AllFreeNovel
Share Us
chapter 55
quinn
Quinn doesn’t believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt. Nine times out of ten, in a case like Lottie Martini’s – abductions, murders – the perp is someone close to the victim. She went hard at Alexa Martini in the beginning because she was trying to get at the truth. She’s not going to feel bad about it now.
OK, maybe a bit bad.
But that has nothing to do with why she’s committed to this story.Obsessed, according to Marnie. Which is fine with Quinn: she can live with obsessed. What she can’t live with is failure.
She flips her six-month AA chip in the air and catches it again, slapping it on the back of her hand. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Christ, she wants a drink.
She makes herself a cafetière of strong Panamanian Hacienda La Esmeralda coffee (£90 a pound, but a girl has to have some vices) and settles into a large, comfortable armchair with her laptop. She’s set aside the weekend to re-read all the original police interview transcripts from the wedding guests in the light of everything she knows now.
Everyone lies in a police investigation. About who they werewith, what they were doing, how much they’d drunk. Rarely does it have any bearing on the case. But now and again, one small white lie has the power to change the course of an investigation. If Ian Dutton hadn’t lied by omission, maybe the police wouldn’t have been chasing their tails for the last two years.
She begins with the transcripts of the interviews with the members of the wedding party: the tabloids’ ‘twelve apostles’. She’s got no idea what she’s looking for, but she’ll know it when she sees it.
Two hours later, the only thing she’s learned is that Alexa Martini’s a lousy judge of character. Apart from Dutton, Paul Harding and Catherine Lord clearly can’t be trusted either, and Marc Chapman’s not much better, in love with another woman on his wedding day. Alexa needs to pick better friends.
She grinds some more of her gold-plated Panamanian beans and brews another carafe of coffee. It’s in here somewhere, she can feel it. The key to everything, buried in pages of banal details about wedding favours and who sat where.
Several wedding guests mention seeing Lottie talking to the bride’s mother, the last verified sighting of the little girl, but when Quinn gets to the transcript of Penny Williams’ interview, she’s surprised to find the woman makes no mention of the conversation.
Mrs Williams recounts verbatim the discussion she had with her daughter’s hair stylist and a last-minute panic over whether teal nail varnish on the bride’s toenails counted as ‘something blue’. And yet she doesn’t even mention her conversation with a child who went missing less than an hour after she spoke to her.
Quinn’s interrupted by the sound of her phone buzzing on the side table.
Fuck.
Much as she wants to ignore the call, when the editor of INN phones you from her personal mobile on a Sunday afternoon, you take it.
‘Dubai?’ Christie exclaims. ‘What the fuck, Quinn?’
‘Before you flip out, this is entirely on me,’ Quinn says. ‘Phil had no idea the trip wasn’t sanctioned by the News Desk—’
‘Never mind that you made an end-run around the News Desk to pursue your own personal agenda,’ Christie interrupts. ‘You’re our senior UK correspondent, Quinn! You fucked off without a word to anyone, leaving a bloody intern to cover for you, and we got caught with our pants down. The Cambridge explosion led the bulletins on Friday, and we had a twenty-two-year-old kid stammering his way through a two-way on the early evening news. Fucking unprofessional.’
‘I’m sorry about that, but if I’d told you what I was doing—’
‘I know why you didn’t tell me, Quinn. I took you off the story for a reason. Now I’m telling you, once and for all, as your employer and as your friend, toback off.’
Quinn knew there would be a price to pay for playing the lone wolf, but she didn’t expect it to feel like this. Christie is right: it was beyond unprofessional to leave the UK bureau without proper cover. She should have come clean to her weeks ago, when it became clear her investigation was actually going somewhere. Christie would’ve taken her off-roster and let her see how far she could get with the story. Now, it’s too late.
She’s already had more final warnings than the rest of the reporters’ desk combined. If she’s fired, she won’t be able to get a foot in the door of a local free paper, never mind an international news network. Her reputation precedes her and not necessarily to her advantage. She gets results and has the Emmy to prove it, but journalism is a small, incestuous world and she hasn’t made friends on the way up.
There won’t be many hands to catch her on the way down.
She hurls her phone against the wall in fury and frustration. It smacks to the floor, screen down, and bounces twice, before landing neatly at her feet.
Quinn shoves it in her pocket, grabs her denim jacket and heads for the door.
The kid behind the bar is new since she was last here. He looks about sixteen.
Quinn puts her AA chip down on the bar and pulls up a stool.
The kid looks at the chip, and then at her. ‘Sure you should be here?’ he says.
‘Jack Daniel’s,’ Quinn says. ‘Neat. No ice.’
He shrugs and pours her a single measure.
‘Double,’ Quinn says.
She finishes it before he’s even racked the bottle.
‘Again,’ she says, rapping the bar with her AA chip.
In her pocket, her phone buzzes. Quinn switches it off without even glancing at the screen.
