Two Little Girls

6

Just one glass. There was nothing wrong with having a small glass of red wine before Roger came home. It was a quarter-to-seven – perfectly respectable. She used to drink all the time in her old job: nip to the pub at lunchtime with her colleagues, pop out for drinks after work on Fridays as a reward for making it through another emotionally draining week dealing with all those traumatic cases.

Cupping the wine glass, she wandered into the sitting room and switched on the television. It was an early-evening chat show, five glossy women with expensive highlights, dressed in clothes that Carolynn would have worn for a night out in central London, in the days when she had friends to go out in the evening with, sitting behind a pink panelled desk. The women, all her age or older, looked immaculate even under the harsh studio lights; they were so removed from the image she saw in the bathroom mirror every morning, they might as well have been aliens from another planet. She had looked like that once though, hadn’t she? Dewy-skinned, bright-eyed and sleek. Before the pain took its toll …

At the sound of the front door, her shoulders stiffened, the muscles under her skin bunching into tense knots. Roger’s footsteps echoed across the tiled hall as he walked into the kitchen, then stopped. She heard the sound of his breathing and, though he said nothing, she knew he was surprised that she wasn’t in the kitchen preparing dinner. A good meal was important to him after a long day at work. Uneasy, Carolynn looked quickly for somewhere to stow her wine glass, out of sight. But before she’d taken a step, she sensed rather than heard him standing in the lounge doorway, felt his eyes on her.

‘I, uh, I didn’t expect you back,’ she murmured, pasting on a poor impression of a smile as she turned.

A shadow crossed his face when he saw the glass in her hand. ‘I left early so that I could be with you. Because of … you know.’ Because of today.

Carolynn nodded, feeling like a reformed drug user, caught sneaking a hit. ‘I … I just fancied a small glass,’ she said.

‘It’s a bit early, Caro.’

They stood, facing off against each other across the living room. ‘It’s nearly seven, Roger, and it’s only a small glass.’ Her tone sounded like that of a child defending the state of their room.

‘I don’t think you should be drinking alone.’

‘It’s just one.’

‘One leads to two, then three.’ He puffed air into his cheeks and blew noisily out of his mouth, like a balloon deflating. ‘What did you do today?’

I went for a run. I go every day. You couldn’t expect me not to go today of all days.

She didn’t say it. She had changed out of her running clothes, as she did every day before he got home from work, had taken a shower, put on a dress. He liked her to look pretty, feminine. He hated to think of her punishing her body with that obsessive running. He didn’t realize how much she needed it, how it was the only thing keeping her sane.

‘I popped to the supermarket,’ she said. ‘I bought steak for dinner. I thought it would be nice to have something tasty, expensive.’

‘I’ll look forward to that.’ His tone was flat.

When had their relationship become more about what wasn’t said, the undercurrent, than the words actually spoken?

Carolynn chewed a fingernail. ‘I want to integrate a bit, Roger,’ she said. ‘Make some friends … a friend, at least.’ Dr Flynn. Jessie.

His forehead creased. ‘We came here precisely because we didn’t want to integrate.’

‘I know, but I’m lonely.’

‘You have me, Caro.’

‘You’re out at work all day.’

He shook his head. ‘We have each other.’ There was an edge to his tone. ‘You don’t need anyone else.’

Carolynn nodded, feeling like one of the spring-necked plastic animals in the box on the counter in the pound shop, placed there to tempt small children as their parents were paying at the till.

‘We came here to escape, to protect you. I can’t keep you safe if you make friends. Friends ask questions, they need to know about your past, your history. What would you tell them?’

The vexed tears that had been poised behind her eyes since the moment they had snapped open this morning, were creating a film across her corneas now, furring Roger’s face, softening the uncompromising light in his eyes.

‘And I think that you should stop seeing that psychologist. She’s too close.’

Carolynn gasped; couldn’t help herself. In the short time that she had been seeing Jessie Flynn, she had come to live for those sessions, looking forward to them days before they happened and sinking into depression the day after at the prospect of another week dragging by before she’d get to chat again. Really chat.

‘Maybe just one more session.’ That plaintive tone again; she hated herself for it. That tone wasn’t her, she never used to be this needy and dependent.

‘After today, you won’t need to.’ His voice was firm.

After the second anniversary of her death, was what he meant. As if life would miraculously return to normal when they woke tomorrow morning. As if life would be wonderful for the 364 days that followed, until the third anniversary, the fourth …

Carolynn dipped her gaze to the swill of burgundy liquid in the glass. ‘I’ve been careful,’ she murmured. ‘She doesn’t know who I really am. But I think we could be friends. I’d like her as a friend.’

‘A friend?’ He laughed, a bitter sound. ‘You’re paying her, Caro. Actually, let me correct that: I’m paying her. That’s why she’s listening to you. A woman like that will have loads of friends.’

How did he know what Jessie Flynn was like? Oh. She remembered now. He’d collected her after her third session. It had been Flynn’s final appointment of the day, and she’d walked out with Carolynn. Roger had been leaning against the car, warming his face in the late afternoon sun, and she’d noticed even then, though she hadn’t liked to admit it to herself, how his eyes widened when he clocked her psychologist.

‘Christ, I might book a few sessions with her myself,’ he’d muttered, half under his breath, as they drove away.

She shouldn’t have been surprised at his reaction. Jessie Flynn was stunning. She even made those women on the TV chat show look ordinary, with that jet-black waist-length hair and those spectacular ice-blue eyes.

‘I’m only protecting you, Carolynn. You know that, don’t you?’

She gave a faint nod, tuning him out. She could be friends with Jessie Flynn. Tons of her old friends had been like that – cool, edgy, beautiful – when she had lived and worked in London, before motherhood, before Zoe. She had been like that too. Before.

‘Let’s save the wine, eh?’ Stepping across the carpet, he laid his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’ll change out of my work clothes, have a shower and we can have a glass together.’

As he dropped a hand to take her glass, the words on the television cut into Carolynn’s consciousness. She hadn’t even noticed that the chat show had ended.

‘… The body of a young girl has been found at West Wittering beach. Details are still coming in, but police believe that her death was not due to natural causes. A doll was found by her side. Detective Inspector Bobby Simmons of Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes has warned parents to be vigilant.’

The wine glass slipped from her fingers, every rotation in its tumble to the carpet freeze-framing in her mind, like individual pages in a flip-book. The glass hit the cream wool and cartwheeled, once, twice, red liquid fountaining out of it, spraying Roger’s pale mustard boots, peppering the wallpaper, coating the carpet in blood red. A sliver of her brain registered the damage and knew that Roger would be furious about wine stains on his brand-new nubuck Timberlands, but all she could think was:

Another dead girl. Another doll.

7

The figure in the background was unmistakable, his black suit and hair so stark against the white quartz sand that he resembled an overgrown crow. His presence made it impossible for her to take in what the reporter speaking to camera in the foreground was saying.

West Wittering beach, wasn’t it? Jessie recognized it from a couple of months ago, when Callan had booked them a day of kite-surfing lessons. It had been a disaster. She had been unable to grip the bar properly because of her ruined hand and had ended up storming off in a fury – blaming Callan, of course, transferring all her frustration, her anger at her own impotence, on to him.

It was raining down there too. The sky above the beach was metallic and wetly luminous, water pooled in shallow dips in the sand. Her eyes moved from Marilyn to the InciTent, where Tony Burrows, his lead CSI, toddler-rotund in his white forensic overall, was massaging his bald spot with a latex-gloved hand. Though she had only met him once, she recognized the tic as tension. Yellow ‘Police Do Not Cross’ tape flapped in the wind, sealing a section of the dunes off from the press and a handful of local gawkers.

So, it was suspicious death or confirmed murder – must be, to get the police and press out there. Christ, that will keep Marilyn happy, she thought cynically, recognizing a moment after the notion entered her head how the last six months had coloured her attitude to everything, hating herself for that negativity. She was good at helping her patients move on from trauma, pitifully poor at heeding her own lessons. Physician heal thyself – what a joke that was.

‘ . . . the body of a young girl has been found in sand dunes at West Wittering beach …’

Oh God. A dead child. Now I really hate myself.

The picture switched suddenly to the Channel 4 News studio and Jessie froze. The view of the beach on the screen behind the presenters had been replaced by a photograph of a woman. A confident, healthy-looking woman, late-thirties, size ten or twelve, a sensible weight, blonde hair cut in a glossy bob, clear brown eyes focused on something just to the left of the camera. Her head was tilted and she was smiling, showing a perfect row of pearly white teeth.

The name displayed beneath the photo – Carolynn Reynolds – was not the name Jessie knew her by. The face and body had changed, too. In fact, the woman in the photo was barely recognizable as the woman Jessie had seen five times in her consulting room, the fifth time only this morning; the woman who had never met her gaze directly with those lightless brown eyes.

Nevertheless, she was sure that it was Laura. She had spent five hours studying her facial features, every nuance of her expression, her body and its language.

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’

Laura.

She held up a hand to silence Callan. ‘Shhhh, I’m listening.’

‘I’ll take that as a rude, ungrateful yes,’ he muttered, planting a soft kiss at the base of her neck, which made her shiver despite her focus on the television screen. Then he padded barefoot into the kitchen, naked except for a pair of white boxers, his sandy blond hair dishevelled from bed. He’d worked forty-eight hours straight on a trafficking case, had got home at lunchtime and retired to bed for the afternoon. When she’d got home from work, she had stripped off and slid under the duvet, waking him up by sliding her hand into his boxers. They had made slow and languorous love before he had crashed and she had pottered downstairs in his dressing gown to flick through some patient files with the television turned on in the background.

Laura.

‘… the death of this young girl echoes that of little Zoe Reynolds, whose body was found in the dunes at West Wittering beach two years ago today, only a hundred metres from where this child’s body has been found. Zoe’s mother, Carolynn Reynolds, was tried for Zoe’s murder, but acquitted nine months ago due to lack of evidence. No one has been charged with Zoe’s murder. Detective Inspector Bobby Simmons of Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, who led the investigation into the murder of little Zoe and is now on the scene at West Wittering beach, told us that it is too early to confirm a connection between the two cases.’

Jessie scrambled for the remote to freeze the screen on Laura … Carolynn’s photograph so that she could study it, be sure, only remembering, as her finger jabbed impotently at the pause button, that the news was live. Shit.

‘… we will update you as soon as we have more on this story.’

The woman’s photograph was replaced by the picture of a graph in freefall, the story something financial that Jessie immediately tuned out.

‘Callan.’ She still called him by his surname, even though they had been dating for nearly six months and he had virtually moved into her tiny farm worker’s cottage. Gulliver in Lilliput, still hitting his head on the door frames, when he wasn’t concentrating. ‘One of my patients … clients was just on the news.’

A glass of Sauvignon and a bottle of beer in his hands, he came to stand next to her, passed her the wine.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

He smothered a yawn with the back of his hand. ‘Yes. What? Some woman? There’s only one woman I’m interested in and she’s not on the TV.’ He planted another lingering kiss on her neck, which she twisted out of, but not before she’d shivered again at the feel of his lips on her skin.

‘Stop trying to distract me and listen,’ she said, nudging his bare stomach with her elbow. ‘It’s the woman I saw this morning, the one who is so weighed down by guilt that she can hardly force herself to grind through the days.’

She flicked through the TV channels on the remote, BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 5, all showing other programmes or advertisements. Switching to BBC News 24, she laid the remote on the coffee table, aligning its long edge with the edge of the table, corner with corner, before she straightened.

Callan noticed, said nothing.

‘The woman whose daughter died in a car accident?’ he asked, stroking his hand down her arm, lacing his fingers through hers, the movement casual, sensual. But she knew why he’d done it.

Glancing at the remote, she felt the tension rise, the electric suit shiver across her skin, bit her lip to stop herself from pulling her hand from his so that she could adjust its top a few millimetres to the left, align it perfectly, absolutely perfectly, with the table edge. It was catching her eye, dragging her attention from the television and she needed to concentrate for when the child murder story, Laura … no … Carolynn, cycled around again. Her OCD had worsened, driven by the stress and disappointment of the past six months. She was making up for the lack of control over her life’s bigger picture by controlling what she could, the minutiae of her environment, tidying, aligning, ordering. But the knowing didn’t help with the stopping.

‘Are you talking about the woman whose daughter was killed in a car accident?’ Callan’s voice pulled her back.

‘Yes, but Zoe didn’t die in a car accident. She was murdered. Laura— Jesus, Carolynn … she’s actually called Carolynn, lied to me. She lied about her identity and she lied about the death of her daughter.’ She looked over her shoulder and met his searching amber gaze. ‘But why? Why lie?’

8

‘It could be a copycat, sir,’ Workman said, in a tone of forced calm. ‘Zoe Reynolds’ murder was a fixture in the press for months, and the spotlight was shone again when Carolynn was on trial. You’d have to have spent the last two years living in a mud hut in Papua New Guinea not to have read about it, not to know all the details.’ A pause. ‘Everything.’

Eyes fixed on the misty hummock that was the Isle of Wight fifteen kilometres across the Solent to the south, the curved grey back of a breaching whale, Marilyn nodded, hoping she wouldn’t notice that his hands were shaking.

Everything.

Workman was right. The column centimetres the Zoe Reynolds case had occupied would add up to kilometres, every sordid bloody detail raked over countless times, however hard he had tried to keep some things back, just a few elements of the poor little girl’s murder, to preserve some dignity for her memory if nothing else. Zoe Reynolds. That name forever seared into his memory as if it had been cattle-branded on to his temporal lobe. The statistics of child abductions and murders in the UK branded there also, from the many hours he’d spent trawling through the data, buttonholing experts, interviewing convicted paedophiles to try to understand their thought processes, eliminating paedophilia as a possibility, cycling back again and again to the conviction that it must have been the child’s mother, that he had been right to pursue her as hard as he had done, despite being unable to amass enough evidence to nail a guilty verdict.

In the twenty-two years since he joined Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, Zoe Reynolds’ murder was the only case that he still took to bed with him at night; his own personal abject failure. Around two hundred children were unlawfully killed in the UK each year, with at least three quarters of those deaths due to abuse or neglect by a parent – filicide – or other close relation. And those were only the reported cases. The woman he’d spoken with at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children had told him that the statistic was an under-estimation, that each year some parents literally got away with murder. Not all parents who kill their children live on benefits in some sink estate, she’d told him. Affluent parents have tempers too. Affluent parents lose control. The inference wasn’t lost on Marilyn: fall down the stairs in a middle-class household and you’ve slipped; do the same in a tower block with alcoholic parents and your mum or dad threw you down them.

‘A copycat,’ he murmured, finally acknowledging Workman’s comment, yanking on the knot to loosen his tie, lessen the tightening in his airways. Copycat crimes were far from uncommon. Two years to the day. ‘Yes, it could be.’

The soft sigh that he wasn’t supposed to have heard over the shore breeze told him that she had noted the lack of conviction in his tone. She’d been by his side throughout that first case, had been affected by little Zoe’s murder – in truth, even more than he had been. She hadn’t, though, shared his dogged conviction that the mother, Carolynn Reynolds, was responsible. Despite knowing the statistic on child murders as well as he did, she found it hard to accept that a mother could kill her own daughter. Not that pretty, polished mother. Not that daughter. Not in that cold-blooded way. Given Workman’s personal history – her struggle to come to terms with her own childlessness due to infertility – he had doubted her ability to remain objective. He’d come close to having her sidelined for the duration of the investigation, but eventually decided against because losing DS Sarah Workman would have been akin to hacking off his right arm. He had needed her support, particularly with so public a case, his work under such close scrutiny, so he’d kept her with him but monitored her closely, tempering her opinions with a spade full of salt. He’d caught her a few times, studying the crime scene photographs of the dead child, wallowing unhealthily in them, he’d thought at the time. He’d done the same, but privately, and even as he was looking for the umpteenth time, he knew that what he was doing was mentally destructive, the visual equivalent of sticking needles under his fingernails.

‘We owe it to this little girl to—’

Marilyn raised a hand, cutting her off.

‘We do indeed. And we will.’ He dropped his hand to her shoulder. ‘And I don’t need a lecture about objectivity, thanks, Sarah. Come on, let’s leave Burrows to it, get back to base and brief the team. I’ll start jibbering if I don’t get away from the noise of these bloody seagulls.’

* * *

The journalists who had thronged the crime scene on the beach seemed to have made it back to the station in Chichester quicker than he had, which, given he was still driving his beloved Z3 – sixteen years old, 143,000 miles on the clock and performing to every bit of its age and mileage – he had to acknowledge wasn’t surprising.

Monitoring police radio frequencies 24/7 for the first whiff of a heinous crime, the press piranhas had gone into a frenzy the moment they found one. Marilyn was engulfed as soon as he stepped from the car: voice recorders and cameras, like the black eyes of Cyclops, shoved into his face. Shouldering through them, he made it to the concrete steps into the station, where at least his back was covered by the closed front door. Stopping, he turned under the stone arch, squinting against the sinking sun’s rays, knowing that he might as well face the pack now than delay it. Pain now, double pain with bells on later when they’d had a chance to feed off each other, speculate, the process always made more creative, the conclusions more fantastical and inflammatory when they had no factual information to work with. He wasn’t a natural politician, preferred just to get on with the job and let his success rate speak for itself. He didn’t want to become one of those policemen who always had their eye on the main chance, on creating good impressions over delivering results, on the next promotion, but even he’d realized, in a flash of deeply uncomfortable clarity out on the beach, that he would need as many people on his side as he could get, given the high-profile disaster that the Zoe Reynolds case had been. His personal high-profile disaster.

Moreover, he would never forgive himself if this little girl’s killer escaped justice as Zoe’s had. One ghostly child remonstrating with him in the early hours was already one too many. He held up his hand to silence the chatter and still the jostling.

‘The body of a young girl was found in the sand dunes at West Wittering beach by a passer-by late this afternoon. Dr Ghoshal, the Home Office pathologist, estimates her to be nine or ten years old.’

Shouted questions:

‘Who found her?’

‘Where exactly was she found?’

‘How long has she been dead for?’

‘How was she killed?’

He noticed a few elbows connecting with ribs as they vied for the best spot. No raised hands or other such decorum, the press pack aptly named. Stray dogs being tossed a roast chicken would behave better. Ignoring the questions, he pressed on:

‘We have not yet identified the child and so far no one has come forward to tell us that their daughter is missing. My first priority is to identify her.’

Questions coming thick and fast:

‘What does she look like? Hair colour, eye colour—’

‘How are you going to identify her?’

‘What kind of family do you think the kid comes from if no one has noticed she’s missing?’

Fair question that one, but he ignored it too. It wasn’t his job to speculate or criticize. His ex-wife would fall about laughing if she caught him casting judgement on bad parenting on television.

‘How was she killed?’

‘Are there any suspects?’

And then the question, the one he knew would come:

‘Do you think that this second girl was murdered by the same person who murdered Zoe Reynolds? It’s too much of a coincidence, surely, otherwise? A couple of hundred metres from the spot where she was found, two years to the day?’

Two years ago, to the day.

The visceral memory of coming upon Zoe’s strangled body, that vile doll lying beside her, black felt-tip marks around its neck aping the strangulation bruises on Zoe’s. The image visited him often, with unrelenting clarity, as the image of this second little girl’s body would no doubt visit him also.

Another dead child. Another doll.

The same doll – make and model – he was sure of it. The doll’s image was something he’d never forget. It had been so lifelike, but at the same time not, like one of the countless bodies he’d seen on dissecting tables, a lifelike carcass without life or soul. The doll’s eyes, particularly, had stuck in his mind. Brown – the same colour as little Zoe’s eyes.