Shoving the cigarette into her mouth, she lit it, sucking hard, blowing the smoke slowly out of her nostrils, her eyes fixed on Marilyn’s face, daring him to object. He wasn’t about to. Ruby was right. He could murder a cigarette himself, was tempted to snatch it from her slender fingers and take a few desperate drags. The air in the room felt stifling, not the product of the smoke. If he’d had a knife he could have sliced it.
‘Tell me what you remember seeing, Ruby. When you found her, when you found Jodie? Walk it through in your mind. Tell me everything, just as you saw it.’
18
Jessie saw Carolynn immediately, sitting alone on the stony section at the top of the beach, a newspaper flapping in her hand. She wasn’t reading though, just staring out to sea, absolutely motionless, the paper the only animation. Jessie knew nothing about her, beyond what Carolynn had told her in their five counselling sessions, the core of it lies, she now knew. The address she had given, an address in Chichester, was a fake. She had always paid for her sessions in cash, Jessie had found out this morning from the practice receptionist, because ‘my husband has one of those cash-in-hand jobs’. The woman like quicksand.
Sand.
The only certainties to build on in her search for Carolynn this morning, the dusting of crystal white sand she’d noticed on Carolynn’s feet yesterday and the memories she had shared with Jessie about watching container ships plough their way up the Solent to Portsmouth or Southampton Docks with her daughter, how she watched them every day now, alone. And she had run once, she’d said a couple of weeks ago, sprinted, a horse cantering close by her on the sand, feeling superhuman, almost as if she could outrun it. That was a good moment, one of the few. Lies too, perhaps, but Jessie thought not. She had no reason to lie about those details. Only Bracklesham Bay and East Wittering allowed horse riding on the beach during the day in the summer months, so Jessie had decided to start with those. Carolynn hated the confines of her house, particularly when she was stressed or upset, as she would unquestionably be today with this second little girl’s murder. It wasn’t a ridiculous notion to believe that, if Carolynn lived in or close to East Wittering, Jessie would bump into her at some point if she spent the day here, searching.
She had parked in the municipal car park and walked along Cakeham Road, looking in all the shops and cafés, fruitlessly; turned into Shore Road and did the same, again without result. She bought herself a takeaway coffee at one of the cafés and walked on towards the sea, planning to sit for an hour or two on the beach, to see if she could catch Carolynn on one of her many runs.
Draining her coffee, tossing the cup into one of the bins by the Fisherman’s Hut, a cabin selling fresh takeaway seafood, Jessie crunched on to the pebbles at the top of the beach, walking casually towards the sand and sea beyond, silently rehearsing the excuse she’d formulated to explain her presence at the beach. Would Carolynn ignore her, turn away and hide, or would she call out? Jessie wanted her to make the first move, so that their meeting felt like Carolynn’s idea, not something forced on her. She would be feeling extremely vulnerable and sensitive, her antenna tuned to hyper-suspicion.
Jessie had just set foot on the sand at the bottom of the pebbly bank, when she heard Carolynn’s voice, calling a tentative, ‘Dr Flynn?’
She kept walking, pretending that she hadn’t heard.
‘Dr Flynn?’
Turning, she pasted an expression of surprise on to her face. ‘Laura!’
She retraced her steps, as Carolynn rose to her feet, the paper folded now and clutched to her chest, only the back page, sports coverage, visible, Jessie noticed. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘Oh, I live just down the beach,’ Carolynn said, pointing east in the direction of Bracklesham Bay. She broke off and raised a hand to cover her mouth, like a child who has just unwittingly blurted out a secret she’d promised not to share.
‘I’m so envious that you live by the sea,’ Jessie said brightly to take the heat from the moment. ‘I would love to live by the sea, but I’ve never had the opportunity. One day, hopefully.’ She smiled. ‘Can you see the water from your windows?’
‘Oh, only from upstairs. There’s a shoulder-high concrete wall, a sea defence, between the beach and the road in front of my house. It’s ridiculous. I live right by the sea and I can’t see it!’ Her initial tentativeness replaced now by that Technicolor ‘game-show host’ tone, her gaze focused on the expanse of sea over Jessie’s right shoulder. ‘What are you doing at the beach, Dr Flynn?’
‘Jessie. Please call me Jessie. It’s my mother’s wedding next weekend and I wanted to make her a present. I don’t have any client appointments today, so I thought I’d come to the beach, collect some shells and make a picture frame for her. I’ve got a lovely picture of my brother and I when we were kids, playing on the beach in Cornwall, to put in it. I wanted to do something unique, something personal.’
She had formulated this excuse precisely because it was mother, daughter, and personal. She needed to get underneath this woman’s skin in a way she hadn’t during their sessions if she was going to win enough trust to persuade her to contact Marilyn. The first step was turning herself from Dr Flynn into Jessie, a woman with a life outside her professional persona, even if that life was little more than fiction. The contradiction wasn’t lost on her: lie to win trust.
‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘Will you join me for lunch, Laura?’
‘I’ve eaten.’
Jessie doubted that Carolynn had eaten a proper meal for months. She was so thin in her
