Steele points at her. ‘Aha, which brings me to Mulderrin.’ A heat sweeps through me, entirely unwelcome. ‘Who fancies a trip after Christmas?’ she says, all smiles. ‘I’m still not convinced there’s anything there but as we’re hardly drowning in leads, I think we need to get over there to get a sense of things ourselves. And you never know, maybe Alice, Maryanne, whoever, had been in contact with someone from her past and they’d been keeping it secret? If we get in front of them, there’s more chance of dragging it out, right? But if there’s nothing to drag out, if we get nothing, then fine. We can officially downgrade it as a line of enquiry.’
‘I’ll go.’ My voice sounds funny. For a second I wonder if it was even me who said it.
‘Bingo. Well done, Kinsella.’
Steele claps her hands together like it’s the perfect answer she was looking for and in truth, it probably was. For all her ‘as long as you report to me’ declarations, I suspect she’d still prefer me on the fringes, chasing flimsy leads in other countries rather than drilling too close to the centre of the case.
If only she knew.
Steele stands up. Class dismissed. ‘OK, I think that’s it, folks. Thanks for coming in at hideous o’clock but as you know, I’m tied up with Blake from eight thirty so needs must and all that. See what you can get done today – Nate Hicks’ alibi is priority but have a bit of a general dig into him as well – and then for God’s sake, have a Merry bloody Christmas. We’ll get your flight sorted for Monday, Cat.’ To her credit she waits until everyone’s left the room and walked a few paces out of earshot. ‘So make sure you call Dolores – Dr Allen – to see if you can shift your afternoon slot to earlier, OK? Don’t think you’re getting out of it that easily.’
*
I go back to my desk and spend the morning acting like the thought of Mulderrin hasn’t flayed a thick layer of skin from my bones. For four hours straight I flit around the office like a worker bee high on pollen – making tea, chatting theories, powering through paperwork and swearing at spreadsheets. I even think about calling my sister back just to have my mind stuffed full of benign festive fluff, but I haven’t quite decided what I’m doing for Christmas Day and I’m not ready to have that fight yet.
As usual I turn to Parnell to neutralise my angst.
‘So did you make it back for your concert last night?’
‘I did.’ He leans over, offers me a homemade mince pie. ‘Raced all the way back to north London, even did a dodgy u-turn on Stroud Green Road, and do you know what their very important roles were?’ I sense we’re not talking top billing here. ‘Curious sheep,’ he says, laughing. ‘That’s exactly what it said in the programme – Joe and James Parnell: Curious sheep.
And I bet you died of pride anyway. The year I was Mary, Dad had to drive ‘something’ to Manchester at the last minute.
I laugh along. ‘What were they curious about?’
‘God knows? The Angel of the Lord appearing, I think, but bless them, they’re not born thespians. Joe was more of a fidgety sheep and James had his back to the audience the whole time.’
‘A cantankerous sheep?’
‘’Bout right,’ he says, chuckling again.
With my emotions temporarily quietened, I call Aiden Doyle. Just a quick courtesy call to say I’m going to be asking questions around Mulderrin. I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed when the answerphone clicks in and I end up leaving a long, garbled explanation about when and who and why and the cost of last-minute flights, along with my hopes that he has a Bearable Christmas, if not a Happy Christmas, in the light of Maryanne and his dad not being well blah blah blah. I’m still rambling on as the answer machine cuts out.
Parnell eyes me strangely. I put the phone down quickly and distract him with a question.
‘Any more possible sightings, Boss? Recent or the “Lost Years”?’
Parnell picks up a stack of papers, jerks them at me. ‘Plenty of them, nothing that exciting though. Craig and Ben are out all day following up but I’m not holding my breath based on any of the call details. No one’s said they saw her with anyone, and there’s only a few who are absolutely sure it was her.’
I leaf through them anyway, all sixty-seven of them. I’m practically comatose and thinking about lunch when my phone rings. It’s the front desk.
‘Kinsella.’
‘Lady downstairs asking for you, pet.’
There’s a drunk man singing in the background. I think I can just make out that Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny cock.
Oh, the magic of working Christmas Eve.
‘Does this lady have a name?’ I say – or holler, based on Parnell’s reactions.
The front desk clerk raises his voice again. ‘She does, and she told me, but we’ve got a D&D down here – quite the Dean Martin, can you hear him? – so I couldn’t hear her properly, pet, sorry.’
‘No worries, I’ll be down in a jiffy.’
With any luck I’ll catch the next verse.
17
For a second I don’t recognise her. She’s wearing a khaki funnel coat zipped up to her nose and her hair’s scraped back tight, not swishing around her shoulders in all its usual caramel and honey-blonde loveliness. The frown-line gives her away though. That, and the expensive shopping bags arranged neatly around her feet like pets – Liberty, Symthson, Penhaligon, Cos. She’s staring into space – completely oblivious to the shit-faced chanteur in the snowman onesie, now adding another charge to his sheet by belting out a racist version of ‘Deck the Halls’, peppered with the odd shout of ‘No Surrender to the IRA’. She startles when she sees me, as if she’s forgotten where she is and why she’s here.
‘Mrs Hicks.’
She stands up quickly and the pull-down chair snaps back against the wall, making her jump. She apologises, gathers up her bags, flustered.
‘Gina, please. I’m so sorry to drop in like this, are you busy?’
I swipe my pass and push the door. ‘Of course not, come through.’
I try the squishy room first – I’ve got a feeling this could be a squishy room conversation – but there’s an engaged sign slapped across and a horrible keening noise coming from inside. Some pour soul on the rough end of something. I show her into one of the main interview rooms and resist the urge to thank her for instantly making the room smell nicer.
She takes her coat off. Turns down an offer of tea.
‘So what can I do for you, Gina?’ My mind’s throwing out a hundred hypotheses, the main one being that she’s not a complete imbecile and she knows it shouldn’t have taken her husband ten minutes to steward us safely out of the main gates last night, and if she can’t get answers from him, she wants answers from me. ‘I assume you weren’t just passing?’ I say, nudging the Smythson bag with my boot. ‘Or is there any chance that’s for me? I’d die for one of their notebooks.’
She glances down. ‘Oh these.’ Again, that slight sense of disorientation. ‘Have it. I’m serious. I’ve bought them enough already, more than they deserve.’ She actually lifts up the bag and offers it to me. I shake my head, a little embarrassed. ‘I just needed an excuse to come into town. To come here.’
I say nothing and study her face. It’s less remarkable than I’d built it up to be. Attractive but in a commonplace sort of way. The lighting in these rooms are a great leveller.
She lets out a deep breath. ‘I knew her, you see. Alice.’ She pauses, rephrases. ‘Well, I didn’t know her, not really. Our paths crossed in the past – briefly but intensely, you might say.’
Not what I was expecting. There’s a pulsing at the top of my head. A frontal lobe reminder that now’s the time to use my good judgement and go and get Parnell.
But she asked to speak to me specifically.
I don’t want to panic her before we’ve even got going.
It’s also for this reason that I hold back the words, ‘lying to a police officer’, although I do let her know that I need to record everything and then I caution her, in my least cautionary voice possible.
‘God, I don’t know where to start.’ She arches her head right back. I hear the tension crunching through her neck. ‘I just tried to do a good thing and now I’m caught up in all this. I’m so sorry I lied, I truly am. I just .?.?.’