Roisin shook her head and balled the tissue up small, sticking it into her pocket. She stood up and tucked her hair underneath the Supermac’s baseball cap. ‘Na, you’re all right, thanks. I can handle it.’
Carmella stood too, delving into her bag for a biro. ‘If you’re sure. Just call if you change your mind. Or if you remember anything else about that night, whether it’s about Shawn or Mervyn Hammond, OK? Can you write your mobile number down for me in case I need to ask you any more questions later?’
‘Sure,’ the girl said, taking the biro and writing her number on the back of the second business card Carmella produced. ‘Well. I’m glad I could help.’ For a second she looked as if she was barely out of primary school. ‘I don’t think I’m ever going to . . . be with a boy again,’ she said, her lip wobbling.
Carmella wondered if Roisin had somehow sensed that she, Carmella, was gay, and if she were tacitly asking for advice . . . but, much as she liked her, it just wasn’t in her remit to give that sort of help.
‘I meant what I said, about helping you find a counsellor,’ she said instead. ‘You’ve been through a major ordeal. It was lovely to meet you, although I’m sorry about the circumstances. I’ll be in touch, OK?’
Roisin nodded, blushing again. ‘Bye,’ she said, and put her head down against the stiff breeze, striding away towards the burger bar, her sensible trainers making no sound on the pavement. Carmella watched her go, the dejected slope of her shoulders saying almost as much about her as their conversation had. Poor kid, she thought. She wondered if Shawn Barrett had any idea what he’d done to her. It was as if he’d taken the spark out of her and crushed it like a lit cigarette underfoot. Even if she had been a bold little trollop before, too much make-up and slutty clothes, this was surely worse, this awful despondency and world-weariness in a girl who wasn’t yet seventeen.
Sighing, Carmella headed for the nearest bus stop back into O’Connell Street. At least she’d have something to tell Patrick. He’d want to get Barrett in for a chat, for sure – which would be a whole shit storm of media chaos and injunctions up the wazoo, if they weren’t careful. Mervyn Hammond would see to that.
Suddenly, Carmella felt tired and almost as dispirited as Roisin had looked. All she wanted was to be home in Jenny’s arms.
Chapter 28
Day 8 – Patrick
The cab dropped Patrick off outside Shawn Barrett’s apartment block at the same time that a white van pulled up. The van’s driver jumped out, sliding open the side door and emerging with a tower of brown boxes that came up to the bridge of his nose. He wobbled towards the door and was buzzed in, Patrick following, aware that the fifteen or sixteen paparazzi camped out across the street were watching them closely. The paps looked miserable, huddled together in the cold, smoking and sipping from Starbucks cups. What a life. Patrick bet that each of them would sell his or her grandmother to do what Patrick was about to do: ride the lift up to Shawn’s home for an audience with the most famous – with the possible exception of princes William and Harry – young man in England.
‘What do you mean, he can’t come here?’ Patrick had said to Suzanne after she’d got off the phone to the Met’s press bureau, who had asked to be kept informed of all developments in the case.
She gave Patrick a calming smile. ‘I’ve been told that if Shawn Barrett comes to the station, it will be on the front of every tabloid in the country tomorrow, every celebrity gossip site; there’ll be fans blocking the doorways; photographers sticking their cameras in our faces . . . It will be mayhem. Until we get to the point where we’re actually going to charge him, when we’ve got a rock-solid case against him, we need to go to him. Discreetly. He’s agreed to meet you at his apartment in Chelsea Harbour.’
‘Agreed . . . ?’
‘Patrick, don’t be grumpy. It really doesn’t suit you.’
She came across the office, glancing through the window to check no-one was watching, and laid a hand on Patrick’s arm. He felt the current run from the point where she touched him through his veins into his chest.
‘We don’t have any evidence to prove it’s him,’ she said.
‘Yet.’
‘And until then, I’m afraid we have to play by their rules. Do you really want to be on the front page of The Sun tomorrow?’
So here he was, standing behind the van driver and looking down at the grey, churning Thames through the wall-to-ceiling window outside Barrett’s apartment, on the twelfth floor of a building that was home to a collection of Russian oligarchs, movie stars and bankers. Patrick had looked it up on the way over: a two-bedroom flat at this address cost upwards of £4 million. And this wasn’t Barrett’s only home. He also had places in Los Angeles, Ibiza and Stoke-on-Trent, where he had bought not just the ex-council house that he grew up in, where his mum still lived, but the entire street. According to the news story, Mrs Barrett didn’t want to leave her beloved two-up two-down, so Shawn had bought all the houses around it and was paying for the street to be turned into a kind of country estate, with landscaped lawns, pools full of koi, a sauna house (‘My mum loves her saunas’) and a garage full of Bentleys, slap-bang in the middle of the city. You couldn’t make it up.
The door opened and a man Patrick recognised took the tower of boxes from the van driver. Reggie Rickard, OnTarget’s manager. Rickard spotted Patrick, nodded at the driver and put his finger to his lips. Only when the other man was safely in the descending lift did he say, ‘Lennon.’
‘Detective Inspector Lennon.’
‘Ooh, sorry.’ He smirked. ‘Did any of the paps try to talk to you, ask you why you’re here?’
‘Yes, and I told them that Shawn Barrett is a sex offender who I’m questioning in—’
‘For God’s sake, man. Come inside.’ Rickard ushered Patrick in, flapping his arms and peering up and down the corridor. His eyes nearly popped out of his head, making Patrick think of a squeezed hamster. ‘You didn’t really . . . ?’
‘Of course I didn’t.’
Rickard pointed at him. ‘Ah-hah! A cop with a sense of humour. I like that. Mervyn didn’t mention that.’
I bet he didn’t, Patrick thought.
‘Anyway, come in. Shawn’s looking forward to meeting you, showing you what a lot of nonsense this all is.’
Patrick followed the other man down a short hallway, which opened up into a cavernous living room, flooded with light from the windows that gave a spectacular view across Battersea Park. A huge canvas hung on the opposite wall – a cartoonish scene created by a famous Japanese artist whose name Patrick couldn’t remember. The equally vast TV was on, the sound turned down, a PlayStation 4 plugged into it, with games piled up on the floor, spilling from their cases. And at the far end of the room, perched on a black leather sofa with his legs curled beneath him, sat Shawn Barrett, his floppy hair falling over his eyes, a bored expression on his face. He was staring at his iPhone.
‘Shawn, this is Detective Inspector Lennon.’
The boy-band singer looked up. His eyes seemed glazed, not showing much sign of activity behind them. Was he drunk or stoned? Then Patrick remembered Barrett always looked like this, except on stage or in his videos, when he would adopt a cheeky grin and turn on the charm.
‘I come alive when I’m performing,’ he’d said in an interview Patrick had read online last night; an interview in which every line Barrett uttered came straight out of the Big Book of Pop Star Clichés. This guy was so media trained, Patrick suspected, that the chances of a journalist ever getting him to say anything interesting were somewhere between zero and none.
‘Lennon,’ Barrett muttered. ‘Like that guy . . .’