by Kate Medina
Hello, this is the Trigg residence.
It took her a moment to realize that she was listening not to Debs Trigg’s voice, but to Jodie’s, each word carefully enunciated, the tone earnest, but clearly that of a child.
I’m sorry that we can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number after the tone, we will phone you back very soon. Thank you and goodbye.
Now that she had heard Jodie’s voice, she wanted to see her, feel her, understand as much about her as she could from whatever she could find within the four walls that the little girl had once called her own.
There was something eerie and toxically sad about intruding into a dead child’s room, opening her cupboards and drawers, handling her possessions. Clothes, toys, books, pictures … nine years of life snuffed out, leaving behind a room filled with things that had sustained her daily, things she had valued, others she’d loved, the totality of which would hopefully explain a life.
A life and a death.
43
The photograph was of her old self, a woman even she struggled to remember. Unrecognizable to a stranger, surely? The skin on Carolynn’s lips stretched and cracked like parchment as she smiled. Sudden understanding leant a gleam to the oily van-man’s feral eyes. Wrapping the bacon sandwich in a paper napkin, he held it out to her.
‘That’ll be twenty quid,’ he said.
Carolynn sucked in a breath, biting back the – ‘What the hell?’ – growing on her lips. Fine. It was worth it to her. Opening her handbag, she looked for her purse, couldn’t see it. Her handbag’s interior was shadowed by the van’s blue-and-white striped awning. Stepping back into the sunlight, she held her handbag open and rummaged inside. Car keys, hairbrush, powder compact, mascara, a lipstick, mirror, ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile phone, a collection of coins for parking clinking in the bottom. But no purse.
Oh God. She remembered now: taking her purse out of her bag to give £2 to a charity collector who’d knocked on the front door selling cupcakes yesterday. Then what had she done? Left it on the hall table? Carried it with her into the kitchen, and put it down on the work surface while she emptied the cakes into the bin? She couldn’t think. Looking up, she met the man’s hooded gaze.
‘I must have left my purse at home.’ She tried to keep her voice even, mask the thread of desperation. ‘But I’ve got £10 in my pocket, here—’ She held it out to him. ‘And some change.’ Raking her fingers along the bottom of her handbag, she scooped up the change, a couple of pound coins, three fifties, a few other silvers and some coppers, all covered in downy lint. She laid the pile of coins on the counter.
The man grinned, a wet red hole gaping at the centre of his mouth where both of his incisors were missing.
‘Like I said, the sandwich costs twenty quid, lady. Cheap at the price, I’d say.’
‘And I’ve just told you that I’ve forgotten my purse.’ Carolynn held up her bag to him, open so that he could see. She was close to tears. What else could possibly go wrong? How else would she be punished? Hadn’t she been punished enough for what she had done? Punished over and over and over.
Scooping up the money, the man winked. ‘I’ll let you off the rest, lady, ’cause I’m nice like that. You have a good day now, won’t yeh.’
44
On her way from the Reynolds’ house to Buena Vista, Jessie had sat on the beach wall and studied the crime scene photographs of little Jodie’s pale body, her head surrounded by that halo of curly brown hair that looked like seaweed, a mermaid from a child’s fairy story washed up on the beach in her heart of shells. She had looked at Zoe’s too, the staging of the dead girls identical, the differences only in the children themselves, Zoe blonde and brown-eyed, Jodie green-eyed and dark-haired. But despite those differences and the divergence in their backgrounds and lifestyles, she didn’t believe that either girl had been randomly chosen. Each item of the stage set, so carefully constructed, had meant something to the killer. She would review all the material that Marilyn had collected during the investigation into Zoe’s murder later, but for now her focus was on Jodie. If she could get into the little girl’s mind, understand how she thought, how she behaved, perhaps she could uncover the reason for her death and learn something valuable about the person who killed her.
So who was Jodie Trigg? Her job to find out.
On the surface, she was the nine-year-old daughter of a single mother. Her father had left before Jodie was born, leaving Debs with no way of funding her daughter beyond relying on the government or on herself. Though she would no doubt be vilified as a chaotic and uncaring mother in the press, she had chosen to rely on herself, and that one act alone spoke volumes to Jessie about who Debs Trigg was and who she would have wanted her daughter to grow up to be. Two nights ago, she had got back from work late – seven and a half hours after Jodie had left school, between six and seven hours after she had been murdered in the dunes – and found her bed empty. No doubt she would forever be haunted by the fact that she had been working, oblivious, while someone was wringing the neck of her baby girl.
Zoe, conversely, was the privileged daughter of affluent married parents, her lifestyle comfortable, her education private, her future, if she had lived to take it, assured in a way that Jodie’s would never have been.
As she twisted the handle and pushed the door open, Jessie held her breath, almost expecting a child with dark, curly hair to come bouncing across the room, grab her by the hand and pull her through the doorway, talking, explaining, picking things up and showing them off to her, doing handstands on the beds. But the room was empty and silent – of course it would be – east-facing and flooded with morning sunlight, no nets in here to diffuse its brightness. Jessie wondered if Jodie had slept with the curtains open as she did, letting the night come into the room with her, counting stars.
45
A uniformed PC waved Marilyn to a halt as he drew up to the entrance of West Wittering beach car park, then stepped back apologetically, hands raised when he recognized the car’s driver.
‘Any luck?’ Marilyn asked.
Four uniforms had manned the entrance from dawn until dusk since Jodie’s murder, stopping every car, quizzing the occupants as to their whereabouts on Thursday afternoon between three and five-thirty p.m., showing them Jodie Trigg’s photograph, asking if they’d seen her, any girls who looked like her, might have been her, even a slim chance, in the vicinity of the beach on Thursday afternoon. Questioning them as to whether they’d seen her in the few days preceding her murder either alone or in company. Or if they’d seen anyone, male or female, acting suspiciously on Thursday afternoon or any of the preceding days. Other uniforms were strung out along the beach from West Wittering to Bracklesham Bay, outside the Reynolds’ rental house, showing the same photograph and asking the same questions. He had PCs on the roads in and out of the Witterings, stopping all the cars, others going from house to house. He was leaving no stone unturned, and still they had turned up nothing useful.
‘Nothing,’ the PC said, hastily adding, ‘So far, sir, so far,’ in response to Marilyn’s crestfallen look.
West Wittering car park was routinely packed to capacity throughout the summer weekends, the kilometres of white sand a magnet for holiday-makers and day-trippers from London. This afternoon, though, it was barely a tenth full, murder bad for business, only the ghouls drawn by it. He drove until the tarmac road that cut through the car park petered to a sandy cul-de-sac, then parked. It had been here, at the far end of the beach car park, that he had first set eyes on Carolynn Reynolds clutching Zoe’s lifeless body and howling. Great playacting, he’d always thought, the woman as cold as a dip in the Solent in January. Hypothermia-inducing cold.
‘What have you found?’ Marilyn asked, ducking under the ‘Police – Do Not Cross’ tape a few minutes later to join his lead CSI, Tony Burrows, in the dunes on the deserted peninsula.
‘Nothing,’ Burrows muttered. He looked tired and windswept, his bald spot sunburn
t to a wince-inducing smoked salmon. ‘Or everything.’
Marilyn raised an eyebrow. ‘Everything?’
‘A bin-lorryload of discarded food wrappers; assorted kids action figures; one green-and-purple Furby; three beach towels; two pairs of ladies knickers and a pair of gents boxers, stripy – quite natty ones, actually; a pink lacy bra, courtesy of M&S’s Autograph Collection, whatever that is; twelve condoms at the last count; and a significant amount of faeces.’ He shuddered. ‘Both dog and human. Makes me never want to sit on a beach again.’
Marilyn smiled grimly. ‘Sounds like the Generation Game, Brucie.’
‘And next on the conveyor-belt …’
‘Is some luck.’ He couldn’t imagine being lucky on this case, however much he crossed his fingers and promised God he’d be an upstanding, clean-living citizen in exchange for a break.
His gaze moved past Burrows to survey the deserted dunes, still taped off, still officially a crime scene. Nearly forty-eight hours since Jodie Trigg’s body had been found and a few hardy journalists were hanging around outside the cordon, hoping for a juicy tit-bit, testament to how high profile his Zoe Reynolds debacle had been, how Jodie Trigg’s identikit murder had them smelling ‘massive circulation’ blood. At least the seagulls seemed to have worked out that they’d get no joy here and had moved on.
‘I can’t afford to fail this time, Tony,’ he murmured.
Without making eye contact, Burrows laid a slightly awkward hand on his shoulder. ‘Everyone fails, Marilyn.’
Marilyn nodded grimly. ‘Only the once though. Only the once – and I’ve had my once.’
46
Workman and DC Cara crunched side by side up the gravel drive, past a lime green Lamborghini, to the front door.
‘I thought those cars only existed outside Harrods,’ Workman said.
‘Or in my dreams,’ Cara replied.
He had started off his police career in Traffic because he loved cars, he’d told Workman as they trudged, sweating, from house to house, past Mercedes SLs and SLKs, top-of-the-range BMWs, a couple of Porsches, all in silver, grey or black, muted, distinguished tones, expensive statements, but not tacky ones. The owner of the Lamborghini wasn’t so circumspect.
‘If you save half of your salary for the next ten years, you might be able to afford this,’ Workman said to Cara, indicating a metre-by-metre patch of flowerbed by the front door.
‘How long for the Lambo?’
‘Until you’re my age.’
‘Another half-century then.’
She met his grin with a roll of her eyes.
They had already visited twenty houses – palatial residences, more accurately – on the bankers’ ghetto of West Strand, houses that fronted on to the beach and would leave no change from £5 million. So far they’d had no joy in finding anyone who had seen Jodie Trigg, either alone or with her killer, on Thursday afternoon. Most of the houses were owned by weekending financiers and their families, and the few who had been in residence on Thursday hadn’t been looking out of their windows at school girls from the cheap end of town passing by on the beach.
Was it really possible for a nine-year-old girl to walk to her death on a summer afternoon and for no one to notice?
47
Jodie Trigg’s small bedroom was dominated by two single beds, both covered in purple duvet covers scattered with pink and white butterflies, both neatly made up. The bed by the window must have been the one that Jodie had slept in as the other was crammed with stuffed toys – all cuddly cats, Jessie realized after a moment, in different sizes and colours, all tucked side by side under the duvet, their fluffy heads resting on the pillow. No dolls in the collection on the bed or anywhere else, she noticed, thinking of the plastic doll in its pink nylon ballerina dress that had been left by the dead little girls’ sides. What had been the significance of the dolls? Significance for the killer, Jessie thought, not for the child, or not for Jodie at least.
Had the same been true for Zoe? Carolynn had told her, in one of their sessions, that Zoe had hated dolls and Jessie had had no reason to disbelieve her, not then, at least. And now? Had Marilyn asked her that question, received an answer? Pulling her mobile from her pocket, she pressed voice record and spoke into it, reminding herself to check with Marilyn about the dolls.
Sliding her phone back into her pocket, she opened the single wardrobe to reveal an interior that reminded her of the cupboards of new army recruits or of her own wardrobes – perhaps not quite that extreme – the few summer dresses hanging creaseless, jumpers, jeans and T-shirts carefully folded and stacked, colour coded, with their own kind, pants, socks and tights neatly layered in a plastic basket on the bottom shelf. Though she was loath to deal in stereotypes, they could usefully provide an initial frame of reference that could be embroidered or picked apart as more information was gathered. This wasn’t the room of a stereotypical nine-year-old girl, the type of messy, disorganized nine-year-old that most of her friends and she herself had been, before Jamie’s death and the advent of her OCD. There were no clothes strewn on the floor, no books scattered on the bedside table, no posters of ponies, actors or musicians on the walls. Even the cuddly cats were ordered in their slumber in the spare bed, ranged from large to small, but not large at one end, graduating to small on the other, Jessie realized. Jodie had arranged them so that the large cats were at the edges of the bed, the smaller further in, and the smallest, a pale blue kitten with a navy and white polka-dot bow around its neck, right in the middle. Looking at the arrangement, the word protected, occurred to her, the bigger protecting the smaller.
Sitting on the end of Jodie’s bed, Jessie pulled the iPad that Marilyn had given her from her handbag.
Instagram, he’d said. Have a look.
Typing in the password ‘Odie’, Jessie pressed ‘enter’. Wrong password. She tried again, typing carefully. Access still denied. She texted Marilyn. ‘What was the password to Jodie’s iPad?’
A few moments later, her phone pinged. Oddie. The dog in Garfield. As I said before!!
Jessie texted back. Thank you. Btw. The dog in Garfield is called Odie!
Another ping. Smartarse.
The little girl’s Instagram page was short, just twelve photographs and two videos. Most of the photos showed her on the beach with her mother, a few with friends. A couple of photographs, selfies from the closeness and angle, showed Jodie cuddling a peculiar-looking, splodgy black, tan and cream cat. It made the farm cat that was forever attempting to prostrate itself on Jessie’s under-floor-heated kitchen tiles look like a super-model feline, though from the way it was cuddling up to Jodie, it looked friendly enough. It was impossible to judge the location of the photographs, as little background was visible, but in one the cat was sitting on the bonnet of a car, a slash of silver paintwork beneath its paws, the reflection of the edge of the iPad visible in the windscreen over Jodie’s left shoulder.
The last photograph was one of Jodie sitting on her bed, drawing. For a moment, Jessie thought that Jodie had drawn one of her cuddly toys, but when she turned the iPad upside down, so that she could look at the drawing the right way up, she realized that Jodie had drawn the ugly tortoiseshell cat. The cat was sitting on a black-and-white tiled floor, tiles that reminded her of a butcher’s shop. The cat didn’t have a collar. Whose cat was it, if anyone’s? Did it matter?
48
Walking, determinedly, head bent, along the beach towards the car park, ignoring the few journalists trailing in his wake, hoping his ‘no comment’ had been a joke, that he’d suddenly feel a burning desire to unburden his soul, give them the journalist’s equivalent of manna from heaven, Marilyn mentally reviewed everything he’d achieved, or more accurately, failed to achieve, since Jodie Trigg’s murder two days ago, and what already felt like a lifetime of lost sleep and self-recrimination. He had once watched a film in which a man in a suit had committed suicide by walking into the sea. Just walking, calmly and purposefully, as if he was perambulating along
the pavement in the City of London, until he had disappeared under the waves. He had pulled a few suicides from the freezing sea when he’d served in Brighton, the grim reality so different from the stylized film. And yet, when he had seen little Jodie’s pale, broken body on the beach, he’d had the overwhelming urge to walk down the sand and into the sea, keep walking across the Channel to France, emerge into a shiny new life. Buy a small vineyard and start a winemaking business, perhaps. Working with alcohol would suit him, as would pottering down to the pension in the local village to drink espressos, smoke Gauloise cigarettes and shrug his shoulders, impervious to the march of the rest of the world. Leave the demons that he had amassed from his time in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes behind. Over the past two days, he had thrown everything at the Jodie Trigg murder, but still they had achieved nothing concrete.
What had he missed with Zoe Reynolds? Why had he failed so spectacularly to nail anyone for her murder? Carolynn’s DNA had been all over her child, all over the doll left by her body, all over the shells. Her footprints had surrounded the crime scene, obscuring any others, if there were others to obscure. The forensic case had been impossible and beyond that, despite tens of thousands of man-hours, they’d found nothing solid enough to hang a conviction on.
Before the little girls’ deaths, he would have thought a touristy beach a crazy place to commit murder, but he now knew better. Was the killer as forensically smart as he or she seemed to be, or had he or she just been lucky? Yet another question to which he had no answer. It was becoming a nasty habit.