I step closer.
‘Um, I’m not a hundred per cent sure, she looks very different,’ says Shah, getting his excuses in early. ‘I’ve blown it up as much as possible. I think it’s her.’
I’m a hundred per cent sure though.
A hundred and ten per cent sure, as annoying people often say.
It most definitely is Maryanne Doyle.
I say the words out loud but I’m not sure if they hear over the sound of my phone crashing to the floor. Almost instantly it rings again but I stay rooted to the spot, fearful that if I crouch down, I might never find the strength to get up again. Eventually it rings off.
Maryanne Doyle and Saskia French. Together. Standing, maybe dancing, on a coffee table. Maryanne with her liquorice-black curls and Saskia with a shaggier bob, a couple of shades lighter than the coal-black hue she currently sports. They can’t be more than eighteen, nineteen, tops, with their bottles of lemon Hooch and their matching denim mini-skirts. Smiles broad and cheeky. Clearly loving life.
But it’s not the girls who chill my blood, it’s the men in the background. The men leering and laughing with their lager cans brandished high like trophies.
The men I remember from Dad’s pub.
The men who’d count money in the back room when Mum was away.
And ‘Uncle’ Frank, sitting on the arm of a sofa wearing a West Ham shirt identical to Dad’s, except Dad’s had ‘Di Canio 10’ printed on the back whereas Frank’s had ‘Frankie 666,’ the crass, egotistical prick.
No sign of Dad though, and it definitely wasn’t taken in the pub which is something. One molecule of mercy in this mountain of dirt.
Although someone had to be taking the photo. The thought that it might have been Dad is so riddled with dirt that I’ve got no choice but to temporarily block it out.
I hear voices in the distance as I try to steady my breathing. Familiar, comforting voices. Parnell pacifying Steele over the phone. Emily whining about the stairs. Seth out-poshing Naomi Berry with his upper-class pronunciation and use of the word ‘splendid’.
Suddenly, a voice gets closer. I hadn’t even registered him walking in.
‘Well?’ says Parnell, breathless from the climb. ‘Is it her?’
I don’t answer, I just point towards the top left-hand corner. There’s a tremor in my hand that I pray is only visible to me. Parnell’s mouth makes a puckered ‘O’ as he clocks the mini-skirted buddies. He confirms to Steele that it’s definitely her and hangs up.
Somewhere outside the room, Naomi Berry shouts, ‘Tea’.
Parnell pokes his head out. ‘No time for tea, I’m afraid. Can you go and see Detective Swaines, please? He’ll take a full statement from you. He’s out on the landing now – tall lad, fair hair, makes Brad Pitt look like a warthog, you can’t miss him.’
Her protest about ‘not knowing anything’ gets fainter as she sashays back up the hall.
Parnell picks up my phone, hands it to me with a funny look. ‘So what does this mean then?’
Usually when Parnell asks me questions like this, it’s some sort of test. It’s Parnell doing his sage, avuncular thing. Today I think he’s genuinely stumped.
‘I don’t know exactly.’ My feet prickle with the urge to run away but my legs feel too heavy. I clear some junk off the bed and sit down. The mattress feels saggy and lumpy, decades old. ‘It means Saskia’s been lying through her teeth which has to mean Gina Hicks is lying too, unless we’re supposed to believe that Maryanne was friends with Saskia from way back but then just happened to turn up on the same IVF forum as Saskia’s landlady four years ago. I mean, I know you believe in coincidences, Boss, but I’d like to see the odds on this one.’
Parnell takes a photo of the photo on his phone then sits down beside me, staring blankly ahead. ‘But who’s covering for who? And why? What are we missing?’ He puts his hand to his jaw. ‘Damn it, my tooth hurts.’
‘My head hurts. We’ve got a victim with two identities, a missing/dead baby, a load of people who couldn’t lie straight in bed but no stand-up-in-court motive for any of them. Saskia French’s missing. Gina Hicks is clearly hiding something. And even though it’s the women who are wrecking our heads the most, we’re fairly sure our killer, or at least the person who dumped the body, is a man!’
Parnell scratches his head. Half-laughs, because you might as well.
‘Aiden Doyle is some big-shot algorithim-analyst-nerd,’ I add. ‘He’d have a better shot at solving this headfuck than us, I reckon.’
Parnell nudges me. ‘Hey, we’re not quite the Keystone Cops, kiddo, we’re getting there. I think we can safely say Saskia French’s now a person of interest so we’ll get an appeal out for information – Her Majesty can get on to the Press Office. We’ – a wiggle of the fingers to confirm he means me and him – ‘need to find out what the Hickses’ make of all this. I’ll run it by Steele but I don’t want to arrest them or bring them in at this point, they’ll only lawyer-up if we do. I say we surprise them at home, and then cross our fingers they decide that a cosy little chat on the sofa, under caution of course, doesn’t warrant getting their brief over. I just want to see how they explain this away before we get heavy. We won’t be able to record it,’ he adds, ‘so make sure you note everything down, OK?’
Emily sticks her head round the door, a giddy look on her face. ‘Sir, I think I might have something. A woman at 12b says she saw Saskia let a guy into the flat on Christmas Eve morning and heard raised voices. She doesn’t usually pay much attention to men coming and going – she seems to know the score – but she remembers this one because he looked pretty young.’
Young. Not in his mid-fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and a smile that could melt granite. I nearly combust with relief.
‘Saskia likes them young.’ I say. ‘According to Naomi, anyway. So maybe she’s got a boyfriend? Maybe she’s with a boyfriend?’
Emily hasn’t finished. ‘You know who the description sounds like, Cat? The eldest Hicks lad. The one who came into the kitchen when we were there. You know, the one with the faux-hawk.’
‘Spiky hair,’ I confirm to a frowning Parnell. ‘She means the violin-playing geezer-boy.’
Emily continues. ‘I found him on Instagram. His profile pic’s not great, he’s used this stupid psychedelic filter which obviously distorts things a bit, but she’s still about eighty per cent sure it was him.’
Parnell stands up abruptly leaving the knackered mattress rippling. ‘Right, come on,’ he says to me. ‘We need to get over there now.’ To Emily, ‘Get this collage bagged up, please. Let what’s-her-name know we’re seizing it on the grounds it could be evidence in relation to an offence.’
I snatch one last look at the photo, wishing with every fibre of my being that we could leave it here, displayed in this safe, unthreatening place, far from the world of evidence bags and incident boards. Because, make no mistake, once it’s up on our board and ‘Uncle’ Frank’s familiar face becomes permanent MIT4 wallpaper, my failure to identify him definitely puts me in losing-my-job-territory.
As if I wasn’t there already.
It possibly puts me in losing-my-freedom territory too – attempting to pervert the course of justice wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for a particularly pumped-up prosecutor and misconduct in a public office would be mere child’s play. A prosecutorial walk in the park.
I trail Parnell back down the hall. His step’s surprisingly sprightly given he’s got nearly thirty years on me and over thirty kilos, but then he’s full of purpose while I’m full of guilt and the guilt is weighing heavy on me. My legs feel like lead. As I pass by the living room, I remember I opened a window earlier. I call out to Parnell to wait a second while I close it.
And that’s when I see it.