Two Little Girls

by Kate Medina

  ‘Good luck to them. They’ll find nothing. Neither of us knew the child.’

  Jessie was watching him closely, the nuances of his expression; it didn’t change, not even minutely.

  ‘So Carolynn didn’t tell you that she had befriended Jodie?’

  His widened eyes met hers for a brief moment before he regained control and the shutters came back down. He was surprised, she realized, genuinely.

  ‘Lies,’ he snapped. ‘She would have told me if she’d known Jodie Trigg.’ His tone had a hard edge to it. ‘She tells me everything.’

  ‘Clearly not quite everything,’ Jessie said.

  53

  Past

  Paulsgrove, Portsmouth

  Breaking off a corner from the slice of bread, the girl laid it on the windowsill. She broke off a second piece and placed that on the top of her chest of drawers, by the open window. A third piece, she laid on the floor. When she had finished, a trail of bread led from her bedroom window to the far corner of her box room.

  Ducking down beneath the windowsill, she covered herself with the dirty grey sheet from her bed and settled down to wait. She would wait as long as she needed to. She had nowhere to go, nothing else to do and she was patient. She had learned patience over the years of having nothing to occupy herself but the television and the seagulls, and today her patience would pay off.

  A flap of wings and the scratch of claws on wood, as a seagull landed on her windowsill. She felt totally calm, euphorically calm almost, every one of her muscles relaxed, her breathing shallow, just enough to gain oxygen to sustain her, but no more. Another flap and a different timbre under claws now as the seagull scrabbled along the veneered top of her chest of drawers. She could make out its ghostly shape through the sheet, as it flapped from the chest to the floor, following the trail of bread that she had laid into the far corner.

  Bursting up from under the sheet, she slammed the window closed as the seagull bulleted against the glass and crumpled to the floor, stunned by the impact. But it would only be for a moment and the girl knew that she’d have to be quick. The sheet stretched between her hands, she tossed it over the seagull, following with her body, feeling the bird’s frantic struggle underneath her. She lay on top of the seagull as it bit and clawed at the sheet, at her skin in frenzied terror, but she felt no pain. Only an intense exhilaration.

  After a few minutes, the struggling ceased, the bird exhausted. She could hear it panting, feel the raised, fearful beat of its heart through the thin cotton. She smiled, enjoying the unfamiliar feeling of power. As she inched the sheet away from the seagull’s head, it swung and snapped at her viciously, but she clamped her hands around its neck and yanked its body free of the material.

  The seagull was huge and strong in her hands and she felt its vital desperation as it kicked and writhed, fighting for its life. The feathers on its neck were silky, downy, just as she had imagined they would be. She tightened her grip and felt the sinews underneath, felt the blood pulsing in its arteries in time with the panicked beat of the bird’s heart.

  Its eyes bulged from its head as she gripped even tighter. In a last desperate movement, its body twisted wildly from its neck, webbed feet pedalling the air. Laughing, the girl lifted her legs from the floor and pedalled her own webbed feet in time with the seagull’s. Two pairs of webbed feet, one bird, one human. One free, one trapped. But where it had been she who had been trapped before, now it was the seagull. The feeling of power she felt over something that had been so free made her giddy with its intensity. The seagull’s will to live was strong, but her will to kill was stronger. The seagull’s webbed feet twitched, once, twice and were still.

  She sat, cradling the lifeless body in her arms, until it cooled and began to stiffen. Moving to the window, she opened her fingers and watched the seagull fall. Its wings rose out from its body and for one brief second they looked as if they would catch the wind and take the animal out to sea. But then they folded in on themselves and the seagull plummeted to the concrete below.

  Now that she had killed, the girl felt good. Elated. Powerful. The seagulls would lose their freedom and she – the girl with the webbed feet – would gain hers. It was only a matter of time and she was patient.

  54

  ‘Do you have a cat?’ Jessie asked.

  ‘What?’ Reynolds’ voice was incredulous.

  ‘Do you have a cat?’

  ‘What the hell has whether we’ve got a cat or not got to do with anything?’ He pointed his finger at the ceiling. ‘Got to do with this … this invasion?’

  ‘Just humour me, please?’

  Reynolds sighed. ‘Yes, Dr Flynn, we have a cat. Did my wife not share that information with you in any of your cosy sessions? How remiss of her.’ He raised an eyebrow and smirked, courting a reaction.

  ‘Can you tell me about him or her,’ Jessie said evenly, denying him the satisfaction of providing one.

  ‘Him. My mother bought him for Zoe’s fourth birthday. A Burmese, because they love people. Zoe adored that damn cat and it adored her. So yes, we have a cat …’ His voice faltered. ‘A legacy cat.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  Reynolds’ brow wrinkled. ‘He has a head, a body, a tail and four legs.’

  ‘And two eyes, a nose and a mouth.’

  Reynolds sighed. ‘He’s splodgy,’ he muttered. ‘He’s covered in black, brown and cream splodges, like some abstract art exhibition. As if a kid coloured him in, a kid with no artistic talent. Zoe called him Oddie, because he looks odd.’

  ‘We have a photograph of Jodie Trigg stroking a cat which looks as if it could be him. And the password to her iPad was Oddie.’

  ‘Oddie’s a tart. He spends half his day on the wall outside, begging passers-by to pet him.’

  ‘Jodie Trigg drew a picture of herself and the cat sitting on a tiled floor that looks very much like the one in your hallway.’

  ‘Have you not noticed the state of this house?’ Reynolds snapped. ‘It’s a nasty, cheap rental. I can’t imagine that the hall tiles would be expensive or rare. I’m pretty sure that the butcher’s in East Wittering has the same. Why don’t you pop down there and ask them about their bloody cat.’

  ‘A witness saw a blonde woman walking along the beach with a child who was most probably Jodie Trigg on Thursday afternoon.’

  ‘Have you nothing concrete, Dr Flynn?’ His voice was taunting, though Jessie registered the high note of unease running through his tone.

  ‘It was enough to get the search warrant.’

  ‘Of course it would have been,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t doubt that just our names were enough.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jessie said plainly. And she meant it, felt it, genuinely.

  Reynolds swung around to face her. There was a vicious light in his eyes.

  ‘Are you, really, Dr Flynn? Because what exactly is your role? To feed that bastard DI information my wife shared with you in confidence?’

  Jessie forced herself to hold his gaze, weathering the pulsing hatred. ‘As I told you before, everything that your wife shared with me in our sessions is confidential. I have not, and will not, pass any of it to the police, or anyone else, even you. You have my word on that.’

  ‘Your word?’ he spat. ‘I have learnt from bitter experience to trust no one’s word, Dr Flynn, and that decision has served me … served us very well for the past nine months. Unfortunately, it seems that my wife didn’t learn that lesson well enough.’

  Jessie sat forward. ‘Carolynn is allowed to associate with people, make friends, Mr Reynolds. Her associating with Jodie doesn’t necessarily mean anything significant.’

  ‘If she associated with Jodie Trigg, then of course it fucking means something. It means that, whatever the truth is, our lives will get ripped to shreds all over again.’ He pointed his index finger at the ceiling. ‘This is just the beginning.’

  ‘DI Simmons is very experienced,’ Jessie said lamely.

  ‘He’s not object
ive,’ Reynolds snapped.

  Should she contradict him? She should, perhaps, out of loyalty to Marilyn if nothing else, but she believed that Reynolds was right. Marilyn wasn’t objective on this case. He had seized on the information that Jodie Trigg was on first-name terms with the Reynolds’ cat with the unbridled glee of a vulture tearing into a fresh carcass. Could she best help solve these murders by defending Marilyn, a lost cause in Reynolds’ eyes, or by trying to convince Reynolds of her impartiality? Marilyn was clearly right – Carolynn had run. If Jessie had any hope of convincing Reynolds to help her locate Carolynn before she entirely hung herself in Marilyn’s eyes, it had to be the latter.

  ‘I’ve spent a lot of time with your wife and I don’t believe that she’s a killer and I am objective. But running isn’t going to help her case. Please help me find her and convince her to turn herself in before this gets completely out of hand.’

  His lip curled. ‘Listen, love, I have as much idea of where she is as you do. Now why don’t you just run along and join your mates crawling all over my bloody house, so I can watch the football.’

  55

  Jessie went out into the hallway, each step in the forensic overalls and over-shoes making her feel as if she was encased in a supermarket’s plastic bag. The forensic locusts had spread downstairs. She almost tripped over Burrows in his white onesie, squatting by the front doormat, dusting fingerprint powder on to the tiles.

  She felt nauseous again. The house was close and claustrophobic: low ceilings, the wall colours dense sixties beiges and browns that shrank the space to doll’s house proportions and thickened the air. She wanted to haul open the front door and step outside, gulp in sea air to calm her stomach, but a quick glance around the edge of the kitchen blind told her that the rubberneckers’ ranks had been swelled by a few journalists and that whoever ventured out would be fresh kill for the pack.

  Skirting back around Burrows, she tried a couple of other doors off the hallway and found the downstairs toilet. Climbing on to the toilet seat, she cracked the window open and pressed her nose to the gap, sucking in air. Feeling no better, she dropped to the floor, lifted the toilet lid, and felt her stomach heave. She vomited twice, took a couple of sucking breaths and vomited again until her stomach felt as if it had been turned inside out. She closed the lid, flushed and washed her mouth out with water from the tap. Emerging from the bathroom, she saw Marilyn descending the stairs, clutching a dusty cardboard box.

  ‘Join me in the sitting room, please, Dr Flynn.’ His tone was formal, his voice loud enough to carry and not for her benefit.

  Reynolds was still determinedly watching the television, an advert for baby formula now. Marilyn dropped the box on the floor at his feet.

  ‘Don’t touch,’ he snapped, as Reynolds leant forward. No surprise on his face this time, Jessie noted; he already knew what the box contained. As Marilyn lifted the cardboard flaps with a latex-clad hand, it took all of Jessie’s professionalism not to recoil.

  The box contained a doll. A plastic doll in a cheap, pink nylon ballerina dress, identical to the ones found by the little girls’ bodies. Except that this doll had blue eyes. Brown for Zoe. Green for Jodie. Blue for …?

  ‘You already knew what was in this box, didn’t you, Mr Reynolds?’ Jessie said, looking from the doll to Reynolds.

  ‘I’ve only been in the loft once since the day we moved in and that was on Wednesday.’

  ‘You knew,’ she pressed.

  Silence. Then a sigh, followed by a dull nod.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I saw that box for the first time this week,’ he muttered.

  ‘On Wednesday?’ Jessie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’ Marilyn cut in.

  ‘In Carolynn’s bedroom cupboard, right at the back, hidden behind her shoe rack.’

  ‘What were you doing in her cupboard?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Humour me.’

  ‘We … Carolynn, kept a shoebox of Zoe’s things. Photographs, her favourite teddy bear, her first sleepsuit, first shoes. With the anniversary of her … her death the following day, I wanted to have a look through the shoebox.’ His gaze dipped. ‘Wallow, I suppose you’d call it.’

  ‘And you found the box with the doll in it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it you or Carolynn who moved the box to the loft?’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s repulsive. Creepy and repulsive. I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing that an identical doll to the one found by my daughter’s body was in my bedroom.’

  ‘Did you challenge Carolynn as to why she had it?’ Jessie demanded. ‘Where it came from?’

  ‘Not when I found it. But I thought that when she realized I’d found and moved the doll, she’d speak to me. I wanted her to talk about it … to tell me why she had it. But she never mentioned it and I didn’t want to press her.’

  ‘Because the issue was too delicate, particularly given the time of year, the anniversary?’

  His gaze locked to the doll in the box, Reynolds nodded.

  ‘So your wife bought it. Is that what you’re saying?’ Marilyn asked.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before is what I’m saying. All I’m saying.’

  ‘Why were you in the loft this morning?’ Marilyn asked.

  ‘I felt dust, grit, on the landing carpet this morning under my bare feet. The only place it could have come from was the loft hatch. I wanted to know why Carolynn had opened it.’

  Marilyn eyeballed him. ‘And why had she opened it?’

  From his stance and tone, Jessie knew his hackles were rising, tried to catch his eye, warn him to keep the conversation civil. Reynolds was cooperating; confrontation was liable to make him clam up. But Marilyn wasn’t looking at her – deliberately?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Reynolds muttered.

  ‘To collect a suitcase?’

  ‘I said, I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s a rectangular imprint against the brick chimney breast in the loft that is dust free. Below is a stack of suitcases. The imprint says to me that the top suitcase is missing.’

  ‘Does it?’ Reynolds lifted his shoulders in studied nonchalance. ‘I was only up there for a minute, and then came down because you rang the doorbell. I didn’t get as far as the chimney breast.’

  Marilyn switched tack. ‘Mr Reynolds, you have told us repeatedly that no one apart from you and Carolynn has entered this house since you moved in nine months ago.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ Though the look of studied indifference was still fixed to his face, his body language was as deflated as a week-old party balloon that most of the air – the fight – had leaked from. ‘But you’re telling me that Jodie Trigg was probably here.’

  Marilyn nodded. ‘Most of the surfaces downstairs, those that people routinely touch, have been recently wiped clean, including all the door handles, the surfaces of the doors, the downstairs toilet, kitchen worktops, cupboard doors and the kitchen table and chairs.’

  ‘I like things tidy …’ Reynolds said, hastily adding, ‘We both like things tidy.’

  Marilyn raised an eyebrow. ‘However, we have found a child’s fingerprints on the hall floor.’ He held out his hands horizontally, miming placing them on a flat surface. ‘Our CSI thinks the prints were left when the child was sitting on the floor, perhaps putting his or her shoes back on.’

  ‘Are they Jodie Trigg’s prints?’ Roger asked dully.

  ‘We’ll need to compare them to those we’ve taken from Jodie before I can answer that question. We found another set on the kitchen windowsill, just the left hand. The child must have been standing at the window for some reason and rested her left hand on the sill.’

  ‘The cat sleeps on the kitchen windowsill because it catches the sun, the only place in this godforsaken house that does. The kid probably stood by the window and stroked the cat.’

  Marilyn nodded. ‘Thank yo
u, Mr Reynolds,’ he said. ‘We also found two sets of footprints in the loft. A pair of your wife’s shoes match the smaller prints. The larger prints were barefoot, size 11. I assume they were yours from this morning?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘We’ll have to confirm that.’

  ‘I’d expect nothing less, DI Simmons. Dot the i’s, cross the t’s and miss the big fucking picture altogether.’

  Marilyn ignored the goad. ‘My CSI, Tony Burrows, is waiting in the loft, if you’d be so kind as to go up now and assist him.’

  ‘Where is the cat?’ Jessie asked, as Reynolds stood. ‘Where is Oddie?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him today.’

  ‘Do you usually see him every day?’

  Reynolds nodded. ‘He’s a homebody. The furthest he ever ventures is the garden wall, to court attention from people passing by. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.’ His dull gaze met hers. ‘You can have the cat, Dr Flynn, when he returns, if you want him. There’s no love for him here any more and he does so enjoy being loved.’

  56

  Carolynn pulled off the A3 at the next junction, took a couple of turnings until she found a quiet country lane and cut the engine. Winding down her window, she hurled the bacon sandwich into the bushes. Tears of frustrated anger were sitting right behind her eyes and in the constriction of her throat. But she wasn’t going to cry. She had learnt at an early age that crying was pointless.

  No.

  She could sit here and cry impotent tears or she could take control. She’d had enough of being a victim, enough of letting life get the better of her and it stopped now.

  She desperately wanted her old, perfect life back. The life that she’d had, not before Zoe died, but before the bloody child had come into her life at all, when it had just been her and Roger, living in a beautiful house in a civilized neighbourhood, dining in expensive restaurants, weekending in Prague or Palma, having stylish, clever friends, women like Jessie Flynn. And she wanted to look like that woman she’d locked eyes with on the front page of the van-man’s newspaper and on the television screen. She had worked so hard, for so many years to transform herself into that well-spoken, well-mannered, cultivated woman, with the gym-toned body, the expensively highlighted hair and the immaculate clothes, unrecognizable to anyone who had known her as a child. She wanted to be, she would be, inside that enviable skin once again.