numbers,’ Seth confirms.
‘What phone numbers?’ he repeats, growing antsy.
I make a bit of a performance of sifting through my papers. Lapaine tries to flash-read but frankly half of them aren’t relevant, just whatever I could grab in the squad room, most of it bound for the shredder.
Thing is, paper makes people nervous. Far more than technology, surprisingly.
I find what I’m looking for, slide the piece of paper towards him. ‘Do you recognise either of these numbers?’
His eyebrows knit together. ‘No, but then I don’t recognise many numbers off-hand. Just Alice’s and maybe my parents. Whose are they?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. Alice made several calls to both over the past few weeks.’
‘Well, I can’t help.’
I flick my hand. ‘No worries. We knew it was a bit of a long shot.’ I draw in a little closer, watch his jaw set as the chair legs make a scraping sound across the floor. ‘Tom, you said that Alice had initially been very keen to start a family. You sort of implied it was the main reason she agreed to come back to the UK.’
Impatient. ‘Yes.’
I take a deep breath, a warning to him that he’s not going to like what I say next. ‘You see, the post-mortem report has confirmed something that may, or may not, come as a shock to you.’
That gets a laugh. ‘My wife turned out to be a completely different person to who I thought she was, Detective. I’m not sure anything can come as a shock anymore so please, say what you have to say.’
I take him at his word and don’t bother with a preamble. ‘Your wife had at some point given birth to a child, Tom. Not just got pregnant – that’s not what I’m saying – she’d actually delivered a child.’
It’s subtle, so subtle that I’ll probably doubt later that it was ever really there, but there’s a momentary rigidity to him – from the set of his eyes to the ram-rod straightness of his spine, that tells me he’s thunderstruck.
‘What exactly are you telling me?’ he says, eyes boring into mine. ‘That my wife carried and delivered a child and somehow managed to conceal it from me? Clearly Alice’s ability to deceive was far beyond what I imagined but still, I think I’d have noticed that.’
I answer coolly. ‘Then it must have been before you met. So can you tell us, did she ever speak to you about it? Or did you ever suspect that she’d had a child?’