Two Little Girls

With the soft mattress underneath her, the warmth of Callan’s hard body next to her, she should have drifted easily to sleep, but her mind kept circling back to the television news, to Laura … Carolynn.

‘What’s wrong, Jessie?’ Callan murmured, his lips moving against her ear. She could feel him, warm and semi-hard against her thigh. Half-sleepy, half-aroused. Shifting on to her side, she shuffled the gap between them closed and slid her arms around his neck.

‘Nothing.’

‘Sure?’ His fingers moved absently-mindedly through her hair.

‘Sure.’ Linking her fingers with his, she guided his hand to her chest, placed it right over her heart. ‘Your hand would be more gainfully employed somewhere around here, I feel, Mr Callan.

Shifting closer, moulding her naked body to his, she kissed him deeply, her tongue teasing his, felt him harden, fully awake now. And though she tried to lock on to the feeling of his lips against hers, his thumb circling her nipple, the sensation firing hot in her groin, all she could think of was Carolynn, her face plastered all over the television screen. Carolynn Reynolds and two murdered girls.

I’d hate you to actually be able to read my mind. She had been a long way from a mind reader with that woman.

She felt Callan’s hands on her shoulders, rolling her gently on to her back, and he moved on top of her, the muscles on his chest and abdomen hard against her breasts and stomach, his weight pinning her down.

Another little girl murdered in the same place Carolynn’s daughter had been murdered two years ago. Two years to the day. September seventh. Lucky seven. Seven detestable sins.

Callan’s knee eased between both of hers and she felt his hand stroke down her stomach, his fingers slip between her legs, slowly inside her. She gasped, moving her hands to his shoulders, simultaneously holding him away and digging her nails into his back, her body responding, her mind somewhere else, beyond her control, detached from the maelstrom of desire, obsessing.

Outside, the night sky, lit only by a sliver of moon, was so black that the stars dotting it seemed to be pulsing, alive with energy. The curtains framing either side of the window caught her eye. Caught and held it. The left curtain was flush against the window frame, but the right was half-drawn, truncating her view of the sky. The electric suit tingled against her skin.

‘Callan,’ she murmured. He was rock hard against her thigh now.

‘Yeah?’

Usually, she loved making love with him, loved to mould herself around him as he moved inside her, loved to grate her nails down his back as she came. But now the curtains were lodged in her mind along with Carolynn’s lies, two little dead girls, and the electric suit was hissing and snapping.

‘Callan, I just want to, uh, to look at the stars quickly.’

‘Huh?’

‘I just want to look at the stars.’

‘What?’ Pushing himself up on to his hands, he stared down at her incredulously.

Tilting her head so that she didn’t have to lock eyes with him, she slid out from under him. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said.

Rolling back to his side of the bed, Callan put his hands over his face and groaned. ‘Jesus Christ, Jessie.’

‘I’m sorry, but it’s such a beautiful night. It’s going to rain soon and then the stars will be obscured by clouds.’

Her excuse sounded ridiculous, even to her ears, but on the spot she couldn’t think of anything more convincing. Climbing out of bed, she padded over to the window. Raising her arms as nonchalantly as she could manage, the electric suit hot against her skin, she ran her hand quickly down the edge of the right-hand curtain, pushing it back, aligning it with the window frame.

The left curtain was straight; the right still wasn’t. She repeated the movement again, sliding both hands down the curtains in unison this time.

Again – three.

‘What the hell are you doing, Jessie?’

‘I’m just looking at the stars, like I said,’ she managed. ‘They’re stunning tonight.’

The curtains were straight. She knew in her logical mind that they were straight, but the electric suit still hissed and snapped.

Four.

Quickly – five. Still no release.

Perhaps if she ran her hands down the curtains seven times, lucky seven, she’d know they were straight.

‘Enough now,’ Callan said, his tone one of suppressed anger. ‘Come back to bed.’

‘In a minute.’

She had to reach lucky seven, then the curtains would be straight, the electric suit would die down, she’d be able to return to bed, make love with Callan, not think about Carolynn and the lies that she had told. Not think about two little dead girls.

‘For fuck’s sake, Jessie,’ Callan muttered, subsiding back against his pillows.

How many times? Four? Had it been four?

She couldn’t concentrate, knowing that Callan was watching her. Her rational mind acknowledged that her behaviour, the need, was abnormal, but the compulsion to perform the ritual was too strong to resist.

Four? No – no, five.

‘I can see Gemini,’ she managed, running her hand back down the curtain again. Yin and yang. Light and dark. Good and evil.

‘Stop now, Jessie.’

Without answering, she shook her head.

She was pretending to look at the night sky, but Callan knew exactly what she was doing, recognized the compulsion that drove her to perform the ritual even as he found it impossible to understand. The curtains were perfectly aligned, but that didn’t seem to matter. Her OCD had worsened since she’d been invalided from the army and he had no idea what to do about it, how to help her.

Seven. The heat from the electric suit died, as if she’d found the secret emergency ‘Off’ switch.

When she returned to the bed, Callan was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Sliding under the covers, she shuffled across, closing the space between them and pressed her chilled body against his. Curling an arm over his chest, a leg over his thighs, she buried her face into his neck. His body was warm, but she could only feel his bones and the muscles that wrapped around them. Nothing yielded to her touch.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said, rolling away from her.

He locked the bathroom door and switched on the shower. His erection had died, but his balls were aching. Stepping under the jet of warm water, he tilted forward, resting one hand against the cool tiles, letting the water run down his back while he masturbated. Jessie would know what he was doing, but he didn’t give a shit.

When he climbed back into bed she was lying motionless, staring up at the ceiling as he had been while she’d been fiddling with the curtains. Though he knew that the compulsions were out of her control, he felt unreasonably angry. He had been so ready to make love to her that it hurt.

‘I’m sorry, Callan,’ she murmured, shifting on to her side to face him. Reaching out, she traced her fingers across his cheek, to the scarred rose of the Taliban bullet wound on his temple.

‘It’s fine,’ he muttered, not moving, not responding physically.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a pain. I know that I’m being a pain. More than a pain.’

He sighed. ‘It’s fine, Jessie. I understand.’ Though he didn’t.

‘I love you, Callan.’

Sliding an arm around her, he pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, the slight dampness left on his skin from the shower, warming between them.

‘I love you too, Jessie. Now go to sleep.’

‘Night, Callan,’ she murmured.

Now go to sleep.

But would she? Could she? Her mind was starting to race again.

12

The only view that Buena Vista benefited from was a three-sixty of other static mobile homes, so close on all sides that a swinging cat would have had its head caved in. Buena Vista itself was dark cream, a tarmac parking area to its left-hand side, empty of cars, an ankle-high white plastic picket fence demarcating a narrow, rectangular garden to its right. Lights shone through grey net curtains that covered a full-width window at the near end, and other smaller aluminium framed windows dotted the caravan’s carcass, casting yellow rectangles on to the surrounding mobile homes. Though nothing about him or Workman overtly said ‘police’, their combined forty-plus years in the force must have left some indelible external mark, because he sensed that they were being watched by multiple pairs of eyes as they skirted Buena Vista to locate the front door.

In the narrow garden, a rotary dryer sagged under the weight of washing, limp in the cool night air, and someone had planted a few perennials, most of them wilted from neglect. But it was the child’s pink bicycle leaning against the concrete steps leading to the door that tightened Marilyn’s throat. He plucked at the knot of his tie to loosen it, the result fruitless, the constriction in his airways undiminished.

Before he knocked, he glanced over his shoulder at Workman. Her expression was detached, her gaze fixed resolutely on what would have been his back, if he hadn’t turned unexpectedly and caught her eye. She wasn’t the only one who appeared devoid of emotion. As he turned back to knock, he met his own faint reflection in the rectangle of mirrored glass set into the door panel, recognized the studied expression of neutrality that he’d become so adept at fixing to his face when the situation required it.

The woman who yanked the door open before his fist had connected was a little over five foot tall, heavy in a solid, shapeless way. Her dark hair, pulled into a tight ponytail, was dyed a few shades too dark, accentuating the paleness of her skin. ‘Indoor’ skin, Marilyn found himself thinking, despite her living right by a stunning beach. Green eyes – the little girl’s eyes, Jodie’s eyes, Marilyn recognized immediately – ringed with red, met his. He raised his warrant card and Debs Trigg stepped back from the door, her face collapsing in on itself.

She had called the police when she had discovered Jodie’s bed empty and unslept in, and seen Marilyn’s appeal to identify the dead child on a news channel. She must therefore have had a strong suspicion that the murdered girl was her Jodie, but their poker-faced presence at her door was the final big nail in the coffin of her hope.

An animal yelp of pure pain rooted Marilyn to the spot. Jack-knifing on to the sofa, Debs Trigg scratched clawed fingers down her cheeks, raising bloody red weals in their wake. Workman shoved past Marilyn, knocking his shoulder in the cramped space, and caught Trigg’s wrists.

‘Don’t, love, don’t do that. Please don’t hurt yourself like that.’

He should have stepped forward himself, he knew, should have grabbed her wrists himself, but from the moment he had set eyes on her all he could think of was Zoe Reynolds, his mind spinning back to Carolynn on her knees in the beach car park cradling Zoe’s limp body and howling, and later, sitting opposite him in the interview room at Chichester police station, so composed by then, so closed-down. He had been wholly unable to see anything in those dark eyes, or to decipher the secrets buried in the brain behind them. A second child was dead because of his ineptitude.

His gaze moved past Debs Trigg and Workman to the photograph of Jodie on the shelf behind the sofa, a ten by eight colour shot of a laughing child, arms spread wide, wind flapping her yellow summer dress around her thighs, the white sails of yachts in the background. Unmistakably West Wittering beach. Unmistakably the little girl he had seen dead this morning, a chain of bruises around her neck, that vile doll by her side, the last chink of uncertainty closed. Heartbreaking. Utterly heartbreaking and his responsibility. His fault. His failure.

It took Debs Trigg a long time to stop crying. Marilyn and Workman had exchanged tense glances and he had resumed staring through the nets at the blank white backside of the static caravan next door while Workman did her best to comfort the distraught woman. Slipping his mobile from his pocket, Marilyn fired off a quick text to DC Cara, asking him to chase the family liaison officer pronto. The sooner he could escape from this hellhole of emotion and get back to investigating little Jodie’s death, the better for all concerned.

Rising from the sofa, Trigg scrabbled for the packet of Superkings on the table and lit a cigarette, sinking back beside Workman, hunching her shoulders and folding an arm across her chest – defensive body language, Marilyn recognized, inwardly allowing himself a brief, cynical smile at the knowledge and terminology he had absorbed from Jessie Flynn.

‘It’s definitely her, isn’t it?’ she muttered, on a stream of smoky breath. ‘Definitely?’

‘We’ll need you or a relative to formally identify her, but yes, we’re pretty certain that the girl found this afternoon in the dunes at West Wittering is your daughter, Jodie,’ he said, in the businesslike tone he resorted to when faced with emotionally charged situations. ‘She was wearing a navy-blue school unform, white shirt, navy jumper and trousers. She also had a pendant necklace, with two sets of footprints engraved on it, around her neck.’

Hauling smoke into her lungs through pale lips, Trigg nodded, tear-stained eyes fixed on the floor. ‘She loved that necklace. Found it on the beach one day when she was walking home from school, she did, a couple of months ago. I told her she should hand it in, but—’ she broke off with a shrug. ‘You know, and she loved it an’ all, so I just let her keep it.’

Workman pulled a black notebook from her pocket and Marilyn noticed her shift sideways, expanding the space between her and Debs, subtly re-establishing a professional distance. She made a note about the necklace in the book.

‘I need to ask you a few questions, Mrs Trigg,’ Marilyn continued. ‘To help us with the investigation.’

‘Miss. There isn’t a Mr – though I think you already worked that out, didn’t you, Inspector?’ She took another tense drag of the cigarette. ‘Ask away.’

‘Why didn’t you report Jodie missing earlier?

‘I was at work, wasn’t I.’

‘Where do you work?’

‘F & G Foods in Chichester, on the packing line.’

Workman wrote the name of Debs’ employer in her notebook.

‘What time did you get home?’ Marilyn continued.

‘I’m on lates this week. My shift is midday until ten p.m., so I didn’t get home until eleven.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I went into Jodie’s room to check on her and found her bed empty. I could tell that it hadn’t been slept in.’

‘What time does she usually get home?’

‘School finishes at three-fifteen.’

‘And she walks home alone?’

Debs frowned. ‘She’s nearly ten years old, for Christ’s sake – Year Five. So yeah, of course she walks alone. There and back. It’s only half a kilometre along the beach.’

‘Where is she a pupil?’

‘East Wittering Community Primary.’

‘So, she would have been on the beach alone yesterday afternoon?’ Marilyn confirmed. ‘Walking home from school.’

‘Not down there. Not as far as West Wittering. School’s East Wittering. West Wittering is a good kilometre further on, in the wrong direction to home.’ Anger flared in Debs’ eyes. ‘If you’re gonna have a go at me, you can get out.’

Marilyn saw her aggression for what it was: grief transfigured as anger. For a woman like Debs Trigg, every day would be a fight, for money, for food, for time, for a job that paid more than £7.50 an hour, subsistence living. Fight – anger – would be her ‘go-to’ emotion and it would be far easier for her to process than grief. Whatever her relationship with Jodie, which he had yet to clarify, he knew that she would be hit by a freight train of misery when they left. He wouldn’t want to be in her or the family liaison officer’s shoes for anything.

‘Would Jodie have had any cause to go to West Wittering beach yesterday afternoon?’

Rubbing the back of her hand across her nose, Trigg sniffed. ‘No, of course not. Like I already said, it’s in the opposite direction to home.’

‘Did she like to meet friends on the beach?’

‘School friends, sometimes. They all like to hang out on the beach, don’t they? What kid wouldn’t?’

‘We’ll need a list of their names.’

‘Fine. The school will know better than me.’

‘What about adults? Was she friends with any adults?’

Her lip curled as she looked up and met his gaze with her tear-stained eyes. ‘What, like nonces?’

Marilyn shook his head. ‘Anyone.’

The lit tip of the cigarette glowed as Trigg sucked hard, her chest expanding as she drew the smoke deep into her lungs. Marilyn would have killed for a cigarette right now, but lighting up in the middle of an interview could hardly be called professional, whatever the interviewee was doing, and he was going to play this one by the book. Page, line, word and letter.

‘People who work around the caravan park,’ she murmured, exhaling. ‘It’s friendly like, and we’ve lived here since Jodie was born. She knows everyone on the site. The staff and full-timers, that is, not the holiday rental lot.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘Do you give her a time she needs to be home by?’ he continued, using the present tense deliberately, following Trigg’s lead, to minimize her stress and upset. Faint hope.

‘I tell her she needs to be home by eight, latest.’

‘And you finish work at ten p.m.’

‘Depends if I’m on an early or late shift, but yeah, yesterday was a late, ten p.m., and then it’s an hour bus-ride home.’

‘So, what does Jodie do between three fifteen and eight?’

‘She stays out and plays with schoolkids on the beach, or kids from the caravan park. Sometimes she goes to hang out at the entertainment centre, watches people play the arcade games.’

Marilyn nodded. The list of people the little girl had known and the time that she had spent alone both seemed to fall into the category ‘how long is a piece of string?’ The only certainty: another murder of another little girl, two years ago, the link between them, in his mind at least, concrete. The colour of the doll’s eyes a detail that he was sure hadn’t been in the papers.

He was a pot calling the kettle black, pulling Debs Trigg up on her parenting skills, particularly as he recognized that she had little choice, but at least his own parental failings had been compensated for by his ex-wife, a caring, responsible woman. Even so, his daughter had gone off the rails. It sounded as if poor little Jodie had had no such stability and his heart went out to her, to her memory. Many nine-year-old kids he’d dealt with in his career had had it far worse, but he still felt that every child deserved a fairy tale childhood. Adulthood was tough enough, without hard times starting long before.

‘Would she have gone to West Wittering beach voluntarily?’ he asked.

Trigg gave an evasive shrug. ‘What reason would she have to go?’

‘I was hoping that you would be able to help me with that.’ A sharp edge to this tone that he was struggling to suppress. ‘She has four and three-quarter hours from when school finishes to when you expect her home and another three hours after that, before you actually get home. It’s a long time.’ A very long time, particularly for a nine-year-old child.

Trigg waved the stub of the cigarette towards the corner of the caravan. ‘We’ve got the telly and often as not she’s got homework.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘But she could have gone down to West Wittering voluntarily. She could have been meeting someone without you knowing.’

Trigg’s red-rimmed eyes remained fixed on the blank square of the television screen in the corner, looking but not seeing.

‘Couldn’t she, Miss Trigg?’ he prompted.

‘Yeah, I suppose she could ’ave.’ The words drew a little jerk out of her, as if the effort of acknowledgement hurt her.

‘I’ll need that list of her close school friends and everyone else she knew and saw around here on a regular basis. Detective Sergeant Workman will give you a hand with it.’

Trigg gave a dull nod. All the aggression, the fight had leaked from her. Tears welled in her eyes and a barely audible voice came from the back of her throat. ‘How was she killed, Detective Inspector? How was my baby killed?’

‘She was strangled,’ Marilyn said plainly. There was no benefit in sugar-coating, not for anyone.

‘When?’

‘Mid-to-late afternoon.’ He glanced at his watch. It was half-past midnight. Yesterday afternoon. ‘Thursday afternoon,’ he added, probably unnecessarily.

‘When I was at work then,’ Debs muttered. ‘When I was on the fucking packing line, knowing nothing, some bastard was strangling my baby to death.’

Marilyn didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

‘She wasn’t …’ Her body twisted with anguish at the question. ‘She wasn’t sexually assaulted, raped, was she?’

Though only Dr Ghoshal could confirm with 100 per cent certainty whether Jodie had been sexually assaulted, Marilyn shook his head, ignoring the look of chastisement that Workman shot him. He was getting good at ignoring her looks. He had seen the child’s body in the InciTent, still dressed in her school uniform, shirt and trousers, none of her clothing disturbed. Zoe Reynolds hadn’t been sexually assaulted and he would be happy to stake his professional reputation – what little he had left when it came to solving child murders – on the fact that Jodie Trigg hadn’t either. Every fibre of his instinct told him that Jodie’s murder, as with Zoe’s, wasn’t a sexually motivated crime. Every fibre told him, still, that Zoe’s mother Carolynn was responsible for her murder. And Jodie’s? He’d find out. This time he would find out.

‘No, she wasn’t sexually assaulted,’ he repeated firmly. ‘We’ll know a lot more once the, uh, once the autopsy has been performed later today.’

At the word ‘autopsy’, Trigg began rubbing her hands convulsively up and down her arms, her clawed fingers leaving raw weals on her pale skin.

Workman caught one of her wrists again. ‘Please don’t.’

‘Autopsy. Why? Why can’t you just leave her alone? Give her back to me to bury in one piece.’

‘It will help us to catch her killer,’ Workman said gently. Her hand was knocked away as Trigg shrank into the corner of the sofa, looking from Marilyn to Workman and back, like a cornered animal.

‘Look, I know this is difficult, Miss Trigg,’ Marilyn said, measuring his tone.

‘You don’t know anything,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t know me. You didn’t know Jodie. Has your daughter died, Detective Inspector?’ She caught his gaze and held it defiantly, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘So don’t fucking pretend that you know anything about us, or anything about how I’m feeling.’

‘Miss Trigg,’ Workman said.

Trigg spun around, eyes blazing. ‘Or you!’

‘We’re trying to help you, Debs.’

A sob washed over her. ‘No one can help me. Jodie was the only good thing that had ever happened to me. No one can help me now.’

Workman’s jaw was rigid. The colour had completely drained from her face. Looking across at her, sitting stiffly in the passenger seat next to him, Marilyn cursed himself for not bringing DC Cara with him instead. The death of a child was emotionally the toughest crime for an investigative team to deal with; he knew that from Zoe Reynolds. But it had to be easier for a twenty-two-year-old DC who’d never had his own kids and was aeons away from wanting any, than a forty-six-year-old woman who had tried everything to have them and failed. Her voice was thick and Marilyn realized, with horror that she was struggling not to cry.

His own coping mechanism relied on his focusing with blinkered efficiency on the investigation, the hard evidence. The emotional aspects he locked in a small box deep in his brain, stowing the key somewhere he hoped never to find. It hadn’t quite worked out that way with Zoe. The little girl’s ghost seemed to know exactly where he’d hidden the key, chose his weakest moments to unlock the box and unleash the flood of memories, the world of self-recrimination.