‘I’m thinking that there are only three people in this world who’d put flowers on the grave of this little girl, on the second anniversary of her murder.’
‘The Reynolds,’ Cara said, more of a statement than a question. ‘Carolynn and Roger.’
Workman nodded.
‘And the third?’
Her knees clicked as she stood. She wasn’t getting any younger and despite regularly admonishing Marilyn for burning the candle at both ends and simultaneously incinerating the middle, she could do with looking after herself a bit more too.
‘Roger has an eighty-year-old mother. She was devastated by Zoe’s death. Genuinely.’ As opposed to … she didn’t say it. ‘But I doubt it’s her because she was admitted to a home a few months after Zoe died. She may be dead herself. We should check, actually.’ She added another line to her mental ‘to-do’ list.
‘So one or both of them have been here,’ Cara said, as they weaved their way back through the graves to the tarmac path.
‘Yesterday, I’d say. Yesterday would make sense, wouldn’t it?’
‘The anniversary?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what does it mean?’ Cara asked.
Workman shrugged. ‘That one of them is thinking about Zoe at least, thinking and caring, and that they’re not too far away.’
Her gaze found the dark space under the trees where she and Marilyn had stood watching the funeral. It was empty. Of course, it would be. What had she expected to see? The Reynolds? The ghost of a little girl waiting patiently for justice? The ghosts of two little girls?
26
A black mist descended over Marilyn as he walked into the dissecting room. Jodie Trigg, a little girl who’d once watched X-Factor and run on the beach with her friends was laid out before him, a waxy mannequin on a metal dissecting table in the centre of a chilly, white-tiled room, the embodiment of his failure. Her skin was pale and smooth, as if she had been washed clean in a soapy bath – she was whiter than white – and there was no smell, no scent of death, as if she was too young, too fresh for that.
The beanpole figure of Dr Ghoshal, his angular features all business, waited for him, flanked by two morticians, the unacknowledged hard labourers of the autopsy, to the pathologist’s star turn. The three of them were ranged around Jodie’s body, Dr Ghoshal at the head, the morticians either side, a sombre, frozen tableau. The only time that Marilyn had ever seen the pathologist and seasoned morticians behave as they were now, standing in silence, paying their respects, was two years ago, at Zoe Reynolds’ autopsy. The sight, and the memory it dragged to the surface, twisted a knife deep in his chest. Christ, how the hell am I going to make it through the next couple of hours? He hadn’t been blessed with a strong stomach, struggled with the autopsies of grown men, scumbags, who’d met their end at the hands of fellow drug dealers in revenge for trampling on their patch. God shows no partiality – it was a quote from the Bible, wasn’t it? In the search for perpetrators, he showed no partiality either, believed that every victim deserved justice, however unsavoury they may have been in life, but it wasn’t the same in an autopsy, the body stripped down to its rawest. In here, the sight of the naked little girl on that table made him want to kill to avenge her, administer a slow and agonizing death.
Dr Ghoshal gave a nod to acknowledge Marilyn’s presence, breaking the sombre reverie. The morticians moved off silently on their rubber-soled feet and set about collecting bowls, turning on hoses, laying out instrument trays.
Dr Ghoshal cleared his throat. ‘DI Simmons.’ Not Marilyn. Never Marilyn, a nickname that Simmons had acquired on his first day in the force, after Manson, not Monroe, he would always hasten to add, due to their shared heterochromia. Dr Ghoshal wasn’t one for ludicrous nicknames or manufactured mateyness. ‘Nice to see you again.’
Only someone with antenna quivering as much as Marilyn’s would have noticed the accent of tension in Ghoshal’s habitually colourless tone.
‘Thank you, Dr Ghoshal.’
Goshal indicated Jodie Trigg’s corpse. ‘What is your theory, Detective Inspector?’
‘I’m trying to keep an open mind.’
Ghoshal smiled cynically. ‘That goes without saying.’
Marilyn sighed. ‘Similarities to the Zoe Reynolds case. Look for similarities, please. Anything that I can use to link the two cases.’
‘You think it’s the same killer?’
‘Yes, or a very knowledgeable copycat.’
‘You favour the former explanation?’
No flies on Dr Ghoshal. Marilyn nodded.
‘Why?’
‘The age of the victim, the date of her murder, two years to the day of Zoe Reynolds, where her body was found, the heart of shells, the doll.’ He paused. ‘The method of killing also looks to be the same, though obviously that’s up to you to confirm.’
Dr Ghoshal’s’ hawk-like gaze moved from Marilyn to survey the bruises around Jodie Trigg’s throat. ‘Strangulation.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘The similarities are all very compelling, but circumstantial,’ he said. ‘I need to find a link between the two little girls’ murders that wasn’t in the papers, so that I can eliminate a copycat.’
Another cynical smile. ‘Did any details fail to reach the papers?’
Marilyn rolled his eyes in response. He didn’t mention that the colour of the doll’s eyes had matched the colour of each child’s eyes – brown for Zoe, green for Jodie. It wasn’t relevant to the autopsy and he wanted Dr Ghoshal to believe that he was Marilyn’s only hope of unequivocally linking the two girls’ killer, a motivational nod to Dr Ghoshal’s professional arrogance if nothing else. Also, he didn’t know how leaky Dr Ghoshal’s ship was, whether either mortician had a loose tongue. He didn’t want his only trump card leaked to the press.
‘Let’s begin,’ Dr Ghoshal said.
Positioning himself over the little girl’s body, he raised his scalpel. The sight of the child’s soft skin puckering under the scalpel’s blade before it bit, the sound of flesh and the muscle layer beneath being sliced, the smell of the freshly opened body hit Marilyn in successive waves,
