‘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.’
13
‘Marilyn told me about the Reynolds case,’ Callan said, slumping down on the sofa next to Jessie, coffee in hand. ‘The murder of that first little girl.’
She glanced over and met his gaze. ‘Zoe, you mean? When did he tell you about it?’
She had been watching News 24 for the past three hours, since four a.m., unable to sleep at all last night, a fact she wasn’t about to share with Callan. She had risen six more times during the night to straighten the curtains, seven times in all, sliding her feet softly heel to toe on the carpet as she crossed the bedroom so as not to wake him, to avoid the inevitable, impossible explanations if he caught her. She had spent the rest of the night lying on her side, watching him sleep, feeling unbelievably lucky that she could call him hers, but desperately insecure at the same time at how her tenuous grip on normality might wreck what they had. He only had so much patience and she knew that, though he professed to understand her OCD, there was no way that he did, or could.
She had watched five half-hourly cycles of ‘The West Wittering child murder’, as the press were calling it, clearly at a loss for a snappier title. The little girl had been named an hour ago as Jodie Trigg, the last news update featuring footage of the press clamouring at the closed door of a static caravan, a uniformed police constable guarding it, trying to keep them at bay, kids in pyjamas jumping up and down in the background, trying to get their faces on television, their parents looking more suitably sombre.
‘He visited me in hospital last December while you were in the Persian Gulf and unburdened his soul. He probably thought I was too drugged up to remember.’
‘What did he
