I groan inwardly. ‘Not your fault. Thanks for letting me know. I’d better try to get that deleted before her mates log on for the day.’
I start to walk over but then someone says something about a panic attack so I back off and watch while the experts try to explain the basics of diaphragmatic breathing to someone struggling with the basics of bladder control. Tamsin Black looks so listless and pale through the layers of fake tan – and so painfully young – that I have to fight the urge to stride over and take her hand. To tell her I understand and that she can talk to me. To tell her the brutal images will fade.
Essentially to lie that it gets easier.
Then I realise I’m being ‘over-empathetic’ so I walk back over to Steele and grass her up immediately. Steele does the requisite amount of eye-rolling but honestly, it’s a battle we conceded long ago. Facebook helps more cases than it ever harms so we live with it.
Parnell yawns. ‘So what’s the plan then, Boss?’
‘I need to wait for them to finish, give them permission to remove the body,’ says Steele, nodding towards the SOCOs. ‘Then I’m heading straight over to HQ to get things set up. You pair stay here for a while. House-to-House should be here soon so can you brief them, Lu? Hopefully we’ll get something from CCTV but for now we’re working on the assumption that she must have been driven here, so someone might have heard a car?’
‘Funny place to dump a body, don’t you think?’ I say. ‘There’s got to be easier places than the middle of central London.’
‘Panic maybe? Listen, Kinsella, have another crack at the witness before they whisk her off to UCH, OK? I know we can’t rely on the detail too much but at least it’ll be fresh and I want to get some sort of statement out of her before Mummy Dearest gets here and starts saying her little angel’s been through enough already.’
Exactly what my mum would have said. Once she’d ripped me a new hole for wandering around London half-cut and half-naked at half-four in the morning.
God, I miss my mum. To the rest of the world you’re just a living, growing mass of cells. Your brain fully forms and your bones start to lengthen and before you know it, you’re a card-carrying grown-up who’s expected to drive cars, pay bills and remember to buy tinfoil. But to your mum, you’ll always be a bit gormless. The girl who sneezed in her porridge and ate it anyway.
And I miss that. I miss being a half-wit and being loved for it.
Lately I’ve been obsessing about what Mum would think of twenty-six-year-old me. What she’d say if she could see me now, out of bed and being productive before lunchtime.
In all honesty, she probably wouldn’t recognise me. It’s fair to say I wasn’t the easiest of adolescents. Dad often said that it took an iron fist and a will of steel to discipline me – not that he ever tried, of course, preferring always to claim that there was no point in him disciplining me when he just couldn’t work me out. Couldn’t ‘get on my level’.
I’d worked him out though. I knew exactly what he was.
I saw the way he’d looked at Maryanne Doyle, and I saw a lot more too.
Heard a few things as well.
Not that I ever told him, or anyone else for that matter. The silence of childhood fear gradually morphed into teenage rebellion – a far more fun way to vent my hate than raking up history and throwing accusations – and lately, in recent years, we’ve slipped into a kind of venomous stalemate. A white-hot apathy.
You stay out of my way and I’ll stay out of yours.
Mum knew I loved her, though, I’m sure of it. I certainly told her enough times. Every morning and every evening and several texts in between.
‘Luv U’, ‘Ur the best, Mum! xxx’
And apparently she can see me now. According to the same clairvoyant who mumbled clichéd statements about my heart-line, Mum’s always with me and she’s proud of me. She enjoys watching me dance apparently. It assures her I’ve moved on from her loss. I didn’t have the heart to tell the lousy charlatan who was charging me sixty pounds an hour for this heartwarming slice of hoodoo, that the only time you’ll ever find me dancing is when I’m paralytic-drunk and Mum definitely wouldn’t enjoy watching that. Who would enjoy watching their last-born child twerking in front of a rabble of baying IT consultants while trying not to vomit peach schnapps?
Mother’s Day 2013.
They haven’t got any easier or any less shambolic.
‘You look bloody shattered, girl.’ As if reading my mind, Steele comes over all quasi-maternal, laying a hand on my arm. ‘Initial briefing at one p.m., OK, but in the meantime, go home and get a few hours shut-eye. That’s an order, both of you.’ She says ‘both’ but she’s looking at me. ‘I mean it. Stay here for an hour, tops .?.?.’
We stay three hours.
Three hours where we learn very little.
I speak to the witness again but you couldn’t exactly call it a statement, just a few random proclamations of ‘So much blood’ like a bizarrely reimagined Lady Macbeth, and repeated requests for her mum. As instructed, Parnell briefs the House-to-House crew – a team of six men and women dedicated to fighting crime with questionnaires and clipboards – and we even do a bit ourselves, flashing our IDs at confused-looking people with morning breath and sticky-up hair. It yields zilch though. A whole load of ‘nothings’ and one dubious ‘maybe’ which doesn’t really fit with our timeline anyway.
After three hours of spreading hysteria, Parnell announces that he’s going home to have sex, bacon and a Radox bath. He doesn’t mind in what order.
I don’t announce where I’m going.
3
McAuley’s Old Ale House. Maccers for short.
My dad’s pub.
Home.
Home right now is a ten-by-eight in the eaves of the Dawson family residence in Vauxhall, where I’ve got my own sink and toilet, two shelves for my food, and the gnawing guilt of knowing a child was evicted from her bedroom in favour of ￡500 a month because Claire Dawson lost her job and they needed a lodger.
Home, from the age of eight, was a five-bedroomed detached new-build in Radlett. A ‘cul-de-sac’, Mum had proudly announced, as if a dead end was something to aspire to. I’d had to look up what it meant.
But to me, my real home, the place where I was formed and where I was at my most happy, will always be McAuley’s Old Ale House.
As I was just a child when we left the pub, my sister Jacqui insists that the only life I’ve ever known has been one of en-suite shower rooms and Sky TV, but she couldn’t be more wrong. I remember every madcap minute we lived above McAuley’s. The peeling paint and the knock-off furniture. Dad cashing up while Mum was mopping down. I was so bloody content there. A proper little pub kid, rushing down the stairs on Saturday morning, gathering up the coins that people had dropped the night before, nicking crisps, skimming pints. Learning the word ‘cunt’ and how to play snooker.
It’s changed, though. Duck-egg blue, no longer brick-and-pollution-coloured. ‘Aspirational’, I bet Jacqui calls it, meaning hipsters drinking whisky sours out of jam jars. Less ‘boozer’, more ‘gastro-pub’. When we lived here in the Nineties, you either microwaved it or you battered it; if you were being particularly cosmopolitan, you might have put a sprig of parsley with it, but now there’s a chalked sign outside offering ‘Potted Prawns, with apple and radish’ and ‘Slow Cooked Porchetta’. Not a deep-fat fryer in sight.
There’s a few lights on but it’s too early to be open so I walk around the back and up the fire escape to what we used to illogically call the front door.
What am I doing? Why have I come? It’s not even ten a.m., Dad probably won’t be here.