Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperColl‌insPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperColl‌insPublishers 2018

Copyright © Kate Medina 2018

Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperColl‌insPublishers 2018Cover photographs © Idiko Neer/Trevillion Images (shoes in sand); Joana Kruse/Arcangel Images (sea foam). Back cover © Rachel Ennis/Arcangel Images (girl paddling)

Kate Medina asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © MAY 2017

ISBN: 9780008214029

Version: 2020-05-21

Dedication

For Isabel and Anna, my two little girls

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Acknowledgements

Read on for an exclusive early sneak peak at the latest thriller from Kate Medina, coming September 2020 …

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Kate Medina

About the Publisher

1

Though the summer holidays had ended for most, there were still a few children playing on the sand, their parents – holiday-makers, she could tell – setting out windbreaks and unpacking the colourful detritus of a family morning at the beach. Others, local mothers in jeans and T-shirts, walked barefoot with friends and dogs, keeping a roving eye on their offspring.

The sun was shining, but the air felt laden with the threat of rain and Carolynn could make out the dark trace of a sea storm hovering to the south of the Isle of Wight, misting the horizon from view. Would it rain or would the sun win out, she wondered. Would the storm come in to shore or blow out to the English Channel? Who knew; the weather by the sea, like life, so unpredictable.

Raising a hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight knifing through the clouds, she watched three little girls in pastel swimming costumes throwing a tennis ball to each other, a small dog – one of those handbag dogs she’d never seen the point of – running, yapping between them.

It was a good sign that she had brought herself to West Wittering beach this morning when she knew that families with children would be here. Evidence of her growing strength, that she could stand to watch little girls playing, listen to their shouts and their laughter.

She was healing. Except for the nightmares.

On the edge of a carefully constructed calm, aware though that her heart was beating harder in her chest – but still softly enough to ignore, and she would ignore it, she could ignore it, she wouldn’t have another panic attack, not now – she slithered down from the dunes feeling the talcum-powder sand between her bare toes, the warmth that it had soaked up from the long summer. A ball streamed past her feet, followed, seconds later, by a little girl, the youngest of the three, nine years old or so from the look of her, just a year younger than Zoe had been. She bent to pick up the ball, flicked a sandy knot of hair from her face and smiled up at Carolynn as she walked back to her sisters. Carolynn watched her go, transfixed by the shape of her body in the pale pink swimsuit; still pudgy, no waist, puppy fat padding her arms and legs – just how she remembered Zoe’s limbs, a perfect dimple behind each elbow.

She realized suddenly that the little girl had stopped, was looking back over her shoulder, pale blue eyes under blonde brows, wrinkling with concern. Carolynn forced a quick smile, felt it flicker and fade. She dragged her gaze away from the girl. She wouldn’t want her to think that there was something wrong with her, that she was anything other than a mother out for a walk on the beach, just like the little girl’s own mother. That she was someone to be feared. A danger.

Pushing off against the wet sand, each footstep leaving a damp indent behind her, Carolynn walked on towards the sea. Ever since she was a girl herself, the outside, nature, had been her escape, her way of letting her mind float free. Over these past two years she had needed its uncomplicated help more than ever before. Today of all days, she needed it desperately.

A massive hulk appeared in her peripheral vision: a ship, loaded three storeys high with a coloured patchwork of rusting steel containers, grimly industrial and incongruously man-made against the backdrop of sky and sea and the seagulls swirling overhead.

Another memory, surfacing so violently that she caught her breath at its intensity. A good memory, though. Don’t shut it out. Standing at the top of the sand dunes with Zoe, two summers ago, looking out over the Solent and watching a huge container ship glide past on its way to unload at Southampton docks. Zoe had been awed by its sheer size, a floating multi-storey tower block that the law of physics said should just turn turtle, flip upside down and be swallowed by the sea, it was so ridiculously top-heavy. The questions bursting from her without a break, words mixed up, back to front in her excitement to ask everything.

Where does it come from? Where is it going to? What’s in all those big coloured blocks on the ship, Mummy? Why don’t they all topple off into the sea? How does the ship stay upright, Mummy? Mummy? Mummy? Mummy …

Carolynn’s gaze had found the writing on the side of the ship’s hull. China Line. All the ships that cut through the Solent seemed to be from China these days.

Toys, darling.

Toys?

Zoe’s brown eyes saucer-wide, terrified she might miss the answers if she blinked for even a millisecond.

The day had been changeable, much like today. Grey clouds skipping across the sun, but still warm enough to walk in T-shirt and jeans, a cool breeze blowing in from the sea, the sand warm under their bare feet, holding the summer’s heat. The last day of their long-weekend break.

‘Can we watch the ships next time we come here?’

Reaching for Zoe’s hand, feeling the spangles of sand on Zoe’s skin grate against hers, squeezing tight, so tight. ‘Of course we can, darling. If you’re good. But you must try very hard to be good.’

They had driven back to London that night, she remembered: Zoe fast asleep in the back seat, exhausted by the fresh air, a layer of sand coating her bare legs and arms and pooled around her on the seat, as if someone had sprinkled icing sugar through a sieve; Roger miles away as he stared through the windscreen, exasperated by the weight of Sunday traffic, his mind already fixing on tomorrow’s workday.

She shouldn’t have come to the beach today. It had been a stupid mistake.

Next time.

She might go for hours with the sense that she was finally getting to grips with her grief, and then suddenly she’d be visited by a memory, an image so intense that it would take her breath away. And even the good memories hurt so badly.

Next time.

There hadn’t been a next time.

She raised her hand to her mouth, pushing back a sob. How could anyone believe that I murdered my own daughter?

2

Jessie reached for the green cardboard file of loose papers on her desk, but her fingers refused to obey the command sent from her brain, and instead of gripping the file she felt it slide from her left hand, watched helplessly as a slow-motion waterfall of papers gushed to the floor and spread across the carpet.

Shit.

She sank to her knees, feeling like a disorganized schoolkid, ludicrous, unprofessional. How the hell was a client supposed to trust her judgement when she couldn’t even persuade her useless, Judas hand to grasp a simple file? The disability constantly there, goading her. She should have stapled the papers, but she didn’t like to. Liked to be able to spread her patients’ – ‘clients’, the majority of them were called now, she reminded herself – files out on her desk, look at the pages all at once, her gaze skipping from the notes of one session to the notes of another, nothing in the human brain working in a linear fashion, so why should notes be laid out linearly, read sequentially? It made no sense.

‘Please, just sit down. I can get them myself.’ Trying to keep the edge from her voice.

‘I’m happy to help.’ The tone of the reply too bright, too jolly for such a benign statement. Everything that Laura said tinted with that Technicolor tone.

Even down here on the floor together, scrabbling to collect Jessie’s spilled papers, Laura wouldn’t meet her eye. Five sessions in and Laura had never looked her directly in the eye, not once, not even fleetingly. She wore a sober grey skirt suit and cream pussy-bow blouse, work clothes, from a life before her daughter’s accident, but Jessie noticed a fine layer of sand, like fairy dust, coating her bare feet in the sensible, low-heeled black court shoes. She had been to the beach before she came here. Outside. Nature. Jessie wouldn’t know until they started talking whether that was a good or a bad sign. Laura had told her in that first session, five weeks ago, that nature – immersing herself in nature, walking, or more often running now – since her life had changed in that one fleeting moment two years ago, was the only way she could force her mind to float free. To give up its obsessive hamster-wheel motion, if only temporarily.

Two years today, wasn’t it? September seventh? Jessie glanced down at the scattered pages, trying to find the notes from Laura’s first session to check, knowing, as she looked, that looking was unnecessary, the date cast in her memory. Seven, randomly, her favourite number. When she was a child, she used to change her favourite number every year on her birthday to match her age. At the age of seven, she had been old enough to understand that a favourite number wasn’t favourite if it changed annually, and so seven stuck. It was only when she was older that she realized she’d happened upon ‘lucky 7’. Seven days of the week, seven colours of the rainbow, seven notes on a musical scale, seven seas and seven continents.

Seven for Laura, a number forever wedded with tragedy. The day that her daughter, spotting her best friend across the road, had pulled her hand from Laura’s and been hit by a courier’s van.

Laura held out the papers she’d collected.

‘Thank you,’ Jessie said, taking them.

They rose. Clutching the file to her chest with her left arm, Jessie sat down in one of the two leather bucket chairs that she used for her sessions. She had positioned the chairs in front of the window, as the bucket chairs in her old office at Bradley Court had been positioned. No discs in the carpet yet, from their feet, to knock her sense of order off-kilter if patients nudged them out of line, the office and her life outside the army too new for such well-worn, comfortable grooves. She glanced over to the window, her gaze still trained to expect the wide-open view of lawns sweeping down to the lake, saw instead a brick Georgian terrace. Her ears, tuned to birdsong, heard the hum of traffic. The architecture was beautiful, the road narrow, quiet, but this new environment was grating all the same. Grating, Jessie admitted to herself in her more honest moments, purely because it wasn’t Bradley Court. Wasn’t her old life. A life that she hadn’t voluntarily surrendered.

She looked down at her left hand. The scar across her palm from the knife attack was still a gnarled, angry purple. Two finer, paler tracks ran perpendicular, where the surgeon had peeled back her skin to repair the severed tendons, a row of pale spots either side of the main scar where he had sewn her palm back together, each stitch identical in length and equidistant, a triumph of pedanticism, the best job that could be done, given the severity of damage to her extensor tendons, he had assured her. It still felt as if it belonged to someone else – the grotesque hand of a mannequin. Occasionally it obeyed her; more often it didn’t.

She sensed Laura watching her, looked up quickly to try to catch her eye, saw her gaze flash away.

‘We can sit at the desk, if it’s easier,’ Laura murmured.

Jessie shook her head. The barrier of the desk was too formal, too divisive for such a tense, skittish patient. ‘How was the beach?’ she asked.

‘Huh?’ Laura’s eyes, fixed resolutely on a point just to the left of Jessie’s, on a blank spot of wall, Jessie knew without needing to look, widened.

‘Sand. Your feet.’

Laura glanced down. ‘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.’

Jessie returned the smile, watching Laura’s expression, listening to the nuances in her voice. The forced jollity, like a game-show host worried for her job, always, irrespective of the subject matter.

‘So how was it?’ she prompted.

‘What?’

‘The beach?’

Laura took a moment, and Jessie noticed the apple in her throat rising and falling with the silence, as if the answer was sticking in her craw.

‘Fine … good.’

Using the oldest trick in the book, Jessie acknowledged her words with a brief nod, but remained silent. Dipping her gaze to Laura’s file, she tapped her fingers along the papers’ edges, smoothed her fingertips around the corners, perfectly aligning each sheet with the others and the edge of the file.

Laura’s voice pulled her back. ‘There were … there were children there. Girls. Little girls. Three, playing with a ball.’ Laura let out a high-pitched, nervous bark. ‘And one of those dreadful little dogs. The type that Paris Hilton carts around in a handbag.’

‘How did you feel?’ Jessie asked gently.

The apple bobbing, sticking.

‘Fine … OK.’

Jessie had learned over the five sessions not to probe too actively. The woman in front of her was tiny, blonde hair worn up in a chignon and liquid brown gazelle’s eyes made huge by the persistent dark circles under them, roving, watching – always watching, taking everything in, but never engaging. They reminded her of Callan’s eyes the first time she had met him, recently back from Afghanistan, the Taliban bullet lodged in his brain. The wary eyes of someone for whom the prospect of danger is a constant.

Laura’s file said forty-one, but she looked at least five years older than that, late, rather than early forties, every bit of the pain she had lived through etched into the lines on her soft-skinned, pale oval face.

‘The girls were, uh, sweet. They were sweet. One ran past me.’ Laura’s skeleton hand moved to cup her elbow. ‘She had dimples, here. Puppy fat—’ She broke off, the internal tension the words had created in her palpable.

‘The storm held off?’ Jessie asked, changing the subject to relieve the pressure.

‘It went out to sea. It was nice. Not hot, but warm, sunny.’

Her gaze moved from the blank wall to Jessie’s scarred left hand. It was clear from her questioning look that she wanted to know how the scars came to be there, but Jessie wasn’t willing to share personal information with a patient. She’d had colleagues who’d been burnt in the past, letting a patient cross the line from professional to personal. However much she sympathized with Laura and felt a shared history in the traumatic loss of a loved one far too young, she had no intention of making that mistake herself.

‘I have scars too.’ Laura gave a tentative smile. ‘And not just psychological ones.’ Slipping off one of her court shoes, she showed Jessie the pale lines of ancient scars running between each of her toes. ‘I was born with webbed feet, like a seagull. Perhaps that’s why I like the sea.’

They both laughed, nervous half-laughs, grateful for the opportunity to break the tension, if only for a moment. For both of them the subject – scars, psychological scars – was minefield sensitive.

‘Will it ever stop?’ Laura croaked.

What could she say? No. No, it will never stop. Your dead daughter will be the first thing you think about the second you wake. Or perhaps, if you’re lucky, the second after that. During that first second, still caught by semi-consciousness, you may imagine that she is alive, asleep under her unicorn duvet cover, clutching her favourite teddy, blonde hair spread across the pillow. But you’ll only be spared for that first second. Then the pain will hit you, hit you like a freight train and keep pace with you throughout your waking hours. This is now your life. Over time, a long time, it will lessen. One day you’ll realize that instead of thinking about her every minute, you haven’t thought of her for a whole hour. Then a day. But will it stop? No, it will never stop. Jamie never stopped, even for me, his sister. And for my mother? No, never.

‘It will fade,’ she said lamely.

Laura’s fingers had found the buckle of the narrow black patent leather belt cinching her skirt at the waist, the only thing preventing it from skidding down over her non-existent hips, the skirt having been designed for a figure ten kilos heavier.

‘It has been two years.’

‘I know.’

‘September seventh. It’s supposed to be the luckiest number in the world, isn’t it? Seven?’

Seven dwarves for Snow White, seven brides for seven brothers, Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, Sinbad the Sailor’s seven voyages, James Bond, 007.

Laura’s eyes grazed around Jessie’s consulting room, minute changes of expression flitting across her face as she absorbed the salient details: no clutter, no mess, spotlessly clean, the single vase of flowers – white tulips, Jessie’s favourite – clean and geometric, arranged so that each stem was equidistant from the next. The sunlight cutting in through the window lit tears in those liquid gazelle eyes, Jessie noticed, as her gaze flitted past.

‘Except that the bible doesn’t agree,’ Laura said.

Seven deadly sins.

‘It was my fault.’

Jessie shook her head. ‘No. We’ve talked through this, Laura.’ Countless times. And they would, she knew, countless more. ‘It was an accident, plain and simple. An accident with horrible consequences that you would have given everything to be able to prevent, but still an accident.’

‘That’s a mother’s job, isn’t it, though? To protect her child from harm. That above anything else, the one and only vital job. You can fail at all the others, but not that one. Not that one.’ Laura rubbed her hands over her eyes, smearing the welling tears across her cheeks. ‘I succeeded at everything else. All the stuff that I thought was so bloody important back then. Writing her name before she’d even started in Reception, reading level 4 Biff and Chip books by the Christmas holidays, number bonds to ten by Easter, even though learning was such a struggle for her. But it wasn’t important, was it? That was all a big fat lie.’ Her face twisted with anguish. ‘And the one thing, the only thing, the only critical job was the one I failed at. The job of keeping her alive.’

Jessie had faced her fair share of grief, her own and other people’s, patients’, in bland consulting rooms like this one, but the grief pulsing from this woman felt different. Like the grief she had felt from her own mother when her little brother, Jamie, had committed suicide. Grief and guilt. The overwhelming emotion – guilt. And something else too, something she couldn’t put her finger on. Why wouldn’t Laura look her in the eye, even momentarily? Still?

‘Laura.’

She nodded. She looked worse than the last time Jessie had seen her, just a week ago. Exhausted, thinner, if that was possible in such a short time, the black rings under her eyes so dark, they looked as if they had been charcoaled on. She reminded Jessie of a pencil sketch: there, but almost not.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Laura. None of it was your fault.’

3

The woman screwed her eyes up against the rain and the wind that drove it horizontally into her face and lashed the wet dregs of her blonde hair around her cheeks. She was alone on the beach, and that was how she liked it.

The gunmetal sea lapping the sand was deserted also; certainly no pleasure boats out this afternoon, but no ships either that she could see, visibility misted to a few hundred metres offshore, the primary colours of the rides at Hayling Island funfair across the mouth of the harbour resembling washed watercolour strokes on grey paper.

Weather like this caused holiday-makers to bolt for shelter. Duck into the cafés and restaurants on Shore Road, their steaming waterproofs draped on the backs of chairs while they had tea and cake; or potter around the pound shops in East Wittering village, throwing a fiver at their kids’ boredom until the rain stopped or the shops closed, whichever happened first. There were too many people during the summer months, which was both a curse and a bonus for her. She watched them with suspicion and they watched her with more, used to seeing tanned, long-limbed girls in surfer T-shirts and board shorts at the beach, not the kind of woman they’d expect to see begging for coins around train stations in grotty town centres or rifling through the ‘past sell-by date’ bin in budget supermarkets.

She had mixed feelings now that the summer holidays were nearly over. She despised the tourists who arrogantly commandeered her beach with their hoards of possessions and their loudly advertised happiness. She hated them, but their presence occasionally brought her a windfall: things deliberately discarded, others left accidentally, having slipped from overflowing beach bags or dropped from baggy pockets. Items she could use, barter or sell. Days like this were good, rain following sun. She didn’t mind the miserable weather because it cloaked her in solitude. Solitude was comfortable to her – she knew nothing other than loneliness. There had been only a brief period in her life when she hadn’t been on her own, a wonderful, fleeting time that had changed everything.

The woman looked from the stormy horizon to the little girl lying in the dunes at her feet. The sand was white, the little girl’s skin whiter, as if she had been washed sparkling clean by the rain. The tinny tune of a washing powder advertisement from years ago, from when she had used to be parked in front of the television for hours on end as a girl herself, chimed in the woman’s dulled brain.

Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone.

She had wanted to be the girl in that advert. That perfect, soft focus blonde child playing in a meadow full of wild flowers. She had wanted, so desperately wanted, the crisp white broderie anglaise dress the little girl was wearing. But though she was blonde and fair-skinned, she had never owned a dress like that, never seen a field of grass, just the scrappy patches of dirt dotted around the tower blocks where she lived, where kids skidded their bikes and teenagers smoked and fucked. She had never seen a meadow, cows, sheep, horses; had never seen any animals aside from the pumped-up dogs dragged around on studded leather leads and the rats that scurried around the bins at night.

The eyes of the girl with the perfect white skin were open, staring fixedly up to the sky as if her gaze had been caught by one of the seagulls hovering above them on an updraught. They were cloudy green like the sea on a cold, clear day. Her hair was brown and curly, so dark against the sand and her own white skin that it looked as if her head had been caught in a halo of dirty seaweed.

Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone.

A doll lay next to the girl. A nasty plastic doll dressed in a cheap pink ballerina dress, with eyes that the woman knew would move if she lifted it. The doll’s eyes were green like the girl’s.

You’ve always been a quiet one, but I don’t know, it doesn’t seem to keep you any cleaner.

Shells ringed the child and the doll in the shape of a heart, a heart even whiter than the sand and the little girl’s washed white skin. It was so long since the woman had considered love, felt love, that the shape of the heart knifed, just for a second, into a part of her that she had long since shut and padlocked. She shook her head, trying to shake off the memory and the feelings the sight of the little girl and the perfect pale heart surrounding her had brought to the surface.

Extending her foot, she nudged her toe against one of the shells, knocking it out of kilter, against a second, third and fourth, kicking them out of line too. She smiled to herself, a small, satisfied smile. The heart was broken now and that was better. A broken heart reflected the life that she had lived. The life this little girl would doubtless have lived, had she lived. Real hearts were for television advertisements and soppy songs written by fools.

Bending down, she fingered the necklace around the girl’s neck. It was a silver locket; antique, from the look of it, engraved with two sets of footprints: those of an adult and, next to them, the smaller prints of a child. The silver was cold and her thumb pushed the wet from the engraved metal and left a dull print that was swallowed by raindrops the instant she pulled her thumb away. It would be worth something that, but she wasn’t going to take it. She had her reasons for not stooping to that. For not taking a necklace off a dead child. Beneath the necklace’s chain of silver coiled another, the thick dark chain of a bruise. Apart from the bruise, starkly black and purple against the soft white skin, the little girl looked untouched. Alabaster.

The woman stared down at the dead child and thought that she would feel something.

Sadness? Horror? Anger?

Or nothing? At least – nothing.

But what she felt was worse. It was a feeling that she recognized as satisfaction. Satisfaction that someone else would hurt the way she hurt every moment of every day. Cruel. When had she become so cruel as to enjoy someone else’s grief?

Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone. Though I cannot share your dreams, you are still my very own.

A small part of who she was – who she used to be – hated herself for the feeling. But that person was so far gone that she existed in another life, a life that had happened to someone else, and the tiny nugget of self-hatred was easy to ignore.

She looked down at the bruised tracks on the underside of her forearm, the soft skin there almost as white as the dead child’s, the needle marks dark as the snake of bruises coiled around the child’s neck. The woman had lived by the sea all her life and she recognized weather patterns like she recognized those self-inflicted patterns on her arm. The rain had set in for the evening, at least. There would be no one else to disturb the quiet of the dunes today, walking where she had walked. She didn’t need to rush. There was no urgency to tell the police. The little girl was dead. She would stay right here in her heart of shells and the doll with the matching eyes would keep her company.

Pushing herself to her feet, stepping carefully around the prone child, the woman walked on, the wet sand clinging to her bare soles, rainwater slopping around her toes. A packet of cigarettes caught her eye, damp, sodden, but she could dry them. Bending, she slipped them into the pocket of her jacket. A little further on, a two-pound coin, spilled from a purse or pocket. Lucky. A lucky day, for her at least. September seventh. Lucky seven.

Straightening, she walked on, eyes grazing the sand for treasure, leaving the dead child behind her alone in the dunes, staring up at the sky, staring up at nothing.

4

Icy water stung Carolynn’s cheeks as she fumbled the front-door key into the lock with one hand. The plastic handles of the grocery bags cut into the wrist of her other arm; usually she would have set them down on the ground, but the path at her feet was sodden. It hadn’t been raining when she’d left the house mid-afternoon for her run, but the sky had been a uniform ceiling of grey, so she had slipped her waterproof cagoule over her lycra tights and tank before she’d set out.

Roger’s car wasn’t on the drive so he must still be at work. Though she preferred it when he wasn’t home, the thought of stepping into that oppressive little house, alone once again, made a sick feeling balloon in her stomach. Today of all days, she couldn’t bear to be out among the crowds – couldn’t trust herself to be in enclosed spaces with families, bracing herself against the sound of children’s voices rolling in from down the street, or from another aisle in the supermarket. But now that she was alone, with no external stimuli to distract her, her mind was flooding with memories, pictures so vivid that she felt faint, knocked sideways with the pain.

Unbidden, an image from her visit to the beach that morning rose in her mind: the little girl in a pastel pink bathing costume. Where would she be now? With her parents and sisters, eating Nutella pancakes at the surf café? Tucked up on a sofa in a rented holiday home watching cartoons? Playing board games in a hotel lounge? Normal rainy-day holiday activities that she would never again do with a child of her own. Her goal when building her family had been to have pretty, bright, well-mannered children, to want to spend quality time in each other’s company, to relish every single, simple moment. The thought of that dimpled little girl on the beach hurt like a weeping sore.

It wasn’t my fault, she screamed inside. You need to believe that it wasn’t my fault.

Grocery bags knocking around her bare ankles, she staggered into the kitchen and laid them on the clay-tiled floor. On a dull early evening like this, even with all the ceiling spots on, the kitchen was unbearably claustrophobic. Dirty cream walls and dark wood kitchen cabinets topped with black laminate work surfaces shrunk it to half the size it actually was, making her feel as if she’d squeezed herself into a cardboard box.

The house was a rental. A small white house jammed between the gate of a static caravan park on one side and a boarded-up, crumbling bungalow on the other. It was right by the sea, but you wouldn’t know it, except for the stream of tourists wandering past in the summer, shouldering beach bags and clutching ice creams, and the brutal weather that rattled the window panes in winter. From the kitchen window, she could see the road and beyond that the concrete sea wall that wouldn’t have looked out of place bordering a military bunker. It had been built head high and a metre thick to prevent the sea from eating up more land, but she couldn’t see the point of being by the sea if you couldn’t appreciate its beauty. And she did love the sea. Cheap and faceless, this was a running-away-to house, a hiding-away-in house. They had only planned to be here a couple of months until the furore surrounding the court case had died down and they’d decided how and where to rebuild their lives. But their London house hadn’t sold – prospective buyers put off by having seen it on television for all the wrong reasons – so their hands were tied.

Hauling the fridge door open, Carolynn listlessly filled it with the shopping, every bend and straighten a gargantuan effort. She felt physically and mentally exhausted, wrung out like a damp dishcloth. She had eaten nothing all day and yet she wasn’t hungry, was rarely hungry these days. She had to force herself to eat enough to keep her body grinding along.

As she flicked the kettle on to make herself a cup of tea, the cat jumped on to the island, leaving a trail of dusty paw marks from its litter tray across the black laminate surface. Revolted, Carolynn fought the urge to swing the full kettle from its stand and knock the bloody animal to the floor with it. The cat had been Zoe’s, a Burmese, bought for her by Roger’s mother because ‘every child needs a pet’. Carolynn hadn’t needed to ask the subtext. Every child needs someone or something they can love unconditionally, that loves them back without reserve or judgement.

Didn’t your husband become so alarmed about your ambivalence towards your daughter that he asked his mother to move into your house to look after her?

No.

And did his mother not live with you for a full eighteen months, from when Zoe was a year old until she was two and a half, until her husband, your father-in-law, became ill and she had to move back to her home to look after him?

No. It wasn’t like that.

She’d tried hard to put her struggle with motherhood, all those negative feelings she’d had, behind her by the time Pamela bought Zoe that repulsive cat. She was four then. Pamela had used her fourth birthday as an excuse for the purchase, but Carolynn knew the real reason. Why were people – her own mother-in-law, for Christ’s sake – still treating her as if she couldn’t manage, couldn’t be a proper mother, even then? And why did Roger let Pamela behave like that? Shouldn’t he have supported her, his own wife?

Thereafter, did your husband not employ a full-time live-in au pair, even though you were not employed yourself? I put it to you that it was because he was worried about his daughter’s safety if he left her with you alone. With her own mother.

That’s not true.

You had severe depression, didn’t you, Mrs Reynolds?

No. No, I didn’t.

The prosecuting solicitor had kept interrupting her. Arrogant. He was so arrogant, he wouldn’t let her speak.

Absentmindedly, she reached out to stroke the cat, but it arched its back, bared its teeth and hissed at her. God, even the cat hates me. The cat who’d been bought precisely because Burmese cats were as loving as dogs. She’d see it sitting on the garden wall, letting every damn stranger who walked up the street pet it, rubbing its head against their hands; she could hear its purr even through the glass window. And yet it couldn’t abide her.

You were referred to a specialist mental health team because you had such severe depression.

Making a huge show of putting on his glasses, letting the jurors’ minds linger on the words ‘specialist mental health team’, as if she was mad. He wanted them to think that she was mad. He hadn’t understood. None of them had understood.

Depression brought on by motherhood. Isn’t that true, Mrs Reynolds?

There was nothing strange about postnatal depression, so why had they used it against her in court? Tried to insinuate that she was crazy? Mental health was an issue for many people. Some philosopher she’d read had summed it up beautifully. She couldn’t remember the exact words, but it was something about most people leading lives of quiet desperation. Life was mainly struggle, wasn’t it? Hardly surprising then that so many people succumbed to depression, as she had done. She had found motherhood tougher than she had expected it to be. She hadn’t fallen crazily and unconditionally in love with Zoe. Those weren’t crimes.

Reaching for a tea towel, she flapped it at the cat, which arched and hissed again and then leapt to the floor, scooting a wide path around her legs to dodge the kick she launched at it. She’d find a furry patch on one of the cream sofa cushions in the sitting room later, no doubt. Have to wrap Sellotape around her fingers and pat her hand across the patch to collect up all the stray hairs, pick up the few that had stuck, like pine needles, in the cream cotton with her nails. Roger liked the house clean. We both do – it’s not just him.

The kettle had boiled and she made herself a cup of green tea, paced as she sipped it, too stressed and upset to sit down, sit still.

September seventh.

Lucky seven.

Seven detestable sins.

She hadn’t told Dr Flynn in her session this morning that, besides Roger and the odd impersonal interaction with people in shops around the village, she was the only living adult Carolynn spoke with all week. That she would talk properly to no one, bar her husband, until next week’s session. That the sessions were rapidly becoming a beacon of light for her; her only beacon. She recognized a kindred spirit in Jessie Flynn. Flynn wouldn’t tolerate a filthy cat padding over the surfaces in her kitchen. Those surfaces would be spotless – spotless and bright white. Everything in Flynn’s house would be white, Carolynn imagined, and immaculate, just as her own house had been, back when they lived in London.

Though she was sure that Jessie would be able to disguise her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder from less perceptive patients, she couldn’t hide it from her. Carolynn recognized OCD when she saw it, shared that desire for cleanliness and order, even though she wasn’t a fellow sufferer. She would like to be friends with Jessie. She needed a friend, desperately. Someone who she could talk to, someone who would understand. They couldn’t just keep running and hiding. Keep telling lies.

5

The seagulls were agitating Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons, unsettling him. There was a flock of them, circling overhead, like vultures orbiting a carcass, as if they knew there was a dead child inside that tent, as if they could smell the blood, sense death.

Later, he would accept that they were attracted by the people, himself included; a Pavlovian response after a summer of beachgoers tossing chips, burger buns and the fag end of sandwiches in their direction. But the sight of them, that ear-splitting squawking, made his nerves and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He was tempted to grab a handful of stones and hurl them up into the sky, throw stone after stone until every single one of the vile creatures had scattered, but that would give the smattering of reporters who had got the early wire about the little girl’s murder exactly what they wanted: DI Simmons demonstrating he was taking this case far too personally. Day one, an hour in, and already it had burrowed right under his skin. Even if he could continue to kid himself that he wasn’t yet drawing parallels with Zoe Reynolds’ murder – two years ago today, he had realized a micro-second after he’d heard that the body of a young girl had been found on West Wittering beach – the press wouldn’t be so forgiving. They would forensically examine in print any actions on his part that weren’t entirely by the book, seizing on anything that could be interpreted as proof that he wasn’t coping, that he couldn’t be objective.

Stripping off his overalls and overshoes and handing them to a CSI officer, Marilyn turned his collar up against the spitting rain and slid down the dunes on to the tidal flats, sucking the salt-laced air deep into his cigarette-ravaged lungs, grateful to be out of that claustrophobic InciTent and away from the sad, desecrated little body. Her green eyes were clouding over with a death film already, wide open, but seeing nothing, recognizing nothing.

Though civilization was barely five hundred metres away – £5,000,000 houses owned by city bankers who had cashed in their chips and retired down here with their families for the quiet life, others heading here at weekends – it always surprised him how startlingly remote this peninsula was, tied to the main stretch of the beach by a narrow bar of sand and extending like a bloated finger into the mouth of Chichester Harbour. Fifty acres of silky soft sand dunes topped with knee-high marram grass where children could play for hours, disappear for hours, even when the beach in front of the dunes was packed with holiday-makers. The local police had fielded many calls over the years from frantic parents whose children had gone missing on this stretch of coast. Most turned up an hour or two after they’d disappeared, having simply lost track of time. Years ago, when he was starting out in the force as a PC, before he’d had his own children and experienced parental worry first-hand, he’d done his fair share of trudging through these dunes, sand penetrating his brogues and gritting between his toes, calling out Noah or Amelia’s name, itching to clip the little sod’s ear when he or she was finally found.

The location should have been God’s gift for footprints, but that forensic avenue had been frustrated by the time of year and the weather: a rainy afternoon following on from a sunny morning and a string of sunny days before that, at the end of the summer holidays. Adults and children’s footprints criss-crossed his crime scene as if a herd of demented cattle had passed through; it would have taken forever to process each and every one, had the rain not obliterated the whole lot.

What was the little girl doing all the way out here anyway? Had she been in the dunes when she met her killer? Had she come under her own steam, playing with friends or wandering alone, or had she been brought here? And if she’d come with her killer, had she done so voluntarily, or had she been bribed or coerced? Easy to bribe a child of that age with sweets, easy to force them with threats. Simple for an adult to convince a child who knew them well to come and play on the beach for an hour.

According to the initial estimate from Dr Ghoshal, the pathologist, she had been dead for between one and two and a half hours, which meant that she had been killed sometime between three-thirty and five p.m. Whoever the child’s killer was, he or she had chosen well, both in terms of location, weather and timing.

He didn’t even know who she was. Only nine or ten years old and yet no one had come forward to claim her. For Christ’s sake – what kind of home did the poor little mite come from?

6

Just one glass. There was nothing wrong with having a small glass of red wine before Roger came home. It was a quarter-to-seven – perfectly respectable. She used to drink all the time in her old job: nip to the pub at lunchtime with her colleagues, pop out for drinks after work on Fridays as a reward for making it through another emotionally draining week dealing with all those traumatic cases.

Cupping the wine glass, she wandered into the sitting room and switched on the television. It was an early-evening chat show, five glossy women with expensive highlights, dressed in clothes that Carolynn would have worn for a night out in central London, in the days when she had friends to go out in the evening with, sitting behind a pink panelled desk. The women, all her age or older, looked immaculate even under the harsh studio lights; they were so removed from the image she saw in the bathroom mirror every morning, they might as well have been aliens from another planet. She had looked like that once though, hadn’t she? Dewy-skinned, bright-eyed and sleek. Before the pain took its toll …

At the sound of the front door, her shoulders stiffened, the muscles under her skin bunching into tense knots. Roger’s footsteps echoed across the tiled hall as he walked into the kitchen, then stopped. She heard the sound of his breathing and, though he said nothing, she knew he was surprised that she wasn’t in the kitchen preparing dinner. A good meal was important to him after a long day at work. Uneasy, Carolynn looked quickly for somewhere to stow her wine glass, out of sight. But before she’d taken a step, she sensed rather than heard him standing in the lounge doorway, felt his eyes on her.

‘I, uh, I didn’t expect you back,’ she murmured, pasting on a poor impression of a smile as she turned.

A shadow crossed his face when he saw the glass in her hand. ‘I left early so that I could be with you. Because of … you know.’ Because of today.

Carolynn nodded, feeling like a reformed drug user, caught sneaking a hit. ‘I … I just fancied a small glass,’ she said.

‘It’s a bit early, Caro.’

They stood, facing off against each other across the living room. ‘It’s nearly seven, Roger, and it’s only a small glass.’ Her tone sounded like that of a child defending the state of their room.

‘I don’t think you should be drinking alone.’

‘It’s just one.’

‘One leads to two, then three.’ He puffed air into his cheeks and blew noisily out of his mouth, like a balloon deflating. ‘What did you do today?’

I went for a run. I go every day. You couldn’t expect me not to go today of all days.

She didn’t say it. She had changed out of her running clothes, as she did every day before he got home from work, had taken a shower, put on a dress. He liked her to look pretty, feminine. He hated to think of her punishing her body with that obsessive running. He didn’t realize how much she needed it, how it was the only thing keeping her sane.

‘I popped to the supermarket,’ she said. ‘I bought steak for dinner. I thought it would be nice to have something tasty, expensive.’

‘I’ll look forward to that.’ His tone was flat.

When had their relationship become more about what wasn’t said, the undercurrent, than the words actually spoken?

Carolynn chewed a fingernail. ‘I want to integrate a bit, Roger,’ she said. ‘Make some friends … a friend, at least.’ Dr Flynn. Jessie.

His forehead creased. ‘We came here precisely because we didn’t want to integrate.’

‘I know, but I’m lonely.’

‘You have me, Caro.’

‘You’re out at work all day.’

He shook his head. ‘We have each other.’ There was an edge to his tone. ‘You don’t need anyone else.’

Carolynn nodded, feeling like one of the spring-necked plastic animals in the box on the counter in the pound shop, placed there to tempt small children as their parents were paying at the till.

‘We came here to escape, to protect you. I can’t keep you safe if you make friends. Friends ask questions, they need to know about your past, your history. What would you tell them?’

The vexed tears that had been poised behind her eyes since the moment they had snapped open this morning, were creating a film across her corneas now, furring Roger’s face, softening the uncompromising light in his eyes.

‘And I think that you should stop seeing that psychologist. She’s too close.’

Carolynn gasped; couldn’t help herself. In the short time that she had been seeing Jessie Flynn, she had come to live for those sessions, looking forward to them days before they happened and sinking into depression the day after at the prospect of another week dragging by before she’d get to chat again. Really chat.

‘Maybe just one more session.’ That plaintive tone again; she hated herself for it. That tone wasn’t her, she never used to be this needy and dependent.

‘After today, you won’t need to.’ His voice was firm.

After the second anniversary of her death, was what he meant. As if life would miraculously return to normal when they woke tomorrow morning. As if life would be wonderful for the 364 days that followed, until the third anniversary, the fourth …

Carolynn dipped her gaze to the swill of burgundy liquid in the glass. ‘I’ve been careful,’ she murmured. ‘She doesn’t know who I really am. But I think we could be friends. I’d like her as a friend.’

‘A friend?’ He laughed, a bitter sound. ‘You’re paying her, Caro. Actually, let me correct that: I’m paying her. That’s why she’s listening to you. A woman like that will have loads of friends.’

How did he know what Jessie Flynn was like? Oh. She remembered now. He’d collected her after her third session. It had been Flynn’s final appointment of the day, and she’d walked out with Carolynn. Roger had been leaning against the car, warming his face in the late afternoon sun, and she’d noticed even then, though she hadn’t liked to admit it to herself, how his eyes widened when he clocked her psychologist.

‘Christ, I might book a few sessions with her myself,’ he’d muttered, half under his breath, as they drove away.

She shouldn’t have been surprised at his reaction. Jessie Flynn was stunning. She even made those women on the TV chat show look ordinary, with that jet-black waist-length hair and those spectacular ice-blue eyes.

‘I’m only protecting you, Carolynn. You know that, don’t you?’

She gave a faint nod, tuning him out. She could be friends with Jessie Flynn. Tons of her old friends had been like that – cool, edgy, beautiful – when she had lived and worked in London, before motherhood, before Zoe. She had been like that too. Before.

‘Let’s save the wine, eh?’ Stepping across the carpet, he laid his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’ll change out of my work clothes, have a shower and we can have a glass together.’

As he dropped a hand to take her glass, the words on the television cut into Carolynn’s consciousness. She hadn’t even noticed that the chat show had ended.

‘… The body of a young girl has been found at West Wittering beach. Details are still coming in, but police believe that her death was not due to natural causes. A doll was found by her side. Detective Inspector Bobby Simmons of Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes has warned parents to be vigilant.’

The wine glass slipped from her fingers, every rotation in its tumble to the carpet freeze-framing in her mind, like individual pages in a flip-book. The glass hit the cream wool and cartwheeled, once, twice, red liquid fountaining out of it, spraying Roger’s pale mustard boots, peppering the wallpaper, coating the carpet in blood red. A sliver of her brain registered the damage and knew that Roger would be furious about wine stains on his brand-new nubuck Timberlands, but all she could think was:

Another dead girl. Another doll.

7

The figure in the background was unmistakable, his black suit and hair so stark against the white quartz sand that he resembled an overgrown crow. His presence made it impossible for her to take in what the reporter speaking to camera in the foreground was saying.

West Wittering beach, wasn’t it? Jessie recognized it from a couple of months ago, when Callan had booked them a day of kite-surfing lessons. It had been a disaster. She had been unable to grip the bar properly because of her ruined hand and had ended up storming off in a fury – blaming Callan, of course, transferring all her frustration, her anger at her own impotence, on to him.

It was raining down there too. The sky above the beach was metallic and wetly luminous, water pooled in shallow dips in the sand. Her eyes moved from Marilyn to the InciTent, where Tony Burrows, his lead CSI, toddler-rotund in his white forensic overall, was massaging his bald spot with a latex-gloved hand. Though she had only met him once, she recognized the tic as tension. Yellow ‘Police Do Not Cross’ tape flapped in the wind, sealing a section of the dunes off from the press and a handful of local gawkers.

So, it was suspicious death or confirmed murder – must be, to get the police and press out there. Christ, that will keep Marilyn happy, she thought cynically, recognizing a moment after the notion entered her head how the last six months had coloured her attitude to everything, hating herself for that negativity. She was good at helping her patients move on from trauma, pitifully poor at heeding her own lessons. Physician heal thyself – what a joke that was.

‘ . . . the body of a young girl has been found in sand dunes at West Wittering beach …’

Oh God. A dead child. Now I really hate myself.

The picture switched suddenly to the Channel 4 News studio and Jessie froze. The view of the beach on the screen behind the presenters had been replaced by a photograph of a woman. A confident, healthy-looking woman, late-thirties, size ten or twelve, a sensible weight, blonde hair cut in a glossy bob, clear brown eyes focused on something just to the left of the camera. Her head was tilted and she was smiling, showing a perfect row of pearly white teeth.

The name displayed beneath the photo – Carolynn Reynolds – was not the name Jessie knew her by. The face and body had changed, too. In fact, the woman in the photo was barely recognizable as the woman Jessie had seen five times in her consulting room, the fifth time only this morning; the woman who had never met her gaze directly with those lightless brown eyes.

Nevertheless, she was sure that it was Laura. She had spent five hours studying her facial features, every nuance of her expression, her body and its language.

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’

Laura.

She held up a hand to silence Callan. ‘Shhhh, I’m listening.’

‘I’ll take that as a rude, ungrateful yes,’ he muttered, planting a soft kiss at the base of her neck, which made her shiver despite her focus on the television screen. Then he padded barefoot into the kitchen, naked except for a pair of white boxers, his sandy blond hair dishevelled from bed. He’d worked forty-eight hours straight on a trafficking case, had got home at lunchtime and retired to bed for the afternoon. When she’d got home from work, she had stripped off and slid under the duvet, waking him up by sliding her hand into his boxers. They had made slow and languorous love before he had crashed and she had pottered downstairs in his dressing gown to flick through some patient files with the television turned on in the background.

Laura.

‘… the death of this young girl echoes that of little Zoe Reynolds, whose body was found in the dunes at West Wittering beach two years ago today, only a hundred metres from where this child’s body has been found. Zoe’s mother, Carolynn Reynolds, was tried for Zoe’s murder, but acquitted nine months ago due to lack of evidence. No one has been charged with Zoe’s murder. Detective Inspector Bobby Simmons of Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, who led the investigation into the murder of little Zoe and is now on the scene at West Wittering beach, told us that it is too early to confirm a connection between the two cases.’

Jessie scrambled for the remote to freeze the screen on Laura … Carolynn’s photograph so that she could study it, be sure, only remembering, as her finger jabbed impotently at the pause button, that the news was live. Shit.

‘… we will update you as soon as we have more on this story.’

The woman’s photograph was replaced by the picture of a graph in freefall, the story something financial that Jessie immediately tuned out.

‘Callan.’ She still called him by his surname, even though they had been dating for nearly six months and he had virtually moved into her tiny farm worker’s cottage. Gulliver in Lilliput, still hitting his head on the door frames, when he wasn’t concentrating. ‘One of my patients … clients was just on the news.’

A glass of Sauvignon and a bottle of beer in his hands, he came to stand next to her, passed her the wine.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

He smothered a yawn with the back of his hand. ‘Yes. What? Some woman? There’s only one woman I’m interested in and she’s not on the TV.’ He planted another lingering kiss on her neck, which she twisted out of, but not before she’d shivered again at the feel of his lips on her skin.

‘Stop trying to distract me and listen,’ she said, nudging his bare stomach with her elbow. ‘It’s the woman I saw this morning, the one who is so weighed down by guilt that she can hardly force herself to grind through the days.’

She flicked through the TV channels on the remote, BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 5, all showing other programmes or advertisements. Switching to BBC News 24, she laid the remote on the coffee table, aligning its long edge with the edge of the table, corner with corner, before she straightened.

Callan noticed, said nothing.

‘The woman whose daughter died in a car accident?’ he asked, stroking his hand down her arm, lacing his fingers through hers, the movement casual, sensual. But she knew why he’d done it.

Glancing at the remote, she felt the tension rise, the electric suit shiver across her skin, bit her lip to stop herself from pulling her hand from his so that she could adjust its top a few millimetres to the left, align it perfectly, absolutely perfectly, with the table edge. It was catching her eye, dragging her attention from the television and she needed to concentrate for when the child murder story, Laura … no … Carolynn, cycled around again. Her OCD had worsened, driven by the stress and disappointment of the past six months. She was making up for the lack of control over her life’s bigger picture by controlling what she could, the minutiae of her environment, tidying, aligning, ordering. But the knowing didn’t help with the stopping.

‘Are you talking about the woman whose daughter was killed in a car accident?’ Callan’s voice pulled her back.

‘Yes, but Zoe didn’t die in a car accident. She was murdered. Laura— Jesus, Carolynn … she’s actually called Carolynn, lied to me. She lied about her identity and she lied about the death of her daughter.’ She looked over her shoulder and met his searching amber gaze. ‘But why? Why lie?’

8

‘It could be a copycat, sir,’ Workman said, in a tone of forced calm. ‘Zoe Reynolds’ murder was a fixture in the press for months, and the spotlight was shone again when Carolynn was on trial. You’d have to have spent the last two years living in a mud hut in Papua New Guinea not to have read about it, not to know all the details.’ A pause. ‘Everything.’

Eyes fixed on the misty hummock that was the Isle of Wight fifteen kilometres across the Solent to the south, the curved grey back of a breaching whale, Marilyn nodded, hoping she wouldn’t notice that his hands were shaking.

Everything.

Workman was right. The column centimetres the Zoe Reynolds case had occupied would add up to kilometres, every sordid bloody detail raked over countless times, however hard he had tried to keep some things back, just a few elements of the poor little girl’s murder, to preserve some dignity for her memory if nothing else. Zoe Reynolds. That name forever seared into his memory as if it had been cattle-branded on to his temporal lobe. The statistics of child abductions and murders in the UK branded there also, from the many hours he’d spent trawling through the data, buttonholing experts, interviewing convicted paedophiles to try to understand their thought processes, eliminating paedophilia as a possibility, cycling back again and again to the conviction that it must have been the child’s mother, that he had been right to pursue her as hard as he had done, despite being unable to amass enough evidence to nail a guilty verdict.

In the twenty-two years since he joined Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, Zoe Reynolds’ murder was the only case that he still took to bed with him at night; his own personal abject failure. Around two hundred children were unlawfully killed in the UK each year, with at least three quarters of those deaths due to abuse or neglect by a parent – filicide – or other close relation. And those were only the reported cases. The woman he’d spoken with at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children had told him that the statistic was an under-estimation, that each year some parents literally got away with murder. Not all parents who kill their children live on benefits in some sink estate, she’d told him. Affluent parents have tempers too. Affluent parents lose control. The inference wasn’t lost on Marilyn: fall down the stairs in a middle-class household and you’ve slipped; do the same in a tower block with alcoholic parents and your mum or dad threw you down them.

‘A copycat,’ he murmured, finally acknowledging Workman’s comment, yanking on the knot to loosen his tie, lessen the tightening in his airways. Copycat crimes were far from uncommon. Two years to the day. ‘Yes, it could be.’

The soft sigh that he wasn’t supposed to have heard over the shore breeze told him that she had noted the lack of conviction in his tone. She’d been by his side throughout that first case, had been affected by little Zoe’s murder – in truth, even more than he had been. She hadn’t, though, shared his dogged conviction that the mother, Carolynn Reynolds, was responsible. Despite knowing the statistic on child murders as well as he did, she found it hard to accept that a mother could kill her own daughter. Not that pretty, polished mother. Not that daughter. Not in that cold-blooded way. Given Workman’s personal history – her struggle to come to terms with her own childlessness due to infertility – he had doubted her ability to remain objective. He’d come close to having her sidelined for the duration of the investigation, but eventually decided against because losing DS Sarah Workman would have been akin to hacking off his right arm. He had needed her support, particularly with so public a case, his work under such close scrutiny, so he’d kept her with him but monitored her closely, tempering her opinions with a spade full of salt. He’d caught her a few times, studying the crime scene photographs of the dead child, wallowing unhealthily in them, he’d thought at the time. He’d done the same, but privately, and even as he was looking for the umpteenth time, he knew that what he was doing was mentally destructive, the visual equivalent of sticking needles under his fingernails.

‘We owe it to this little girl to—’

Marilyn raised a hand, cutting her off.

‘We do indeed. And we will.’ He dropped his hand to her shoulder. ‘And I don’t need a lecture about objectivity, thanks, Sarah. Come on, let’s leave Burrows to it, get back to base and brief the team. I’ll start jibbering if I don’t get away from the noise of these bloody seagulls.’

* * *

The journalists who had thronged the crime scene on the beach seemed to have made it back to the station in Chichester quicker than he had, which, given he was still driving his beloved Z3 – sixteen years old, 143,000 miles on the clock and performing to every bit of its age and mileage – he had to acknowledge wasn’t surprising.

Monitoring police radio frequencies 24/7 for the first whiff of a heinous crime, the press piranhas had gone into a frenzy the moment they found one. Marilyn was engulfed as soon as he stepped from the car: voice recorders and cameras, like the black eyes of Cyclops, shoved into his face. Shouldering through them, he made it to the concrete steps into the station, where at least his back was covered by the closed front door. Stopping, he turned under the stone arch, squinting against the sinking sun’s rays, knowing that he might as well face the pack now than delay it. Pain now, double pain with bells on later when they’d had a chance to feed off each other, speculate, the process always made more creative, the conclusions more fantastical and inflammatory when they had no factual information to work with. He wasn’t a natural politician, preferred just to get on with the job and let his success rate speak for itself. He didn’t want to become one of those policemen who always had their eye on the main chance, on creating good impressions over delivering results, on the next promotion, but even he’d realized, in a flash of deeply uncomfortable clarity out on the beach, that he would need as many people on his side as he could get, given the high-profile disaster that the Zoe Reynolds case had been. His personal high-profile disaster.

Moreover, he would never forgive himself if this little girl’s killer escaped justice as Zoe’s had. One ghostly child remonstrating with him in the early hours was already one too many. He held up his hand to silence the chatter and still the jostling.

‘The body of a young girl was found in the sand dunes at West Wittering beach by a passer-by late this afternoon. Dr Ghoshal, the Home Office pathologist, estimates her to be nine or ten years old.’

Shouted questions:

‘Who found her?’

‘Where exactly was she found?’

‘How long has she been dead for?’

‘How was she killed?’

He noticed a few elbows connecting with ribs as they vied for the best spot. No raised hands or other such decorum, the press pack aptly named. Stray dogs being tossed a roast chicken would behave better. Ignoring the questions, he pressed on:

‘We have not yet identified the child and so far no one has come forward to tell us that their daughter is missing. My first priority is to identify her.’

Questions coming thick and fast:

‘What does she look like? Hair colour, eye colour—’

‘How are you going to identify her?’

‘What kind of family do you think the kid comes from if no one has noticed she’s missing?’

Fair question that one, but he ignored it too. It wasn’t his job to speculate or criticize. His ex-wife would fall about laughing if she caught him casting judgement on bad parenting on television.

‘How was she killed?’

‘Are there any suspects?’

And then the question, the one he knew would come:

‘Do you think that this second girl was murdered by the same person who murdered Zoe Reynolds? It’s too much of a coincidence, surely, otherwise? A couple of hundred metres from the spot where she was found, two years to the day?’

Two years ago, to the day.

The visceral memory of coming upon Zoe’s strangled body, that vile doll lying beside her, black felt-tip marks around its neck aping the strangulation bruises on Zoe’s. The image visited him often, with unrelenting clarity, as the image of this second little girl’s body would no doubt visit him also.

Another dead child. Another doll.

The same doll – make and model – he was sure of it. The doll’s image was something he’d never forget. It had been so lifelike, but at the same time not, like one of the countless bodies he’d seen on dissecting tables, a lifelike carcass without life or soul. The doll’s eyes, particularly, had stuck in his mind. Brown – the same colour as little Zoe’s eyes.

And the doll found beside this child?

Green.

It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, back on the beach, but both the child and the doll had green eyes. He saw them now in his mind’s eye: the child’s eyes a deep sea green, already clouding over, the doll blinking its glassy green eyes at Burrows as he lifted it with gloved hands and slid it into an evidence bag.

Brown to match Zoe’s eyes. Green to match this second little dead girl’s eyes. Jesus, what the hell am I dealing with? Had that detail been in the press? Would a copycat know? Or was it just coincidence that the dolls’ eyes matched the girls’?

Coincidence?

Whatever he was about to tell the press in an effort to defuse tension around the possibility of a double child murderer being on the loose in this sleepy seaside town, he didn’t believe in coincidences.

The restless increase in volume from the press pack brought him back to the moment.

‘It is far too early to make any judgements as to whether the murder of this little girl and the murder of Zoe Reynolds, two years ago, are connected. However, I would like to speak with Zoe’s parents and would ask them to get in touch with me as a matter of urgency.’

Holding up a hand to signal that the impromptu press conference was over, receiving a barrage of new questions in reply, he backed up the stairs, still facing them. Never good to turn your back on a journalist, unless you want a knife between the shoulder blades.

‘We will hold a full press conference in due course to update you all properly on the progress of this case,’ he concluded. ‘Now if you will excuse me, I have a child murder to solve.’ A second child murder …

9

Carolynn turned the taps on full force in the downstairs cloakroom, though Roger would know that the rush of water was to mask another sound, the guttural sound of her retching. Her stomach heaved and she vomited again, a stream of hot bile the colour of buttercups running over her fingers. Sitting back on her haunches, she sucked in a breath, locking on to the feeling of the cold floor tiles against her legs, holding that sense of chill calm in her mind as her stomach heaved again, heaved and settled.

Pushing herself to her feet, she reached for the hand towel, catching her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she did so. Lollipop. A pasty, wan, lollipop. She and her friends used to laugh at women like her, women they called lollipops because their heads were so ludicrously oversized on their emaciated bodies, rail-thin models who posted pictures of themselves on Instagram clutching plates of pizza in an attempt to convince people that they really did eat. Just as she now kept the fridge filled and cooked meal after meal to convince Roger that she was eating, to keep him off her back, though the reality was every mouthful tasted like cardboard and she ended up tossing most of the food into the caravan park’s bins so Roger wouldn’t catch her out.

She swiped a hand across the mirror, leaving a streak of bile across the glass, fuzzing her own grotesque image from view.

Back in the sitting room, the silence jarring, Carolynn realized that the television was now off. Roger watched her gaze track to the blank screen.

‘I switched it off,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘We don’t need to see any more.’

‘What are we going to do, Roger?’

‘Do?’ His eyes registered surprise.

‘I need to understand what the police are thinking.’

‘You were acquitted, Carolynn.’

She nodded, concentrating hard on the brown vines twisting through the wallpaper like strings of DNA, not meeting his searching gaze. She hated this room, had always felt claustrophobic in it, and now she felt as if the vines were coiling around her, squeezing her throat with each rasping breath she managed.

‘That detective inspector—’ Even now, nine months since the collapse of her trial, since they had fled down here to anonymity, she couldn’t bear to say his name. The man who had hounded her, who was convinced of her guilt, still, no doubt. She had caught his eye as she’d left the Old Bailey a free woman, had recognized the cynicism and anger in his look. He would never stop hunting her.

And now. Now he had another reason. A second dead child. High-octane fuel to his fire.

‘That detective inspector said on the news that he would like to speak with me … with, uh, with us.’

‘He has to find us first, and he won’t be able to do that. Nobody knows where we are. We left no trace. They won’t find us. They won’t expect us to be living here in Bracklesham Bay, so close to where Zoe was murdered. It was a clever choice.’

Carolynn nodded distractedly. The location, a sprawling seaside town crammed with tourists and seasonal workers in summer, shuttered and battened down, locals retreating inside to their hearths and their television sets in winter, provided perfect anonymity. Roger had read about the beautiful, kilometres-long white-sand beaches that stretched from Bracklesham Bay to East and West Wittering in The Sunday Times a few years ago, and they had spent a long weekend here every September since, a last hurrah before Zoe went back to school.

‘My photograph was on the news. It will be in every paper. I can’t face it again. I can’t face that whole process, being treated like a side of meat.’

My body, the searches – they said that they wanted to make sure I didn’t have any hidden drugs, but really they just wanted to dehumanize me, remove every shred of my dignity.

‘I could never go through that again, Roger.’ Her voice shook. ‘I couldn’t—’

Complete strangers screaming at me in the street, calling me a child murderer, dragging at my clothes and hair, spitting in my face.

‘You won’t have to, because they won’t find us,’ he said firmly. ‘You don’t look like you used to. Your hair is different, your face, your body. There’s nothing left of your body.’ He emitted a brief, heartless laugh. ‘Remember that book we used to read to … to Zoe?’

Carolynn flinched at the sound of Zoe’s name on his lips.

‘Stick Man. Do you remember it, my Stick Lady love?’ His fingers and thumb pinched the skin of her upper arm. His grip left two white indents, which she knew would turn black. Was she bruising more easily these days? ‘You are virtually unrecognizable now, Carolynn.’

She tried to suppress the involuntary shudder as his arms slid around her waist and he stepped forward, closing the gap between them, pressing himself against her. She wanted to shove him away, dismiss him, but she couldn’t. She needed his support, his complicity. They were in this together.

‘And this little girl’s death is totally different,’ he murmured, his breath misting hot and damp against her ear, making her want to shudder all over again. ‘You were nowhere near West Wittering beach this afternoon, were you?’

She had been the one to find Zoe dead in the sand dunes of West Wittering beach two years ago. She had left footprints all over the crime scene, her DNA had been all over her daughter’s body – Well, it would have been, wouldn’t it? I’m her mother – her fingerprints on that disgusting doll with the moving eyes and the black marks around its neck. Roger was right. This was different.

‘You have an alibi. You were here, at home.’

Carolynn gave an uncertain nod.

‘Weren’t you?’ he pressed. ‘Apart from that quick trip to the supermarket?’

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘But I was alone.’

‘It was dull, rainy. You had the lights on in the kitchen when I got back. Someone would have seen you through the window. Someone from the caravan park.’

‘Yes,’ she murmured listlessly.

She had been out running again, on the beach, down to East Wittering and further, to the west, pounding along the sand, the rain peppering her face, the beach deserted. Only a kite-surfer zipping backwards and forwards two hundred metres offshore, too far away to attest to the identity of anyone on the beach. Her breath caught in her throat. Oh God.

‘What?’ Roger asked.

‘Nothing.’

His eyes remained fixed on her face, weighing, judging.

‘Really, Roger, it was nothing.’

She pressed her hands against his chest and levered him away from her, trying to keep the relief she felt at the widening space between them from telegraphing itself to her face.

‘Take some of your pills and go to bed early. Stay away from the windows, away from television. An early night will do you good. And tomorrow …’ He paused. ‘Tomorrow everything will look better.’

She nodded dully. The last thing she needed was to sleep, to dream. She wanted to think. The news of the little girl’s death had brought back something about the day she had found Zoe’s body, something that was hovering at the edge of her memory, just out reach.

Roger left the sitting room and she heard him jogging up the stairs, returning a moment later, two small white pills nestled in the palm of his hand. Flunitrazepam. He had bought the pills, liquid, every possible method of sedating her, off the Internet from Malaysia, had had them delivered to a PO Box in Chichester, which he had opened under their new false identity.

She looked at the pills and shook her head. ‘I might go for a run.’

‘Are you serious, Carolynn. Now? With that police and media circus out there? You’re upset and you need to calm down.’

They stood, facing off against each other across the sitting room. Carolynn chewed at the skin around her thumbnail.

‘Stop that, Carolynn. You’ll make your hands look ugly.’

Dropping her hand, she nodded dully. He was right about the nail-biting, about the pills, about staying inside. He was always right these days. He hadn’t used to be, when they first got married, but now she could see that he was. Always. When had the tables turned? Since she had been accused of Zoe’s murder, since the trial? Or earlier than that? Since becoming a mother had leeched her energy and her happiness?

But she longed to experience the feeling of endorphins coursing through her body, the euphoria, however temporary that came with utter physical exhaustion. Sometimes when she returned from her runs along the beach, something had shifted inside her and she found some small measure of peace. Often though, only her body was changed, the miles she’d run registering themselves in physical exhaustion, but everything else, her mind, the thoughts that haunted her waking hours, unchanged. Still, running was like a drug to her now, her only hope of respite, however temporary.

‘Here.’ He held out his hand. ‘Take your pills.’

Obediently, Carolynn extended her right hand for the pills, her left for the water. He watched as she popped first one and then the other into her mouth. His eyes tracked the movement of her hand as she raised the glass to her lips and took a sip. Tilting forward, he planted a soft kiss on her cheek, grimacing, she could sense without even seeing his expression, as the downy white lanugo hair on her face tickled his lips.

‘I can’t go back,’ she said again, when he had stepped away, aware of the thread of desperation in her voice. ‘I can’t go through all that again. I can’t.’

‘You won’t need to, but you have to listen to me, do what I tell you.’

She nodded. No matter how hard she looked into his eyes, searched for something there, all she ever saw was emptiness. It was the same emptiness she saw in her own.

‘That means no friends, for starters. And no more visits to Dr Flynn.’

She started to speak, to object, but his fingers moved to cover her mouth, cutting her off.

‘We can’t risk getting close to people, Carolynn. You know that. Not now. Not with this second little girl dead, so close to where you found— where Zoe was found. It’s too much of a risk. They’ll find us and then they’ll find out … they’ll find out the truth this time and we just can’t take that chance.’

The truth.

He left the sitting room and she spat the pills into her palm and slipped them into her pocket.

10

Marilyn stood at the front of the incident room and contemplated the hastily assembled team. Sarah Workman had looked washed-out on the beach, but he’d put it down to the light filtering through grey clouds; now, under the harsh fluorescent strips, her skin was a sickly pale grey and she looked even worse. Already the stress of the case was taking its toll, and there would doubtless be sleepless nights and soaring stress levels to come for all of them. He met her gaze and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but was more likely a maniacal grimace. Nothing about this case promoted a genuine smile.

‘Good evening, everyone. I won’t keep you for long, as we have a lot to do.’

A photograph of the dead girl was already tacked to the whiteboard behind him, where it would stay throughout the investigation. Once they found out who she was, it would be joined by one of her alive, smiling preferably, looking like the undefiled child she had been, reminding everyone why they were here, who the eighteen hour days were for.

‘As you all know, the body of a young girl was found in the sand dunes at West Wittering beach earlier this evening.’ He glanced down at the notes he’d scribbled, though he knew everything, what little they had so far, by heart. ‘I don’t have much to give you, I’m afraid. Dr Ghoshal will perform the autopsy tomorrow, but his preliminary assessment is that she was killed by strangulation. She was wearing what looked to be a school uniform – white shirt, navy-blue jumper and navy trousers, no identifying school badge – and her clothing wasn’t disturbed, so it is unlikely that she was a victim of sexual assault, though of course the autopsy will confirm or refute that.’ He paused. ‘A doll in a pink ballerina dress was found by her side. The doll had black marks drawn around its neck with felt-tip pen. The black marks aped the strangulation bruise marks around the little girl’s neck.’

His gaze scanned the assembled faces as they digested the information. A stranger could be forgiven for thinking them indifferent; Marilyn knew better, knew that the little girl’s murder had touched them all deeply, just as Zoe Reynolds’ had done two years previously.

Arthur Lawford, the exhibits officer, raised his hand. He had been with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes longer even than Marilyn, a solid thirty years on the job and still a sergeant, a role he was more than happy to languish in until retirement. Not everyone could be the star player; not everyone wanted to be. Lawford had been the exhibits officer on the Zoe Reynolds case, and along with Marilyn and Workman he’d lived through the disaster it had become.

‘A doll, sir?’ The inference clear.

Marilyn nodded. ‘Similar.’ He paused. ‘The same. Identical, except for the colour of her … of its eyes.’

Lawford frowned. ‘Its eyes, sir?’

‘What colour were the eyes of the doll we found by Zoe Reynolds’ body, Artie?’

‘I don’t remember, sir.’

‘Brown. They were brown, weren’t they?’

Lawford shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Think about it, Artie, think. They were the same colour as the little girl’s, weren’t they? Brown? The same colour as Zoe’s eyes?’

He scanned the room again. Its occupants stilled, the usual background noises – the shifting of bottoms in seats, crossing and uncrossing of legs, the rustle of clothing – had ceased. He knew what they were all thinking. Only DC Cara was new to the team. The rest had worked with him on the Zoe Reynolds case, had been party to his unswerving conviction that Carolynn Reynolds had murdered her own daughter, had watched him wilt, shrivel, as the trial progressed and it became clear that they hadn’t secured enough evidence to convict. He couldn’t afford to get emotionally involved in this second murder case, had to maintain a professional distance. Easier said than done.

‘Check will you, please, Artie, and let me know,’ Marilyn said as casually as he could manage.

‘Yes, sir.’

Tapping the whiteboard behind him, Marilyn indicated the list he’d scribbled. ‘Our priorities are to identify the dead child and interview her parents; interview the woman who found her body; get uniforms on the ground in the beach car park, the village centre, on the road in and out of East and West Wittering villages and on the knock to try to locate some witnesses. We need to construct a detailed timeline of the little girl’s movements, from when she left her school – whether that was alone, with one or both of her parents, or with a friend or friends – to when she was killed. Most prep-schools finish at three-thirty, so there isn’t a lot of time between her leaving school and her meeting her death. That suggests to me that the school is local to the beach, in Bracklesham Bay, East or West Wittering. There can’t be many, so let’s find out where she was a pupil quickly, based on her uniform. Lastly, we need to find Carolynn and Roger Reynolds, Zoe Reynolds’ parents. Though this is something I won’t be disclosing to the press, I would be very surprised if this second child’s murder isn’t linked to Zoe’s. I made enquiries earlier this evening and it appears that the Reynolds have disappeared.’ Run. He didn’t say it.

‘Are they suspects, sir?’ a voice from the back of the room asked. ‘Is she a suspect?’

A knock on the door saved Marilyn from having to answer the million-dollar question to which he hadn’t yet formulated a balanced, unprejudiced answer. DC Darren Cara stepped through the doorway, holding up a piece of paper.

‘I think we have a name for the little girl, sir – Jodie Trigg. Call just came through. The mother got back from work half an hour ago and found her daughter missing. Her bed looked as if it hasn’t been slept in. The description of her daughter matches that of the dead child.’

‘And Jodie Trigg’s mother has just realized that she’s missing now?’ Marilyn said angrily. He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s knocking midnight. The little girl has been dead eight hours, for Christ’s sake.’

Cara gave a slight shrug of his shoulders.

‘What about friends and relatives?’ Marilyn asked. ‘Has she checked with them?’

‘She has a sister in Bognor Regis, but Jodie isn’t there. The mother – Deborah, Debs Trigg, she’s called – lives at Seaview Caravan Park in Bracklesham Bay. She called park security and asked around her neighbours and Jodie hasn’t been seen since she left for school this morning. She’s a pupil at East Wittering Community Primary. I tracked down the school’s headmistress and she confirmed that Jodie was at school all day today, though she did mention that Jodie is not the best attendee and often turns up late. She also confirmed that the children wear a navy-blue uniform. Only the blazer has the school badge on it.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘And the child wasn’t wearing a blazer. Thorough job, DC Cara. Thank you.’ His gaze moved from Cara back to the assembled team. ‘Have we had any other calls about missing children?’

A mass shaking of heads. Marilyn raised a surprised eyebrow. Typically, when a serious crime made the news, their phones rang off the hook with people eager to get a slice of the macabre action. The over-helpful, the hoaxers, the gloaters, the ghouls and the common or garden nutters: the whole gamut. This was the reason he had only ever appealed one case on Crimewatch – Zoe Reynolds, driven by utter desperation after her mother had been released and all other investigative avenues closed. A Crimewatch reconstruction could be useful for jogging memories, but it inevitably resulted in a deluge of information, most of it entirely useless. But he had been surprised, back then too, at how few hoax calls they’d received when Zoe’s murder was re-enacted on BBC One: an unexpectedly compassionate response. It seemed as if this second murdered little girl – Jodie Trigg, he reminded himself, they had her name now – was engendering the same solicitude. The violent murder of a young child too tragic for even the crazies to wallow in.

Marilyn took the piece of paper that Cara was holding out to him and read: Jodie Trigg, mother, Deborah (Debs) Trigg, Buena Vista, Seaview Caravan Park, Bracklesham Bay. It was a sprawling park of rectangular static mobile homes, a beige-hued blot on the landscape, half a kilometre eastwards along the beach from East Wittering, a kilometre from West. At its centre was a huge entertainment complex, jammed with arcade games and slot machines and serviced by a huge restaurant and a couple of snack bars which served anything that could be fried to within an inch of its life. There was a nod to health and fitness in the form of a swimming pool, resplendent with fake palms and a tiled beach that sloped into one side of the pool. He’d taken his own kids there once, so many years ago that it could have been last century – probably was – and he still shuddered at the memory of curly hairs clogging the drains in the changing rooms and the stench of chlorine masking eau-de-kiddies’-piss.

Some caravans were holiday lets, others occupied by permanent residents whose number, he assumed, included Debs Trigg and her daughter Jodie. No mention of a father, he noticed, then immediately chastised himself for making an assumption about the structure of their family purely based on where they lived. He knew all too well that people held similar, uninformed prejudices about his own fifteen-year absence from his now adult children’s lives. Well-justified prejudices, in his case.

‘Listen up,’ he said, refocusing. ‘DS Dave Johnson will take the lead on organizing the uniforms. DS Workman and I will go to Seaview Caravan Park now to speak with Debs Trigg. Cara, you take the lead on the search for Carolynn and Roger Reynolds.’

‘Do you think the two cases are linked?’ Cara asked.

Marilyn shrugged. Another awkward question he’d happily duck. Privately, he was iron-clad certain, given the location of the murder, the date, and the arrangement of the girl’s body in the heart of shells, an identical doll by her side, that the two cases were linked, but he wasn’t about to share that certainty this early on, even to his team. ‘It’s too soon to say for sure, but as a courtesy, if nothing else, we should get in touch with them. They’ll be seeing all this on the news and it will bring everything that they experienced two years ago straight back to the surface. I’d like to chat with them in person, reassure them that we haven’t forgotten little Zoe.’ It was an evasive answer, the best he was going to give at the moment.

‘What about Ruby Lovatt, the woman who found Jodie’s body?’ Workman asked. ‘She’s still in an interview room downstairs. We could divide and conquer.’

Marilyn shook his head. After the Zoe Reynolds disaster, he wanted, needed, to be in on all the action on this new case. He couldn’t afford to miss anything, any nuance.

‘Send her home and ask her to come back first thing tomorrow, eight a.m. Cara, get a family liaison officer to meet us at the Trigg’s caravan, will you?’

His gaze made one final circuit of the room and settled again on Workman.

‘Steel yourself, Sarah. We have a difficult house call to make.’

11

Jessie liked to leave the curtains open at night, to let the stars and the moon come into the bedroom with them. It reminded her of Wimbledon: of the winter evening she and Jamie had wrapped themselves up in blankets and taken their mugs of hot chocolate outside, lain on their backs on the lawn, Jessie pointing out the bear constellations, Ursula Major and Ursula Minor, to Jamie and Pandy, his beloved cuddly panda; of standing at her bedroom window at night, when the rest of the house was asleep, tracking the stars that made up her star sign, Gemini.

When she’d lived with her father and Diane in their narrow terraced house in frenetic Fulham, all she had been able to see through her attic bedroom’s skylight was the sodium streetlights’ orange blanket, cloaking the moon and stars. She had hated the feeling, ever since, of being unable to see the night sky from her bedroom. Callan didn’t mind. He liked the outdoors, was happy to leave the curtains open and let the night flood into the bedroom with them.

With the soft mattress underneath her, the warmth of Callan’s hard body next to her, she should have drifted easily to sleep, but her mind kept circling back to the television news, to Laura … Carolynn.

‘What’s wrong, Jessie?’ Callan murmured, his lips moving against her ear. She could feel him, warm and semi-hard against her thigh. Half-sleepy, half-aroused. Shifting on to her side, she shuffled the gap between them closed and slid her arms around his neck.

‘Nothing.’

‘Sure?’ His fingers moved absently-mindedly through her hair.

‘Sure.’ Linking her fingers with his, she guided his hand to her chest, placed it right over her heart. ‘Your hand would be more gainfully employed somewhere around here, I feel, Mr Callan.

Shifting closer, moulding her naked body to his, she kissed him deeply, her tongue teasing his, felt him harden, fully awake now. And though she tried to lock on to the feeling of his lips against hers, his thumb circling her nipple, the sensation firing hot in her groin, all she could think of was Carolynn, her face plastered all over the television screen. Carolynn Reynolds and two murdered girls.

I’d hate you to actually be able to read my mind. She had been a long way from a mind reader with that woman.

She felt Callan’s hands on her shoulders, rolling her gently on to her back, and he moved on top of her, the muscles on his chest and abdomen hard against her breasts and stomach, his weight pinning her down.

Another little girl murdered in the same place Carolynn’s daughter had been murdered two years ago. Two years to the day. September seventh. Lucky seven. Seven detestable sins.

Callan’s knee eased between both of hers and she felt his hand stroke down her stomach, his fingers slip between her legs, slowly inside her. She gasped, moving her hands to his shoulders, simultaneously holding him away and digging her nails into his back, her body responding, her mind somewhere else, beyond her control, detached from the maelstrom of desire, obsessing.

Outside, the night sky, lit only by a sliver of moon, was so black that the stars dotting it seemed to be pulsing, alive with energy. The curtains framing either side of the window caught her eye. Caught and held it. The left curtain was flush against the window frame, but the right was half-drawn, truncating her view of the sky. The electric suit tingled against her skin.

‘Callan,’ she murmured. He was rock hard against her thigh now.

‘Yeah?’

Usually, she loved making love with him, loved to mould herself around him as he moved inside her, loved to grate her nails down his back as she came. But now the curtains were lodged in her mind along with Carolynn’s lies, two little dead girls, and the electric suit was hissing and snapping.

‘Callan, I just want to, uh, to look at the stars quickly.’

‘Huh?’

‘I just want to look at the stars.’

‘What?’ Pushing himself up on to his hands, he stared down at her incredulously.

Tilting her head so that she didn’t have to lock eyes with him, she slid out from under him. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said.

Rolling back to his side of the bed, Callan put his hands over his face and groaned. ‘Jesus Christ, Jessie.’

‘I’m sorry, but it’s such a beautiful night. It’s going to rain soon and then the stars will be obscured by clouds.’

Her excuse sounded ridiculous, even to her ears, but on the spot she couldn’t think of anything more convincing. Climbing out of bed, she padded over to the window. Raising her arms as nonchalantly as she could manage, the electric suit hot against her skin, she ran her hand quickly down the edge of the right-hand curtain, pushing it back, aligning it with the window frame.

The left curtain was straight; the right still wasn’t. She repeated the movement again, sliding both hands down the curtains in unison this time.

Again – three.

‘What the hell are you doing, Jessie?’

‘I’m just looking at the stars, like I said,’ she managed. ‘They’re stunning tonight.’

The curtains were straight. She knew in her logical mind that they were straight, but the electric suit still hissed and snapped.

Four.

Quickly – five. Still no release.

Perhaps if she ran her hands down the curtains seven times, lucky seven, she’d know they were straight.

‘Enough now,’ Callan said, his tone one of suppressed anger. ‘Come back to bed.’

‘In a minute.’

She had to reach lucky seven, then the curtains would be straight, the electric suit would die down, she’d be able to return to bed, make love with Callan, not think about Carolynn and the lies that she had told. Not think about two little dead girls.

‘For fuck’s sake, Jessie,’ Callan muttered, subsiding back against his pillows.

How many times? Four? Had it been four?

She couldn’t concentrate, knowing that Callan was watching her. Her rational mind acknowledged that her behaviour, the need, was abnormal, but the compulsion to perform the ritual was too strong to resist.

Four? No – no, five.

‘I can see Gemini,’ she managed, running her hand back down the curtain again. Yin and yang. Light and dark. Good and evil.

‘Stop now, Jessie.’

Without answering, she shook her head.

She was pretending to look at the night sky, but Callan knew exactly what she was doing, recognized the compulsion that drove her to perform the ritual even as he found it impossible to understand. The curtains were perfectly aligned, but that didn’t seem to matter. Her OCD had worsened since she’d been invalided from the army and he had no idea what to do about it, how to help her.

Seven. The heat from the electric suit died, as if she’d found the secret emergency ‘Off’ switch.

When she returned to the bed, Callan was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling. Sliding under the covers, she shuffled across, closing the space between them and pressed her chilled body against his. Curling an arm over his chest, a leg over his thighs, she buried her face into his neck. His body was warm, but she could only feel his bones and the muscles that wrapped around them. Nothing yielded to her touch.

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ he said, rolling away from her.

He locked the bathroom door and switched on the shower. His erection had died, but his balls were aching. Stepping under the jet of warm water, he tilted forward, resting one hand against the cool tiles, letting the water run down his back while he masturbated. Jessie would know what he was doing, but he didn’t give a shit.

When he climbed back into bed she was lying motionless, staring up at the ceiling as he had been while she’d been fiddling with the curtains. Though he knew that the compulsions were out of her control, he felt unreasonably angry. He had been so ready to make love to her that it hurt.

‘I’m sorry, Callan,’ she murmured, shifting on to her side to face him. Reaching out, she traced her fingers across his cheek, to the scarred rose of the Taliban bullet wound on his temple.

‘It’s fine,’ he muttered, not moving, not responding physically.

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I’m a pain. I know that I’m being a pain. More than a pain.’

He sighed. ‘It’s fine, Jessie. I understand.’ Though he didn’t.

‘I love you, Callan.’

Sliding an arm around her, he pulled her close and kissed the top of her head, the slight dampness left on his skin from the shower, warming between them.

‘I love you too, Jessie. Now go to sleep.’

‘Night, Callan,’ she murmured.

Now go to sleep.

But would she? Could she? Her mind was starting to race again.

12

The only view that Buena Vista benefited from was a three-sixty of other static mobile homes, so close on all sides that a swinging cat would have had its head caved in. Buena Vista itself was dark cream, a tarmac parking area to its left-hand side, empty of cars, an ankle-high white plastic picket fence demarcating a narrow, rectangular garden to its right. Lights shone through grey net curtains that covered a full-width window at the near end, and other smaller aluminium framed windows dotted the caravan’s carcass, casting yellow rectangles on to the surrounding mobile homes. Though nothing about him or Workman overtly said ‘police’, their combined forty-plus years in the force must have left some indelible external mark, because he sensed that they were being watched by multiple pairs of eyes as they skirted Buena Vista to locate the front door.

In the narrow garden, a rotary dryer sagged under the weight of washing, limp in the cool night air, and someone had planted a few perennials, most of them wilted from neglect. But it was the child’s pink bicycle leaning against the concrete steps leading to the door that tightened Marilyn’s throat. He plucked at the knot of his tie to loosen it, the result fruitless, the constriction in his airways undiminished.

Before he knocked, he glanced over his shoulder at Workman. Her expression was detached, her gaze fixed resolutely on what would have been his back, if he hadn’t turned unexpectedly and caught her eye. She wasn’t the only one who appeared devoid of emotion. As he turned back to knock, he met his own faint reflection in the rectangle of mirrored glass set into the door panel, recognized the studied expression of neutrality that he’d become so adept at fixing to his face when the situation required it.

The woman who yanked the door open before his fist had connected was a little over five foot tall, heavy in a solid, shapeless way. Her dark hair, pulled into a tight ponytail, was dyed a few shades too dark, accentuating the paleness of her skin. ‘Indoor’ skin, Marilyn found himself thinking, despite her living right by a stunning beach. Green eyes – the little girl’s eyes, Jodie’s eyes, Marilyn recognized immediately – ringed with red, met his. He raised his warrant card and Debs Trigg stepped back from the door, her face collapsing in on itself.

She had called the police when she had discovered Jodie’s bed empty and unslept in, and seen Marilyn’s appeal to identify the dead child on a news channel. She must therefore have had a strong suspicion that the murdered girl was her Jodie, but their poker-faced presence at her door was the final big nail in the coffin of her hope.

An animal yelp of pure pain rooted Marilyn to the spot. Jack-knifing on to the sofa, Debs Trigg scratched clawed fingers down her cheeks, raising bloody red weals in their wake. Workman shoved past Marilyn, knocking his shoulder in the cramped space, and caught Trigg’s wrists.

‘Don’t, love, don’t do that. Please don’t hurt yourself like that.’

He should have stepped forward himself, he knew, should have grabbed her wrists himself, but from the moment he had set eyes on her all he could think of was Zoe Reynolds, his mind spinning back to Carolynn on her knees in the beach car park cradling Zoe’s limp body and howling, and later, sitting opposite him in the interview room at Chichester police station, so composed by then, so closed-down. He had been wholly unable to see anything in those dark eyes, or to decipher the secrets buried in the brain behind them. A second child was dead because of his ineptitude.

His gaze moved past Debs Trigg and Workman to the photograph of Jodie on the shelf behind the sofa, a ten by eight colour shot of a laughing child, arms spread wide, wind flapping her yellow summer dress around her thighs, the white sails of yachts in the background. Unmistakably West Wittering beach. Unmistakably the little girl he had seen dead this morning, a chain of bruises around her neck, that vile doll by her side, the last chink of uncertainty closed. Heartbreaking. Utterly heartbreaking and his responsibility. His fault. His failure.

It took Debs Trigg a long time to stop crying. Marilyn and Workman had exchanged tense glances and he had resumed staring through the nets at the blank white backside of the static caravan next door while Workman did her best to comfort the distraught woman. Slipping his mobile from his pocket, Marilyn fired off a quick text to DC Cara, asking him to chase the family liaison officer pronto. The sooner he could escape from this hellhole of emotion and get back to investigating little Jodie’s death, the better for all concerned.

Rising from the sofa, Trigg scrabbled for the packet of Superkings on the table and lit a cigarette, sinking back beside Workman, hunching her shoulders and folding an arm across her chest – defensive body language, Marilyn recognized, inwardly allowing himself a brief, cynical smile at the knowledge and terminology he had absorbed from Jessie Flynn.

‘It’s definitely her, isn’t it?’ she muttered, on a stream of smoky breath. ‘Definitely?’

‘We’ll need you or a relative to formally identify her, but yes, we’re pretty certain that the girl found this afternoon in the dunes at West Wittering is your daughter, Jodie,’ he said, in the businesslike tone he resorted to when faced with emotionally charged situations. ‘She was wearing a navy-blue school unform, white shirt, navy jumper and trousers. She also had a pendant necklace, with two sets of footprints engraved on it, around her neck.’

Hauling smoke into her lungs through pale lips, Trigg nodded, tear-stained eyes fixed on the floor. ‘She loved that necklace. Found it on the beach one day when she was walking home from school, she did, a couple of months ago. I told her she should hand it in, but—’ she broke off with a shrug. ‘You know, and she loved it an’ all, so I just let her keep it.’

Workman pulled a black notebook from her pocket and Marilyn noticed her shift sideways, expanding the space between her and Debs, subtly re-establishing a professional distance. She made a note about the necklace in the book.

‘I need to ask you a few questions, Mrs Trigg,’ Marilyn continued. ‘To help us with the investigation.’

‘Miss. There isn’t a Mr – though I think you already worked that out, didn’t you, Inspector?’ She took another tense drag of the cigarette. ‘Ask away.’

‘Why didn’t you report Jodie missing earlier?

‘I was at work, wasn’t I.’

‘Where do you work?’

‘F & G Foods in Chichester, on the packing line.’

Workman wrote the name of Debs’ employer in her notebook.

‘What time did you get home?’ Marilyn continued.

‘I’m on lates this week. My shift is midday until ten p.m., so I didn’t get home until eleven.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I went into Jodie’s room to check on her and found her bed empty. I could tell that it hadn’t been slept in.’

‘What time does she usually get home?’

‘School finishes at three-fifteen.’

‘And she walks home alone?’

Debs frowned. ‘She’s nearly ten years old, for Christ’s sake – Year Five. So yeah, of course she walks alone. There and back. It’s only half a kilometre along the beach.’

‘Where is she a pupil?’

‘East Wittering Community Primary.’

‘So, she would have been on the beach alone yesterday afternoon?’ Marilyn confirmed. ‘Walking home from school.’

‘Not down there. Not as far as West Wittering. School’s East Wittering. West Wittering is a good kilometre further on, in the wrong direction to home.’ Anger flared in Debs’ eyes. ‘If you’re gonna have a go at me, you can get out.’

Marilyn saw her aggression for what it was: grief transfigured as anger. For a woman like Debs Trigg, every day would be a fight, for money, for food, for time, for a job that paid more than £7.50 an hour, subsistence living. Fight – anger – would be her ‘go-to’ emotion and it would be far easier for her to process than grief. Whatever her relationship with Jodie, which he had yet to clarify, he knew that she would be hit by a freight train of misery when they left. He wouldn’t want to be in her or the family liaison officer’s shoes for anything.

‘Would Jodie have had any cause to go to West Wittering beach yesterday afternoon?’

Rubbing the back of her hand across her nose, Trigg sniffed. ‘No, of course not. Like I already said, it’s in the opposite direction to home.’

‘Did she like to meet friends on the beach?’

‘School friends, sometimes. They all like to hang out on the beach, don’t they? What kid wouldn’t?’

‘We’ll need a list of their names.’

‘Fine. The school will know better than me.’

‘What about adults? Was she friends with any adults?’

Her lip curled as she looked up and met his gaze with her tear-stained eyes. ‘What, like nonces?’

Marilyn shook his head. ‘Anyone.’

The lit tip of the cigarette glowed as Trigg sucked hard, her chest expanding as she drew the smoke deep into her lungs. Marilyn would have killed for a cigarette right now, but lighting up in the middle of an interview could hardly be called professional, whatever the interviewee was doing, and he was going to play this one by the book. Page, line, word and letter.

‘People who work around the caravan park,’ she murmured, exhaling. ‘It’s friendly like, and we’ve lived here since Jodie was born. She knows everyone on the site. The staff and full-timers, that is, not the holiday rental lot.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘Do you give her a time she needs to be home by?’ he continued, using the present tense deliberately, following Trigg’s lead, to minimize her stress and upset. Faint hope.

‘I tell her she needs to be home by eight, latest.’

‘And you finish work at ten p.m.’

‘Depends if I’m on an early or late shift, but yeah, yesterday was a late, ten p.m., and then it’s an hour bus-ride home.’

‘So, what does Jodie do between three fifteen and eight?’

‘She stays out and plays with schoolkids on the beach, or kids from the caravan park. Sometimes she goes to hang out at the entertainment centre, watches people play the arcade games.’

Marilyn nodded. The list of people the little girl had known and the time that she had spent alone both seemed to fall into the category ‘how long is a piece of string?’ The only certainty: another murder of another little girl, two years ago, the link between them, in his mind at least, concrete. The colour of the doll’s eyes a detail that he was sure hadn’t been in the papers.

He was a pot calling the kettle black, pulling Debs Trigg up on her parenting skills, particularly as he recognized that she had little choice, but at least his own parental failings had been compensated for by his ex-wife, a caring, responsible woman. Even so, his daughter had gone off the rails. It sounded as if poor little Jodie had had no such stability and his heart went out to her, to her memory. Many nine-year-old kids he’d dealt with in his career had had it far worse, but he still felt that every child deserved a fairy tale childhood. Adulthood was tough enough, without hard times starting long before.

‘Would she have gone to West Wittering beach voluntarily?’ he asked.

Trigg gave an evasive shrug. ‘What reason would she have to go?’

‘I was hoping that you would be able to help me with that.’ A sharp edge to this tone that he was struggling to suppress. ‘She has four and three-quarter hours from when school finishes to when you expect her home and another three hours after that, before you actually get home. It’s a long time.’ A very long time, particularly for a nine-year-old child.

Trigg waved the stub of the cigarette towards the corner of the caravan. ‘We’ve got the telly and often as not she’s got homework.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘But she could have gone down to West Wittering voluntarily. She could have been meeting someone without you knowing.’

Trigg’s red-rimmed eyes remained fixed on the blank square of the television screen in the corner, looking but not seeing.

‘Couldn’t she, Miss Trigg?’ he prompted.

‘Yeah, I suppose she could ’ave.’ The words drew a little jerk out of her, as if the effort of acknowledgement hurt her.

‘I’ll need that list of her close school friends and everyone else she knew and saw around here on a regular basis. Detective Sergeant Workman will give you a hand with it.’

Trigg gave a dull nod. All the aggression, the fight had leaked from her. Tears welled in her eyes and a barely audible voice came from the back of her throat. ‘How was she killed, Detective Inspector? How was my baby killed?’

‘She was strangled,’ Marilyn said plainly. There was no benefit in sugar-coating, not for anyone.

‘When?’

‘Mid-to-late afternoon.’ He glanced at his watch. It was half-past midnight. Yesterday afternoon. ‘Thursday afternoon,’ he added, probably unnecessarily.

‘When I was at work then,’ Debs muttered. ‘When I was on the fucking packing line, knowing nothing, some bastard was strangling my baby to death.’

Marilyn didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

‘She wasn’t …’ Her body twisted with anguish at the question. ‘She wasn’t sexually assaulted, raped, was she?’

Though only Dr Ghoshal could confirm with 100 per cent certainty whether Jodie had been sexually assaulted, Marilyn shook his head, ignoring the look of chastisement that Workman shot him. He was getting good at ignoring her looks. He had seen the child’s body in the InciTent, still dressed in her school uniform, shirt and trousers, none of her clothing disturbed. Zoe Reynolds hadn’t been sexually assaulted and he would be happy to stake his professional reputation – what little he had left when it came to solving child murders – on the fact that Jodie Trigg hadn’t either. Every fibre of his instinct told him that Jodie’s murder, as with Zoe’s, wasn’t a sexually motivated crime. Every fibre told him, still, that Zoe’s mother Carolynn was responsible for her murder. And Jodie’s? He’d find out. This time he would find out.

‘No, she wasn’t sexually assaulted,’ he repeated firmly. ‘We’ll know a lot more once the, uh, once the autopsy has been performed later today.’

At the word ‘autopsy’, Trigg began rubbing her hands convulsively up and down her arms, her clawed fingers leaving raw weals on her pale skin.

Workman caught one of her wrists again. ‘Please don’t.’

‘Autopsy. Why? Why can’t you just leave her alone? Give her back to me to bury in one piece.’

‘It will help us to catch her killer,’ Workman said gently. Her hand was knocked away as Trigg shrank into the corner of the sofa, looking from Marilyn to Workman and back, like a cornered animal.

‘Look, I know this is difficult, Miss Trigg,’ Marilyn said, measuring his tone.

‘You don’t know anything,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t know me. You didn’t know Jodie. Has your daughter died, Detective Inspector?’ She caught his gaze and held it defiantly, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘So don’t fucking pretend that you know anything about us, or anything about how I’m feeling.’

‘Miss Trigg,’ Workman said.

Trigg spun around, eyes blazing. ‘Or you!’

‘We’re trying to help you, Debs.’

A sob washed over her. ‘No one can help me. Jodie was the only good thing that had ever happened to me. No one can help me now.’

Workman’s jaw was rigid. The colour had completely drained from her face. Looking across at her, sitting stiffly in the passenger seat next to him, Marilyn cursed himself for not bringing DC Cara with him instead. The death of a child was emotionally the toughest crime for an investigative team to deal with; he knew that from Zoe Reynolds. But it had to be easier for a twenty-two-year-old DC who’d never had his own kids and was aeons away from wanting any, than a forty-six-year-old woman who had tried everything to have them and failed. Her voice was thick and Marilyn realized, with horror that she was struggling not to cry.

His own coping mechanism relied on his focusing with blinkered efficiency on the investigation, the hard evidence. The emotional aspects he locked in a small box deep in his brain, stowing the key somewhere he hoped never to find. It hadn’t quite worked out that way with Zoe. The little girl’s ghost seemed to know exactly where he’d hidden the key, chose his weakest moments to unlock the box and unleash the flood of memories, the world of self-recrimination.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Workman sniffed, embarrassed.

Marilyn slid his arm around her shoulders, a move which they both found awkward in the cramped car. Dropping his arm quickly, he muttered, ‘You’re human, Workman. And so am I. Believe it or not, so am I.’

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