Dad gives her a nod, a resigned go-ahead. ‘Two sides of the same coin, really. I know everything.’ She slides down the wall, slumping hard to the floor, exhausted. ‘So how did you nail them? Who talked?’ Her head snaps up, eyes wide. ‘There’s no way they’ll get bail, is there? Not for this?’
I can’t lie. I mean, literally, I can’t. I don’t have one ounce of guile left in me.
‘We don’t have them for this. We’ve arrested them on other grounds for now but they aren’t exactly top-drawer. They’re locked up for tonight, that’s all I can promise you.’ So make a decision, quick. ‘We’re going to need more to hold them for longer. Can you give us more? We can protect you, Saskia, if you tell us everything you know. It’s the only way you’ll be safe in the long run.’
I say ‘we’ but my career’s surely over. It was over after the first lie. I don’t need to read the College of Policing’s ‘Standards of Professional Behaviour’ to know mine have been utterly abysmal.
Saskia looks to Dad again and something weighty passes between them. I’m not sensing a romance but something deeper. True friendship might be Disney-coating it, more a mutual kind of dependency.
She takes a deep, trembly breath, a life-changing one. ‘OK, I’ll tell you everything on one condition. You keep Mike – your dad – out of it.’
Has she always known who I am? Did she know the day I was at the King’s Cross flat?
‘He doesn’t need to be involved. He wasn’t really involved anyway, not in a big way, or in the worst way. And he took care of me that night, the night Maryanne died, when I had nowhere else to go, and I won’t see him punished for this. I won’t. He’s the only person who ever gave a shit about me and Maryanne, then and now. He looked out for us, had a laugh with us, treated us like human beings, not like prison guards and the girls like cattle. So that’s the deal. You don’t need Mike to take them down, you only need me.’
It’s a lovely spin to put on things and I nearly ask her to keep talking. To pull up a pew and tell me all about the great man I’ve missed out on, all the wonderful traits I could never see. And it’s a lifeline too. A chance to cling on to the job I love for that little bit longer – because I’m not stupid enough to think that it wouldn’t come back to bite me in the end, of course. But just a little bit longer would be nice. Long enough for me to be remembered for more than just this.
It’ll never happen though. How can it?
‘You might want to keep my dad out of it, Saskia, but when we charge Gina Hicks, she might have other ideas. And Patrick Mackie.’
She slaps me down quickly – she’s clearly thought this through. ‘That’s not the way they work. Their type don’t drag people down with them, certainly not – no offence, Mike – the small fry. What would be the point? You’re only giving someone ammunition to spill more shit about you and Mike has plenty of shit on them, stuff that goes beyond this. They wouldn’t run the risk, I know it. There’s no benefit in dragging him into this for anyone.’ A pointed look towards me. ‘Including you, I’d have thought?’
So Saskia tells all. The Hickses go down. One of the UK’s most wanted villains is back under our jurisdiction and Maryanne gets justice.
And I get to keep my job, or at least have a wild, gutsy, come-what-may stab at keeping it.
Everyone’s a winner, right?
I slowly nod my head but I feel laden with loss.
27
I picture us in the pub when this is all over. Flowers is getting the round in. Ben and Seth are monopolising the jukebox as usual. Me and Parnell have bagged our regular table – the oak-panelled booth, big and round enough to house a mid-size Murder team and Renée’s swearing she’s only staying for one – later claiming she meant one bottle, not one glass. Emily’s being chatted up by someone – could be one of the old boys who drink in here because the beer’s fairly cheap and they show the Channel 4 racing, or maybe one of the young suits, who pour out of local offices, professing their love for a ‘proper old boozer’ before loading up on low-strength bottled lager and bags of vegetable crisps.
As ever, the busiest woman in Christendom – DCI Kate Steele – ‘will be there in a minute’.
Then once the booze has been bought and the tunes have been chosen, conversation will inevitably turn to the moment this case cracked open. Our breakthrough. Everyone will stake a claim in it, of course. Exaggerate their part in its unravelling. But the fact of the matter is nobody swung this case one way or the other. No one gets the bragging rights. Because as far as anyone except me is concerned, at nine fifty-two p.m. on December 31st 2016, Saskia French walked into the reception of Holborn police station and voluntarily, and of her own volition, asked to speak with whoever was in charge of the Maryanne Doyle investigation.
Parnell was out at the time, having a quick walk around the block – his ‘evening constitutional’ to quote the great man himself, so Seth got the gist down while Parnell hot-footed it back to HQ, read Saskia her rights.
She refused a solicitor.
This is how it happened, no matter how it’s romanticised and re-configured in the annals of MIT4 history.
This is how it’s happening right now, in fact.
Present in the interview are Acting Detective Inspector Luigi Parnell and DC Renée Akwa. Parnell and Renée are a good combination. More nuanced than good cop/bad cop, they aim for friendly cop/formal cop with Parnell doing the empathy, Renée, the direct questions.
Slumped in the observation room watching everything on TV is me.
I haven’t worked out what I’ll say to Parnell about why I’m back here. Why I’m not tucked up in bed nursing my sudden mystery illness. All I know right now is that I need to be here. There’s no way I can let Saskia out of my sight, not now she a significant witness.
A significant witness with an incendiary energy you can never quite trust.
A significant witness who’s wearing a jumper of mine, nicked from the wardrobe of my old teenage bedroom.
*
‘OK, Saskia, let’s start at the beginning.’ Parnell leans back, getting comfy – a signal for her to do the same. ‘It is Saskia? Not Sarah?’
A slow smirk as she trails a finger along the edge of the table. ‘Saskia.’
‘Why did you change it?’ asks Parnell, as though just curious.
‘There’s no big story. I just wanted something more exotic for work. Sarah seemed a bit conventional, a bit wifey. That’s not what clients want.’
‘Fair enough.’
Renée takes over, masking her innate warmth with a cool, factual tone. ‘When did you first meet Maryanne Doyle, Saskia?’
She stretches out her hands, examines her chipped nails.
Arrogance personified but I know it’s all front.
‘In 1999. I was having a fag at the back of the clinic and it was fucking freezing so it can’t have been any later than say, February. She bummed a light off me, said she worked in an office across the road, and then every fag break for a few days after, there she was. Anyway, we got talking, just about bands and that, and then one day she produces these tickets – Faithless, Brixton Academy. I thought it was sold out but she just laughs, says she knows people, and then she says none of her mates are that into them, so do I fancy it? I mean, I thought it was a bit weird but I really wanted to see them so I thought “fuck it”. And then we sort of became mates. She always had loads of money, she was always paying for things – more gigs, swanky bars, the best clubs .?.?.’ She draws her hands back, sits on them. ‘Anyway, this went on for a couple of months and then she asked me. I knew she’d been building up to it then, this “new best friend” act had just been a load of bollocks.’
‘Asked you what?’ asks Renée.
She looks downwards. ‘If I’d be up for passing on the details of any girls booked in for abortions, or consultations, who I thought might be wobbling, especially Irish girls. She said she knew some guy who’d pay big for that kind of information. I worked on reception, you see – booked the girls in, watched them. You get to know the signs.’