Two Little Girls

And the doll found beside this child?

Green.

It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, back on the beach, but both the child and the doll had green eyes. He saw them now in his mind’s eye: the child’s eyes a deep sea green, already clouding over, the doll blinking its glassy green eyes at Burrows as he lifted it with gloved hands and slid it into an evidence bag.

Brown to match Zoe’s eyes. Green to match this second little dead girl’s eyes. Jesus, what the hell am I dealing with? Had that detail been in the press? Would a copycat know? Or was it just coincidence that the dolls’ eyes matched the girls’?

Coincidence?

Whatever he was about to tell the press in an effort to defuse tension around the possibility of a double child murderer being on the loose in this sleepy seaside town, he didn’t believe in coincidences.

The restless increase in volume from the press pack brought him back to the moment.

‘It is far too early to make any judgements as to whether the murder of this little girl and the murder of Zoe Reynolds, two years ago, are connected. However, I would like to speak with Zoe’s parents and would ask them to get in touch with me as a matter of urgency.’

Holding up a hand to signal that the impromptu press conference was over, receiving a barrage of new questions in reply, he backed up the stairs, still facing them. Never good to turn your back on a journalist, unless you want a knife between the shoulder blades.

‘We will hold a full press conference in due course to update you all properly on the progress of this case,’ he concluded. ‘Now if you will excuse me, I have a child murder to solve.’ A second child murder …

9

Carolynn turned the taps on full force in the downstairs cloakroom, though Roger would know that the rush of water was to mask another sound, the guttural sound of her retching. Her stomach heaved and she vomited again, a stream of hot bile the colour of buttercups running over her fingers. Sitting back on her haunches, she sucked in a breath, locking on to the feeling of the cold floor tiles against her legs, holding that sense of chill calm in her mind as her stomach heaved again, heaved and settled.

Pushing herself to her feet, she reached for the hand towel, catching her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she did so. Lollipop. A pasty, wan, lollipop. She and her friends used to laugh at women like her, women they called lollipops because their heads were so ludicrously oversized on their emaciated bodies, rail-thin models who posted pictures of themselves on Instagram clutching plates of pizza in an attempt to convince people that they really did eat. Just as she now kept the fridge filled and cooked meal after meal to convince Roger that she was eating, to keep him off her back, though the reality was every mouthful tasted like cardboard and she ended up tossing most of the food into the caravan park’s bins so Roger wouldn’t catch her out.

She swiped a hand across the mirror, leaving a streak of bile across the glass, fuzzing her own grotesque image from view.

Back in the sitting room, the silence jarring, Carolynn realized that the television was now off. Roger watched her gaze track to the blank screen.

‘I switched it off,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘We don’t need to see any more.’

‘What are we going to do, Roger?’

‘Do?’ His eyes registered surprise.

‘I need to understand what the police are thinking.’

‘You were acquitted, Carolynn.’

She nodded, concentrating hard on the brown vines twisting through the wallpaper like strings of DNA, not meeting his searching gaze. She hated this room, had always felt claustrophobic in it, and now she felt as if the vines were coiling around her, squeezing her throat with each rasping breath she managed.

‘That detective inspector—’ Even now, nine months since the collapse of her trial, since they had fled down here to anonymity, she couldn’t bear to say his name. The man who had hounded her, who was convinced of her guilt, still, no doubt. She had caught his eye as she’d left the Old Bailey a free woman, had recognized the cynicism and anger in his look. He would never stop hunting her.

And now. Now he had another reason. A second dead child. High-octane fuel to his fire.

‘That detective inspector said on the news that he would like to speak with me … with, uh, with us.’

‘He has to find us first, and he won’t be able to do that. Nobody knows where we are. We left no trace. They won’t find us. They won’t expect us to be living here in Bracklesham Bay, so close to where Zoe was murdered. It was a clever choice.’

Carolynn nodded distractedly. The location, a sprawling seaside town crammed with tourists and seasonal workers in summer, shuttered and battened down, locals retreating inside to their hearths and their television sets in winter, provided perfect anonymity. Roger had read about the beautiful, kilometres-long white-sand beaches that stretched from Bracklesham Bay to East and West Wittering in The Sunday Times a few years ago, and they had spent a long weekend here every September since, a last hurrah before Zoe went back to school.

‘My photograph was on the news. It will be in every paper. I can’t face it again. I can’t face that whole process, being treated like a side of meat.’

My body, the searches – they said that they wanted to make sure I didn’t have any hidden drugs, but really they just wanted to dehumanize me, remove every shred of my dignity.

‘I could never go through that again, Roger.’ Her voice shook. ‘I couldn’t—’

Complete strangers screaming at me in the street, calling me a child murderer, dragging at my clothes and hair, spitting in my face.

‘You won’t have to, because they won’t find us,’ he said firmly. ‘You don’t look like you used to. Your hair is different, your face, your body. There’s nothing left of your body.’ He emitted a brief, heartless laugh. ‘Remember that book we used to read to … to Zoe?’

Carolynn flinched at the sound of Zoe’s name on his lips.

‘Stick Man. Do you remember it, my Stick Lady love?’ His fingers and thumb pinched the skin of her upper arm. His grip left two white indents, which she knew would turn black. Was she bruising more easily these days? ‘You are virtually unrecognizable now, Carolynn.’

She tried to suppress the involuntary shudder as his arms slid around her waist and he stepped forward, closing the gap between them, pressing himself against her. She wanted to shove him away, dismiss him, but she couldn’t. She needed his support, his complicity. They were in this together.

‘And this little girl’s death is totally different,’ he murmured, his breath misting hot and damp against her ear, making her want to shudder all over again. ‘You were nowhere near West Wittering beach this afternoon, were you?’

She had been the one to find Zoe dead in the sand dunes of West Wittering beach two years ago. She had left footprints all over the crime scene, her DNA had been all over her daughter’s body – Well, it would have been, wouldn’t it? I’m her mother – her fingerprints on that disgusting doll with the moving eyes and the black marks around its neck. Roger was right. This was different.

‘You have an alibi. You were here, at home.’

Carolynn gave an uncertain nod.

‘Weren’t you?’ he pressed. ‘Apart from that quick trip to the supermarket?’

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘But I was alone.’

‘It was dull, rainy. You had the lights on in the kitchen when I got back. Someone would have seen you through the window. Someone from the caravan park.’

‘Yes,’ she murmured listlessly.

She had been out running again, on the beach, down to East Wittering and further, to the west, pounding along the sand, the rain peppering her face, the beach deserted. Only a kite-surfer zipping backwards and forwards two hundred metres offshore, too far away to attest to the identity of anyone on the beach. Her breath caught in her throat. Oh God.

‘What?’ Roger asked.

‘Nothing.’

His eyes remained fixed on her face, weighing, judging.

‘Really, Roger, it was nothing.’

She pressed her hands against his chest and levered him away from her, trying to keep the relief she felt at the widening space between them from telegraphing itself to her face.

‘Take some of your pills and go to bed early. Stay away from the windows, away from television. An early night will do you good. And tomorrow …’ He paused. ‘Tomorrow everything will look better.’

She nodded dully. The last thing she needed was to sleep, to dream. She wanted to think. The news of the little girl’s death had brought back something about the day she had found Zoe’s body, something that was hovering at the edge of her memory, just out reach.

Roger left the sitting room and she heard him jogging up the stairs, returning a moment later, two small white pills nestled in the palm of his hand. Flunitrazepam. He had bought the pills, liquid, every possible method of sedating her, off the Internet from Malaysia, had had them delivered to a PO Box in Chichester, which he had opened under their new false identity.

She looked at the pills and shook her head. ‘I might go for a run.’

‘Are you serious, Carolynn. Now? With that police and media circus out there? You’re upset and you need to calm down.’

They stood, facing off against each other across the sitting room. Carolynn chewed at the skin around her thumbnail.

‘Stop that, Carolynn. You’ll make your hands look ugly.’

Dropping her hand, she nodded dully. He was right about the nail-biting, about the pills, about staying inside. He was always right these days. He hadn’t used to be, when they first got married, but now she could see that he was. Always. When had the tables turned? Since she had been accused of Zoe’s murder, since the trial? Or earlier than that? Since becoming a mother had leeched her energy and her happiness?

But she longed to experience the feeling of endorphins coursing through her body, the euphoria, however temporary that came with utter physical exhaustion. Sometimes when she returned from her runs along the beach, something had shifted inside her and she found some small measure of peace. Often though, only her body was changed, the miles she’d run registering themselves in physical exhaustion, but everything else, her mind, the thoughts that haunted her waking hours, unchanged. Still, running was like a drug to her now, her only hope of respite, however temporary.

‘Here.’ He held out his hand. ‘Take your pills.’

Obediently, Carolynn extended her right hand for the pills, her left for the water. He watched as she popped first one and then the other into her mouth. His eyes tracked the movement of her hand as she raised the glass to her lips and took a sip. Tilting forward, he planted a soft kiss on her cheek, grimacing, she could sense without even seeing his expression, as the downy white lanugo hair on her face tickled his lips.

‘I can’t go back,’ she said again, when he had stepped away, aware of the thread of desperation in her voice. ‘I can’t go through all that again. I can’t.’

‘You won’t need to, but you have to listen to me, do what I tell you.’

She nodded. No matter how hard she looked into his eyes, searched for something there, all she ever saw was emptiness. It was the same emptiness she saw in her own.

‘That means no friends, for starters. And no more visits to Dr Flynn.’

She started to speak, to object, but his fingers moved to cover her mouth, cutting her off.

‘We can’t risk getting close to people, Carolynn. You know that. Not now. Not with this second little girl dead, so close to where you found— where Zoe was found. It’s too much of a risk. They’ll find us and then they’ll find out … they’ll find out the truth this time and we just can’t take that chance.’

The truth.

He left the sitting room and she spat the pills into her palm and slipped them into her pocket.

10

Marilyn stood at the front of the incident room and contemplated the hastily assembled team. Sarah Workman had looked washed-out on the beach, but he’d put it down to the light filtering through grey clouds; now, under the harsh fluorescent strips, her skin was a sickly pale grey and she looked even worse. Already the stress of the case was taking its toll, and there would doubtless be sleepless nights and soaring stress levels to come for all of them. He met her gaze and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but was more likely a maniacal grimace. Nothing about this case promoted a genuine smile.

‘Good evening, everyone. I won’t keep you for long, as we have a lot to do.’

A photograph of the dead girl was already tacked to the whiteboard behind him, where it would stay throughout the investigation. Once they found out who she was, it would be joined by one of her alive, smiling preferably, looking like the undefiled child she had been, reminding everyone why they were here, who the eighteen hour days were for.

‘As you all know, the body of a young girl was found in the sand dunes at West Wittering beach earlier this evening.’ He glanced down at the notes he’d scribbled, though he knew everything, what little they had so far, by heart. ‘I don’t have much to give you, I’m afraid. Dr Ghoshal will perform the autopsy tomorrow, but his preliminary assessment is that she was killed by strangulation. She was wearing what looked to be a school uniform – white shirt, navy-blue jumper and navy trousers, no identifying school badge – and her clothing wasn’t disturbed, so it is unlikely that she was a victim of sexual assault, though of course the autopsy will confirm or refute that.’ He paused. ‘A doll in a pink ballerina dress was found by her side. The doll had black marks drawn around its neck with felt-tip pen. The black marks aped the strangulation bruise marks around the little girl’s neck.’

His gaze scanned the assembled faces as they digested the information. A stranger could be forgiven for thinking them indifferent; Marilyn knew better, knew that the little girl’s murder had touched them all deeply, just as Zoe Reynolds’ had done two years previously.

Arthur Lawford, the exhibits officer, raised his hand. He had been with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes longer even than Marilyn, a solid thirty years on the job and still a sergeant, a role he was more than happy to languish in until retirement. Not everyone could be the star player; not everyone wanted to be. Lawford had been the exhibits officer on the Zoe Reynolds case, and along with Marilyn and Workman he’d lived through the disaster it had become.

‘A doll, sir?’ The inference clear.

Marilyn nodded. ‘Similar.’ He paused. ‘The same. Identical, except for the colour of her … of its eyes.’

Lawford frowned. ‘Its eyes, sir?’

‘What colour were the eyes of the doll we found by Zoe Reynolds’ body, Artie?’

‘I don’t remember, sir.’

‘Brown. They were brown, weren’t they?’

Lawford shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Think about it, Artie, think. They were the same colour as the little girl’s, weren’t they? Brown? The same colour as Zoe’s eyes?’

He scanned the room again. Its occupants stilled, the usual background noises – the shifting of bottoms in seats, crossing and uncrossing of legs, the rustle of clothing – had ceased. He knew what they were all thinking. Only DC Cara was new to the team. The rest had worked with him on the Zoe Reynolds case, had been party to his unswerving conviction that Carolynn Reynolds had murdered her own daughter, had watched him wilt, shrivel, as the trial progressed and it became clear that they hadn’t secured enough evidence to convict. He couldn’t afford to get emotionally involved in this second murder case, had to maintain a professional distance. Easier said than done.

‘Check will you, please, Artie, and let me know,’ Marilyn said as casually as he could manage.

‘Yes, sir.’

Tapping the whiteboard behind him, Marilyn indicated the list he’d scribbled. ‘Our priorities are to identify the dead child and interview her parents; interview the woman who found her body; get uniforms on the ground in the beach car park, the village centre, on the road in and out of East and West Wittering villages and on the knock to try to locate some witnesses. We need to construct a detailed timeline of the little girl’s movements, from when she left her school – whether that was alone, with one or both of her parents, or with a friend or friends – to when she was killed. Most prep-schools finish at three-thirty, so there isn’t a lot of time between her leaving school and her meeting her death. That suggests to me that the school is local to the beach, in Bracklesham Bay, East or West Wittering. There can’t be many, so let’s find out where she was a pupil quickly, based on her uniform. Lastly, we need to find Carolynn and Roger Reynolds, Zoe Reynolds’ parents. Though this is something I won’t be disclosing to the press, I would be very surprised if this second child’s murder isn’t linked to Zoe’s. I made enquiries earlier this evening and it appears that the Reynolds have disappeared.’ Run. He didn’t say it.

‘Are they suspects, sir?’ a voice from the back of the room asked. ‘Is she a suspect?’

A knock on the door saved Marilyn from having to answer the million-dollar question to which he hadn’t yet formulated a balanced, unprejudiced answer. DC Darren Cara stepped through the doorway, holding up a piece of paper.

‘I think we have a name for the little girl, sir – Jodie Trigg. Call just came through. The mother got back from work half an hour ago and found her daughter missing. Her bed looked as if it hasn’t been slept in. The description of her daughter matches that of the dead child.’

‘And Jodie Trigg’s mother has just realized that she’s missing now?’ Marilyn said angrily. He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s knocking midnight. The little girl has been dead eight hours, for Christ’s sake.’

Cara gave a slight shrug of his shoulders.

‘What about friends and relatives?’ Marilyn asked. ‘Has she checked with them?’

‘She has a sister in Bognor Regis, but Jodie isn’t there. The mother – Deborah, Debs Trigg, she’s called – lives at Seaview Caravan Park in Bracklesham Bay. She called park security and asked around her neighbours and Jodie hasn’t been seen since she left for school this morning. She’s a pupil at East Wittering Community Primary. I tracked down the school’s headmistress and she confirmed that Jodie was at school all day today, though she did mention that Jodie is not the best attendee and often turns up late. She also confirmed that the children wear a navy-blue uniform. Only the blazer has the school badge on it.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘And the child wasn’t wearing a blazer. Thorough job, DC Cara. Thank you.’ His gaze moved from Cara back to the assembled team. ‘Have we had any other calls about missing children?’

A mass shaking of heads. Marilyn raised a surprised eyebrow. Typically, when a serious crime made the news, their phones rang off the hook with people eager to get a slice of the macabre action. The over-helpful, the hoaxers, the gloaters, the ghouls and the common or garden nutters: the whole gamut. This was the reason he had only ever appealed one case on Crimewatch – Zoe Reynolds, driven by utter desperation after her mother had been released and all other investigative avenues closed. A Crimewatch reconstruction could be useful for jogging memories, but it inevitably resulted in a deluge of information, most of it entirely useless. But he had been surprised, back then too, at how few hoax calls they’d received when Zoe’s murder was re-enacted on BBC One: an unexpectedly compassionate response. It seemed as if this second murdered little girl – Jodie Trigg, he reminded himself, they had her name now – was engendering the same solicitude. The violent murder of a young child too tragic for even the crazies to wallow in.

Marilyn took the piece of paper that Cara was holding out to him and read: Jodie Trigg, mother, Deborah (Debs) Trigg, Buena Vista, Seaview Caravan Park, Bracklesham Bay. It was a sprawling park of rectangular static mobile homes, a beige-hued blot on the landscape, half a kilometre eastwards along the beach from East Wittering, a kilometre from West. At its centre was a huge entertainment complex, jammed with arcade games and slot machines and serviced by a huge restaurant and a couple of snack bars which served anything that could be fried to within an inch of its life. There was a nod to health and fitness in the form of a swimming pool, resplendent with fake palms and a tiled beach that sloped into one side of the pool. He’d taken his own kids there once, so many years ago that it could have been last century – probably was – and he still shuddered at the memory of curly hairs clogging the drains in the changing rooms and the stench of chlorine masking eau-de-kiddies’-piss.

Some caravans were holiday lets, others occupied by permanent residents whose number, he assumed, included Debs Trigg and her daughter Jodie. No mention of a father, he noticed, then immediately chastised himself for making an assumption about the structure of their family purely based on where they lived. He knew all too well that people held similar, uninformed prejudices about his own fifteen-year absence from his now adult children’s lives. Well-justified prejudices, in his case.

‘Listen up,’ he said, refocusing. ‘DS Dave Johnson will take the lead on organizing the uniforms. DS Workman and I will go to Seaview Caravan Park now to speak with Debs Trigg. Cara, you take the lead on the search for Carolynn and Roger Reynolds.’

‘Do you think the two cases are linked?’ Cara asked.

Marilyn shrugged. Another awkward question he’d happily duck. Privately, he was iron-clad certain, given the location of the murder, the date, and the arrangement of the girl’s body in the heart of shells, an identical doll by her side, that the two cases were linked, but he wasn’t about to share that certainty this early on, even to his team. ‘It’s too soon to say for sure, but as a courtesy, if nothing else, we should get in touch with them. They’ll be seeing all this on the news and it will bring everything that they experienced two years ago straight back to the surface. I’d like to chat with them in person, reassure them that we haven’t forgotten little Zoe.’ It was an evasive answer, the best he was going to give at the moment.

‘What about Ruby Lovatt, the woman who found Jodie’s body?’ Workman asked. ‘She’s still in an interview room downstairs. We could divide and conquer.’

Marilyn shook his head. After the Zoe Reynolds disaster, he wanted, needed, to be in on all the action on this new case. He couldn’t afford to miss anything, any nuance.

‘Send her home and ask her to come back first thing tomorrow, eight a.m. Cara, get a family liaison officer to meet us at the Trigg’s caravan, will you?’

His gaze made one final circuit of the room and settled again on Workman.

‘Steel yourself, Sarah. We have a difficult house call to make.’

11

Jessie liked to leave the curtains open at night, to let the stars and the moon come into the bedroom with them. It reminded her of Wimbledon: of the winter evening she and Jamie had wrapped themselves up in blankets and taken their mugs of hot chocolate outside, lain on their backs on the lawn, Jessie pointing out the bear constellations, Ursula Major and Ursula Minor, to Jamie and Pandy, his beloved cuddly panda; of standing at her bedroom window at night, when the rest of the house was asleep, tracking the stars that made up her star sign, Gemini.

When she’d lived with her father and Diane in their narrow terraced house in frenetic Fulham, all she had been able to see through her attic bedroom’s skylight was the sodium streetlights’ orange blanket, cloaking the moon and stars. She had hated the feeling, ever since, of being unable to see the night sky from her bedroom. Callan didn’t mind. He liked the outdoors, was happy to leave the curtains open and let the night flood into the bedroom with them.