She had watched the little girl, Jodie Trigg, too. Seen her enter the dirty white house often, the blonde woman wrapping her arms around her, as if she was welcoming her own daughter home from school, ushering her quickly inside, skittish dark eyes grazing over the little girl’s head to take in the road beyond, check that no one was watching. But Ruby was invisible. She had been invisible virtually since the day she was born. It used to hurt, but now her invisibility was like a worn pair of slippers, comfortable and useful.
Watching the woman with Jodie Trigg, she wondered sometimes where her own child was, at that moment when Jodie was being ushered inside a warm house by someone who cared for her. Her child had been a spring baby, born with the lambs. New life had been everywhere when Ruby was mourning her loss, nature, God, taunting her, rubbing her broken heart raw.
Ruby looked back up at the house. If she were a good citizen, she’d tell DI Simmons that she knew where the woman he was searching for was living. That she also knew the woman had spent many hours alone with Jodie Trigg. Mother of the first dead girl; surrogate mother to the second. A coincidence?
Like hell, Ruby muttered to herself with a bitter chuckle.
She liked DI Simmons. She had liked him from the first time she’d met him, in another miserable segment of her miserable life. He was one of the only people she’d ever had contact with who had treated her like a human being, not like a vessel to be used – the men – or something beneath contempt, to be sneered at or ignored – the women. But being a good citizen had served her poorly and, however much she liked him, it wasn’t enough. She was wiser now. Older, wiser, tougher and more cynical. She had learned to take her opportunities where she could find them.
How much was it worth to Carolynn Reynolds for Ruby to keep her secrets? How much was it worth to her husband, to learn his wife’s? Or she to learn her husband’s?
Turning away from the house, she slid down the pebbles and on to the flat sand of the beach. Pulling off her plastic ballet pumps, she started to walk, feeling the cool damp sand against her soles. Little pleasures. She felt a shiver of anticipation and excitement, and it felt good.
29
A fat, white moon surrounded by stars hung in a clear navy sky, its shimmering image reflected in the sea, shrinking and growing with the motion of the waves. Lights off, Carolynn stood by the bedroom window, knowing that it would be a long time before she would absorb this view again. This panorama of sea and sky that changed by the hour and season was the only thing she would miss about this miserable house. Big sky country: she’d heard that somewhere and it felt appropriate.
Headlights suddenly, illuminating the road outside. She shrank back, apprehension drying out her throat. Roger. What would she say to him? He had claimed to be at work when Jodie Trigg was murdered, but she knew now that wasn’t true. Would she challenge him or let his lie ride? He hadn’t had an alibi for Zoe’s murder either. Although they had been on holiday at the Witterings, spending that last long weekend at the beach before Zoe started back at school for the new academic year, he’d been stressing about work, had driven to Kingley Vale in the South Downs, he’d said, hiked to the top of the nature reserve and sat down on the crest of the hill with a flask of tea to mull over the issues. He’d been there for hours, watching the changing day reflected in the Solent below him. There had been no mobile reception and the police hadn’t been able to reach him for hours to tell him that his daughter had been murdered and his wife taken into custody. Had he lied about his whereabouts then too?
No.
She was thinking the unthinkable. She couldn’t let her mind go there. She had been with Roger for twenty years, knew him better than she knew herself – surely – didn’t she? And Zoe had been their only child, hard fought for, hard won. Though he hadn’t been the one accused of Zoe’s murder, he had supported her unfailingly throughout the trial, had been tarred with the brush of hatred by association, lived with the vitriolic fallout, his enviably perfect life disintegrating alongside hers.
No, there had to be a reasonable explanation for his lying to her about his whereabouts these past two days. She would have liked longer to work out how best to broach the subject. He was unsettlingly tense nowadays.
The car drew up against the sea wall opposite and Carolynn breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Roger’s car, but an ancient-looking BMW Z3. God, she hadn’t seen one of those in forever. The car’s headlights were extinguished and a man climbed out. The afterimage of the moon and the car’s headlights lingering on her retina, she couldn’t make him out beyond his height, medium, and build, skinny. Slowly, her vision acclimatized to the dark and she saw that he had black hair and was wearing a black suit. Instead of heading towards the caravan park as she’d expected him to, he moved into the middle of the road and surveyed the house.
A chill gripped Carolynn as if the temperature in the room had suddenly plummeted. She shrunk against the wall to the side of the bedroom window, unable to move, to breathe even.
It was him.
That horrid detective inspector with the pale face and those weird mismatched eyes. Those piercing eyes that had stripped her raw every time she’d been pinned beneath their unrelenting stare.
He
