Two Little Girls

by Kate Medina

Jessie had just set foot on the sand at the bottom of the pebbly bank, when she heard Carolynn’s voice, calling a tentative, ‘Dr Flynn?’

  She kept walking, pretending that she hadn’t heard.

  ‘Dr Flynn?’

  Turning, she pasted an expression of surprise on to her face. ‘Laura!’

  She retraced her steps, as Carolynn rose to her feet, the paper folded now and clutched to her chest, only the back page, sports coverage, visible, Jessie noticed. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, I live just down the beach,’ Carolynn said, pointing east in the direction of Bracklesham Bay. She broke off and raised a hand to cover her mouth, like a child who has just unwittingly blurted out a secret she’d promised not to share.

  ‘I’m so envious that you live by the sea,’ Jessie said brightly to take the heat from the moment. ‘I would love to live by the sea, but I’ve never had the opportunity. One day, hopefully.’ She smiled. ‘Can you see the water from your windows?’

  ‘Oh, only from upstairs. There’s a shoulder-high concrete wall, a sea defence, between the beach and the road in front of my house. It’s ridiculous. I live right by the sea and I can’t see it!’ Her initial tentativeness replaced now by that Technicolor ‘game-show host’ tone, her gaze focused on the expanse of sea over Jessie’s right shoulder. ‘What are you doing at the beach, Dr Flynn?’

  ‘Jessie. Please call me Jessie. It’s my mother’s wedding next weekend and I wanted to make her a present. I don’t have any client appointments today, so I thought I’d come to the beach, collect some shells and make a picture frame for her. I’ve got a lovely picture of my brother and I when we were kids, playing on the beach in Cornwall, to put in it. I wanted to do something unique, something personal.’

  She had formulated this excuse precisely because it was mother, daughter, and personal. She needed to get underneath this woman’s skin in a way she hadn’t during their sessions if she was going to win enough trust to persuade her to contact Marilyn. The first step was turning herself from Dr Flynn into Jessie, a woman with a life outside her professional persona, even if that life was little more than fiction. The contradiction wasn’t lost on her: lie to win trust.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘Will you join me for lunch, Laura?’

  ‘I’ve eaten.’

  Jessie doubted that Carolynn had eaten a proper meal for months. She was so thin in her sheer running tights and vest that Jessie could see the contour of her bones underneath her skin, as if she was a skeleton hanging off a hook in a biology lab.

  ‘Keep me company then?’

  The only free table in the café Carolynn led her to was round, three chairs, placed at elliptical angles to each other. Not ideal. Jessie would have preferred to sit directly opposite her, so that she could try to force the eye contact she’d failed to achieve in their sessions or on the beach. They sat down and Jessie ordered a pancake and a tea and Carolynn a black coffee.

  ‘You live in Bracklesham Bay, you said?’ Jessie began.

  Carolynn hesitated; Jessie shrugged off her question, playing the psychology.

  ‘Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No, of course I do, there’s no reason I wouldn’t.’ Emphatically the game-show host again. ‘Yes, we’re … we’re renting a house in Bracklesham Bay. Not very glamorous, I’m afraid. There’s a derelict house on one side and the gates to a huge static caravan park on the other side.’

  ‘By the sea though, at least?’

  ‘By the sea,’ Carolynn acknowledged, relaxing slightly, when she realized that Jessie wasn’t going to press her, wasn’t interested in exactly where she lived. Small talk. Jessie was just making small talk. It had been so long since she’d sat opposite someone in a café and just chatted, that she felt rusty, a conversational Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz. She mustn’t be so uptight; she wanted, needed, to make this work. She really enjoyed Jessie’s company, would love a relationship beyond the professional, a genuine friendship.

  Roger’s warning voice rose in her mind: You’re paying her, Caro. Actually, let me correct that: I’m paying her. That’s why she’s listening to you.

  No, he was wrong. She would prove him wrong.

  The food and drinks arrived. Carolynn watched Jessie struggle to hold the fork, an expression of intense concentration on her face, as if she had to focus on sending the electrical signals to ‘grip’ from her brain to her left hand. It was badly scarred, an angry gash across her palm that had been stitched. She’d noticed it before during her counselling sessions, had wanted to ask about it, but she had been stopped by professional distance. Reaching across the table, she laid her hand on Jessie’s.

  The unexpected contact of Carolynn’s chill fingers made Jessie flinch. She recovered quickly, smiling to gloss over her discomfort.

  ‘What happened?’ Carolynn asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘To your hand?’

  ‘Oh, uh, just an accident.’ Why am I lying? I don’t need to lie about this. I’m as bad as she is. ‘Actually, not quite an accident. I used to be an army psychologist and I was attacked by someone. He had a hunting knife.’ She held up her ruined hand. ‘This was the result. Not pretty and not functional, but it’s getting better.’

  ‘You had to leave the army because of it?’

  ‘I was invalided out five months ago.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘Very much. Though I am in a relationship with a military policeman, so I got something good from it at least.’ Callan would be furious if he knew that she was sharing information about their relationship to build bridges, force a deeper connection, with Carolynn.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Callan. Ben Callan.’

  ‘Is he hot?’

  ‘Beautiful.’ Jessie smiled; genuinely, she realized, for the first time since she’d met Carolynn. ‘Truly. I’m very lucky.’

  Carolynn nodded wistfully.

  ‘What’s your husband called?’

  ‘Roger.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘Through friends, years ago now. We’ve been together for twenty years, married for seventeen.’

  ‘Wow, you get less for—’ Jessie broke off. You get less for murder. She couldn’t believe what she’d been about to say. The café was a crowded surf café with a chilled, fun vibe. She was relaxing too much herself, she realized, lulled into a false sense of security by the atmosphere. She needed to get a grip, get to the point and then excuse herself.

  Carolynn raised an eyebrow. ‘Less for what?’

  ‘No, nothing. Laura, there’s, uh, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’ Reaching across the table, Jessie unfolded Carolynn’s Mail and opened it to page five. ‘I saw your photo on the television this morning. You’re called Carolynn, not Laura, and Zoe didn’t die in a car accident, did she?’

  Carolynn picked at the corner of the sky-blue paper napkin that had come with her coffee. The colour, what little there’d been, had drained from her face.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lied to you.’

  Jessie shrugged. She worked with patients who lied all the time. It was an occupational hazard. Usually, though, she could see through them, recognize the lies. Why hadn’t she with Carolynn? What had made her so convincing? It was the fact that she had swallowed Carolynn’s story whole that disturbed her the most.

  ‘You had a horrible time, Carolynn. Can I call you Carolynn?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘And irrespective of how Zoe died, the emotional fallout is similar.’ Not strictly true. ‘You still lost a child.’

  ‘You’re not angry with me?’

  ‘Of course not. I have no reason to be.’ Again, not true.

  She thought back to what Callan had said this morning. She could be a child killer. She could have murdered her own child. Her flippancy – laughing it off.

  ‘But I lied to you.’

  ‘Everyone lies sometimes.’
r />   ‘White lies.’

  ‘White lies, black lies and every shade in between. You’ve had an incredibly tough time and it was not unreasonable that you wanted to disappear, become anonymous.’

  Carolynn’s lips drew back from her teeth in the type of smile a toddler pulls for a photograph. It was as if she had forgotten how to smile naturally.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Her cold hand found Jessie’s. ‘I won’t lie to you again.’

  Jessie nodded, forcing herself not to recoil from the chilly touch.

  ‘There’s something I need to ask you to do,’ Jessie said. There was no easy way to broach the subject, no easy words. ‘Detective Inspector Bobby Simmons is someone I’ve worked with before. I think you should call him and tell him where you are. I’m sure that he just wants to get in touch so that he can let you know about this other little girl’s death personally, out of courtesy. He would have hated to know that you’d read about her in the paper.’

  Carolynn looked horrified. ‘I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. You won’t tell him you’ve seen me, will you?’

  ‘No. No, absolutely not. I would never, ever break patient confidentiality. But I do think that you’re only making it worse for yourself if you carry on hiding. Mentally worse for yourself, if nothing else. Living your life with such secrecy is very stressful.’

  ‘You have no idea what I went through when Zoe died, and afterwards, with the police and the trial. That was mentally destructive.’

  ‘You’re right, I have no idea, and I do understand why you want to hide from society, but hiding from the police is different.’

  Carolynn bent her head and gave a faint nod. She was twisting the strip that she’d torn from the blue paper napkin in her fingertips. Jessie watched her, the emotions ticker-taping across her face, only half the information she’d usually have access to as she still hadn’t been able to make eye contact, every second line in the story missing.

  ‘This little girl’s death could be connected to Zoe’s. This might be your chance to finally get justice for her and clear your name.’

  Carolynn’s fingers stilled and she nodded again, distractedly. Her gaze had moved from the napkin to the newspaper that Jessie had spread across the middle of the table. The overhead lights cast shadows where her eyes should have been, so that Jessie couldn’t tell exactly where she was looking. At her photograph again? At something else?

  Carolynn sensed Jessie watching her. She knew that she should look up, catch Jessie’s eye and smile, chat, work on the friendship she was determined to establish, but her gaze was gripped by a photograph that she hadn’t noticed before. It was the photograph of a necklace. Her necklace. Hers. A ‘new mummy’ present from Roger when Zoe had arrived. It was a silver locket carved with the imprint of two sets of footprints walking alongside each other as if on a beach, one pair an adult’s and the other a child’s. It had been too mawkish for her taste and she’d hardly worn it, hadn’t noticed its absence until a few days ago. She had no idea when it had gone missing.

  ‘Give DI Simmons a call, Carolynn,’ she heard Jessie say. ‘Tell him where you are.’

  She tore her gaze from the necklace. She felt disorientated, horribly claustrophobic suddenly, as if the floor was rising and the ceiling falling, trapping her in between. You must have mislaid it around the house somewhere. It’s bound to turn up, Roger had said, a few days ago, as they’d stood in their spotless bedroom, no clutter within which to lose personal items.

  Something else occurred to her suddenly.

  Oh, God – prints. She hadn’t worn the necklace since forever, but it might still hold her fingerprints. The police had them and her DNA on file from Zoe’s murder. If the necklace did bear her prints, how long would it take the police to match them? Anything connected with a child murder would be expedited through the system.

  Jessie watched the woman across from her, the look of abject horror on her face. Something fundamental had changed. Was it something she’d said – her urging Carolynn to contact Marilyn? Or had Carolynn seen something in the paper? Or nothing? Just her being uptight, over-sensitive? The tabletop was a mess, Carolynn’s empty coffee cup sitting in a puddle of black sludge, the dregs of her chocolate pancake spread across her plate, like a mud fight. Threads of tissue from the napkin that Carolynn had shredded were dancing across the tabletop, animated by the breeze from the open café doorway. Looking at the detritus, Jessie felt the familiar hiss of the electric suit travel across her skin. If she were alone, she would scoop up the loose threads and stuff them into the coffee cup, call a waitress over to clear up the china and cutlery. But she was supposed to be the professional here, inspire confidence, and she couldn’t let Carolynn glimpse that damaged part of her psychology.

  ‘Are you OK, Carolynn?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s been a lovely lunch.’ A bright, brittle laugh. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think that I need any more sessions.’ That stilted smile again. ‘I … I’ve enjoyed talking to you here far more than I did in your office. It’s so nice just chatting like this. I feel as if we’re getting on so well. I’d love to keep in touch, not on a professional basis, but as … as friends.’

  Jessie returned Carolynn’s smile, hers feeling as fakely plastered to her face as Carolynn’s looked.

  ‘Call DI Simmons,’ she said, matter-of-factly. She felt intensely uncomfortable suddenly. Something about that twisted smile, Carolynn’s tone, her words, made Jessie think again of what Callan had said.

  She could be a child killer. She could have murdered her own child.

  He was wrong. She was sure that he was wrong. Even so, she had thought that she would be able to breeze through this lunch, persuade Carolynn to contact Marilyn, or not, but at least she would have tried, and then shrug off the meeting, maybe even find a B & B and have a relaxed evening by the beach, drive back to Surrey in the morning to spend the rest of the weekend with Callan making amends, put this woman and the two dead little girls to the back of her mind. How naive had she been? She didn’t want to be friends, didn’t want that level of connection to someone who had lied so compulsively to her, whatever the motivation.

  ‘Tell him where you were,’ she reiterated. ‘He’ll understand. I know that you had a terrible experience previously, but I can vouch for the fact that he is one of the good guys.’

  Carolynn nodded. If only Jessie knew the half of it – the torment she’d experienced because of that man – she wouldn’t say that he was one of the good guys, wouldn’t suggest that she call.

  ‘I’ll call,’ she murmured, a tiny lie against all the others she had told. She’d been lying so long that she barely knew truth from fiction any more. Sliding her hand across the table, she coiled her fingers around Jessie’s and met her ice-blue eyes directly for the first time ever. ‘I’ll call, but only because you’ve asked me to.’

  19

  Through a cloud of smoke, Ruby nodded. For a few moments, the only sound was that of her inhaling and exhaling and of Workman turning a page in her notebook.

  ‘She was whiter than white,’ Ruby murmured eventually.

  Marilyn hadn’t expected that. ‘Whiter than white? What do you mean?’

  ‘There was an advert for washing powder that I remember watching, years ago, when I was little. Proper little, four or five. A blonde girl in a meadow full of wild flowers. There was some stupid jingly song that went with the advert and that was all I could think of when I saw her.’ Ruby started to sing, almost under her breath. ‘Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone—’ She broke off with a smirk, but Marilyn noticed that her eyes were shinier than they had been. The smoke making them water? ‘She was so white. The sand is white, isn’t it, up there in the dunes? Like white powder. And she was whiter, brilliant white, like she’d been washed.’

  He gave an encouraging nod, but didn’t speak.

  ‘Her hair was brown and curly. Her eyes
were open. She was laid inside that heart of shells and that doll was beside her.’

  ‘Did you notice anything about the doll?’

  ‘It had black marks around its neck that looked as if they’d been drawn on with a felt-tip.’

  Marilyn nodded. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Like what?’

  Its eyes. The colour? He didn’t say it, couldn’t lead her. Did you notice that the doll’s eyes were the same colour as the girl’s?

  ‘Anything else notable?’ he said.

  Ruby shrugged and her gaze slid from his. ‘It was just a cheap plastic doll in a shiny pink ballerina dress.’

  Marilyn nodded. ‘What else did you see?’

  ‘The little girl had a necklace around her neck.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Silver. A silver chain with a pendant hanging off it.’

  ‘Did you notice anything about the pendant?’ Marilyn asked.

  ‘It was engraved with footprints. Two sets, big and small.’ Her gaze dipped. ‘An adult and a child, walking next to each other.’

  Marilyn wasn’t sure if he imagined that her voice was rougher, as if she was forcing the words around a lump in her throat. The cigarette smoke again?

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’ She took a long drag on the cigarette, funnelled the smoke slowly out of her nostrils.

  Marilyn resisted the urge to lean forward, right into her personal space, to surround himself with the smoke. Second-hand stress relief.

  Footprints. An adult and a child. She was right.

  He was asking, not because he needed to know what the necklace looked like. He had seen it in an evidence bag and it was currently at the lab being fingerprinted, expedited, the child murder shot to the top of the month’s ‘to-do list’, the year’s ‘to-do list’. He had asked her the question to see how many details she had absorbed, how well he could rely on her testimony.

  ‘It reminded me of God,’ she said.

  ‘Why God?’ he asked.

  ‘Just something I remember from school. A story about walking on the sand with God. Footprints in the sand or something stupid like that. That’s what it made me think of anyway, that necklace. The beach and that necklace.’