by Kate Medina
She wasn’t deluded enough to believe that she could go back, reclaim her old life to the letter, but she was resourceful, clever and exceptionally determined – she always had been, ever since she was tiny – and she was certain that she could go forward into something good, something better, perhaps, even than before.
Reaching out, she stroked her hand gently down Oddie the cat’s body, from his head to the tip of his tail, enjoying the tickle of his silky fur against her palm. She had taken care of him as she had promised herself that she would. As she had promised Zoe’s memory. She had taken care of him, as she had taken care of the seagulls who had landed on her bedroom windowsill when she was a girl.
She stroked her hand from head to tail again, pressing harder, feeling the solid knots of his muscles underneath his skin, the ridged lines of his bones. He was cold now. Cold and stiff.
Curiosity killed the cat.
He had always hated her and she had always hated him because he was Zoe’s, her best friend, the only thing that she had truly loved. Opening the door, she slid her hand under his doughnut body. His head sagged as she lifted him. His neck was broken – she’d pressed harder than she had needed to and snapped his spine. Careless, when all she had intended to do was to cut off the oxygen and blood to his brain, send him gently to sleep.
No matter. The end result was the same.
Placing him on the grass verge, to sleep in a patch of sunlight, she climbed back into the car and started the engine. A plan had formed in her mind; she’d take the A3 north for a few more junctions. She wasn’t going to let anyone or anything derail her plans. She had worked too hard, suffered too much, survived too much for that.
57
Past
Queen Alexandra Hospital, Cosham, Portsmouth
There was a clock on the wall and the girl fixed her gaze on it, though time had already lost all meaning for her. She could only measure its passing by locking on to the rhythmic sound of her own blood pounding in her temple, the hammering beat of her heart and the soft timbre of her baby’s tiny heart, that she could hear through the monitor the nurse had strapped to her stomach. With each pulse, each beat, the pain – the biting, twisting agony – of the contractions built, and with each one her fear intensified. She had been shut in a room on her own, not because she was a private patient, but to keep her away from prying eyes. Hide what was to come when her baby was born.
The contractions were relentless now and she could focus on nothing but the pain, each new wave coming faster than the one before, leaving her no space in between to breathe, to cry out. She was terrified and still no one came. She had been alone for most of her short life, but she had never felt as lonely, as abandoned, as she did now. Though she had borne a lot, she was struggling to bear this. But her baby was coming, to be born into wretchedness, whether she wanted it to or not.
The room lightened, daybreak, as the girl writhed there, chewing on her fingers to stop herself from crying out. She wouldn’t cry, had learnt, many times, that crying did no good. She sensed now that she was no longer alone, that there were others in the room with her, but the pain was so great that she was just drifting, floating and sinking, with each new wave of agony.
A blur of uniforms, the clash of metal instruments, noise, voices, faces swimming before her. Intense pain and a sudden, desperate need to push, to expel, the only need that mattered now.
‘It’s a baby girl,’ a voice said. A soft voice, with warmth in it. The first warmth that the girl had heard. ‘And she’s gorgeous. Just gorgeous.’
58
‘What?’ Jessie asked, shutting the incident room door behind her.
Burrows wouldn’t meet her gaze; Marilyn held it directly, throwing down a challenge.
‘Tony has dusted that doll we found in the Reynolds’ loft for fingerprints and found one clear set,’ Marilyn said.
‘Whose are they?’
With a slight smile, Marilyn shook his head. ‘Whose do you think they are?’
Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘I forgot to pack my crystal ball, Marilyn.’
‘Guess.’
‘Why? So I can be wrong and you can be smug? Because this case is a competition between us, isn’t it?’
‘That’s what we agreed at breakfast: that I need someone as intransigent as I am to work with. As intransigent and with the opposite viewpoint.’
Pulling out a chair, Jessie sat down. She tried to catch Workman’s eye, but she was gazing out of the window, faux nonchalantly, distancing herself from the palpable antagonism. Sensible lady. Workman was by nature a smoother, a facilitator, Jessie had surmised from their limited interactions. It was a personality type that would work well with Marilyn when he was on track, but with this case, and Zoe’s, Marilyn needed a rock to counter his hard place. My job.
‘Carolynn’s,’ she said. ‘I think that the prints are Carolynn’s.’
Marilyn arched a suspicious eyebrow. He hadn’t been expecting that response. Good.
‘Why do you think they’re Carolynn’s?’
‘Because you have a self-congratulatory look on your face and, as you don’t like losing, I assume that the fingerprints have affirmed your viewpoint.’
‘No flies on you, Doctor Flynn.’
‘So I’m right?’
He nodded. ‘The doll bears Carolynn’s fingerprints.’
‘And Roger’s?’
‘No. Just the print of his flat hands on the sides of the box, and his index finger and thumb on the lid.’ Raising a hand, he pressed his thumb and index finger together. ‘Pincer fingers.’
Jessie took a moment to think. ‘Where were Carolynn’s prints?’
‘As I’ve already said, on the doll.’
‘Yes, but where specifically? On which part of her— its anatomy?’
Marilyn narrowed his eyes. ‘Does it matter?’
‘From a psychological point of view, I think it does.’
Her gaze moved from Marilyn to Burrows. ‘Tony?’
‘The prints were on the doll’s ankle,’ Burrows said.
‘The ankle?’
‘Yes. The doll’s left ankle.’ He pressed his thumb and index finger together as Marilyn had done. ‘Pincer fingers. The index finger and thumb.’
Jessie nodded. ‘Did you find Carolynn’s fingerprints anywhere else on the doll?’
‘No.’
‘Is it possible that her prints are somewhere else on the doll that you weren’t able to lift, such as on the doll’s dress?’ she asked. ‘The dress covers most of her body.’
‘Thanks to my counterparts at the Scottish Police Services Authority and the University of Abertay, Dundee, who pioneered the technique a few years ago, we can now lift fingerprints from some clothing materials using VMD – vacuum metal deposition,’ Burrows said. ‘The dresses are nylon, one of the materials that works with this technique. There were no fingerprints on the doll’s dress, not Carolynn Reynolds’ or anyone else’s.’ He held up his hand, to stop Jessie from interrupting. ‘But I have detected fingerprint residue on the doll’s hair.’
‘You couldn’t lift a traceable print?’
‘Not yet, but I’m working on it. I need to lay the hairs in exactly the same position they were in when the prints were left, or at least enough hairs to get an adequate section of fingerprint to enable us to match it. I’m working on it.’
Sitting back, Jessie ground the tips of her fingers into her eye sockets. Though she had lain in bed for eight hours in the B & B, the curtains open, surrounded by stars, she had barely slept. There had been too many disturbing images, too much information careering around inside her skull: Zoe; Jodie; Carolynn; Roger; Oddie, that ugly, splodgy cat; Callan; her mother’s wedding; the inescapable feeling that she was letting everyone down. She had finally come to the realization that it was fine to let the others down temporarily – but not Zoe and Jodie. She refused to let them down. Whatever it took, however much she’d have to disappoint everyone else, she was determined to get a result for t
hem. A robust result, and justice.
‘Revulsion,’ she said, dropping her hands.
Marilyn frowned. ‘Revulsion? You’ve lost me.’
‘The way Carolynn held the doll. I believe that it signals revulsion.’
As she verbalized the thought, a memory from fifteen years ago rose in her mind: coming home from school and running straight upstairs to her attic bedroom as she had done every day since she had been sent to live with her father and his new wife, Diane. She would shut herself in, make herself invisible, not there, for hours, until she heard the sound of her father returning from work.
But on this one day, she had jogged silently up the stairs to find Diane in her room. Diane’s arm was outstretched and something black-and-white dangled from her pincer fingers. Pandy. She was holding Pandy, Jamie’s beloved teddy bear, by its ankle between her thumb and index finger, her arm perpendicular to her body and ramrod straight. Even now, fifteen years later, every detail of the expression on Diane’s face was seared into Jessie’s memory. It had been a look of pure revulsion. She had thought, back then, a naive, disturbed fourteen-year-old, that Diane had been revolted by how smelly and grey Pandy was. The only reality Jessie still had of Jamie, beyond static two-dimensional photographs, was his scent caught in Pandy’s dirty fur and so she’d never washed him. But as an adult, with the benefit both of hindsight and her professional training as a psychologist, she realized that Diane’s revulsion had not been directed at Pandy but at everything he represented: her new husband’s past, his family, his children, whose existence, if only in memory for Jamie, she could never erase. Jessie had snatched Pandy from Diane’s pincer fingers and shouted right in her face: Get out of my bedroom.
Diane’s response: It’s not your bedroom. It’s a room in my house that you have temporary use of until we can find somewhere else for you to go.
Jessie’s: It’s my father’s house. He bought it. You don’t even have a job.
The acrimony between them as thick and black as tar. As Diane’s angry clatter receded down the stairs, she had tucked Pandy back under her duvet, his ratty head resting on her pillow. Naive. So naive. She should have known then what Diane would do next, how there was no way that she would let Jessie win.
‘Revulsion,’ she repeated, her gaze travelling from Marilyn’s cynical expression to take in Burrows’ non-committal one, to Workman who had looked back from the window and was nodding. ‘Isn’t that the way you hold something if you’re revolted by it? If it disgusts you? By the ankle, in pincer fingers.’ She reached across to Workman’s notepad, the nearest thing to her and lifted it by the corner. ‘By the corner, the tip, the ankle, so that you touch as little of it as possible. And holding the doll upside down is dismissive, devalues it.’
Marilyn rolled his eyes. ‘Where do you hold a straw if you’re clutching it?’
Jessie ignored him. ‘What do you think, Sarah? Tony?’
‘I can see where Jessie is coming from,’ Workman said. ‘When my husband leaves his boxer shorts on the floor instead of putting them in the laundry bin, I pick them up by the elastic, with the tips of my fingers.’ She immediately reddened, as if regretting the personal nature of what she had just shared.
‘When the foxes attack my bins and spread rubbish all over my front garden, I pick the detritus up in the tips of my fingers,’ Burrows added.
Marilyn dropped his head to the table and mimed banging it on the wood.
‘God help me.’
‘You and me both,’ Jessie said, sitting forward. ‘You and me both, Marilyn, because we’re nowhere, are we? It’s now … what …?’ Her eyes found the wall clock. ‘Seventy-two hours since Jodie Trigg was murdered, two years and seventy-two hours since Zoe was murdered, and we’re still virtually nowhere, despite you throwing everything at it. You have all those years’ experience as a major crimes detective, you’ve solved countless murders and yet we’re still nowhere on this one. We have a few of Jodie’s prints from inside the Reynolds’ rental house. But really – so what?’
Marilyn sighed. ‘I need certainty, Jessie.’
‘Psychology isn’t about certainty. It’s about probabilities. For heaven’s sake, medicine as a whole isn’t about certainty, and the brain is the least well-understood organ in the body. I can help you generate theories, possibilities, probabilities that we can then turn into certainties by fleshing them out with evidence.’
‘So, if your theory is correct and Carolynn was revolted by the doll, why did she have it? Why did she stow it in her bedroom cupboard?’
‘There are a number of possible reasons why, the most unlikely being that she intends to murder another child and wanted to prepare in advance.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘A compulsive disorder. She saw the doll somewhere and was compelled to buy it.’
‘How do you define compulsion?’
This definition Jessie knew like the back of her hand from her own OCD.
‘A compulsion is an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way or do a certain thing.’
Cynicism written all over his face, Marilyn held up the thumb of his right hand. ‘Possible reason one – compulsion. Driven by …?’
‘Driven by the doll’s significance in her daughter’s death. Perhaps because it was keeping her dead daughter company on the beach, or that with the exception of Zoe’s killer, that doll was the last one to see Zoe alive, and it was the last thing Zoe saw before she was murdered.’
‘That would be totally irrational.’
‘I don’t believe that Carolynn is rational.’
Marilyn raised an eyebrow. His look said: QED.
‘But it doesn’t mean that she’s a killer,’ Jessie snapped. I have a PhD in acting irrationally and I’ve never killed anyone, though at the moment I’m tempted.
‘What else?’
‘Perhaps someone sent it to her.’
He held up his index finger. ‘Two. Why?’
‘The killer, to taunt her.’
‘Zoe was also found in a heart of shells,’ Marilyn said. ‘Where’s the box of shells in the loft?’
Jessie sighed. She was finding this discussion hard going. Marilyn was being deliberately obtuse. At times like this, she found it difficult to justify every nuance of her trade. So much of psychology was about constructing and testing straw men, and her men were struggling to stand up in the face of Marilyn’s icy arctic gale. She remembered a quote that she had heard from the governor of Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, something about how he could let half of his patients out tomorrow and they wouldn’t reoffend, the only issue being that he didn’t know which half.
‘The shells were laid out in the shape of a heart, so I would suggest that the shape has more significance than the materials used to make the shape. The children were murdered on a beach. There are shells everywhere.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘So the heart signals love?’
‘Love. Hate. Loss. A combination, perhaps. I’d say that they’re all different sides of the same multi-faceted shape.’
‘Which does suggest that the killer had a personal connection to both children.’
Jessie nodded. ‘Certainly to Zoe. But neither of us have ever believed that these killings were random.’
‘Why just Zoe?’
‘Because she was the first.’
‘Meaning?’
She waved a hand in the air, in a gesture that she knew looked as ineffectual as her thought processes felt. ‘I’m not sure. But her murder precipitated all this. She definitely has a fundamental connection to the killer, while Jodie might just be fallout.’
‘Collateral damage?’
‘In a way, yes. Two years is a long time to wait, so I would suggest that the killer isn’t a serial killer or he or she would want to kill more often.’ She looked at Marilyn for confirmation.
‘Typically,’ he said. ‘And serial killers of children are usually sexually motivated and there was no sexual assault or rape in either case.
’
‘So I’d suggest that something happened between the two murders, to precipitate Jodie’s.’
‘Like Carolynn befriending Jodie,’ Marilyn said. ‘Poor little sod.’
‘Yes, like that—’ She held up both hands to halt his interruption. ‘But that doesn’t mean that Carolynn killed her, or Zoe. We need to understand what the personal connection was between Zoe and the killer and why it was so dangerously negative.’
‘Motive,’ Marilyn said. ‘The classic – motive.’
‘When you interviewed Carolynn as a suspect in her daughter’s murder, did you ask her about the doll?’
Marilyn nodded. ‘Many times.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She repeatedly said that she had no idea why a doll would be left by her daughter’s body. She was adamant that Zoe wasn’t a girly girl, that she had never liked dolls.’
He glanced at Workman, who concurred.
‘She said that Zoe liked teddies, cuddly toys, but that she had never shown any interest in dolls and that she had never owned a doll,’ Workman said.
‘How did Carolynn know that Zoe didn’t like dolls if she’d never given her any?’ Jessie murmured, half to herself. She raised her voice: ‘Did you speak to the doll’s manufacturer?’
‘They’re made in China, surprise surprise. By a company in Shanghai, to be precise, who has been making those exact dolls since 2001. The dolls are all identical, except for the colour of their eyes. The company manufactures the same doll with brown, green, blue and grey eyes so that children can buy a doll with eyes that match their own, if they so choose. They’re shipped to the UK on those floating multi-storeys you see ploughing through the Solent, and they’re sold in a number of shops, including Toys R Us, Argos and the Entertainer. It was a dead end.’