‘I’ll call,’ she murmured, a tiny lie against all the others she had told. She’d been lying so long that she barely knew truth from fiction any more. Sliding her hand across the table, she coiled her fingers around Jessie’s and met her ice-blue eyes directly for the first time ever. ‘I’ll call, but only because you’ve asked me to.’
19
Through a cloud of smoke, Ruby nodded. For a few moments, the only sound was that of her inhaling and exhaling and of Workman turning a page in her notebook.
‘She was whiter than white,’ Ruby murmured eventually.
Marilyn hadn’t expected that. ‘Whiter than white? What do you mean?’
‘There was an advert for washing powder that I remember watching, years ago, when I was little. Proper little, four or five. A blonde girl in a meadow full of wild flowers. There was some stupid jingly song that went with the advert and that was all I could think of when I saw her.’ Ruby started to sing, almost under her breath. ‘Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone—’ She broke off with a smirk, but Marilyn noticed that her eyes were shinier than they had been. The smoke making them water? ‘She was so white. The sand is white, isn’t it, up there in the dunes? Like white powder. And she was whiter, brilliant white, like she’d been washed.’
He gave an encouraging nod, but didn’t speak.
‘Her hair was brown and curly. Her eyes were open. She was laid inside that heart of shells and that doll was beside her.’
‘Did you notice anything about the doll?’
‘It had black marks around its neck that looked as if they’d been drawn on with a felt-tip.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘Anything else?’
‘Like what?’
Its eyes. The colour? He didn’t say it, couldn’t lead her. Did you notice that the doll’s eyes were the same colour as the girl’s?
‘Anything else notable?’ he said.
Ruby shrugged and her gaze slid from his. ‘It was just a cheap plastic doll in a shiny pink ballerina dress.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘What else did you see?’
‘The little girl had a necklace around her neck.’
‘What was it?’
‘Silver. A silver chain with a pendant hanging off it.’
‘Did you notice anything about the pendant?’ Marilyn asked.
‘It was engraved with footprints. Two sets, big and small.’ Her gaze dipped. ‘An adult and a child, walking next to each other.’
Marilyn wasn’t sure if he imagined that her voice was rougher, as if she was forcing the words around a lump in her throat. The cigarette smoke again?
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive.’ She took a long drag on the cigarette, funnelled the smoke slowly out of her nostrils.
Marilyn resisted the urge to lean forward, right into her personal space, to surround himself with the smoke. Second-hand stress relief.
Footprints. An adult and a child. She was right.
He was asking, not because he needed to know what the necklace looked like. He had seen it in an evidence bag and it was currently at the lab being fingerprinted, expedited, the child murder shot to the top of the month’s ‘to-do list’, the year’s ‘to-do list’. He had asked her the question to see how many details she had absorbed, how well he could rely on her testimony.
‘It reminded me of God,’ she said.
‘Why God?’ he asked.
‘Just something I remember from school. A story about walking on the sand with God. Footprints in the sand or something stupid like that. That’s what it made me think of anyway, that necklace. The beach and that necklace.’
Marilyn nodded. Her eyes were the same as he remembered from the first time they had met. Such a soft blue that they were almost violet. The colour of the purplest bluebells. Workman’s voice made their eyes unlock and their heads swivel in unison.
‘“Lord, you said once I decided to follow you, You’d walk with me all the way. But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life, there was only one set of footprints. I don’t understand, when I needed You the most, You would desert me.” “My precious child, I love you and I will never leave you, never, ever, during your trials and testings. When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”’
‘Do you go to church then, Detective Sergeant Workman? You one of them?’ Ruby asked.
Workman shook her head and smiled. ‘It’s pinned above the kitchen sink in the children’s centre I volunteer at every Saturday. I get to do a lot of washing up, so I’ve read it that many times I could recite it in my sleep.’
Ruby held her gaze for a long moment, without returning the smile. She curled her lip.
‘There was only one set of prints when I needed him the most and they were mine,’ she hissed. ‘He was no-fucking-where to be seen during the saddest times of my life.’
Hands locked into one fist, fingers white with tension, Workman nodded. This interview fell outside her range of experience. Marilyn would have liked to be alone with Ruby, knew that he would be able to get under her skin more if they were alone, but he’d already sent Workman out on a coffee-run once and protocol would throw up its hands in horror if he asked her to leave him to it now, with the undercurrent palpable. His gaze moved from Workman’s and found the cross hanging around Ruby’s neck.
‘No, before you ask,’ she said, noticing him looking. ‘I don’t fucking believe.’ She gave a short, harsh laugh. ‘Mary Magdalene is the patron saint of prostitutes. That’s why I wear it. Got nothing to do with Him, or any other sodding man for that matter.’
‘You’re not a prostitute any more, Ruby.’
She winked, the armour sliding back into place seamlessly, as if she had never lowered it. ‘I could be if you wanted
