by Kate Medina
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.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Workman sniffed, embarrassed.
Marilyn slid his arm around her shoulders, a move which they both found awkward in the cramped car. Dropping his arm quickly, he muttered, ‘You’re human, Workman. And so am I. Believe it or not, so am I.’
13
‘Marilyn told me about the Reynolds case,’ Callan said, slumping down on the sofa next to Jessie, coffee in hand. ‘The murder of that first little
girl.’
She glanced over and met his gaze. ‘Zoe, you mean? When did he tell you about it?’
She had been watching News 24 for the past three hours, since four a.m., unable to sleep at all last night, a fact she wasn’t about to share with Callan. She had risen six more times during the night to straighten the curtains, seven times in all, sliding her feet softly heel to toe on the carpet as she crossed the bedroom so as not to wake him, to avoid the inevitable, impossible explanations if he caught her. She had spent the rest of the night lying on her side, watching him sleep, feeling unbelievably lucky that she could call him hers, but desperately insecure at the same time at how her tenuous grip on normality might wreck what they had. He only had so much patience and she knew that, though he professed to understand her OCD, there was no way that he did, or could.
She had watched five half-hourly cycles of ‘The West Wittering child murder’, as the press were calling it, clearly at a loss for a snappier title. The little girl had been named an hour ago as Jodie Trigg, the last news update featuring footage of the press clamouring at the closed door of a static caravan, a uniformed police constable guarding it, trying to keep them at bay, kids in pyjamas jumping up and down in the background, trying to get their faces on television, their parents looking more suitably sombre.
‘He visited me in hospital last December while you were in the Persian Gulf and unburdened his soul. He probably thought I was too drugged up to remember.’
‘What did he say?’ She tried to sound nonchalant.
‘That she keeps him awake at night.’
‘Zoe?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And?’
‘That he was certain her mother murdered her.’
‘She was acquitted,’ Jessie said.
‘Due to lack of evidence.’
‘She was still acquitted.’
Callan frowned. ‘It’s not the same as being found innocent by a jury, as you well know.’
Jessie took the opportunity of the story cycling around again to break eye contact. Marilyn this time, exiting the police station, looking as rough as Jessie felt. His tie was crooked and his black suit – did he have any others, or was there a row of identical suits hanging in his wardrobe? – was crumpled. He raised his hands and the press pack fell silent.
‘You need to tell Marilyn that you know where Zoe’s mother is now living and what she’s calling herself,’ Callan said.
Jessie kept her gaze focused on the screen. ‘I’m sure he already knows,’ she said dismissively, as she heard Marilyn, clear as a bell, asking Carolynn and Roger Reynolds to get in touch with him as a matter of urgency.
Callan raised an eyebrow. Pressing mute on the remote, Jessie cut Marilyn off mid-flow and swung around to face him.
‘He can find her,’ she snapped. ‘He’s a policeman after all, so that’s his job. Doing some work for a change will be good for his liver.’
Callan sighed. ‘It’s bloody hard to find someone who doesn’t want to be found, and he has enough to be getting on with, investigating the murder of a child. The second murder of a second child.’
Jessie held his cool amber gaze unflinching, but she regretted what she’d said about Marilyn, knew it had been unnecessary, nasty. She didn’t even know why she’d said it. Many of the things she said and did nowadays felt as if they were coming, involuntarily, from a new, alien part of herself that even she didn’t like. She hunched her shoulders like a stroppy teenager.
‘There is such a thing as patient confidentiality, Callan.’
‘When can patient confidentiality be breached?’
‘Never.’
‘That’s not true. There are conditions under which patient confidentiality no longer applies. Confidentiality is an important duty, but it’s not absolute.’
‘For me it is absolute.’
Callan’s hands were clenched into fists and one of his legs jittered, a sure sign that he was angry, trying to contain it. ‘You can disclose information if it’s required by law.’
‘Fine. When Marilyn has me in handcuffs, I’ll ’fess up.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Handcuffs. Now there’s something we should try.’ It was a feeble attempt to lighten the moment, another thing she regretted as soon as she’d said it. Neither of them was in the mood for pathetic flippancy.
Dipping his gaze, Callan shook his head wearily. ‘I’m being serious, Jessie.’
‘So am I.’ She bit her lip. ‘If my patients can’t trust me, I’m nothing, I’m worthless to them. They come to me because they’re desperate. I’m often their last port of call before suicide, or crime, usually after they’ve tried burying their issues with alcohol and drugs. Many of them have been let down by society so often that they have no one else to go to and trust no one. I can’t just be another person who fucks with their minds.’
‘This is different. The woman could be a killer. You could be putting yourself in danger meeting with her and you could be putting other people in danger by concealing her whereabouts.’
Jessie gave a snort of laughter. ‘If you had met her, you wouldn’t be saying that. She’s a frightened, timid, traumatized, middle-aged woman who is so thin she could play hide-and-seek behind a broom handle. She’s not a threat to anyone.’
‘She’s a very convincing liar, because she had you fooled.’
‘I’ve been trying to help her out, not catch her out. Find her out.’
‘Marilyn believes that she’s guilty of her daughter’s murder.’
‘She didn’t murder Zoe. I know she didn’t.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘It’s not bullshit.’ She gave another teenaged shrug. ‘I have a good sense of her. An intuition.’ Even though I fell for her lies about her daughter dying in a car accident. But generally, she did have a good sense of people, a sixth sense. It came with the territory of her job.
‘So why is she hiding?’ Callan asked curtly. ‘Why is she lying, even to you? Someone she can trust, with whom all her conversations are confidential?’
Jessie threw up her hands. ‘What reception do you think a woman labelled a child killer would have got? She would have been vilified, taunted, stalked, jeered at, chased down the street, pushed around, spat at. Even her best friends, her own family, her parents, if they’re alive, her husband, for Christ’s sake – even they would have looked at her differently, even they would have wondered.’ She sought out his gaze, usually the colour of warm honey, now cold and cynical. ‘You’d heard about the Zoe Reynolds murder, even before Marilyn told you, hadn’t you?’
It was his turn to give a teenage shrug. ‘I was in Afghanistan two years ago.’
‘And I bet that you still heard. It made the Sun, the Mirror – all those quality papers you boys read when you’re at war.’
He didn’t reply.
‘Callan.’
‘Vaguely,’ he muttered. ‘I remember it vaguely.’
‘So?’
‘So what? The press moves on. People move on.’
‘They don’t though, not in such an emotionally charged and shocking case, and particularly not in one that wasn’t solved. There’s no smoke without fire, after all. And now – now that this second little girl has been found dead? Two years to the day after Zoe’s murder. Can you imagine the press storm? You could see it on the beach last night.’ She waved her hand towards the television screen, where Marilyn was now trying to force open the driver’s door of his dilapidated Z3 against a jam of press bodies and cameras: ‘You can see it now. Newspapers, TV stations – they’re all there.’
Callan drained his coffee and set his cup on the table, rolled his eyes and picked it up again in response to Jessie’s admonishing look. ‘The two cases may not be related. This second girl could have been killed by a copycat. By a parent, a relative, an adult friend, someone she knew who took the opportunity to do what they’ve been wanting to do for some time.’
Pulling the sleeve of her dressing gown over her hand, Jessie rubbed at the ring Callan�
�s cup had left on the spotless wood.
‘Even if they’re not related, this child’s death will break open all the old wounds,’ she said, looking up. ‘Laura— Carolynn, whatever the hell her bloody name is, will be splashed across the front pages, forced back into everyone’s consciousness to be the victim of that “no smoke without fire” speculation all over again. The stares, the gossip, the snide behind-hand remarks, the pushing and shoving in the supermarket, the Internet trolling – it will start all over again.’
‘Perhaps there isn’t smoke without fire. All those old sayings come from somewhere.’
Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘From the mouths of idiots.’
Callan gave a wry smile. ‘Thanks.’
Jessie sighed. ‘Can you really not see why she went to ground?’
‘Of course I can. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that she may be a child killer. She may be dangerous and I don’t want you to put yourself – or anyone else – at risk.’
Jessie bit her lip, didn’t answer. She felt as angry as he did and she felt right. Righteous anger, a powerful force.
‘Ever since you were invalided out of the army, you’ve had your finger firmly on the self-destruct button,’ Callan muttered.
‘Self-destruct button? What the hell are you talking about?’
He sighed. ‘You know exactly what I’m talking about.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’
But she did know what he meant. She just couldn’t help herself. Couldn’t help that mean new alien streak that made her feel as if she didn’t care about anything or anyone – with the exception of Callan and Ahmose, her elderly next-door neighbour who was more family to her now than her actual family – and least of all herself. Couldn’t help that her OCD, which she had worked hard to control until her army career was ruined, had resurged with a vengeance, and was now spinning out of control.
Digging her top teeth into her bottom lip, tasting the copper tang of blood, Jessie focused hard on the television. She could butt against Callan all day, argue, get nowhere, but what was the point? She had already made her decision. Hooking a leg over Callan’s thighs, she swivelled around and slid on to his knee, facing him.