Two Little Girls

by Kate Medina

  ‘Carolynn. Carolynn.’ Roger’s voice cut through her thoughts. ‘Listen to me. You were at home when that girl was killed and I was at work. You always have the lights on, even during the day, so someone would have seen you through the window.’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. She couldn’t tell him that she had been out running in the rain, had run down the beach to West Wittering, the beach deserted.

  ‘We’ll be able to find someone to testify on your behalf.’

  At the word ‘testify’, Carolynn’s stomach knotted.

  ‘But it won’t come to that.’

  Her legs were trembling. She leaned against the wall for support, clutching the receiver to her ear as if it was a life raft.

  ‘We need to move, go somewhere else, before the police find out where we are.’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere, Carolynn.’

  ‘I can’t go through it again—’

  ‘Just do what I tell you. Stay at home, don’t open the door and don’t speak to anyone. I’ll be home in a couple of hours.’

  Jodie Trigg. I knew her.

  ‘Close the curtains—’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘Go upstairs and get one of your pills, put the telly on and watch one of those rubbishy chat shows that you like—’

  ‘I don’t want to take a pill,’ she snapped. ‘They make me feel drowsy, stupid.’

  I need a clear head. I need to think. I grew up in a prison. Spending my adult life in one is unconscionable. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

  ‘Can’t you come back sooner?’

  ‘I’ve got a few things I need to finish at work, but I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

  Before she could answer, the dial tone buzzed in her ear. As she lowered the receiver to its cradle, her legs buckled. Sliding down the wall, she concertinaed herself into a ‘Z’ on the hall floor, tucked her face between her knees and screamed until her throat was raw.

  Zoe.

  Jodie.

  You were home when that girl was killed.

  If DI Simmons found her, how would she explain the missing hours when she’d been running along the coast, the rain cloaking her in solitude, trying to shake the headache, the ghastly images that the second anniversary of Zoe’s death had surfaced, like a horror film reel spinning inside her head. He had failed to convict in Zoe’s case. He couldn’t let a second child murder go unsolved. With Zoe, as time went on, he’d needed a scapegoat and she had been an easy target. Her fingerprints had been on the shells surrounding Zoe’s body, all over that hideous doll left by her daughter’s side.

  Oh God. The necklace. She had forgotten to tell Roger about the necklace. She couldn’t tell him that she knew Jodie, but surely when he learned that her necklace had been found around the dead girl’s neck, he would agree to leave, to run, to go to ground somewhere else, far from here.

  Unwinding herself from her crunched ‘Z’, Carolynn pulled the telephone from the hall table on to her knee and dialled Roger’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail, didn’t even ring. He had been hurried when they’d spoken, keen to cut their call short, she’d sensed from his tone, so he must have known that his phone battery was running on empty. He wouldn’t have switched it off – surely? – not when he knew how stressed and upset she was.

  Once, a couple of months ago, Roger had called his boss from the home phone and when he’d gone upstairs to bed, she’d quickly keyed in 1471 and scribbled down the ‘last number dialled’. Roger liked to keep work and home separate and would have been furious if he’d known, but she wanted the number in case of emergencies and was glad now that she’d done it. She needed to tell him about the necklace.

  A man answered, his voice deep and sonorous.

  ‘He’s not in today, Mrs Reynard.’ Reynard: their cover surname. Reynard – fox – cunning. Roger had liked the inference. And it was close enough to their actual surname to be memorable, off-the-cuff answerable to.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He hasn’t been in since Wednesday. Perhaps he’s working somewhere else. Some of my guys moonlight at other places for the odd day or two if the pay’s right, though he did say that he was off sick.’ A deep chuckle echoed down the line, a chuckle that Carolynn could close her eyes and sink into. No wonder Roger liked to spend so much time at work. His boss sounded easy-going, kind. But Roger wasn’t there today.

  ‘Did you say Wednesday?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Reynard. Wednesday was the last time I saw Roger.’

  ‘He wasn’t there yesterday?’ Carolynn pressed.

  ‘No, I told you, Wednesday.’ The man laughed again, but with a slight edge this time. ‘Tell him, I’m expecting him back on Monday, could you please. We’ve got a big new landscaping job starting next week for a stately home, so I need him here.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ Carolynn managed.

  ‘And you take care now, Mrs Reynard.’

  As she laid the receiver back on its stand, she felt as if a black sinkhole was opening underneath her. Roger hadn’t been at work yesterday or today.

  You were at home when that girl was killed and I was at work.

  22

  There was a pale, ragged line of shells where the flat sand of the beach met the steep stony section, as if the tide, when it came in, brought them as far as the pebbles, but couldn’t carry them further. With her Judas left hand, Jessie reached for the closest, the multicoloured oil-slick oval of an oyster shell, concentrating hard on sending the signal from her brain to her fingers to command them to curl and grip. It felt like a gargantuan effort: as if she had to will each electrical impulse to travel from her cerebellum down the nerves, visualize them sparking like lightning, like a flash of electricity from the dreaded suit she could still feel coating her limbs, across each synapse. If there had been anyone around, even people she didn’t know, she would have deferred to her right hand, picked the shell up in one confident, fluid movement. But the afternoon was petering towards early evening, the beach virtually deserted. She could use her left without feeling self-conscious, practise, train her deadened fingers, do something positive for a change. Pinching the oyster shell between fingertips and thumb, she placed it on a pristine patch of sand to her left, unsullied by footprints or worm casts.

  Another shell. A clam, this time. The pinch required smaller, the movement more intricate. Her fingers felt as if they were encased in lead gloves. The muscles were tired already, she realized, the tendons stressed, just by that one fine movement of pinching and moving the oyster shell. She felt close to tears. Not only because of her inability to master the use of her own traitorous hand, but also because of Carolynn, Callan, the feeling that she was floating, anchorless in the world at the moment, the knowledge that her OCD was worsening and that, despite the window into other people’s minds that her profession afforded her, she didn’t know how to help herself.

  Switching to her right hand, she moved the clam next to the oyster. She collected five more shells, arranging them with the others in a curved line, their outside edges symmetrical. Seven shells in all – lucky seven – each one different. An oyster, a cockle, a clam, a mussel and three she couldn’t name. Pushing herself to her feet, she wandered along the edge of the stones, following the ragged line of shells, bending and collecting more. Returning to her previous spot, she sorted the shells, selecting seven more, identical to the first seven. She arranged them as a mirror image of the first to form the shape of a heart. Zoe and Jodie’s killer or killers had arranged a heart around their bodies and left a doll by their sides. Jodie also had a necklace around her throat. What was the significance of each of those items?

  The heart – love? The breakdown of love? Hatred? Jealousy? Betrayal? All different sides of the same multi-faceted shape.

  The doll? A historically significant item for the children or for their murderer? A token to keep the dead child company – a tiny glimmer of humanity from the killer – or something left to taunt the living, the bereaved?

  And wha
t about the necklace? It had looked from the photograph in the newspaper to have something engraved on its surface, but Jessie hadn’t been close enough to see what that was. Why did Jodie have a necklace around her neck and not Zoe? Was it Jodie’s necklace or had the killer put it around her neck? So many questions to which, she hoped for the little girls’ and their loved ones’ sakes, Marilyn had some answers.

  She looked back down to her heart of shells. It was beautiful: too beautiful to be associated with tragedy and death. Collecting up the shells, she slipped them into the side pocket of her handbag. Perhaps she would make a picture frame for her mother’s wedding. A heart-shaped picture frame to celebrate love rather than death.

  23

  Workman shivered.

  ‘Are you OK, ma’am?’

  ‘Just someone walking over my grave, DC Cara.’

  Walking over the grave of a dead girl.

  The street looked the same as she remembered it, exactly the same. The leaves on the small poplars planted at intervals along the pavement, as luscious summer emerald as the last time she’d been here, a mix of black, grey and navy family Range Rover Evoques, Volvos and BMW four-wheel drives and compact hatchbacks, nanny runarounds, parked at the kerb. No nets in any of the windows, not then or now, all plantation shutters or nothing at all, the owners of these smart, five-bedroom, redbrick terraced houses in south-west London, happy to let passers-by glimpse their enviably comfortable lifestyles.

  She thought now, as she had thought back then, almost two years ago, when she had first visited this address with Marilyn, how horrifying it would have been for this neighbourhood to have such tragedy as a child murder lurching down these suburban streets, a thing as unimaginable as an alien descending from outer space.

  Workman didn’t need to be here, Cara was capable of handling it alone, but she’d wanted to come back, unable to shake off the sense that, by being here in person, she’d be able to sniff out the Reynolds’ trail on the air like a bloodhound.

  ‘Let’s chat with the neighbours,’ she said to Cara. ‘See if any of them know where the Reynolds have disappeared to.’

  Marilyn had tasked Cara with using his ‘Millennials’ knowledge of all things technology-related to track the Reynolds down via the Internet, and Cara had spent most of last night and today trying to locate them: scanning the electoral roll, mining 192.com, ferreting through all the online friendship and contacts databases he could think of – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram – searching credit-card databases, every search returning a blank. He had discovered that they had rented out their old family house in Battersea via an agency who dealt with them purely by email, and transferred the money to an ‘Internet only’ bank account that had been set up with their Battersea address. Beyond that, there was no trace. It was pitifully easy, these days, to get convincing fake identification documents via the Internet, allowing anyone who had the desire to reinvent themselves, to steal someone else’s identity or create a fictional new one. The Reynolds had clearly made a very conscious decision to disappear and had engineered that disappearance with enviable aplomb.

  Workman and Cara had just visited the Reynolds’ old house. The woman renting it told them that the Reynolds hadn’t left a forwarding address, but that she kept a cardboard box in the cellar, adding any mail addressed to them to the burgeoning pile, throwing away circulars or company promotions.

  She smiled and shrugged. ‘I should probably just throw it all away, but after what they’ve been through …’ She let the end of the sentence hang.

  Workman took the box and its contents, telling the woman that she’d pass it on to the Reynolds when they tracked them down, after they’d opened and examined every item of post for clues – she didn’t vocalize that last bit.

  ‘I’ll take this side of the road, you take the opposite,’ she said to Cara. ‘Make sure that you show your warrant card, as soon as they open the door.’ Her inference clear: even here in the melting pot that was London, the sudden appearance of a mixed-race twenty-two-year-old male on their doorstep in the early evening, many parents still at work, their wives or nannies and children alone in the house, would induce suspicion and mistrust. ‘Try not to arouse too much curiosity,’ she added. ‘We want to chat to the Reynolds out of courtesy, nothing more.’

  Cara nodded. He was a good kid and Workman liked him. The Surrey and Sussex forces needed more diversity and switched-on, clever kids like Cara would, as well being fantastic assets in their own right, hopefully encourage others to join. Race should no longer be an issue, but it was: black, Asian and mixed-race kids as rare as hen’s teeth outside the big south coast cities of Brighton, Portsmouth and Southampton, and even in those cities, rarely interested in joining the police, the perceived enemy.

  A well-preserved, dark-haired woman in her mid to late fifties, dressed in a navy wrap dress and beige wedge-heeled sandals, answered the sage-green door of the house to the right of the Reynolds’.

  ‘I was surprised when they just upped and left with no forwarding address,’ she said, leaning against the doorjamb. ‘I liked to think that we were friends, but I suppose when something like that happens, worlds shatter and nothing is the same. Perhaps it was naive of me to think they’d keep in touch.’

  ‘You haven’t heard anything at all? No emails, postcards, Christmas cards?’

  The woman shook her head.

  ‘Something innocuous, that might have slipped your mind?’ Workman pressed.

  ‘We’re a friendly road, not best friends or anything, but friendly, and as far as I know, no one has heard from them. We haven’t talked about them for months, to be honest, but with this second little girl found murdered on the same beach people have started talking again, wondering—’ Breaking off, she raised an eyebrow and smiled. Workman let the silence grow. She was here to gain information, not to share it. ‘Wondering what happened to this second little girl.’ The woman finished. ‘It would be good to know, considering how close we were to the whole event. You know how it is.’

  Workman nodded. She did know how it was. Jodie Trigg’s murder would precipitate an overdrive of wagging tongues. The residents of this tidy suburban street’s connection to the Reynolds, however tenuous, would give them a macabre celebrity in the office, at the school gate and in the local coffee shops, which many would, no doubt, exploit with gusto. But she wasn’t going to add fuel to the fire by providing information. She held out her business card to the woman.

  ‘Thank you for your time. Please do get in touch if anything occurs to you. The card has both my office and mobile numbers.’

  With a final nod of thanks, she turned and clack-clacked her way back down the tiled path to the gate. Onwards and upwards. Or onwards at least: another sixteen front doors to knock on.

  The clog of rush-hour traffic reminded Workman why she had never felt any desire to live in London or work for the Met.

  ‘Do you mind if we pay another quick visit, Darren?’

  Cara shook his head. ‘Where to, ma’am.’

  ‘Lambeth Cemetery, please. Blackshaw Road, Tooting.’

  He glanced across.

  ‘Zoe,’ she said simply. ‘Zoe Reynolds is buried there. I’d like to …’ She tailed off. Like to what? Pay my respects? Apologize? Seek inspiration at the grave of a long-dead little girl who hasn’t received justice?

  Tilting her head back, she closed her eyes, as much to avoid the searching glances Cara was casting at her as anything else, letting the rev of idling engines, the hoot of frustrated horns fade into the background.

  Cara had worked in Traffic for four years before transferring to Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes and so, unlike when Marilyn drove her in that heap of rust and Blu-Tack he called a car – one hand holding the wheel, the other a cigarette, his mind ruminating on some issue that didn’t involve getting them from A to B in one piece – Workman felt no need to direct Cara to a cemetery he had never been to or to ask him to keep his eyes on the road.

  They’d had no luck
with any of the Reynolds’ old neighbours. The couple seemed to have successfully disappeared off the face of the earth. Before her daughter’s murder, Carolynn Reynolds had been the assistant director of Children’s Specialist Services at Wandsworth London Borough Council, had been for years. And after – nothing. Just the investigation and trial, every aspect of her old life in smithereens.

  What had her husband, Roger, worked as? A surveyor? An architect? Something to do with buildings, property, interiors. No, not interiors, she remembered suddenly, exteriors. A landscape architect, of course. Workman remembered Marilyn muttering at the time about how ridiculous a name it was for a glorified gardener. Like calling a cleaner a ‘hygiene specialist’, or a bus driver a ‘transportation facilitator’.

  What was important though, was that it could be a ‘cash-in-hand’ job, the civilized end of the British black market. The Reynolds could disappear entirely from the radar and still earn a living. So how on earth were they going to find them?

  24

  Callan fetched himself a bottle of beer from the fridge and went into the garden, slumping down at Jessie’s garden table and hefting over a second chair to rest his feet on. It was a warm evening, the sun hovering halfway between sky and land, washing the field at the end of the garden with a mellow orange glow.

  He took a swig of beer, his mind tracing back over his phone conversation with Jessie. It hadn’t gone as he had planned, not that he’d given much thought as to how to handle the discussion before he’d called her, to be fair. His mistake. He was worried about her and not just because of that woman, Carolynn Reynolds. Since she’d been invalided out of the army, she had developed an armoured carapace of aggression that shielded the hurt and vulnerability underneath. He didn’t know how to handle her these days, felt as if he was treading on eggshells, and breaking the majority of them, despite his best efforts.