Marilyn could feel himself blushing. Not because of what she had said – he saw it for the edgy banter that it was – but because she’d said it in front of Workman. He felt reduced to the gauche PC he had been the first time he’d met Ruby.
‘Ruby,’ he muttered, shaking his head.
She lifted the cigarette to her mouth again, and his gaze found the pattern of needle marks on her arm.
‘Life’s tough, DI Simmons,’ she murmured. ‘Even for you with your fancy job.’ Her gaze moved to Workman. ‘Even for you, hey?’
‘If you were out there looking for treasure, why didn’t you take the necklace?’ he asked, dodging her comment.
She lifted her shoulders and gave a wry half-smile. ‘I was going to nick it, wasn’t I? But not off a dead child. I’m not total scum.’
‘Did you touch it?’
‘Yeah.’
Marilyn’s groan was audible.
‘I wasn’t thinking.’
He nodded. ‘We’ve got your prints on file. Where are you living now, Ruby?’
‘East Wittering. Council flat.’
‘What’s the address, please,’ Workman cut in, flicking to a new page in her notebook.
‘Wyatt Court, Stocks Lane.’
‘Number?’
‘Seven.’
Workman made a note.
Marilyn sat back. ‘Anything else that you think might be important?’
Ruby shook her head.
‘Thank you for coming in, Ruby. Please don’t go anywhere without letting us know. We’ll probably need to speak to you again.’
She nodded. ‘Got nowhere to go and no money to go there with, DI Simmons.’
Marilyn walked Ruby down the stairs.
‘The last I heard, you had a child, Ruby,’ he said gently, as they walked.
‘Had, yeah.’
‘What happened to him or her?’
A careless shrug. ‘I got him adopted.’
‘When?’
‘Ten, eleven years ago now.’ She smiled sardonically. ‘I had no use for a kiddie.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘I’ll let you out the back. The press are out front.’
‘You mean I don’t get to have my fifteen minutes of fame?’
‘Up to you.’
‘Nah.’ A wink. ‘The back door’s fine. I’m well used to taking it the back way, whether I want to or not.’ The carapace firmly back in place.
As they walked side by side along the corridor in silence, Ruby dug in the pocket of her cargo jacket, produced a yellow packet and held it out to Marilyn. He shook his head.
‘Rescue Remedy?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Another sardonic smile. ‘Take a lot more than this gum to rescue me, DI Simmons, but I gotta start somewhere.’
Warm air billowed into the corridor and sunlight flooded the worn wooden floorboards as he pulled the door open for her.
‘Take care, Ruby. You know where I am if you need anything.’
‘Thanks, DI Simmons.’ Standing on tiptoes, she gave him a quick peck on the cheek. ‘See ya then.’
Popping the chewing gum into her mouth, she turned away and he watched her clack in her silver stilettos down the concrete steps and across the car park, feeling as if something heavy had dropped hard into his stomach. A dead weight.
20
Taking her ballet pumps off at the top of the bank, Jessie tucked them neatly, side by side behind the Fisherman’s Hut and picked her way down the steep, pebbly section of the beach. The sand was damp, a cool salve to her bare soles after the sharp heat of the pebbles. She walked towards the water – two hundred metres away, the tide fully out, the sea’s edge a bubbling line of white foam – stopping occasionally to inspect a shell, dig her toe into the sand-spaghetti string of a lugworm cast.
‘I’ll call,’ Carolynn had said. ‘I’ll call, but only because you’ve asked me to.’
Jessie shivered, remembering those words and the feel of Carolynn’s fingers. Her touch had been chill, as if she’d been resting her hand on a block of ice. Used to their roles being clearly demarcated by the professional environment, Jessie had expected that subtle red line to remain intact. But Carolynn had taken their lunch as an opportunity to step over a boundary that Jessie had no intention of letting her cross.
She paused to trace the tip of her toe around the sand-spaghetti trail of another lugworm cast.
I’ll call him, but only because you’ve asked me to.
She hadn’t believed Carolynn. She had fallen for many of her lies, but now she was wiser and that statement had been accompanied by direct eye contact for the first time ever, an unblinking stare that had unnerved her with its intensity. When most people lied, they broke eye contact, if only fleetingly, but for Carolynn, a woman who had never met Jessie’s gaze directly before, the opposite was true. She had forced herself to hold Jessie’s gaze unwaveringly, in the mistaken belief that eye contact signalled truth.
What should she do now? She knew what Callan would want her to do, but he was a policeman. It was in his nature, his DNA, to doubt. Carolynn had terminated their professional relationship, so she no longer needed to worry about patient confidentiality, but could she really just hang her out to dry? Squashing the lugworm cast flat with the base of her foot, an unnecessarily destructive action which she regretted the second she’d done it, she walked on until she reached the water’s edge and turned right, heading towards West Wittering, a kilometre away, slopping along in the shallows, her feet engulfed in white foam with each new breaking wave.
She had experienced social isolation herself when she’d returned to school after being incarcerated at Hartmoor Mental Hospital for a year, and it had hurt, badly. She’d been a teenager then, unable to escape, had made up for her lack of control by tidying and ordering the fragments of her life contained within her four bedroom walls. How much worse would Carolynn’s experience have been – a woman accused of murdering her own daughter? She would have had perfect strangers intimidating her in the street: stalking her, calling her names, spitting on her, shoving and hitting her. Threatening calls at all hours of the day and night, bricks hurled through her windows, her car scratched and dented, its
