With this as a father, had Gina ever stood a chance?
30
The wind-down of most cases is generally tedious and time-consuming but there’s an air of collective bounce within MIT4 as we edge towards the end of January. Of course, it could just be the relief of a much-awaited pay-day on the horizon or maybe the slight shift in temperature from ‘baltic’ to ‘a bit nippy’, but in all probability, it’s the sheer unfettered delight of not having to prepare for a trial. Guilty pleas are always seen as a job well done, back-slaps all round, and the pints and Prosecco flow every night in the Bell Tavern. Even Steele comes out eventually. It’s the first time I’ve seen her tipsy. We even get her singing one particularly rowdy night – her and Parnell murdering ‘Islands in the Stream’ with not a tuneful note between them. Melodically challenged might be the kindest way to put it.
It makes me laugh though. Then I loathe myself for laughing.
Because while I still have my job and Dad still has his freedom, Maryanne Doyle is still very much dead. Buried in a field in Surrey at the cruel insistence of Thomas Lapaine – a man who can barely speak her name – despite her family’s pleas for her to be brought back to Ireland and buried alongside her mam. And probably soon enough, her dad.
The day we clear out the incident room I feel knotty and nauseous. Someone else needs it now, I get it – there’s been a fifteen-year-old fatally stabbed just behind St Pancras, whereas we haven’t had anything new in that requires more than a few desks stuck in a corner somewhere – but still, I don’t feel quite ready to pack Maryanne away yet and I literally can’t bear the thought of Flowers, maybe Ben, tossing her remnants into boxes then kicking the boxes across the floor because they’re too hungover to pick them up. I’ve seen it. Christ, I’ve probably done it myself once or twice. But Maryanne’s different.
Maryanne will always be different.
In the end, I do the only thing I can do and I stay late that night, making sure that everything’s done neatly. That Maryanne’s last hours in this room are at least orderly and in some way, dignified.
The photo featuring ‘Uncle’ Frank thumps me in the solar plexus one last time. Demented with guilt, I call Dad and ask him to tell me the truth about how big a part his so-called blood-brother played in the operation. Am I shielding a key player or just another hustler? A fully paid-up trafficker, or just a lager-fuelled lech? For one laughable, never-gonna-happen second, I swear on everything I hold dear that if Dad implicates Frank in anything more than just enjoying the hospitality in that flat, I’ll call Steele right away – or probably Parnell, if I’m honest – and I’ll confess everything there and then. To hell with careers and families, they’re overrated anyway.
But Dad’s cagey. Noncommittal. He says ‘he wouldn’t be surprised’ if Frank had put some money up, had some direct links to the top, but he claims he doesn’t know for sure, and he certainly doesn’t have any proof.
And so the ball falls squarely back in my court. Do I protect Dad or go after Frank? I can’t do both. We might not share DNA with ‘Uncle’ Frank but still, our roots are too entwined for any of us to survive the fallout of a formal investigation into Francis ‘Frank’ Clayton.
So I choose Dad. Like I always knew I would, except for one mad, fanciful second.
Good daughter.
Bad cop.
*
And between all the public back-slapping and private self-condemnation, the business of Murder goes on. We’re still trying to locate Leo Hicks. Witness intimidation isn’t a thing we take lightly, even when it’s carried out by public schoolboys with gangster complexes, acting at the behest of their mummies.
In fact, even when the CPS advise it could be tricky to prove, given that Saskia wasn’t our witness at the time Leo threatened her.
It turns out the concert performance was true, at least – not that Leo Hicks ever turned up. The Kensington Symphony Orchestra were left to perform with one less violinist at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, and both his parents still refuse to shed any light on his whereabouts and nothing enlightening has shown up on their phones. The only thing we can be sure of is that he hasn’t flown out of Austria, although with the train system providing links to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary to name just a few, Leo Hicks could be practically anywhere. Sinking a beer in Munich or having an audience with the Pope in Rome.
When I’m not schmoozing with Interpol, I’m trawling through the death records of every Kristen who passed away in late 2000. Assuming her death was actually registered is stupidly optimistic of me, given it’s likely she was disposed of in a rather more unofficial fashion, but someone’s got to try, you know. A young girl’s life has to be worth at least a brief wild goose-chase.
When it proves to be exactly that, I run a search for every Kristen reported missing in the UK and Ireland in the early Noughties and there’s one that looks interesting – a Kristen McCloud, reported missing by her mother in February 2001, after moving to London in May 2000 from County Kerry. Kristen regularly phoned home, her mother tells me, although she hadn’t been back to visit, however the last time she called had been the first week of December 2000 and she recalls her daughter did sound a bit down that day. She never heard from her only child ever again. Saskia French takes a look at her photo, pitifully insists it’s not her while her chin wobbles and her eyes bulge with tears. Gina Hicks struggles to even glance at it. Both women haunted in their own way by the reality of what happened to Kristen. Both still wanting to believe that maybe she was out there, living a great life with an army of children and just a couple of faint scars on her wrists to remind her that her life wasn’t always so wonderful.
We’re still waiting on sentencing. While in theory a guilty plea should be straightforward, there’s always a bit of sniping that has to happen between prosecution and defence around what the agreed facts are, and in this case, the point of sending a terminally ill man to prison. With any luck though, Patrick Mackie will die inside. Which means he’ll serve a maximum of twelve months for murder.
I can’t dwell on that for too long, my insides start to itch.
My guess is Gina will get five years for assault – we now know it was assault, the location of the bloodstains suggests a push, not a fall. I’m not sure they’ll bother too much with an assisting an offender charge, not when there’s a host of historic trafficking charges gathering pace but we’ll see. It’s fair to say, prison isn’t suiting her. In the four weeks since she was charged, her honey-blonde hair has gone grey at the roots and stripped of her make-up and all her Wandsworth-set props, she looks ordinary. Almost featureless. She doesn’t get many visitors either. All the people who drank her posh wine and ate her Christmas canapés appear to be staying well away. It’s only really Felix Whiteley and occasionally me or Parnell who grace her presence, scavenging for more information that she refuses to give. The only time she speaks is to ask after the twins, who she doesn’t want visiting, and the occasional abrupt enquiry as to her Dad’s health. There’s not a word about Nate, and poor Amber – ‘Leo’s mine, Amber’s Nate’s’ – hardly gets a look in either. When the chips are down, Gina Hicks obviously feels that blood is unequivocally thicker than water.
Something I understand only too well.
*
In a reversal of fortune that I know she just loves, it’s me who stalks Jacqui in the busy weeks that follow. It’s me who leaves the voicemails and begs for her time. We finally meet one lunchtime in a café by St Paul’s. I order a panini and a large cappuccino. Jacqui says she doesn’t want anything and then bursts into tears.