by Kate Medina
‘No, I’m alone.’
The woman raised an eyebrow. ‘Now that does surprise me, a beautiful girl like you alone at the weekend. Though men are idiots aren’t they? Always like the blondes.’ She patted her own strawberry-blonde curls. ‘Highlighted, obviously, but yours is far too dark to dye.’
‘I’ve just split up with my fiancée so I wanted to get away for a day or two,’ Jessie said. ‘To clear my head.’
Una Subramaniam put her hand to her heart and gasped. ‘I’m so sorry, my dear. I really didn’t mean to pry.’
Jessie shrugged. Why was she being so facetious? Just for amusement after a frustrating day? A frustrating six months? Or because she had her finger firmly on the ‘destruct’ button – Callan’s opinion. That because she was unhappy, she needed to spread unhappiness to others, make them feel as uncomfortable, as marginalized, as she did.
‘If anyone comes, would you mind telling them that I’m not here?’
Hand still pasted to her heart, Una Subramaniam took a step back. ‘Will he turn up here?’
‘I don’t think so. Hopefully, he doesn’t know where I’ve gone.’
‘Do you have a connection here? One he might know about?’
‘We got engaged on the beach.’
Una Subramaniam’s mouth popped open.
‘But I’m sure he won’t put two and two together and if he does he’ll probably end up with five.’
Una Subramaniam patted Jessie’s arm. ‘I’m sure that it feels terrible now, lovey, but you know what,’ she lowered her voice to that conspiratorial whisper again, ‘they all end up like him downstairs, just getting under your feet. It never lasts, that first flush of love. Really, it never lasts.’
28
Ruby Lovatt stood on the beach alone and cloaked in darkness, watching the dirty white house across the road, the faint shadow of the woman she knew was inside, moving behind the translucent kitchen blinds. The woman had arrived home an hour earlier and as soon as she’d shut the front door she had gone from room to room, quickly lowering the blinds and drawing the curtains downstairs.
Ruby had seen her before on the beach many times, running, always running, pounding the sand, a skeletal automaton, no light in those eyes, no expression on that pale face. Only blankness. It was a blankness that Ruby recognized: the blankness of a destroyed life. A blankness that Ruby saw every time she looked in the mirror.
She had watched the little girl, Jodie Trigg, too. Seen her enter the dirty white house often, the blonde woman wrapping her arms around her, as if she was welcoming her own daughter home from school, ushering her quickly inside, skittish dark eyes grazing over the little girl’s head to take in the road beyond, check that no one was watching. But Ruby was invisible. She had been invisible virtually since the day she was born. It used to hurt, but now her invisibility was like a worn pair of slippers, comfortable and useful.
Watching the woman with Jodie Trigg, she wondered sometimes where her own child was, at that moment when Jodie was being ushered inside a warm house by someone who cared for her. Her child had been a spring baby, born with the lambs. New life had been everywhere when Ruby was mourning her loss, nature, God, taunting her, rubbing her broken heart raw.
Ruby looked back up at the house. If she were a good citizen, she’d tell DI Simmons that she knew where the woman he was searching for was living. That she also knew the woman had spent many hours alone with Jodie Trigg. Mother of the first dead girl; surrogate mother to the second. A coincidence?
Like hell, Ruby muttered to herself with a bitter chuckle.
She liked DI Simmons. She had liked him from the first time she’d met him, in another miserable segment of her miserable life. He was one of the only people she’d ever had contact with who had treated her like a human being, not like a vessel to be used – the men – or something beneath contempt, to be sneered at or ignored – the women. But being a good citizen had served her poorly and, however much she liked him, it wasn’t enough. She was wiser now. Older, wiser, tougher and more cynical. She had learned to take her opportunities where she could find them.
How much was it worth to Carolynn Reynolds for Ruby to keep her secrets? How much was it worth to her husband, to learn his wife’s? Or she to learn her husband’s?
Turning away from the house, she slid down the pebbles and on to the flat sand of the beach. Pulling off her plastic ballet pumps, she started to walk, feeling the cool damp sand against her soles. Little pleasures. She felt a shiver of anticipation and excitement, and it felt good.
29
A fat, white moon surrounded by stars hung in a clear navy sky, its shimmering image reflected in the sea, shrinking and growing with the motion of the waves. Lights off, Carolynn stood by the bedroom window, knowing that it would be a long time before she would absorb this view again. This panorama of sea and sky that changed by the hour and season was the only thing she would miss about this miserable house. Big sky country: she’d heard that somewhere and it felt appropriate.
Headlights suddenly, illuminating the road outside. She shrank back, apprehension drying out her throat. Roger. What would she say to him? He had claimed to be at work when Jodie Trigg was murdered, but she knew now that wasn’t true. Would she challenge him or let his lie ride? He hadn’t had an alibi for Zoe’s murder either. Although they had been on holiday at the Witterings, spending that last long weekend at the beach before Zoe started back at school for the new academic year, he’d been stressing about work, had driven to Kingley Vale in the South Downs, he’d said, hiked to the top of the nature reserve and sat down on the crest of the hill with a flask of tea to mull over the issues. He’d been there for hours, watching the changing day reflected in the Solent below him. There had been no mobile reception and the police hadn’t been able to reach him for hours to tell him that his daughter had been murdered and his wife taken into custody. Had he lied about his whereabouts then too?
No.
She was thinking the unthinkable. She couldn’t let her mind go there. She had been with Roger for twenty years, knew him better than she knew herself – surely – didn’t she? And Zoe had been their only child, hard fought for, hard won. Though he hadn’t been the one accused of Zoe’s murder, he had supported her unfailingly throughout the trial, had been tarred with the brush of hatred by association, lived with the vitriolic fallout, his enviably perfect life disintegrating alongside hers.
No, there had to be a reasonable explanation for his lying to her about his whereabouts these past two days. She would have liked longer to work out how best to broach the subject. He was unsettlingly tense nowadays.
The car drew up against the sea wall opposite and Carolynn breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Roger’s car, but an ancient-looking BMW Z3. God, she hadn’t seen one of those in forever. The car’s headlights were extinguished and a man climbed out. The afterimage of the moon and the car’s headlights lingering on her retina, she couldn’t make him out beyond his height, medium, and build, skinny. Slowly, her vision acclimatized to the dark and she saw that he had black hair and was wearing a black suit. Instead of heading towards the caravan park as she’d expected him to, he moved into the middle of the road and surveyed the house.
A chill gripped Carolynn as if the temperature in the room had suddenly plummeted. She shrunk against the wall to the side of the bedroom window, unable to move, to breathe even.
It was him.
That horrid detective inspector with the pale face and those weird mismatched eyes. Those piercing eyes that had stripped her raw every time she’d been pinned beneath their unrelenting stare.
He had found her. So quickly. He had found her.
She remembered with cold clarity the look he had given her when she’d left the Old Bailey nine months ago a free woman. She had seen him at the kerbside, standing apart from the heaving press and protestors, alone and static. Their gazes had locked, just for a fraction of a second, as Roger had shepherded her into a taxi. He had nodded his head,
the cynical expression in those odd eyes unchanged, the same expression they’d held throughout her trial. She knew then that he was still unequivocally convinced of her guilt.
And now he was here, outside her safe house, shattering the anonymity she and Roger had so painstakingly constructed. She stood frozen, almost dizzy with tension and watched him study each window in turn. Could he sense her? Hear the ragged sound of her stressed breathing through the walls?
She wanted to scream, howl, cry, rip her skin from her own bones in utter desperation. How had he found her? Had Jessie Flynn betrayed her trust? Had she? No, Carolynn was sure not. Jessie had looked horrified at lunch when she had asked her if she’d tell DI Simmons where she and Roger were living. And besides, they were friends now. Genuine friends.
Carolynn held her breath as his gaze lingered on the bedroom window, on her motionless form, though she was sure that he couldn’t see her. A tense balloon of air emptied from her lungs as he moved around to the side of the house. He must have switched on a torch, because she saw a disc of light moving in jerky arcs across the bedroom’s side window, reflecting off the ceiling above her head. The torch beam moved away and she caught glimpses of it tracking across the ceiling of the landing, the bathroom across from her and Roger’s bedroom. Thank God that she had locked her car inside the garage, so that he couldn’t see it, take down her registration number. One small mercy. The torch moved back to the front of the house and then disappeared, switched off.
The sudden clang of the letterbox made her cry out. She clamped a hand over her mouth, sure that he must have heard her. But a moment later he was crossing the road to his car, casting a last look over his shoulder at the house, before climbing into the driver’s seat.
Carolynn remained at the window for a few minutes more, staring at the blank space where he had parked, too stressed and upset to move. She couldn’t let herself be thrust back into the public eye again, stomach the leering accusations, the vicious online trolling, being chased down the street by perfect strangers, pushed, slapped, spat at. No. She had to protect herself.
30
Jessie felt almost as if she was lying on the floor of a planetarium, the view of the sky and stars was so all-encompassing through the bed and breakfast bedroom’s picture window.
She had laid out the shells she’d collected on the carpet in an identical pattern to the way she’d arranged them on the beach, a perfect heart, each half of the heart, seven shells – lucky seven – each half an identical mirror image of the other.
A perfect heart, to signal love.
She’d forced herself to use her damaged left hand without respite this time, moving every shell with her unresponsive fingers, fashioning the heart’s perfect curve and checking its symmetry, checking seven times, the heat from the electric suit hissing and snapping with each frustration and disappointment, falling with each minor triumph. Pathetic, she knew, but she refused to switch to her right hand and be done with it.
Sitting on the floor, cross-legged like a school child, her gaze found Gemini, her birth sign. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt lonely. Lonely and guilty. Una Subramaniam had left a standing invitation to pop down and have a drink with her and ‘him downstairs’, but she didn’t feel like engaging in polite chitchat. Retrieving her mobile from her handbag, she climbed into bed, leaving the curtains open so that she could still see the sky, and dialled Ahmose’s number. Though she hung on for a full minute, picturing him shuffling stiffly from his reading chair in the sitting room to the phone in the hallway, the ringtone continued, unbroken. Where was he? He was hers, the one entirely reliable, unchallenging constant in her life, as she tried to be the same in his. He was her port in a storm and she felt unreasonably upset that he had gone somewhere without her.
Who else should she call? Callan? Her mother? She had argued with Callan and then cut him off and she had let her mother down a week before one of the most important days of her life. God, I’m such a cow. Would either of them want to speak with her? Because she knew that Callan was right. The need to behave self-destructively was like a parasitic organism that had burrowed itself under her skin, an organism that was hell-bent on goading her into wrecking everything that was good, everything she loved.
She had dealt with many patients who displayed self-destructive behaviour, from negative thinking that trapped them in a downward spiral, leading them to become anorexics, bulimics, over-eaters, self-harmers, alcoholics, drug addicts … Why was she refusing help from people who had her best interests at heart, people who loved her?
31
Nine months ago, after the collapse of the trial, when she and Roger had decided to run, they had both wanted to come to the Witterings, where they’d spent some of their happiest times as a family holidaying, and more importantly where people would least expect them to go to ground – the location of Zoe’s murder. The place itself, a seaside holiday destination, had worked in their favour too: crowded and anonymous in summer, shuttered and battened down in winter. They had changed their surname, bought fake IDs off the Internet, opened a PO Box in Chichester under their new false name of Reynard, for the limited Internet purchases that they made. The house was rented, cash-in-hand, from a dodgy landlord who had no interest in knowing anything about them, beyond their ability to pay the rent. The Witterings had worked well for them for nine months. But no longer. Not now that Jodie Trigg had been murdered and Carolynn’s name, her face, had been thrust back into the spotlight. This time it would be sensible to choose crowded anonymity in a big city, Birmingham or Manchester. It wouldn’t be easy, setting themselves up again, but they could do it. And now that DI Simmons had found them, Roger would agree to leave, he’d have to. They had no choice.
She started to think, plan, directing her anxiety into productivity. They would need a suitcase of clothes, warm stuff for the nights, a wash bag and towels. They’d need to be totally self-sufficient for a while, until they set themselves up again, so sleeping bags and a tent. Where would they be? The loft of course, along with the suitcases they hadn’t used since Zoe’s death.
Pulling herself from the window, she fetched the hooked pole and opened the loft hatch, stepping sideways to dodge the flurry of dust the descending ladder dislodged. She knew this house, her hated prison of the last nine months, so well that she could function perfectly in the dark.
As she reached the top of the ladder and stepped into the loft, seeing nothing but lumpy, unformed shapes in the darkness, the smell of dust and decay was elemental and unnerving. She hadn’t been up here since the day they’d moved in, since she’d helped Roger carry the detritus of their old lives and stow it up here, too raw to decide yet what to keep and what to throw away.
Moonlight from the single velux window cast a milky glow into the centre of the loft, dimming to near blackness at the edges. Carolynn waited until her eyes had accustomed to the graduating shades of darkness and then looked around her. The suitcases were stacked against the far wall, by the brick chimneystack, the tent and sleeping bags piled on top. All their travel gear parked in one dusty, neglected heap.
As she moved across the loft, stepping over taped-down cardboard boxes filled with trinkets salvaged from their old life that no longer held any importance, feeling dust grind under her soles, her eye was caught by a glint.
She froze, her breath catching in her throat.
Oh God, what is it?
An eye? It looked like the eye of a night creature trapped in headlights.
Her heart beating so hard it was almost punching its way out of her chest, she stepped forward and, as though it were a separate being, watched her hand reach out and lift the flap of the box.
A pale face, gelid eyes, a cheap, pink ballerina dress stretched tight over a plump body.
A doll.
The box contained a doll. Its blue eyes catching the moonlight and reflecting it back at her, the frozen, glassy eyes of horror films and nightmares. A doll that she recognized. Carolynn
laughed – she couldn’t help herself – a startled horrified laugh, halfway between a bark and a yelp.
She reached for the doll, then stopped, her hand hovering, unable to force herself to touch it, unable even to catch her breath. The doll was identical to the one that had been left by Zoe’s body and by Jodie Trigg’s.
Rearing back from the box, Carolynn jammed her eyes shut, trying to erase the images of the doll and the memories it had surfaced in her mind.
Why is there a doll next to her? She’s not a girly girl. She hates dolls.
Reaching for it, pushing it away from her daughter, leaving her fingerprints all over its disgusting, bloated body.
Backing away from the box, she skirted quickly around the edge of the loft, grabbed the tent and sleeping bags in one hand, the largest suitcase in the other, desperate now to be out of this cramped, stuffy space, desperate to escape. Escape from this house, from the crumbling edifice of her life.
With Roger though or without? Could she trust him? Did she really know him at all?
32
Jessie’s mother’s tone rose in surprise when she heard her daughter’s voice on the line. When had she last telephoned her mother? She couldn’t actually remember.
‘Did you manage to deal with the emergency, darling?’
Emergency? It took Jessie a moment. ‘Yes, all sorted.’
‘So you’re back at home? That’s good.’
Should she lie? It would be easier, but she’d telephoned her mum to build bridges between them and lying wouldn’t be a great start.
‘No, I’m at the beach.’
‘With Ben? For the weekend?’
Her mother had only met Callan once, the day that she and Richard had announced their engagement. She had called Jessie the week before to say that they were visiting friends in Guildford for lunch and could they pop in for tea on the way home. Pop in. Her and Jessie’s relationship still too fragile, too distant for her just to ask if they could visit for the day without fabricating an excuse. Jessie had long since given up trying to analyse their relationship, as each attempt raised too many memories of Jamie, of life before his suicide, of an uncomplicated happiness she barely remembered before a piece of her heart was permanently severed. She had been alone for so long that self-reliance was woven into her DNA. She felt as if she was no one’s daughter any more, Ahmose the closest thing to family. Ahmose and now Callan, if she didn’t screw it up. Continue to screw it up.