Sweet Little Lies

Problem is, while the lie may be sweet as it falls from your lips, the feeling in your gut is always putridly sour. And almost always bang-on.

The most devastating punishments aren’t always the legal ones.

I should want to spit at him. Bounce his head off the wall. Tear at his face. But I don't feel angry, I feel nothing. Hollow and weightless. I dig my nails into the palms of my hands just to feel the sensation.

There’s a rising worry in his eyes. ‘No.

I was eight years old, podgy, with a head full of greasy curls and a mouth full of wobbly teeth, and I was almost certainly wearing my Pokémon T-shirt.

The martyrdom of the dead is the bane of a Murder detective’s life. It’s hard to pinpoint the truth when people are too busy polishing the halo.

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.

Wake at seven a.m. and I’m thrown straight into focusing on real things, safe things—showers, vitamins, turned milk, tube delays—whereas at five a.m., my usual rise and shine, I’ve got two hours of lying in the half-light to grapple with. Two hours of thinking about all the things I could have done better and all the people I never see.

I never seem to shine with people of my own age. I just never feel that relevant.

it’s true you can’t have it all but you can have some of it.

[H]is living room is everything I'd imagined it to be, styled by his wife, wrecked by his kids, like a Lord of the Flies stage set, only taupe and with scatter cushions.

...like a Lord of the Flies stage set, only taupe and with scatter cushions.

Dolores, not Dr Allen. Visions of them dissecting me over a nice bottle of Merlot does them both a disservice, but I have a tendency to catastrophise when I’m cornered. Another counsellor told me that.

And for that second, the world shrinks to just us. Just his face and mine. Every smell seems to evaporate. Every color ceases to exist. And there’s a silence. I silence so laden with fear and mistrust that it turns everything else abstract and us both to stone.

So I either glide in and wet-nurse him, if that's what the interview needs, or I burst in like a madwoman and tear his nuts off with my teeth?

This isn’t London, Cat. You might be able to run across Piccadilly Circus, naked as the day you were born and no one’d pay a blind bit of notice, but around here, if your washing’s out too long, folk start to speculate. Secrets

who I think he is? I can’t ignore the fact I’ve spent most of my life, not exactly sure in the belief, but certainly toying with – then blocking out – the idea that Dad might have killed Maryanne Doyle in 1998. Now that’s been proved impossible, can I trust my own instincts any more than I mistrust him?

I’m not following, Detective.’ I’m not sure Parnell is either. ‘Well, it’s just that if Alice was conscious about money, and if money was tight, I don’t understand why a fit, able woman