by Kate Medina
‘So what conclusion did you come to about the doll?’ Jessie asked.
‘Either that Carolynn had put the doll by Zoe’s body as a red herring, to mislead us, or that she had put the doll there because it had significance either for her or for Zoe, or for both of them, and she then lied to us about that significance when we fingered her as a suspect.’
Jessie nodded. ‘Or that Carolynn hadn’t put the doll there at all, because she didn’t murder her daughter. What about Jodie?’
‘Debs Trigg said the same,’ Workman replied. ‘That Jodie wasn’t into dolls.’
‘There were none in her room,’ Jessie said.
‘So the doll has a significance for the killer that we don’t yet understand,’ Marilyn surmised.
‘And perhaps that significance is connected with both children or, more likely in my opinion, only Zoe, but by using an identical signature, the killer communicated to us that he or she was responsible for both murders.’
‘What about guilt?’ Marilyn asked.
Jessie raised an eyebrow. ‘Yours or Carolynn’s?’
‘Ha, ha.’
Sliding her chair back, Jessie stood. The room was hot and stuffy and she felt sick again. As far as she was concerned, the conversation was over.
‘Where are you going?’ Marilyn asked.
‘We’re done, aren’t we?’
She felt Marilyn’s eyes trail her as she walked to the door.
‘Why do I feel that there’s something you’re not sharing with me?’ he muttered.
‘Paranoia?’ She smiled over her shoulder, as she pulled the door open. ‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, Marilyn.’
‘What? What the hell does that mean?’
‘You can work it out,’ she said, stepping through the door and pulling it closed behind her.
59
Though Jessie knew no one in East Wittering, she was relieved that Boots the Chemist was empty. She felt like a naughty schoolgirl nipping into the sweet shop on her way home from school against her mother’s strict instruction, as she glanced guiltily both ways down the street – half-expecting to see Marilyn standing there eyeballing her, one cynical eyebrow raised, or worse, Callan – then ducked through the double doors.
She wandered up and down the aisles, scanning the shelves: hand and body; cosmetics; skincare; hair accessories; deodorants and body sprays; holiday essentials; facial skincare; family planning.
She stopped. Family planning. The title laughed at her. What the fuck have I done? – would be more appropriate.
As her gaze roved over condoms – too late for those now – lubricants, ovulation tests, the electric suit skittered across her skin at how out of control her life had become, how seismically more out of control it would become in an instant, based on the results of a simple two-minute test.
Pregnancy tests.
She had expected there to be only one type, but of course that would have been far too easy. She scanned the multiple boxes and grabbed one that advertised itself as being early detection and ‘Swiss made’. The Swiss were renowned for always being on time and her watch had never let her down, so there had to be some quality assurance in that.
As she rose, shielding the box against her chest with her arm, she had the sudden, unsettling sense that someone was standing right behind her. She spun around and stepped back, coming hard up against the edge of the metal shelves. The woman, who she didn’t recognize, mirrored her movement, silver stiletto sandals pecking at the lino as she stepped forward, so close that Jessie could barely focus on her face.
The woman arched a plucked eyebrow. ‘Who’s the father?’
Jessie was so shocked at the directness of the question that she didn’t have the self-possession not to answer.
‘I don’t think I’m pregnant,’ she spluttered.
The woman’s cracked lips twisted into a nasty smirk. ‘You wouldn’t be buying one of those if you didn’t think you was pregnant.’
Jessie lifted her shoulders. ‘My boyfriend, maybe.’ She paused. ‘I don’t mean that it could be someone else, only that I’m probably not pregnant at all.’
Her gaze hardened. ‘So you’re too good to screw around, are you? Too posh?’
‘No, I … that wasn’t what I meant. I just didn’t get the opportunity. I’ve never been great with relationships … with men.’ Why the hell am I justifying myself to this stranger? She took a step sideways to disengage herself from the shelves, another backwards and held her hand up in front of her, half-wave goodbye, half unequivocal physical signal that she was disengaging herself from this conversation. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry.’
Immune to Jessie’s body language, the woman aped her movements. ‘Does he know that you’re knocked up?’
‘What?’ No. Who the hell is this woman? This whole conversation was ridiculous and she needed to end it. The thought that she could easily be pregnant and the juggernaut that news would drive through her life – and Callan’s – was white noise in her head, the electric suit an itch that had intensified with the woman’s intrusion. ‘I’m sorry, I really do need to go.’
A blur of movement and the woman’s fingers snaked around her wrist.
‘I’ve seen you,’ she hissed.
Jessie stepped back, trying in vain to disengage her arm.
‘With DI Simmons. I’ve seen you. Are you police?’
Twisting her arm hard, Jessie broke the woman’s hold, no pretence at politeness now. ‘No, I’m a psychologist working with the police.’
‘You must be clever to have a job like that.’ Another spiteful smirk. ‘But not clever enough to use contraception.’
A quickly suppressed titter from the direction of the cash till. Jessie had had enough. She was tempted to toss the pregnancy test back on the shelf and sprint for the exit, but Boots was the only chemist in East Wittering and she needed it. She needed to know. The woman’s voice rose in volume, as she turned away.
‘I saw you at that anorexic blonde’s house. The woman who used to spend time with the murdered girl.’
Though she had an overwhelming urge to keep walking, Jessie had no choice now but to turn back.
‘Jodie Trigg? Are you talking about Jodie Trigg?’
The woman had the most extraordinary lilac eyes, Jessie saw, as she met them again, sunk deep into shadowed, hollowed-out sockets. Jessie had expected the light in them to be hard, calculating, but it wasn’t. It was something else entirely, something she hadn’t expected. Bereft. Desolate. She realized now, as she focused properly on the woman’s face, that she was a good few years younger than she’d thought: late twenties. She would have been extraordinarily pretty, if it wasn’t for the pallid skin, the oily hair bleached a hard white-blonde, and that wretched look in her eyes.
‘What’s your name?’ Jessie asked.
‘DI Simmons knows. He knows me.’
‘Have you told him that you saw Jodie at that house?’
She shook her head. ‘There’s no benefit to me in telling him.’
‘So why are you telling me?’
She couldn’t get a handle on the unsettling mix of aggression, sullenness and intense sadness pulsing from the woman. Her fingers found Jessie’s wrist again. Perhaps because of the urgent look on her face and the desperation in her eyes, Jessie didn’t pull away this time, though she had the urge to claw her nails down her own skin to rid herself of the feel of the woman’s fingers, and the electric suit snapping across her skin.
‘Don’t let anyone take your baby,’ she hissed, right into Jessie’s ear. ‘Whatever they tell you, you’ll give your own baby a better life than anyone else can.’
They. Who are they?
Releasing her arm, the woman slipped past her. As she walked to the till, Jessie realized that she was shaking. She paid quickly, avoiding eye contact with the cashier. She felt deeply unsettled by the conversation. All she wanted to do now was to find somewhere private to take the pregnancy
test and then finish the case, solve it, help those two little dead girls get justice – too little, too late – before she might have to deal with her own living child.
She couldn’t be pregnant. What would she say to Callan? A child didn’t feature anywhere in her, or Callan’s plans. She couldn’t look after herself properly, let alone a child, not with her history, her brother Jamie’s suicide, and her OCD. She needed to sort out her own brain before she could contemplate bringing a tiny human being into the world, and despite her profession, the window into the mind that it afforded her, her own psyche was more out of control than it had ever been.
60
The telephone-kiosk-sized toilet sported a trendy surf-shack door made from warped, reclaimed driftwood planks that started mid-calf, finished half an arm’s length above Jessie’s head and opened into the middle of the surf shop attached to the restaurant. She hadn’t used the toilet when she’d eaten here with Carolynn or Marilyn and if she’d known how exposed it was, she would have gone elsewhere.
As she inched back the cellophane wrapping and extracted a pregnancy test from the box, she felt as if every shopper and diner were privy to her secret. Her gaze hopscotched down the instruction sheet, picking out the essentials: urine, lay test flat to develop, two minutes. Flipping up the toilet lid, she did the necessary, feeling as if she was performing in a goldfish bowl. As she balanced the pregnancy test on the edge of the sink to pull up her knickers and rearrange her dress, she caught sight of her face in the mirror. Despite the faint tan her translucent Irish skin had somehow managed to absorb over the summer months, she looked as white as the plastic casing on the test, as the porcelain it was resting on. Shell-shocked and ghostly pale. She looked down at the test – no change. Glanced at her watch – only fifteen seconds gone. Oh God. She felt as if she’d aged a decade since she’d entered the toilet cubicle.
She knew that countless other women and girls had felt as she did now, alone and sick with anxiety, many of them far younger and much less well equipped to give a child a good life. Even if Callan wasn’t interested in being an active father, she had a good job and her child would have a stable family in Ahmose, her mother and Richard, if not in herself. Her mother would be delighted, not just her wedding to heal the family’s wounds, but a baby. The ultimate Band-Aid baby, plastering over the canyon-sized fissures in their history.
But what if her baby was a boy? Her little brother Jamie’s heart problems, his restrictive cardiomyopathy, had been hereditary, the condition inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, only one copy of the altered gene in each cell necessary to cause the disorder. Only one. No, she couldn’t let her mind go there. In that direction lay only madness.
Whispers outside the door suddenly and a young girl’s urgent voice, ‘I need to go now.’
Jessie washed and dried her hands.
‘Ask them to come out, Mummy. I’m desperate.’
A tentative knock. ‘I’m sorry, are you going to be long?’
‘No, I’m just—’ Just what. The desolate face of the strange young woman with the lilac eyes who had accosted her in the chemist rose up before her. Waiting to see if I’m knocked up. ‘I’m nearly finished.’ She looked at the test again – nothing – at her watch – only forty seconds gone.
‘Pleaseeeeee.’
If she hadn’t felt so close to tears, she would have laughed at the absurdity of her situation. Shoving the test into her handbag, pushing it right to the bottom so that it retained some semblance of ‘flat’, she unlocked the door, squeezed past the mother and her child, muttering a quick – ‘Sorry for taking so long’ – as she passed, ducked out of the shop and ran down to the beach.
61
Past
Queen Alexandra Hospital, Cosham, Portsmouth
Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone.
Fighting back the tears that were blurring her vision, the girl began to dress her baby in the pure white sleepsuit she had bought. She thought of the little girl in the advert she used to watch – that perfect, soft-focus blonde child playing in a meadow full of wild flowers – and she felt a sadness debilitating in its intensity. She would never get to see her own child in a meadow, never get to see her play. She would never even get to hear her daughter’s laugh or know her voice.
She lingered as she dressed her child, savouring every second, committing each detail to her memory – the feel of her skin, the crease in her brow when she frowned, the grip of her tiny hand, the perfect pink crescents of her fingernails – knowing that by the time the images in her mind began to lose focus and fade, her daughter would have changed beyond recognition. She had only known her daughter for a few hours, but she already knew that no one else would ever know her as she did. Love her as she did.
The door to the hospital room opened. Through the fog of her tears, she saw a woman, blonde like her, and a man wearing a navy-blue uniform. A policeman. Why had the social worker brought the police to take her baby away? What did they think she was going to do?
The blond woman walked to the bed and held out her arms. ‘I’ll take her now, thank you,’ she said. There was no emotion in her voice.
‘Anna,’ the girl said. ‘She’s called Anna.’
The blonde woman wouldn’t meet her gaze.
‘Anna,’ she repeated desperately. ‘I named her Anna.’
The blonde woman didn’t acknowledge that she had spoken. Her gaze was fixed on Anna. ‘I said, I will take her now.’
The girl tried to shield her daughter’s body with her own, but the pain in her ravaged stomach was unbearable and she couldn’t bend.
‘Please don’t.’ Her voice, barely there, was choked with tears that she had promised herself she wouldn’t shed. ‘Please don’t take her from me. Please.’
Chill hands slid between her stomach and Anna’s tiny body and though she tried to cling tight, her daughter was wrenched from her arms.
‘I’ll take her now.’
62
A cross.
Jessie felt as if she had been punched hard in the gut. Doubling over, she clutched her arms tight across her stomach and rocked backwards and forwards, smothering her growing howl in the dome of her knees.
Oh God, no. A cross, signalling a seismic earthquake in her life.
She checked the test again, knowing that she didn’t need to, that her first fleeting, horrified look had told her all she needed to know. There was no one close by her on the beach, the walkway behind her deserted. She could scream, yell, cry all she liked and no one would hear. But it wasn’t her style. She had always turned trauma inwards, internalized it, the damage that suppression had caused over the years leaking out through the cracks in her emotional defences in the form of her OCD and the electric suit.
Pressing her head between her knees, she jammed her eyes shut and tried to send her mind to a place of calm, but there was nowhere she could go, no emotional reserves to draw upon and the only thing her mind found was Jamie: a freeze-frame image of her little brother hanging by his school tie from that curtain rail, his beautiful face bloated and purple.
A loud squawk, close by, cut into her consciousness and she raised her head. A seagull was standing on the sand in front of her, so close that she could almost have reached out and stroked its petrol feathers. The pregnancy test on her lap seemed even more alluring to this seagull than her phone had been to the one who had dive-bombed her yesterday. She was tempted to toss it to him. If he carried it away, perhaps that would negate the result and she’d wake up with a sunburnt face, the imprint of beach stones on her back and a sense of intense relief that it had all been a dream. Wishful thinking.
The seagull’s webbed feet, the same buttercup yellow as his beak, left ghostly fan-shaped imprints in the wet sand as he paced in a semi-circle around her.
‘Nothing to see here,’ she murmured, wiping away the single tear that had escaped from her eye. She needed to get a grip, stop obsessing a
bout her own problems and focus on what she was supposed to be doing down here at the beach – and it wasn’t sobbing into her knees or conversing with local wildlife.
The seagull had stopped pacing. Head tilted to one side, he seemed to be studying her, sizing her up. He must have flown here from the dunes, as pale talcum powder sand dusted his webbed feet. The sight dredged a memory.
‘How was the beach?’
‘Huh?’
‘Sand. Your feet.’
‘Oh, I thought you were a mind reader for a second.’ A tentative, distant smile. ‘I’d hate you to actually be able to read my mind.’
She had been the antithesis of a mind reader with Carolynn. Five intensive hours spent in her company and Jessie felt as if she had only seen the inside of a fairground funhouse filled with distorting mirrors. Every view that she’d had of the woman a fake one, warped, disfigured.
‘I have scars too. And not just psychological ones.’
Both of them giving nervous half-laughs, grateful for the opportunity to break the tension, Jessie knowing that the subject matter was minefield-sensitive. Carolynn spreading her toes to show Jessie the pale scar running around their inside edges.
‘I was born with webbed feet, like a seagull. Perhaps that’s why I love the sea.’
Jessie had paid no attention at the time because the content of Carolynn’s reveal had seemed irrelevant and she’d realized that Carolynn had only shared in order to elicit an explanation about her own scarred left hand. Anyway, the scars between Carolynn’s toes had nothing to do with her psychology. Or so she’d thought.
And now?
‘I was born with webbed feet … ’
The memory of Carolynn’s words stirred another: a patient from her NHS days, not one of hers, but a colleague’s, a conversation she’d overheard at the coffee machine. Dropping the pregnancy test into her bag, she dug out her mobile and Googled, scanned the list that the search returned and found what she was looking for. Her stomach knotted as she read.