Two Little Girls

by Kate Medina

  I need the people to get out of my way. They are staring at me with such horror and such pity. I can’t stand to be pitied.

  Zoe’s face stared back at her from the page, tear-stained eyes reproaching her mother for not protecting her, for letting her die. Carolynn forced herself to look at the photograph and felt a great weight pressing down on her chest.

  It’s not Zoe. It’s not her.

  She knew that the photograph wasn’t of Zoe, that what she was seeing wasn’t real. That another little girl was pictured under the headline: Murdered Beach Girl Identified.

  Not Zoe. Of course, it wasn’t Zoe. It couldn’t have been.

  But she knew exactly who it was.

  17

  Ruby Lovatt was already seated in the interview room when Marilyn and Workman entered. She was leaning back in her chair, arms crossed under her breasts, which made her ample cleavage almost pornographically prominent in the thin, low-cut silver jumper. Head tilted to one side, a half-smile on her face, she was eyeballing DC Cara, who was standing in the corner, hands jammed into his pockets, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot as if he’d been stung by something. Marilyn smiled to himself. He knew Ruby of old, knew the tricks that she played. She was well accustomed to dealing with men, manipulating them. He had been a victim himself a few times when he was younger, greener. Ruby’s gaze swung from Cara to meet his as he stepped through the doorway, narrowed as it shifted past him to check out DS Workman.

  ‘DI Simmons,’ she winked. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’

  ‘Good morning, Ruby.’

  Signalling to DC Cara to leave, which he did at speed, Marilyn pulled out a chair and sat down, as did Workman, beside him. Placing the file containing the photographs of the crime scene and Jodie Trigg’s broken little body on the table in front of him, closed for the moment, he placed flat hands on the tabletop either side of the file, met Ruby’s gaze and smiled what he hoped was a pleasant smile that communicated nothing, gave nothing away.

  ‘So how are you, Ruby?’

  She opened her mouth and jutted out her chin in a way that told Marilyn she was about to make a suggestive comment. He braced himself, embarrassed for some reason by Workman’s presence, as if she was an elderly relative who needed sheltering from the baser side of human nature. He wished now that he had come to interview Ruby alone, but this was an important interview, critical, and he knew that Workman would pick up on nuances that he might miss.

  He was surprised when all Ruby said was, ‘I’m fine.’ A pensive nod. ‘OK.’

  Her nose was crooked – it had been broken at some point – and both of her front teeth were chipped.

  ‘Do you mind if we record this interview, so that we have a verbatim record?’ he asked.

  ‘Do what you like,’ she muttered.

  Marilyn switched on the electronic recorder. He spoke the date and time and listed their names.

  ‘What were you doing on the beach, Ruby?’ he began.

  ‘Looking for treasure.’ She smirked. ‘Like a pirate.’

  ‘In the rain?’ Workman queried.

  Ruby’s gaze switched to her. ‘I don’t dissolve.’ She shrugged. ‘I like it out there when the weather’s bad. I like being alone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because nice privileged people who go to the beach with their nice privileged kiddies don’t like to be around people like me. And I don’t like to be around them.’

  Workman nodded. ‘What did you find?’ she asked.

  Ruby jutted her chin. ‘Apart from a dead girl?’

  Marilyn sensed Workman draw in a virtually imperceptible breath; realized, from the slight narrowing of her gaze, that Ruby had also sensed her discomfort.

  ‘What time did you find her?’ Marilyn asked, taking over the questioning.

  Another shrug. ‘You fancy giving me that posh watch of yours and next time I find a strangled little girl I’ll be able to tell you to the second.’ She was looking directly at Workman when she said it. This time, to her credit, Workman didn’t react.

  ‘Estimate,’ Marilyn said.

  ‘What time did the café call you?’ Ruby muttered.

  ‘Five-thirty.’ He didn’t need to check the file to know.

  ‘So maybe I found her half hour before that.’

  ‘Half an hour?’ Even he couldn’t hide his shock. The café was ten minutes’ walk from the spot in the dunes where Jodie’s body had lain; significantly less at a panicked run. ‘What did you do in between?’

  ‘Walked, looking for treasure, like I said.’

  ‘Did you find any?’

  ‘This and that. Bit of cash, couple of other things.’

  ‘How far did you walk?’

  ‘Through the dunes to the end and back along the beach.’

  ‘Then you went to the café and told the manager about Jodie Trigg, and he called us.’

  She nodded and leant forward, giving Marilyn a view of the pale swell of her breasts, the dark valley between, a flash of red lace too shiny to be real. He felt a movement in his trousers, a tightening. Yanking his gaze away, he focused on Jodie Trigg’s file, calling to mind the photograph of her inside it. Jesus, what the hell was wrong with him? He felt wrung out, crazily exhausted already and the little girl had been dead less than twenty-four hours. He knew that the feeling had less to do with the fact he’d been up all night, and more to do with the fact that the murder of a second child, two years to the day, so close to where Zoe Reynolds’ body was found, had kick-started every self-flagellating emotion he possessed. He needed a caffeine hit. He needed to bury his head in the sand while someone else sorted out this mess for him, found a child murderer and delivered him or her into the hands of the law with a file full of irrefutable evidence.

  Only one of those needs was likely to be met this morning.

  ‘Do you want a coffee, Ruby?’

  She shrugged and winked. ‘I’d fancy a coke more, DI Simmons.’ And not the fizzy kind.

  Marilyn turned to Workman. ‘Do you mind going on a coffee run, Sarah?’

  Workman shook her head and stood.

  ‘How do you like your coffee, Ms Lovatt?’

  Ruby raised an eyebrow. ‘Ms Lovatt. I can’t remember the last time anyone called me that. Actually, I can’t remember the last time anyone called me anything other than bitch. Milk and two sugars.’ A pause. ‘Please.’ Her voice sticking on that last word as if it left a bad taste on her tongue.

  Workman left the room and Ruby winked at Marilyn. ‘People are going to start talking, you and me alone in here, DI Simmons,’ she teased.

  ‘The only thing they’re talking about is Jodie Trigg.’ The statement sounded unnecessarily abrupt, even to his own ears.

  Ruby shrugged and her gaze slid from his, but not before Marilyn caught the hurt that flashed in her eyes. Her carapace was no tougher than when he had first met her, nearly fifteen years ago, despite the act she was putting on. She’d been working on that act virtually since birth, and she’d got it to RADA standard by the time she was fourteen. She had been beautiful back then, he remembered, the first time he met her in that grotty interview room in Portsmouth Central Police Station. Beautiful and horribly damaged. She still was beautiful, if you could see past the pallid, sweaty skin, the hollowed-out eyes and the sullen expression. Still beautiful and still horribly damaged, no doubt. Damage like that didn’t heal. She was only in her late twenties, he knew, though her lifestyle and the drugs she took made her look a good fifteen years older.

  ‘Did you see anyone else out there on the beach?’ he asked, pulling his mind back to the present.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘When I got back near the café, there was a few staff leaving. It was closed by then.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  She raised her gaze to the ceiling, drawing an image to mind.

  ‘Someone running. A woman, running. A while before I found the girl.’

  ‘Near the girl?’

&nbs
p; ‘Yeah, pretty near.’

  ‘What was the woman wearing?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever the hell women who have the time and inclination to run wear to run.’

  ‘Colour?’

  The eyes rising again. ‘Dark. Dark blue or black top and bottom.’

  The door opened and Workman came back in, three vending-machine coffees balanced on a hardback notepad in her hand. She slid the notepad on the table and handed out the coffees.

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The woman,’ Marilyn said. ‘The runner.’

  Ruby lifted a hand and pinched a strand of her hair, rolling it between her fingers. ‘Blonde, like me, ’cept hers was probably natural.’

  She dropped her hand and snaked it across the table, palm upwards.

  ‘Do I get a cigarette with my coffee, DI Simmons?’

  Marilyn’s gaze tracked from the rough skin on her slender fingers and hopscotched up the black needle marks on her forearm. Drugs, it was always hard drugs that the truly depressed took to anaesthetize themselves against life, nothing else strong enough, reliable enough, persistent enough. His gaze moved to meet hers and he shook his head.

  ‘We can’t smoke in here, Ruby. You know that. It’s the law.’

  The hand snaked back. ‘For Christ’s sake, the law is a fucking ass. You know that.’

  She was right. He did know that. His mind returned to the first time he had met her, in that interview room in Portsmouth Central Police Station, him still a constable, itching to move up the ranks on to something more exciting, and putting every hour God sent into his work and networking – drinking, in other words – with his colleagues, his family life imploding.

  Ruby and another fourteen-year-old girl had been imprisoned for six days in a ‘trick pad’, a temporary brothel set up in an empty house right in the middle of Portsmouth. She was locked in an attic room that contained nothing but a double bed. Thick plyboard had been nailed over the one small window so that she couldn’t call for help, and the handle on the inside of the door had been removed so that she couldn’t escape. She had been raped by dozens of men who were prepared to pay to have sex with underage girls. The children’s home she lived in had known that she and the other girl were missing, but hadn’t bothered to report their absence to the police. Out of sight, out of mind; plenty of other deeply disturbed, attention-seeking kids to deal with.

  One of the men – of the hundred or more who had raped her over the six days – had salvaged a conscience from some part of his psyche, because he had phoned the police, after he’d forcibly had sex with her. He hadn’t left a name, had melted back to his family, returned to tuck his kids into their beds and watch Strictly with his wife, perhaps salving his conscience with the fact that his call had saved her. God knew how the minds of men like that worked, men who you’d walk past in the street, stand behind in the queue at the supermarket, share banter with in the office. It never ceased to amaze and depress him how people who considered themselves to be upstanding members of society could be so inhumane. Justification in that their victim was marginalized, beneath contempt, perhaps? None of the men who had kidnapped and imprisoned Ruby or the men who had paid to rape her were caught. History was left to repeat itself with countless other vulnerable girls, and the thought made him sick to his stomach.

  A judge had sent Ruby back to the care home. She was too old to be wanted by people looking to adopt, or fosterers, too young to live on her own. A child like thousands of others who fell between all the stools. She had spent most of the two years that followed until she was sixteen and legally allowed to live on her own, playing truant from the children’s home and from school, sliding deeper and deeper into the underworld, further from help.

  Within a year of Marilyn’s first encounter with her, she had a pimp and was hooked on heroin. He later heard she’d been knocked up by one of her clients, and then dumped by her pimp for refusing to get an abortion. He had no idea what had happened to the child, but their paths had crossed a few times since and each time a little more of that feisty, furiously proud but sad and deeply damaged girl he had first met had been replaced with shadow. Numbness. Lifelessness. He wasn’t sure when she’d wound up in East Wittering or where she was living. He’d need to know the latter at least.

  Movement across the table brought him back to the present. Tilting back, Ruby slid her hand into the front pocket of her skin-tight jeans and pulled out a half-smoked cigarette and an orange plastic Bic lighter. Marilyn put his hand out for the cigarette. With his other, he reached into his suit jacket pocket and pulled out his own packet of Silk Cut, held them out to her.

  ‘Swap.’

  He ignored the look that he was sure Workman was casting him, twisted in his chair and tossed the half-smoked cigarette Ruby dropped into his hand towards the bin by the door, watched it bounce on the rim and hit the floor. Sport had never been his strong point. He’d pick it up later.

  ‘I always knew that you were a softie, DI Simmons,’ Ruby said with a grin, scooping up the packet, opening it with a practised flick of her index finger and shaking out a cigarette. She slid the rest of the packet and the lighter into one of the bulging pockets of her olive-green army-style parka that was hanging on the back of her chair.

  ‘The smoke alarm will go off,’ Workman said.

  Standing, Marilyn moved his chair to under the smoke alarm, climbed up and yanked out the battery. Returning his chair to the table, he sat back down, avoiding Workman’s gaze, again. He felt unsettled, disconcerted. There was something about being in Ruby’s presence that made him feel as if he had been trapped in a time machine and transported back fifteen years. Glancing down at Jodie’s file, he forced himself to focus.

  ‘Why didn’t you call us earlier?’ he asked. ‘When you first found the girl’s body?’

  Ruby shrugged. ‘She wasn’t going anywhere, was she?’

  Workman sat forward, elbows on the table, her fingers linked together to form one big fist with her hands. ‘She might still have been alive.’

  Ruby curled her lip. ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘How did you know that for certain?’

  ‘I didn’t come down with the first shower … Miss … Mrs …’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Workman,’ Workman said.

  Marilyn thought that Ruby might sneer again, make some snide remark about Workman’s use of her rank, but she didn’t.

  ‘I’ve seen enough dead bodies in my time, Detective Sergeant Workman. I know what one looks like.’

  ‘And it didn’t occur to you that her mother might be wondering where she was? That people might be worried?’

  ‘She wasn’t, was she?’ Ruby snapped. ‘You didn’t even know who the poor little sod was until hours later, did you? Even I would have made a better fucking mother than that, if I’d wanted to keep my sprog – which I didn’t.’

  Shoving the cigarette into her mouth, she lit it, sucking hard, blowing the smoke slowly out of her nostrils, her eyes fixed on Marilyn’s face, daring him to object. He wasn’t about to. Ruby was right. He could murder a cigarette himself, was tempted to snatch it from her slender fingers and take a few desperate drags. The air in the room felt stifling, not the product of the smoke. If he’d had a knife he could have sliced it.

  ‘Tell me what you remember seeing, Ruby. When you found her, when you found Jodie? Walk it through in your mind. Tell me everything, just as you saw it.’

  18

  Jessie saw Carolynn immediately, sitting alone on the stony section at the top of the beach, a newspaper flapping in her hand. She wasn’t reading though, just staring out to sea, absolutely motionless, the paper the only animation. Jessie knew nothing about her, beyond what Carolynn had told her in their five counselling sessions, the core of it lies, she now knew. The address she had given, an address in Chichester, was a fake. She had always paid for her sessions in cash, Jessie had found out this morning from the practice receptionist, because �
��my husband has one of those cash-in-hand jobs’. The woman like quicksand.

  Sand.

  The only certainties to build on in her search for Carolynn this morning, the dusting of crystal white sand she’d noticed on Carolynn’s feet yesterday and the memories she had shared with Jessie about watching container ships plough their way up the Solent to Portsmouth or Southampton Docks with her daughter, how she watched them every day now, alone. And she had run once, she’d said a couple of weeks ago, sprinted, a horse cantering close by her on the sand, feeling superhuman, almost as if she could outrun it. That was a good moment, one of the few. Lies too, perhaps, but Jessie thought not. She had no reason to lie about those details. Only Bracklesham Bay and East Wittering allowed horse riding on the beach during the day in the summer months, so Jessie had decided to start with those. Carolynn hated the confines of her house, particularly when she was stressed or upset, as she would unquestionably be today with this second little girl’s murder. It wasn’t a ridiculous notion to believe that, if Carolynn lived in or close to East Wittering, Jessie would bump into her at some point if she spent the day here, searching.

  She had parked in the municipal car park and walked along Cakeham Road, looking in all the shops and cafés, fruitlessly; turned into Shore Road and did the same, again without result. She bought herself a takeaway coffee at one of the cafés and walked on towards the sea, planning to sit for an hour or two on the beach, to see if she could catch Carolynn on one of her many runs.

  Draining her coffee, tossing the cup into one of the bins by the Fisherman’s Hut, a cabin selling fresh takeaway seafood, Jessie crunched on to the pebbles at the top of the beach, walking casually towards the sand and sea beyond, silently rehearsing the excuse she’d formulated to explain her presence at the beach. Would Carolynn ignore her, turn away and hide, or would she call out? Jessie wanted her to make the first move, so that their meeting felt like Carolynn’s idea, not something forced on her. She would be feeling extremely vulnerable and sensitive, her antenna tuned to hyper-suspicion.