by Kate Medina
‘I love you,’ she said, stroking her hands down his bare chest to his stomach.
She planted a soft kiss on his lips. He tasted of coffee and warmth and for a brief, intense moment she would have given anything to be back in bed with him, making love. But she needed to get going. Shuffling backwards, off Callan’s knee and the sofa, she stood.
‘I need to go to work, unfortunately.’
‘Don’t do anything stupid, Jessie.’ His gaze was interrogative. She held it steadily.
‘I won’t. I promise.’
And she would keep that promise. However, his definition of stupid was probably very different from hers.
14
The little girl’s murder was already front-page news. It screamed at Carolynn from every paper on the rack displayed inside the sliding double doors of the Co-op and Tesco Metro, from the newsagent’s window, from newspapers folded in shopping bags or tucked under the arms of everyone she passed on Cakeham Road. Eight a.m., a balmy feel to the morning and the East Wittering village centre was bustling, locals and tourists shocked out of bed early by news of the child murder, locked in tight knots, talking in hushed, funereal tones. Carolynn forced herself to walk slowly, leisurely, as if she was no different from anyone else here, fight-or-flight tension locked in every one of her twitching muscles.
Zoe’s murder had precipitated the same news frenzy: a crowd of journalists outside the police station, camera flashes blinding her as she was taken in from the beach to be swabbed down and interviewed; as she was driven to the Old Bailey eleven months later in the blue police van, photographers standing on tiptoes and thrusting their cameras up to the tiny, blacked-out bulletproof windows set high in its walls, hoping to snatch a shot of her, handcuffed and cowering, her life over so many times by then that she didn’t know which way was up and which down. Inconceivable nightmares yet to come.
Everyone was talking about the girl’s death: How was she killed? Who could have done it? Was this death linked to the murder of that other poor little girl, two years ago? What was her name?
Zoe, Carolynn wanted to scream. Zoe Reynolds. My daughter, Zoe. Not just that other child. That other poor little dead girl.
Information, opinion, gossip leaked from every huddle she passed. How could a child have been killed in broad daylight on a family beach? What had she been doing out there alone anyway? Where was her mother when she was being butchered?
An elderly couple were sitting on the bench at the bus stop, heads dipped to the paper spread between them. Carolynn inched closer, ears straining to decipher their murmurs.
‘The mother has finally come forward,’ she heard the man say. Come forward into her own personal nightmare.
‘How could a mother allow such a thing to happen to her own daughter?’ the woman snapped. ‘Why wasn’t she there to protect her? Only nine or ten and out on the beach on her own to be murdered, poor little mite.’
A chill gripped Carolynn and she swayed, snatching at the back of the bench for support. The couple’s heads whipped around as her shadow loomed over them, and Carolynn saw the surprise on their faces, surprise that morphed to concern when they saw how pale she was.
How could a mother allow such a thing to happen to her own daughter? Why wasn’t she there to protect her?
She had heard the same, over and over. The antipathy she had felt towards Zoe, her postnatal depression, twisted by friends, acquaintances, people she’d overhear gossiping in cafés, by Internet trolls, by the press, into wilful neglect, into deliberate child cruelty.
At least this other mother had been spared finding her daughter’s body. At least she wouldn’t suffer those other nightmares – the shallow sympathy that morphed to accusation, the arrest, the trial, the brutal destruction of her hard-won life.
‘Are you OK, dear?’ the old lady asked.
‘I’m fine,’ Carolynn managed, pushing herself upright, finding a television aerial fixed to the newsagent’s roof across the road, focusing hard on that one spot to keep herself from swaying, toppling. She needed to act normally, couldn’t afford to attract attention to herself like this. What if people noticed her odd behaviour and worked out who she was? The old lady was still watching her quizzically. Carolynn met her look with a fixed smile.
‘I’m fine, thank you.’ The voice that spoke, her voice, sounded distant, as if it was coming from someone else. ‘I’ve had a summer cold that went to my head and has been making me dizzy.’
She needed to get a paper, needed to know everything. She didn’t want to know, couldn’t bear to. She needed to not be recognized, felt an overwhelming urge to bolt, keep running until she had outpaced this nightmare.
Both supermarkets were full, people with too much time on their hands, lingering and gossiping, wallowing in shared shock and horror. Her chin welded to her chest, eyes cast to the ground, Carolynn ducked into Tesco Metro and snatched up a copy of the Daily Mail. Holding it in front of her, pretending to read the front page, she headed over to the self-service tills, a blur of tears obscuring everything but the huge black headline that screamed: SECOND GIRL MURDERED AT WEST WITTERING BEACH. A photograph under the headline showed the dunes, a white ‘InciTent’ – she remembered the term from two years ago – and that man, that horrid policeman, with the weird mismatched blue and brown eyes, an overgrown, malevolent raven in his black suit.
At the self-service till, she scanned the barcode, slid the paper under her arm and fumbled her purse from her bum-bag.
‘Please put your product into the bagging area …’
She froze.
‘Please put your product into the bagging area … please put your product into the bagging area …’
Oh God, everyone is looking at me. What am I supposed to do? Panic bloomed in her chest. She had never used one of these tills before, had only chosen it to avoid facing a shop assistant. She felt sick.
‘The paper, madam.’ A man in a blue uniform with a Tesco badge fixed to his chest had appeared beside her. ‘You need to put the paper in the bagging area.’
Where was the bagging area? She should have just gone to the normal till; it felt as if everyone in the store had turned to stare. She couldn’t be recognized.
‘There.’
Without raising her head, Carolynn’s gaze tracked down the man’s arm to his extended finger. She dropped the paper on to the metal tray and the electronic voice ceased.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured. She sensed that he was still watching her as she fumbled her purse open and found sixty-five pence. She wished he’d just go away. ‘I’m fine now, thank you,’ she repeated, a cutting edge to her tone.
A balloon of air eased from her lungs as he stepped away, turned his attention to another customer. She slotted the money into the till and took her receipt.
‘They’ll need to find the first little girl’s mother now,’ a loud female voice chimed right next to her. ‘The one who got let off due to lack of evidence.’
An answering voice, high-pitched and screechy. Uneducated – it was an uneducated voice – Carolynn couldn’t stop herself from thinking.
‘She’s disappeared though, hasn’t she? Says so, right here.’
Two women, she saw from the corner of her eye, both about her own age, early forties, overly made-up with brassy, box-dyed hair. They were both reading a red-top paper.
‘What was her name? D’you remember?’
‘Reynolds, wasn’t it? Karen, Caroline, summink like that?’
A concurring murmur. ‘Stuck up, she was, from what I saw on the telly. Stuck up and ice-cold.’
Carolynn’s breathing was too loud, as if her lungs had been replaced by a rasping pair of bellows.
‘I always thought she did it.’
They are all staring at me. I can feel Zoe’s weight in my arms. Heavy, she’s got so heavy these past few years. I haven’t held her. I hadn’t noticed.
There was a tear in the bellows that kept Carolynn from catching her breath.
‘Yo
u could tell from the way she behaved that she was guilty.’
Her hair is a mess, caught with seaweed. I hate her looking untidy, but I can’t untangle it because my arms are filled with her body and I can’t stop, I must keep going forward. Why are they all staring at me?
‘Well, you wouldn’t go hiding if you was innocent, would you? I wouldn’t if it was me, anyways.’
Carolynn let out a sob – she couldn’t help herself.
‘Are you all right, love?’ The woman’s forehead, under her choppy claret fringe, wrinkled with concern.
Carolynn nodded, fumbling her purse back into her bum-bag. She wanted to scream at them, to tell them how she had been haunted, unable to sleep without medication for two years, unable even to get out of bed for a month after Zoe’s death. How she had lost everything: her job, her friends, her home, her life, her sanity. Everything. How she was afraid, terrified, that it was all going to start again. She turned away, aware that hot tears were running down her cheeks, unable to hold them back.
There is something around her neck. Dirt? Is it dirt? No, bruises. There are bruises around her neck.
‘Hey, hold on, you’ve forgotten your paper.’ The woman’s eyes narrowed as she held out Carolynn’s Mail. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? I don’t mean to meddle, but you look awful, love.’
Shaking her bent head, Carolynn reached for the paper, mumbled a quick ‘thank you’, turned and bolted out of the supermarket and straight across the road.
Her eyes are open, she’s staring up at me, but I don’t think that she can see me. I’m not sure if it’s the reflection of the clouds, but her brown eyes are milky.
The screech of tyres and a bumper collided with her thigh. She tumbled on to the tarmac, the paper spinning from her hand, white pages flapping and dancing in the road.
A man caught her arm. ‘Jesus Christ, are you OK?’
Tugging her arm from his grasp, she nodded, her body transmitting a message of pain to her brain as she struggled to her feet. Her right thigh ached from the bumper and she felt as if her left side had been dragged down a cheese grater.
‘The paper. I need my paper.’
She knew that he must think she was mad as she scrabbled to collect the spilled pages, grabbed the couple he collected from his outstretched hand. He was still watching her as she limped to the side of the road. Others had stopped too, to watch the skinny crazy in the jogging outfit who’d just charged headlong into the road without even looking.
Screaming. I can hear screaming. I think it’s someone else, but the noise is so loud, so constant, like an animal in pain, and I realize that the noise is coming from me. It is me who is screaming.
15
The nausea had risen from Jessie’s stomach to her throat. Lowering the window to allow cool air to rush over her face, she swung off the motorway at the next exit, reached a roundabout and turned off to join a country road. A hundred metres down, she bumped two wheels on to the grassy verge, shoved the door open, and projectile-vomited on to the tarmac. Stumbling to the verge, she vomited again, coffee-saturated bile filling her nose and mouth. She gagged and coughed, trying to clear her clogged airways, hating how the vulnerability of vomiting catapulted her straight back to childhood, wanting, for an acute second, her mother for the first time in as long as she could remember.
She hadn’t been taking care of herself, she knew: not eating properly, downing coffee in the mornings to keep her mind focused on her patients, mainlining wine in the evenings, to take her mind off them. Stupid, self-destructive behaviour. Yet more stupidity to add to her burgeoning list. Resting her forehead on the cool metal roof of her car, she waited for the storm in her stomach to subside, remembering that she hadn’t bought any water, that she’d have to live with a bile-coated tongue until the next service station.
As she straightened, her mobile rang, her mother’s name flashing on its face, as if her fleeting desire for maternal comfort had travelled instantaneously the forty miles north-east to the sixties house in the quiet cul-de-sac in Wimbledon where she had grown up, where her mother still lived with Richard, her new partner, whom Jessie had met once and thankfully liked very much. He was just what her mother needed; everything her father hadn’t been. Caring, solid, reliable. Not a self-obsessed wanker.
‘Mum,’ she croaked.
Her throat ached and the taste in her mouth was revolting.
‘Are you OK, darling? You sound a bit bunged-up.’
‘I’m fine, Mum,’ she croaked again, ducking and wiping her mouth on the hem of her pale blue summer dress.
‘How are you, Mum?’
‘I’m good, darling.’
Their relationship still formal, too much left unsaid for it to be anything but. She wanted to get moving, get to the Witterings and find Carolynn. Encourage her to make contact with Marilyn without having a showdown as to why she’d repeatedly lied in their sessions, the duplicity that had been her and Jessie’s professional relationship for the past five weeks.
‘What do you want, Mum? I’m sorry, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.’
Even over the sound of her own rasping breath, Jessie heard the change in her mother’s, quicker, lighter, betraying agitation. She’d hardly spoken – she couldn’t possibly have offended her mum in only two sentences.
‘I was calling to say that Richard and I are looking forward to seeing you later.’
Later? Her mind still blank.
‘And his daughter is coming too, so you’ll get a chance to meet her. She’s lovely. A little older than you, with two daughters, four and six, but they’re very sweet little girls. I’m sure you’ll get on wonderfully.’ The last sentence said as a plea. ‘They’re going to be our flower girls. I’ve booked a table for us all in the Fox and Grapes at twelve for lunch and the fitting is at two.’
Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit. Now she remembered exactly why, a few weeks ago, she’d blocked out today in her diary. Blocked it out with a quick slash of her biro, late for a meeting, meaning to write lunch with her mum and Richard and the appointment with the bridesmaid’s dress fitter in later, forgetting of course.
‘I’m so sorry, Mum, but something’s come up at work. I need to see one of my patients urgently.’
No reply, just that light, choppy breathing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, feeling another upswell of sickness. ‘But it’s an emergency. I have to see her.’
‘I’ll rearrange …’
‘Yes,’ she managed.
‘When? The wedding’s next Saturday. They do need time to make any alterations.’
She couldn’t ruin her mother’s wedding, but she couldn’t think beyond today, beyond Carolynn, beyond two little dead girls.
‘Monday, Mum.’ It was Friday now. She’d be done by tomorrow. Monday was safe. ‘Monday, first thing. I’m sorry, I have to go.’
Jamming her finger on the red telephone symbol, she spun around and vomited again, pebble-dashing her sandals and bare legs with steaming yellow bile.
16
The woman on page five of the Daily Mail looked sleek and stylish, her hair cut into a glossy long blonde bob – a lob it was called back when she wore it; God knows if it’s still called that – dark brown eyes holding the camera’s lens with a flirtatious confidence, the contrast between blonde and dark striking, stunning, even if she said so herself. It was the photograph of a woman Carolynn no longer recognized. One of her old colleagues, a married man with whom she had engaged in an energizing but harmless office flirtation, had taken the shot at a work dinner.
She had been badly wounded back then, two years ago, when the photograph had found its way into the papers. She’d erroneously expected loyalty from friends and colleagues, only to realize, as successive pictures from friends’ parties, from their weddings, from her godson’s ‘godparents and close family only’ christening appeared in the paper, as her life crumbled, that loyalty was fiction.
She reached the shore and stepped from the concrete walkway d
own on to the pebbles. Why did she always seek out the beach when she needed comfort? The beach where Zoe had been murdered. It made no sense. Nothing made sense any more. Sense was for a life she used to know. Control was for a life she used to know.
The tide was out and a few people were walking by the water’s edge, a couple of dogs chasing balls across the sand, but the pebbly section at the top of the beach, furthest from the water, was deserted. Sinking down, Carolynn unfolded the paper. Its pages were out of order, her photograph, page five, on top. She couldn’t read until she had rearranged it, needed to digest the information in order of gravity, understand what the journalists considered most notable, what they were thinking. Because the journalists’ thought processes mirrored those of their sources in the police, and of that detective inspector with the horrid, piercing eyes. It was imperative that she figure out what he was thinking, where his focus lay. Whether she could continue to hide here, in plain sight, or whether she needed to run again.
Apart from that clamouring headline – SECOND GIRL MURDERED ON WITTERING BEACH – the photograph on the front page could have been from two years ago, her own life stilled in black and white. The only difference, the journalists, even more this time, and the location of the white tent shielding the little girl’s body. Back then the tent had covered the spot in the beach car park, where she, cradling Zoe’s body, had fallen to her knees, where the screams of horrified beachgoers mixed with her own, the sirens of the police arriving, had finally brought her to a standstill.
Zoe is heavy, too heavy. I hadn’t noticed that she’d grown so big. I need to stop, to put her down, but I can’t, I must keep going forward.
Fat wet drops fell on to the page, blotting out the shock-faced uniforms standing outside the tent, the journalists lined up along the ‘Police – Do Not Cross’ tape. Wiping her sleeve across her eyes, Carolynn flipped the page.