Oh God. The necklace. She had forgotten to tell Roger about the necklace. She couldn’t tell him that she knew Jodie, but surely when he learned that her necklace had been found around the dead girl’s neck, he would agree to leave, to run, to go to ground somewhere else, far from here.
Unwinding herself from her crunched ‘Z’, Carolynn pulled the telephone from the hall table on to her knee and dialled Roger’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail, didn’t even ring. He had been hurried when they’d spoken, keen to cut their call short, she’d sensed from his tone, so he must have known that his phone battery was running on empty. He wouldn’t have switched it off – surely? – not when he knew how stressed and upset she was.
Once, a couple of months ago, Roger had called his boss from the home phone and when he’d gone upstairs to bed, she’d quickly keyed in 1471 and scribbled down the ‘last number dialled’. Roger liked to keep work and home separate and would have been furious if he’d known, but she wanted the number in case of emergencies and was glad now that she’d done it. She needed to tell him about the necklace.
A man answered, his voice deep and sonorous.
‘He’s not in today, Mrs Reynard.’ Reynard: their cover surname. Reynard – fox – cunning. Roger had liked the inference. And it was close enough to their actual surname to be memorable, off-the-cuff answerable to.
‘Oh.’
‘He hasn’t been in since Wednesday. Perhaps he’s working somewhere else. Some of my guys moonlight at other places for the odd day or two if the pay’s right, though he did say that he was off sick.’ A deep chuckle echoed down the line, a chuckle that Carolynn could close her eyes and sink into. No wonder Roger liked to spend so much time at work. His boss sounded easy-going, kind. But Roger wasn’t there today.
‘Did you say Wednesday?’
‘Yes, Mrs Reynard. Wednesday was the last time I saw Roger.’
‘He wasn’t there yesterday?’ Carolynn pressed.
‘No, I told you, Wednesday.’ The man laughed again, but with a slight edge this time. ‘Tell him, I’m expecting him back on Monday, could you please. We’ve got a big new landscaping job starting next week for a stately home, so I need him here.’
‘Yes, I will,’ Carolynn managed.
‘And you take care now, Mrs Reynard.’
As she laid the receiver back on its stand, she felt as if a black sinkhole was opening underneath her. Roger hadn’t been at work yesterday or today.
You were at home when that girl was killed and I was at work.
22
There was a pale, ragged line of shells where the flat sand of the beach met the steep stony section, as if the tide, when it came in, brought them as far as the pebbles, but couldn’t carry them further. With her Judas left hand, Jessie reached for the closest, the multicoloured oil-slick oval of an oyster shell, concentrating hard on sending the signal from her brain to her fingers to command them to curl and grip. It felt like a gargantuan effort: as if she had to will each electrical impulse to travel from her cerebellum down the nerves, visualize them sparking like lightning, like a flash of electricity from the dreaded suit she could still feel coating her limbs, across each synapse. If there had been anyone around, even people she didn’t know, she would have deferred to her right hand, picked the shell up in one confident, fluid movement. But the afternoon was petering towards early evening, the beach virtually deserted. She could use her left without feeling self-conscious, practise, train her deadened fingers, do something positive for a change. Pinching the oyster shell between fingertips and thumb, she placed it on a pristine patch of sand to her left, unsullied by footprints or worm casts.
Another shell. A clam, this time. The pinch required smaller, the movement more intricate. Her fingers felt as if they were encased in lead gloves. The muscles were tired already, she realized, the tendons stressed, just by that one fine movement of pinching and moving the oyster shell. She felt close to tears. Not only because of her inability to master the use of her own traitorous hand, but also because of Carolynn, Callan, the feeling that she was floating, anchorless in the world at the moment, the knowledge that her OCD was worsening and that, despite the window into other people’s minds that her profession afforded her, she didn’t know how to help herself.
Switching to her right hand, she moved the clam next to the oyster. She collected five more shells, arranging them with the others in a curved line, their outside edges symmetrical. Seven shells in all – lucky seven – each one different. An oyster, a cockle, a clam, a mussel and three she couldn’t name. Pushing herself to her feet, she wandered along the edge of the stones, following the ragged line of shells, bending and collecting more. Returning to her previous spot, she sorted the shells, selecting seven more, identical to the first seven. She arranged them as a mirror image of the first to form the shape of a heart. Zoe and Jodie’s killer or killers had arranged a heart around their bodies and left a doll by their sides. Jodie also had a necklace around her throat. What was the significance of each of those items?
The heart – love? The breakdown of love? Hatred? Jealousy? Betrayal? All different sides of the same multi-faceted shape.
The doll? A historically significant item for the children or for their murderer? A token to keep the dead child company – a tiny glimmer of humanity from the killer – or something left to taunt the living, the bereaved?
And what about the necklace? It had looked from the photograph in the newspaper to have something engraved on its surface, but Jessie hadn’t been close enough to see
