43
The photograph was of her old self, a woman even she struggled to remember. Unrecognizable to a stranger, surely? The skin on Carolynn’s lips stretched and cracked like parchment as she smiled. Sudden understanding leant a gleam to the oily van-man’s feral eyes. Wrapping the bacon sandwich in a paper napkin, he held it out to her.
‘That’ll be twenty quid,’ he said.
Carolynn sucked in a breath, biting back the – ‘What the hell?’ – growing on her lips. Fine. It was worth it to her. Opening her handbag, she looked for her purse, couldn’t see it. Her handbag’s interior was shadowed by the van’s blue-and-white striped awning. Stepping back into the sunlight, she held her handbag open and rummaged inside. Car keys, hairbrush, powder compact, mascara, a lipstick, mirror, ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile phone, a collection of coins for parking clinking in the bottom. But no purse.
Oh God. She remembered now: taking her purse out of her bag to give £2 to a charity collector who’d knocked on the front door selling cupcakes yesterday. Then what had she done? Left it on the hall table? Carried it with her into the kitchen, and put it down on the work surface while she emptied the cakes into the bin? She couldn’t think. Looking up, she met the man’s hooded gaze.
‘I must have left my purse at home.’ She tried to keep her voice even, mask the thread of desperation. ‘But I’ve got £10 in my pocket, here—’ She held it out to him. ‘And some change.’ Raking her fingers along the bottom of her handbag, she scooped up the change, a couple of pound coins, three fifties, a few other silvers and some coppers, all covered in downy lint. She laid the pile of coins on the counter.
The man grinned, a wet red hole gaping at the centre of his mouth where both of his incisors were missing.
‘Like I said, the sandwich costs twenty quid, lady. Cheap at the price, I’d say.’
‘And I’ve just told you that I’ve forgotten my purse.’ Carolynn held up her bag to him, open so that he could see. She was close to tears. What else could possibly go wrong? How else would she be punished? Hadn’t she been punished enough for what she had done? Punished over and over and over.
Scooping up the money, the man winked. ‘I’ll let you off the rest, lady, ’cause I’m nice like that. You have a good day now, won’t yeh.’
44
On her way from the Reynolds’ house to Buena Vista, Jessie had sat on the beach wall and studied the crime scene photographs of little Jodie’s pale body, her head surrounded by that halo of curly brown hair that looked like seaweed, a mermaid from a child’s fairy story washed up on the beach in her heart of shells. She had looked at Zoe’s too, the staging of the dead girls identical, the differences only in the children themselves, Zoe blonde and brown-eyed, Jodie green-eyed and dark-haired. But despite those differences and the divergence in their backgrounds and lifestyles, she didn’t believe that either girl had been randomly chosen. Each item of the stage set, so carefully constructed, had meant something to the killer. She would review all the material that Marilyn had collected during the investigation into Zoe’s murder later, but for now her focus was on Jodie. If she could get into the little girl’s mind, understand how she thought, how she behaved, perhaps she could uncover the reason for her death and learn something valuable about the person who killed her.
So who was Jodie Trigg? Her job to find out.
On the surface, she was the nine-year-old daughter of a single mother. Her father had left before Jodie was born, leaving Debs with no way of funding her daughter beyond relying on the government or on herself. Though she would no doubt be vilified as a chaotic and uncaring mother in the press, she had chosen to rely on herself, and that one act alone spoke volumes to Jessie about who Debs Trigg was and who she would have wanted her daughter to grow up to be. Two nights ago, she had got back from work late – seven and a half hours after Jodie had left school, between six and seven hours after she had been murdered in the dunes – and found her bed empty. No doubt she would forever be haunted by the fact that she had been working, oblivious, while someone was wringing the neck of her baby girl.
Zoe, conversely, was the privileged daughter of affluent married parents, her lifestyle comfortable, her education private, her future, if she had lived to take it, assured in a way that Jodie’s would never have been.
As she twisted the handle and pushed the door open, Jessie held her breath, almost expecting a child with dark, curly hair to come bouncing across the room, grab her by the hand and pull her through the doorway, talking, explaining, picking things up and showing them off to her, doing handstands on the beds. But the room was empty and silent – of course it would be – east-facing and flooded with morning sunlight, no nets in here to diffuse its brightness. Jessie wondered if Jodie had slept with the curtains open as she did, letting the night come into the room with her, counting stars.
45
A uniformed PC waved Marilyn to a halt as he drew up to the entrance of West Wittering beach car park, then stepped back apologetically, hands raised when he recognized the car’s driver.
‘Any luck?’ Marilyn asked.
Four uniforms had manned the entrance from dawn until dusk since Jodie’s murder, stopping every car, quizzing the occupants as to their whereabouts on Thursday afternoon between three and five-thirty p.m., showing them Jodie Trigg’s photograph, asking if they’d seen her, any girls who looked like her, might have been her, even a slim chance, in the vicinity of the beach on Thursday afternoon. Questioning them as to
