Carolynn looked horrified. ‘I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. You won’t tell him you’ve seen me, will you?’
‘No. No, absolutely not. I would never, ever break patient confidentiality. But I do think that you’re only making it worse for yourself if you carry on hiding. Mentally worse for yourself, if nothing else. Living your life with such secrecy is very stressful.’
‘You have no idea what I went through when Zoe died, and afterwards, with the police and the trial. That was mentally destructive.’
‘You’re right, I have no idea, and I do understand why you want to hide from society, but hiding from the police is different.’
Carolynn bent her head and gave a faint nod. She was twisting the strip that she’d torn from the blue paper napkin in her fingertips. Jessie watched her, the emotions ticker-taping across her face, only half the information she’d usually have access to as she still hadn’t been able to make eye contact, every second line in the story missing.
‘This little girl’s death could be connected to Zoe’s. This might be your chance to finally get justice for her and clear your name.’
Carolynn’s fingers stilled and she nodded again, distractedly. Her gaze had moved from the napkin to the newspaper that Jessie had spread across the middle of the table. The overhead lights cast shadows where her eyes should have been, so that Jessie couldn’t tell exactly where she was looking. At her photograph again? At something else?
Carolynn sensed Jessie watching her. She knew that she should look up, catch Jessie’s eye and smile, chat, work on the friendship she was determined to establish, but her gaze was gripped by a photograph that she hadn’t noticed before. It was the photograph of a necklace. Her necklace. Hers. A ‘new mummy’ present from Roger when Zoe had arrived. It was a silver locket carved with the imprint of two sets of footprints walking alongside each other as if on a beach, one pair an adult’s and the other a child’s. It had been too mawkish for her taste and she’d hardly worn it, hadn’t noticed its absence until a few days ago. She had no idea when it had gone missing.
‘Give DI Simmons a call, Carolynn,’ she heard Jessie say. ‘Tell him where you are.’
She tore her gaze from the necklace. She felt disorientated, horribly claustrophobic suddenly, as if the floor was rising and the ceiling falling, trapping her in between. You must have mislaid it around the house somewhere. It’s bound to turn up, Roger had said, a few days ago, as they’d stood in their spotless bedroom, no clutter within which to lose personal items.
Something else occurred to her suddenly.
Oh, God – prints. She hadn’t worn the necklace since forever, but it might still hold her fingerprints. The police had them and her DNA on file from Zoe’s murder. If the necklace did bear her prints, how long would it take the police to match them? Anything connected with a child murder would be expedited through the system.
Jessie watched the woman across from her, the look of abject horror on her face. Something fundamental had changed. Was it something she’d said – her urging Carolynn to contact Marilyn? Or had Carolynn seen something in the paper? Or nothing? Just her being uptight, over-sensitive? The tabletop was a mess, Carolynn’s empty coffee cup sitting in a puddle of black sludge, the dregs of her chocolate pancake spread across her plate, like a mud fight. Threads of tissue from the napkin that Carolynn had shredded were dancing across the tabletop, animated by the breeze from the open café doorway. Looking at the detritus, Jessie felt the familiar hiss of the electric suit travel across her skin. If she were alone, she would scoop up the loose threads and stuff them into the coffee cup, call a waitress over to clear up the china and cutlery. But she was supposed to be the professional here, inspire confidence, and she couldn’t let Carolynn glimpse that damaged part of her psychology.
‘Are you OK, Carolynn?’ she asked.
‘Yes, of course. It’s been a lovely lunch.’ A bright, brittle laugh. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think that I need any more sessions.’ That stilted smile again. ‘I … I’ve enjoyed talking to you here far more than I did in your office. It’s so nice just chatting like this. I feel as if we’re getting on so well. I’d love to keep in touch, not on a professional basis, but as … as friends.’
Jessie returned Carolynn’s smile, hers feeling as fakely plastered to her face as Carolynn’s looked.
‘Call DI Simmons,’ she said, matter-of-factly. She felt intensely uncomfortable suddenly. Something about that twisted smile, Carolynn’s tone, her words, made Jessie think again of what Callan had said.
She could be a child killer. She could have murdered her own child.
He was wrong. She was sure that he was wrong. Even so, she had thought that she would be able to breeze through this lunch, persuade Carolynn to contact Marilyn, or not, but at least she would have tried, and then shrug off the meeting, maybe even find a B & B and have a relaxed evening by the beach, drive back to Surrey in the morning to spend the rest of the weekend with Callan making amends, put this woman and the two dead little girls to the back of her mind. How naive had she been? She didn’t want to be friends, didn’t want that level of connection to someone who had lied so compulsively to her, whatever the motivation.
‘Tell him where you were,’ she reiterated. ‘He’ll understand. I know that you had a terrible experience previously, but I can vouch for the fact that he is one of the good guys.’
Carolynn nodded. If only Jessie knew the half of it – the torment she’d experienced because
