Two Little Girls

by Kate Medina

  She was tired, sad and lonely, and she’d had enough. Her body felt broken. Her brain felt broken. Her brain had felt broken for a long time now. Perhaps it had broken when she had felt that first seagull writhing in her hands, fighting vainly for its life. Perhaps it had been broken before that. Whatever, whenever, she knew that there was no chance it could ever be fixed. Even Jessie Flynn hadn’t been able to fix it, make her normal, content with her lot, hadn’t been able to scratch the surface.

  She had never done what they had accused her of – she wasn’t the one who’d killed Zoe or Jodie – but she had done enough to bring this fate upon her. She had stolen a child from her mother purely because she had wanted her. She had beaten the old man and dumped his limp body in Jessie’s understairs cupboard. She didn’t care about them, but she did care about Jessie. Perhaps Jessie was dead; she hadn’t stayed to check, hadn’t wanted to know. Her baby, though, was certainly dead. She hadn’t known that Jessie was pregnant until she saw the blood. Would she have behaved differently if she’d known? No, probably not. Her behaviour, the attack, had been fuelled by intense anger and despair that she had been betrayed yet again by a so-called friend. She hadn’t been able to control herself.

  She couldn’t cope with another trial, not after what she’d been through before, couldn’t cope with spending years imprisoned. She had grown up in a prison, and the only thing she had ever wanted was to be free, but now she realized that freedom was a myth. No one was ever truly free.

  Finding a pad in the bedside-table drawer, she wrote an apologetic note. She wasn’t sure if Jessie would ever get to read it, but it felt right to write it anyway, as if she was doing the right thing for once.

  In the bathroom, she stood in front of the huge wall-length mirror and stripped off the sky-blue dress, splattered in its owner’s blood, dropped it in the bath so that she wouldn’t dirty the spotless tiled floor or the fluffy white bath mat.

  Purity, saintliness.

  She was so thin that she fancied for a moment she could see the neon bathroom lights shining through her translucent skin. It was a ridiculous sight. She was ridiculous. Reaching for the light switch, she extinguished the lights so that she could no longer see herself. In the darkness, she showered and shaved her armpits and legs, sliding her fingers between her thighs to feel for the pubic hairs sprouting at the tops of her legs, shaving them off. She didn’t want the pathologist to think that she was dirty, disgusting, that she had let herself go.

  Walking back into the bedroom, she extinguished the lights there also. The moon lit the room milky white and for a moment she stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the panorama of the sky above the darkened fields, the stars appearing to ramble away for miles above her head. Not big-sky country, but almost.

  She felt completely calm now. She lay down on the bed, Jessie Flynn’s bed. She could smell Jessie’s scent on the pillow, but perhaps she was only imagining it. It was as close as she would ever get to her now, but still it made her happy.

  Take one of your pills, Carolynn.

  She emptied the bottle of pills into her palm and fed them into her mouth, one after the other, taking sips of water between so that they slid down smoothly. Though she had put off this moment as many times as she had imagined it, now the time had come, she felt calm, relieved to be finally getting on with it, to be done with life.

  Sliding under the covers, Carolynn closed her eyes ready for the long sleep.

  94

  Shrugging a coat carefully over her broken arm, sliding her feet into her ballet pumps, Jessie let herself out of her hospital room, thankful that understaffing meant the nurses at the station were heads down, too busy to notice one of their patients intent on going AWOL.

  Due to the extensive bruising to her abdomen and the cramps in her stomach, she couldn’t straighten properly, had to hobble down the corridor in shuffling steps, stopping every twenty metres to lean against the wall and catch her breath. It would take her forever to get downstairs and find a taxi to take her to Guildford Cemetery, but she had all morning. She had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.

  When she reached the cemetery, she followed the tarmac path that led to the chapel and stood on its stone steps, looking out over the expanse of lichen covered graves, her gaze snagged here and there by bright pops of colour – flowers, toys – thinking of Zoe and Jodie, and of her little brother Jamie. Three children who had lost their lives far too soon. She had wanted to come to a graveyard to pay her respects, but now that she was here, she realized that she’d made a mistake. She hadn’t known either little girl. They weren’t her children, her relatives, and they weren’t her fight any more.

  And Jamie – she carried him everywhere with her in the torn, ragged section of her heart. She hadn’t needed to come here to think of him, to mourn his death.

  Turning away, she pulled the pregnancy test from her coat pocket. She hadn’t looked at it since that day on the beach, a week ago now, but it had followed her to hospital, tucked in the bottom of her handbag. The cross was still there. A cross for positive. The only tangible sign, now, that her baby had ever existed.

  Finding a shady spot under a tree, across the tarmac path from the children’s graves, she crouched and dug a hole with her fingers, relishing the feel of the soil grating against her fingertips and the earthy smell of churned grass and soil after the antiseptic smell of the hospital. Dropping the pregnancy test into the hole that she had dug, she smoothed the earth back over it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, feeling tears welling in her eyes and, for once, letting them come. It was fine to cry in a graveyard. Everyone cried in graveyards.

  Jessie met Marilyn in the coffee shop in the hospital’s foyer, later that afternoon. She had expected him to look elated; Carolynn Reynolds, his nemesis of two years, banished, even if she had been innocent of both murders. But he just looked exhausted. Emotionally and physically wrung out. He grimaced when he saw her hobbling across the foyer to meet him.

  ‘Jesus Christ, you make a corpse look the picture of health.’

  Lowering herself slowly into the chair that he had pulled out for her, she smiled up at him. ‘Thank you for your kind words, DI Simmons.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Large latte with full-fat milk and a muffin, please. Double chocolate. I need the energy. The two-hundred-metre marathon sprint from my hospital room to here has wiped me out.’

  When he had returned with the coffees and her muffin and sat down opposite, Jessie said, ‘You don’t look happy, Marilyn.’

  He hunched his shoulders. ‘Do I ever look happy?

  ‘Occasionally. Sometimes. When you’re feeling smug.’

  He didn’t smile, not even a forced one to play along.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Another irritable shrug. ‘It irks me that Carolynn caused all this – the death of those two little girls – by taking a baby away from its mother, so coldheartedly, and yet she escaped. Escaped the fallout.’

  ‘I don’t think that death can really be classified as escaping, Marilyn.’

  ‘Still. She chose. She got to choose, to call the shots – again.’

  ‘The trial, the fallout, the destruction of the picture-perfect life that she had constructed was the greatest punishment for her. It’s not as if she got off scot-free. Far from it.’

  Marilyn nodded. He didn’t look convinced. ‘I wanted to look her in the eye.’

  ‘I looked her in the eye, Marilyn. And whatever you believe you would have seen – contrition, shame, regret – you wouldn’t have seen any of it. Nothing stuck to her conscience, not truly. You would have felt even more angry and frustrated than you do now.’

  He sighed. ‘Perhaps.’

  Jessie touched his arm, sensed him flinch at the unaccustomed physical contact.

  ‘I’m sorry – about Ruby,’ she said gently. More sorrys.

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. She’s a double murderer and she’ll get what’s coming to her
. End of.’

  ‘She won’t get justice though, will she?’ Jessie murmured. ‘Because justice doesn’t exist for people like Ruby.’

  For the first time since she had known him, Marilyn wouldn’t meet her gaze. His odd mismatched eyes were fixed on the hospital entrance, as if he was suddenly fascinated by the motley stream of humanity shuffling in through its doors. Something about that woman, Ruby, had clawed its way deep under his skin.

  ‘Will you tell Ruby that Zoe was her daughter?’ Jessie asked.

  Eyes still fixed on the doorway, Marilyn gave an unequivocally firm nod.

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s my duty to tell her.’

  ‘She won’t take it well.’

  Her words felt like a ridiculous understatement, but she could sense that Marilyn didn’t need his nose rubbing in the gravity of the task ahead of him. Jessie couldn’t begin to imagine how Ruby would feel when she found out. She had lost a three-month-old foetus, a life that never was, the size of a bean, and she still thought about him … her … it … constantly. It and Jamie. Two little ghosts now, one for each shoulder. She and Marilyn had a lot more in common than she liked to admit.

  95

  In the five days that Jessie had been in Royal Surrey County Hospital, Callan had erased every trace of Carolynn’s visit from her cottage. Carolynn had haunted her fitful, drug-fuelled dreams while she’d been in hospital and she had woken many times, shaking, drenched in sweat, but now that she was home, the woman could have been just a figment of her imagination. She glanced over to the mantelpiece, to Jamie’s photograph. Aligned to the millimetre, wiped clean of the smudged fingerprint – he had remembered to do that too – knowing that her OCD would be in hypersensitive mode when she got home, alert to every possible trigger.

  Ahmose was still in hospital, would be for a couple of weeks more, recovering from the beating that Carolynn had given him with Jessie’s table lamp. Callan had spent much of the past five days flitting between Jessie’s hospital room and Ahmose’s. He had promised to tend to Ahmose’s garden until he was home, prepare it for an autumn that would soon be closing in around them.

  A couple of days’ stubble shaded Callan’s jaw, and his sandy-blond hair curled over his collar, longer than army regulation. He’d need to get it cut before Monday, before he went back to work. He put Jessie’s overnight bag at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Coffee?’

  She nodded. ‘I’d love one.’

  Though he had spent hours sitting by her bedside in hospital, they hadn’t talked about anything substantive, just exchanged pleasantries. They’d talked about her mother and Richard’s wedding, which they’d postponed until Jessie was well enough to attend, discussed the mundanities of Callan’s job, talked about Marilyn and how he was tying up the loose ends of the Zoe Reynolds and Jodie Trigg murder cases. Now that they were home, the atmosphere between them was tense, polite, akin to new housemates. Her fault, because of the way she had treated him during the case and how she had acted in the five months since she’d been invalided out of the army, like an explosive device that needed kid-glove handling.

  She followed him into the kitchen, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze directly, his amber eyes flitting around the room as if he was still checking that it would satisfy her extreme sense of order, stave off her OCD.

  ‘I’m sorry, Callan,’ she said simply, moving over to the crockery cupboard to extract two cups.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s not fine. I was obnoxious. A complete pain in the arse.’

  The Princess wine glass was missing from her collection of glasses on the shelf above the mugs, she noticed. She looked across and he gave a small shrug. Another thing that Carolynn had defiled, banished. He’d ticked every box.

  ‘You were tied up in the case,’ he said.

  ‘“Obsessed” is the word I think you’re looking for.’

  The ghost of a smile crossed his face. ‘You do like your obsessions.’

  ‘Yes, it’s one of my particularly unattractive qualities.’ Setting two cups on the sideboard, she turned to face him. ‘I should have listened to you and not trusted Carolynn.’

  ‘You were right about her, though. She didn’t murder her daughter.’

  ‘No,’ Jessie murmured. ‘She didn’t. But she was still box-of-frogs crazy, and I didn’t see it.’

  Her gaze found the scar from the bullet wound on his temple, the stitched skin like the brown petals of a dead rose. She wanted to reach her arm out, stroke her fingers across it, down his cheek, bury her face in the crook of his neck, but the three metres of kitchen floor between them felt Grand Canyon wide.

  He didn’t know about the baby. That she had lost his baby because of her own stupidity, because she wouldn’t listen to the father of that baby. Or Marilyn. Because she was the psychologist and when it came to understanding people, she knew best. Except that in this case – Carolynn’s case – she hadn’t. She had planned to tell him, to apologize, take whatever fallout came, but now that she was home alone with him, she knew that she wouldn’t. She realized, meeting his flitting amber eyes, how much she had missed him, how much she loved him. She would never forgive herself if she screwed up this relationship. What upside was there in sharing with him that she had been pregnant?

  None. There was none.

  Acknowledgements

  It is always hard to know where to start with acknowledgements as the list of people who have helped me, both with this novel and along the way, is long and humbling.

  Thanks, as always, to my amazing agent, Will Francis, who has been incredibly supportive throughout my writing career and to the rest of the wonderful team at Janklow and Nesbit (UK).

  I am forever indebted to Julia Wisdom, my Publisher at HarperCollins for being such a great champion for the Dr Jessie Flynn Crime Thriller Series. Thank you to Finn Cotton, my fantastic Assistant Editor, for his enthusiasm and conviction, Hannah Gamon and Louis Patel, Felicity Denham, Anne O’Brien who has an unrivalled eye for detail, and the rest of the fabulous team at HarperCollins. It is a privilege to work with you all.

  Thank you to my great friend Mel Fallowfield, for all your support for Dr Jessie Flynn and for not killing me (there is still time). I also wanted to mention Bettina and Sean, Laura Deegan (so lovely to be back in touch), Tanya Carter and Deya Thompson, Galyna for being amazing, Lilia Trigg, Kathleen McInerney, Paul and Katie Creffield for your wonderful friendship and your police and CSI knowledge, and my godson, Will. Huge thanks also to Carolynn and Roger Reynolds for not being horrified!

  Thanks also to the Killer Women for being a hugely supportive and fun writing community to be part of.

  Love always to my family, Pamela, Maggie, Daan, Charlie, William, Jo, Anthony, Isabel, Anna, Alexander, my late father, Derek, and Oddie the dog.

  Most of all, thank you to the readers who pick up Two Little Girls – enjoy. You make writing worthwhile.

  If you’re enjoyed Two Little Girls, try the first novel in the Jessie Flynn series!

  You can click here to buy your copy

  About the Author

  Kate Medina has always been fascinated by the ‘whys’ of human behaviour, an interest that drove her to study Psychology at university and later to start a crime series featuring clinical psychologist Dr Jessie Flynn. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and her debut novel White Crocodile received widespread critical acclaim, as did Fire Damage and Scared to Death, the first two books in the Jessie Flynn series.

  Before turning to writing full time, Kate spent five years in the Territorial Army and has lectured at the London Business School and the London School of Economics. She lives in London with her husband and three children.

  www.katemedina.com

  @KateTMedina

  /KateMedinaAuthor

  Also by Kate Medina

  The Jessie Flynn series

  Fire Damage

  Scared to Death

  Standalone novels

>   White Crocodile

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