Two Little Girls

by Kate Medina

  Glancing towards Carolynn’s cupboard, he thought of the doll that he had found buried behind her shoe rack, the box he’d moved and stowed in the loft, hating the thought of sleeping in proximity to that grotesque bloated body, that rigid tangle of plastic limbs. The doll in the box identical to the one found by Zoe’s body, apart from the colour of its eyes.

  He had thought about both dolls – one brown-eyed, one blue-eyed – when he’d driven to Lambeth Cemetery on Thursday to visit Zoe on the second anniversary of her death. He had bought a cuddly tortoiseshell cat to leave on her grave, to keep her company in death as Oddie had kept her company in life. But when he’d got to the cemetery it had been raining, stair rods of water cutting down from a heavy grey sky, and the cuddly animals on the surrounding graves had looked pitifully forlorn. But it had been the dolls left on some graves, like grotesque plastic effigies of the children buried beneath, that had cut him to the core. Tucking the cuddly cat back inside his coat, he had run across to St George’s hospital and bought a bunch of white roses from the florist in the reception area, handed the cuddly cat to the woman manning the hospital’s main desk to be gifted to the children’s ward, run back, soaked by then, and arranged the roses in the black marble vase on Zoe’s grave.

  That had been Thursday.

  And yesterday?

  Yesterday, he’d driven into Chichester to consult a divorce lawyer. He didn’t want this life any more and he didn’t want Carolynn. Their marriage was nothing, a sham. Their lives nothing. Built on lies, deception.

  But as he sat on the bed, staring at Carolynn’s bedroom cupboard and thinking about the doll, his mind took him somewhere much darker. Took him to doubt, to that pygmy voice in his head, goading him with a question:

  What if Carolynn did murder Zoe? What if you let it happen?

  80

  Marilyn’s mobile rang.

  ‘DI Simmons,’ he barked.

  ‘Detective Inspector.’ The desiccated voice, instantly recognizable as Dr Ghoshal’s, echoed down the line as if it was coming from inside a cave. Marilyn’s mind filled with an image of the pathologist clutching his phone in one viscera-covered hand, a scalpel in the other, as he multi-tasked over a dissecting table in the chilled, white-tiled autopsy suite.

  ‘What can I do for you, Dr Ghoshal?’

  ‘This call is about what I can do for you, DI Simmons.’

  Other senior detectives in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes found Dr Ghoshal’s attitude patronizing and hard to stomach, but Marilyn had worked with him for so long that everything bar the hard content he delivered, invariably excellent, was water off a duck’s back.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Marilyn said, pulling the window shut to dampen the sounds of life drifting up from the street below.

  ‘I have completed Jodie Trigg’s autopsy. I’m sorry that it has taken me so long, but I wanted to be absolutely sure of every detail.’

  Marilyn waited, in silence, for him to continue.

  ‘I can confirm that Jodie Trigg was, as you suspected, killed by manual strangulation: compression of the ceratoid arteries and jugular vein causing cerebral ischemia. The pattern and size of the contusions around her neck would suggest that the murderer was either a small man or, more likely, a woman.’

  Not Roger then. He was big: six-two, with large, calloused workman’s hands.

  ‘Are you sure about that last bit? The woman?’

  A moment of silence. ‘No, I am not sure, DI Simmons, but, as I said, it is likely.’

  ‘How likely?’

  ‘If I was a betting man, which I am not …’

  Was Marilyn imagining the castigation in Dr Ghoshal’s dry tone? Probably. Since learning that Carolynn Reynolds was unlikely to have been Zoe’s biological mother, his paranoia radar had been twitching wildly. Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you – he still wasn’t sure what Jessie Flynn had meant by that.

  ‘… I’d say odds of two to one for it being a woman, twenty to one for a small man.’

  ‘So almost certainly a woman.’

  ‘The child would have fallen unconscious within twenty to thirty seconds,’ Dr Ghoshal continued, as if Marilyn hadn’t spoken. ‘And death would have occurred within a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Would she have been able to scream?’ Marilyn asked. Not that it mattered. There had been no one on the beach to hear her.

  ‘No. Her death was caused by vascular obstruction, but her larynx was damaged and the hyoid bone in her neck broken, which is consistent with significant pressure being applied to her airways. That pressure would have made it very difficult for her to breathe, let alone to scream.’

  ‘How much knowledge would her killer have needed?’

  ‘The right episode of Silent Witness, not even that. Unfortunately, DI Simmons, it is not hard to kill a child via strangulation. Wrap your hands around their neck, apply a reasonable amount of pressure, and there you have it.’

  Marilyn had sensed a change in Dr Ghoshal’s tone as their conversation progressed, a change that he would venture to say sounded alarmingly like emotion, and he remembered the sombre tableau around the dissecting table on which the little girl’s body had lain. Despite a significant weight of evidence to the contrary, there was a beating heart somewhere inside that hypothermic hide of Dr Ghoshal’s.

  81

  Jessie inched the key into the lock and eased open her front door, making no sound. Stepping over the threshold, she stopped, the door open behind her, caught between the silent wall of darkness in front and the whispering wall of darkness behind her in the lane. Stupid. Nothing to be frightened of here. This was her cottage, her place of refuge, and it felt empty, just as Ahmose’s had. There was doubtless a reasonable explanation as to why Ahmose hadn’t been home. Perhaps Callan had taken him out for dinner. Ahmose didn’t have a mobile and though she had called Callan’s twice on the drive up here, and again a few minutes ago when she’d parked outside, it had gone to voicemail each time. She wasn’t Ahmose’s keeper, or Callan’s, despite the leaden secret growing in her tummy.

  Her practised fingers found the sitting room light switch and flicked it on.

  The room looked as she had left it, a shrine to her OCD. Closing the front door softly, shivering slightly at the blast of cool air the movement forced into the room with her, she slipped off her sandals and arranged them on the shoe rack, touching her flat hand to the heels to level them – once, twice, three times. She stopped and felt the electric suit surge. She counted on in her head, tapping flat hands to the shoes’ heels until she reached seven, lucky seven, glancing up to survey the room as she performed the ritual to ensure she was still alone. Of course I am. But some lingering sense of nervousness made her check anyway.

  As she padded barefoot across the sitting room carpet to the kitchen, her gaze was snagged by Jamie’s photograph on the mantelpiece. She stopped frozen to the spot in the middle of the room, her breath trapped in her throat.

  The frame had been moved, just a fraction – she saw that immediately. The only thing on display, she always centred it exactly in the middle of the mantelpiece, equidistant from either end and parallel, to the millimetre, with the wall behind. Both Callan and Ahmose knew her sensibilities regarding Jamie and they never touched it.

  As she moved closer, the silence surrounding her absolute but for her stressed breath hosing the air, the overhead light picked out a smudge on the glass.

  A fingerprint. Too small to be that of a man.

  The only person she trusts is you, Dr Flynn. So where do you live?

  82

  ‘There was no trace evidence of poison, illegal or prescription drugs or other toxins in Jodie Trigg’s stomach contents,’ Dr Ghoshal continued. ‘So she was not sedated prior to being murdered and wasn’t under the influence of alcohol. Neither did I find any prescription drugs, alcohol or other toxins in her blood, and there were no needle marks on her skin, so she wasn’t a regular drug user or a drinker.’
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  ‘She was nine.’

  ‘Nine-year-olds drink and take drugs, DI Simmons.’

  He was right, Marilyn reluctantly conceded, ignoring the condescending tone. He had seen enough of it when he’d worked in Brighton as a young detective: kids hanging out on the beach, mainlining fortified wine or cheap cider, sniffing glue and popping Es. The same, albeit on a significantly smaller, milder scale, in Bracklesham and Selsey. But from what he had learnt, Jodie Trigg wasn’t that kind of child. The only accelerated development she showed was an overly mature sense of responsibility, due to her situation.

  ‘We found partially digested sausage, potatoes, carrot, peas and an apple in her stomach. Lunch, given the time of death. I don’t think she had any breakfast on the day she was murdered.’ That hint of emotion again in Ghoshal’s voice.

  ‘OK. Thanks for all that, Dr Ghoshal,’ Marilyn said, trying to quell the disappointment in his own voice.

  Everything the pathologist had said so far was basically tick-box, nothing there that would lead him to a killer. The only significant information, as far as he was concerned, was the confirmation that Jodie Trigg, and hence Zoe before her, had been murdered by a woman – a blonde woman, if Workman and Cara’s kite-surfing millionaire’s long-distance, high-speed vision was accurate.

  Not enough.

  ‘In addition to the partially digested food, there was also a piece of masticated chewing gum in the deceased’s stomach,’ Dr Ghoshal continued.

  ‘Schools often have tuck shops.’

  ‘Indeed they do, DI Simmons. But I doubt that a school tuck shop would be selling this kind of gum. This one is interesting …’

  83

  A sudden shiver ran down Jessie’s spine, a strong sense that she was no longer alone. She spun around, her eyes finding both doorways into the sitting room, the front door and the kitchen door snapping from them to the bottom of the stairs, to the spaces where someone small could crouch and hide – behind the sofas, under the coffee table – there weren’t many in her Spartan sitting room, her brain knowing almost before she’d finished checking that her sitting room, so familiar to her, was empty. Knowing that she was definitely alone in here.

  She breathed out, sucked a long draught of air into her lungs, willing herself to relax. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Roger’s taunt; Ahmose’s absence; the fingerprint on Jamie’s photograph, which could have been hers but she was sure not. Too much had been odd.

  Soundlessly, she moved to the bottom of the stairway, and looked up. A light shone from her bedroom, so faint that she hadn’t noticed it from elsewhere in the sitting room. Her bedside table lamp, perhaps, or the light in her en-suite bathroom?

  And now that she was standing here, she could hear a barely audible rumbling. Low and complaining. The wind? No, because the noise sounded as if it was coming, not from outside, but closer, from within her cottage, within this room. But who or what, and from where?

  ‘Ahmose.’ Her voice, barely there, was threaded with fear and she hated herself for it.

  Moaning? Now that she really listened, it sounded as if someone, close by, was moaning. Her gaze found the door to the understairs cupboard.

  ‘Ahmose? Is that you?’

  No, of course it couldn’t be, not in that tiny space. As she moved towards the cupboard, her heart was slamming so hard in her chest that she felt as if it would punch its way out of her ribcage.

  ‘Jessie.’

  Jesus.

  She spun around. Carolynn was standing at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I wondered when you’d come,’ she said, smiling.

  84

  ‘All chewing gums consist of a gum base, humectant—’

  ‘Humectant?’

  ‘Moisture retainer,’ Dr Ghoshal said. ‘They also contain flavouring, such as mint oils, sweeteners – either natural or synthetic, depending on the brand.’

  ‘And this gum?’

  ‘Natural. A good quality, if any gum could be called good quality—’

  ‘So what does that tell us?’ Marilyn cut in.

  ‘Let me finish, DI Simmons. Let me finish.’

  Marilyn bit down on his impatience. He had learnt, over many years, that Dr Ghoshal couldn’t be rushed, but at times like this, that knowledge didn’t make dealing with the reality any easier.

  ‘It is a myth that chewing gum takes seven years to move through a person’s intestine and be expelled, but obviously some of the ingredients, such as mint oils, or softeners like vegetable oil or glycerine are very easily digested and quickly excreted, while others – like the gum base, which is usually made from natural or synthetic polymers – can remain in the stomach for an extended period of time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘How long is a piece of string, DI Simmons?’

  Christ. Marilyn felt his will to live ebbing away.

  ‘Each manufacturer has its own recipe for the gum base, with the aim of achieving the perfect degree of elasticity—’

  ‘How does this help me, Dr Ghoshal?’ Marilyn cut in again, his tone firm. He rubbed a hand across the base of his neck, vainly trying to massage away the stress that had lodged itself in his shoulders while he waited for Dr Ghoshal’s measured reply.

  ‘The gum that Jodie had in her stomach also had traces of the following: Helianthemum nummularium, Clematis vitalba, Impatiens glandulifera, Prunus cerasifera and Ornithogalum umbellatum. Do those names ring any bells, DI Simmons?’

  85

  ‘Carolynn. I … I’ve been looking for you.’ Though Jessie fought to keep her voice even, she sounded a lot like Carolynn when she’d masqueraded as ‘Laura’, adopting the phony sing-song jollity of a game-show host.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind that I came to your cottage without asking you, but friends don’t usually mind, do they?’ Carolynn’s voice, in contrast, was one that Jessie had never heard before: calm, measured, confident.

  She met Carolynn’s smile with one of her own, a rictus smile that she knew must look twisted and horrible.

  ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Of course I don’t mind.’

  ‘I love your cottage.’ Carolynn’s gaze moved admiringly around the room, a frown flitting across her face as it passed over Jamie’s photograph. Was the frown driven by the fact that the photograph was of a child, Jessie wondered, or because that dirty smear of chocolate ice cream around Jamie’s mouth contrasted so starkly with the spotless room surrounding it? Or both, perhaps?

  ‘It’s so chic and calming,’ Carolynn continued, her gaze moving back to Jessie’s, no issue with holding eye contact now. ‘Exactly how I imagined it would be.’

  She looked different too; cool and stylish, entirely at home in this environment. She was wearing make-up, Jessie realized, lots of it, expertly applied: a smooth layer of foundation, blusher highlighting her jutting cheekbones, thick black mascara accentuating her lashes, and blue eyeshadow that highlighted the deep brown of her eyes and matched the dress she was wearing. It took Jessie a second longer to realize that the dress was hers. The sky-blue silk dress that Callan had bought her for her last birthday. She had worn it to dinner that evening, without underwear, to tease him. They had wandered into the garden of the hotel after dinner, sat on a chair on the patio and taken a laughing selfie, before walking deeper into the garden and making love on the dark lawn.

  Get it off, she wanted to scream.

  ‘You look amazing, Carolynn,’ she murmured.

  ‘Thank you.’ Carolynn laughed, a tinkling, carefree sound. ‘It’s lovely to wear clothes that aren’t made from lycra for a change.’ Tilting her head, she gave Jessie an odd little smile. ‘It’s yours. Didn’t you recognize it?’

  ‘Wow. No, I didn’t. It never looks that good when I wear it.’ The words felt bitter on her tongue.

  In the moment of silence that followed, Jessie heard another sound, that barely audible moaning again. Carolynn didn’t react, didn’t seem to have heard. Had she imagined it? She flinched
as Carolynn’s chill fingers found her arm and squeezed, just lightly, tensed every muscle to stop herself from snatching her arm away.

  ‘How about some wine?’ Carolynn asked.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Wine, Jessie.’ Carolynn cocked an eyebrow theatrically. ‘I found a bottle in one of your cupboards and put it in the fridge. Sauvignon. It’s your favourite, isn’t it?’

  Jessie nodded dully.

  ‘See, I am a good friend because I remembered. I remembered you saying.’

  86

  ‘Well, Dr Ghoshal, if I wasn’t thinking that gum in the stomach of a dead child would be a very odd place to find such a thing, I’d say that the bell those names are ringing is flower-related,’ Marilyn said.

  A moment of silence. ‘And you’d be right, DI Simmons. Flowers is right.’ Dr Ghoshal sounded unaccountably impressed. ‘Flower essences, to be precise.’

  ‘But why the hell would Jodie Trigg have gum in her stomach that contained flower essences?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Dr Bach, DI Simmons?’

  Marilyn racked his brains. ‘I can’t say that I have, Dr Ghoshal.’

  The impressed note had vanished from Dr Ghoshal’s voice, replaced by a tone of condescension. Business as usual. ‘Doctor Bach was a homeopath and bacteriologist who developed a range of remedies – alternative medicine, if you like – inspired by homeopathy. The remedies were derived from flowers and evidently Dr Bach let his intuition guide him as to which flowers had healing powers and which did not. He found that when he treated the personalities and feelings of his patients with his flower-based remedies, their physical distress would be alleviated naturally as the healing power in their bodies was unlocked and allowed to work.’

  Sounds like a quack version of Jessie Flynn, Marilyn thought. ‘That all sounds like gobbledegook to me, Dr Ghoshal. What relevance does it have to my case?’

  ‘Rescue Remedy,’ Dr Ghoshal said simply. ‘It’s the most famous of the Bach remedies, made up of five flower essences, including—’