‘Exactly,’ says Parnell. ‘So do you know what we do?’
‘Give up? Plant evidence?’
Parnell turns his body to face me, the seatbelt strains across his bulk. ‘Are you a James Bond fan, Kinsella?’
The seriousness of his tone tickles me. ‘Not really. I went through a bit of a spy phase when I was little but it was more Danger Mouse than 007. Why?’
‘But you’ve heard of Goldfinger, though? Tell me you’ve heard of Goldfinger?’
I do a little Shirley Bassey which Parnell takes to mean ‘yes’.
‘Well, after he comes across Bond for the third time, Goldfinger says – and bear with me, my Latvian accent isn’t the best. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”’
I think about this, nod sagely. ‘So we find coincidence number three, and when we do, we consider the Hickses to be the enemy.’ Parnell joins me in the sage nodding. ‘We might find it in the phone records?’
Parnell puts his e-cig down, holds up two fingers. ‘One, that wouldn’t be a coincidence, that would be us blatantly catching them out in a lie, and two, we won’t find anything, he was far too relaxed.’ Suddenly his head juts forward and he squints into the distance. ‘Although, hold up. Speak of the devil.’
I follow his line of sight and see Nate Hicks jogging towards the car. Parnell gives the accelerator a rev for pure devilment and the jog turns into a lumbering sprint.
‘What does he want?’
‘You didn’t forget your glasses again, kiddo?’ I glare at Parnell but it’s a fair question. It happens all the time; pub toilets, train journeys, witnesses’ homes. I live in fear of leaving them at a crime scene.
Parnell winds down the window. I scowl at the cold and in doing so scowl at Nate Hicks, who’s only wearing a thin rugby shirt, making him either rock-hard or panicked.
‘Can we talk?’ he says, ‘Quickly.’
I look back to the kitchen window. Gina Hicks is framed in early-evening light, nursing a cut knee as one of the toddlers sits on the sink. ‘I assume you know your wife can see you?’
‘I said I was checking you could get out the main gate. The sensor plays up occasionally so it’s not a complete lie.’
I didn’t exactly lie, I just didn’t tell the truth.
‘Hop in,’ says Parnell.
He gets in the back, looking completely incongruous. Nate Hicks strikes me as the type of guy who always likes to be at the wheel, metaphorically or otherwise, and there’s something satisfying about the sight of him scrunched up in the back of Parnell’s Citroen C4.
‘I’m sorry I was a bit aggressive back there,’ he says.
I’ve an urge to tell him he wasn’t aggressive at all, just a pompous oaf, but it’s only a thirty second drive up to the main gates so there’s not much time for small talk.
I shift around in my seat. ‘You know, if you have something to tell us about “the dead woman”, your wife is going to find out anyway, and we don’t generally take statements from the backs of cars.’
‘No, no, it’s not about her. Well, not really.’ He drags his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking out at all angles in small fuzzy tufts. ‘God, this is all so embarrassing. I swear I don’t know who this Alice/Maryanne, woman is. Really, I don’t.’ He pauses. ‘But I do know what Saskia is. I’ve known for a while now. By pure accident. Despite what my wife thinks, I do listen sometimes and I did check in on the flat .?.?.’ It’s paining him to go further.
Parnell let’s out a knowing ‘Ah’ and pulls up on a verge, a little to the side of the main gate. A BMW squeezes through and the female driver gives a confused wave to Nate Hicks. He looks mortified which makes me toasty warm inside.
‘So you’ve known your tenant is a prostitute for a while?’ I say, acting like I’m just getting it all straight in my head. ‘But you didn’t see fit to tell your wife?’
It’s obvious where this is heading but it’s fun watching him squirm.
‘No, I didn’t. I couldn’t, we .?.?. I don’t know how it .?.?. I’ve never done anything .?.?.’
Parnell hasn’t got time for bluster, he’s got the twins’ carol concert tonight. ‘Shall I help you, Mr Hicks? You had sex with Saskia French, yes?’
He looks at us both, all hunched-up shoulders and hangdog eyes. In his stripy rugby top and cheeks reddened by the cold – or shame – he resembles an overgrown schoolboy. I turn back to the front to hide my disdain.
‘Was it a financial arrangement?’ asks Parnell.
‘The first couple of times and then it became more of a, well, a thing.’
‘A thing?’
He coughs, awkwardly. ‘More of a relationship. An affair. In her mind anyway. I wanted to cool things.’
I undo my seatbelt, swivel a whole 180 so I can face him fully again. ‘And why are you telling us this?’
It’s not a pointed question. I’m genuinely confused. You see, to a Murder Detective, everything is relevant. Every hazy-eyed anecdote, every inconsequential detail, all the way down to what brand of cereal the victim liked to eat at the weekend could prove to be the shiny gold nugget that leads to a break. But to a shyster like Nate Hicks, who clearly has a rather flexible relationship with the truth, everything he reveals is on a strictly need-to-know basis. And I’m not quite understanding why he thinks we need to know this.
I get my answer, for what it’s worth.
‘I’m just trying to make sense of this dead woman thing.’
Parnell shoots me a sideways glance. ‘Aren’t we all, Mr Hicks? So any information you have, let’s hear it.’
‘Well, it’s not really information, as such.’ He shuffles to the middle of the back seat, sits forward, head parked between me and Parnell like a boulder. ‘I suppose you’d call it more a hypothesis .?.?.’
1998
Sunday 31st May
It was late Sunday evening when we first heard about Maryanne. Mum was cleaning my ears in front of the fire and Dad was trying, and failing, to teach Noel the rules of poker when the back door slammed and in flounced Jacqui, our resident doom-sayer, keen to share her latest scoop.
‘Gone. Kidnapped. Kaput.’ She shrugged, kicking off her Buffalos like she hadn’t a care, or a missing friend, in the world.
It transpired, or so the official line went, that Maryanne had gone out the night before to buy hairspray and hadn’t been home since. Jonjo Doyle and her moron brother had been searching all around the place but now the Guards had been called and the word around town was that Pat Hannon had killed her.
Gran blessed herself and told Jacqui to shut up. Said she shouldn’t be saying such wicked things when Nora Hannon wasn’t yet cold in the ground, but Jacqui stood firm, insisting the theory had legs as Maryanne had called him ‘a wankstain’ in the pub and everyone knew he’d killed his wife to collect the life insurance, so maybe he’d got a taste for it?
Maybe he needed younger blood to satisfy his insatiable murderous lust? Fresh meat, she called it.
Mum said Jacqui was banned from watching eighteen certificates from now on, and anyway, wasn’t it a bit early to be talking of anyone killing anyone? Maryanne was seventeen, for God’s sake. Hadn’t she and Auntie Brona once gone to Galway to get outfits for a wedding and not come back for two days after latching on to a punk rocker with backstage passes for the Boomtown Rats.
Gran remembered this, which surprised us all because lately Gran remembered less and less, often confusing Mum’s name with the dog’s and always asking if it was busy in town when you’d only come back from the toilet. But just the mention of Mum’s cross-county escapades seemed to ignite a momentary spark.
‘Tinkers, the pair of you. You put the heart crossways in me.’
Mum welled up at this, probably grateful for the reminder that she’d once been the child and Gran had been the carer, but then Noel killed the moment by saying he hoped Maryanne was dead and fair play to Pat Hannon if it was true. (She’d laughed at his tram-lines and Noel was always one for holding wholly disproportionate grudges.)