Two Little Girls

her of the cupboards of new army recruits or of her own wardrobes – perhaps not quite that extreme – the few summer dresses hanging creaseless, jumpers, jeans and T-shirts carefully folded and stacked, colour coded, with their own kind, pants, socks and tights neatly layered in a plastic basket on the bottom shelf. Though she was loath to deal in stereotypes, they could usefully provide an initial frame of reference that could be embroidered or picked apart as more information was gathered. This wasn’t the room of a stereotypical nine-year-old girl, the type of messy, disorganized nine-year-old that most of her friends and she herself had been, before Jamie’s death and the advent of her OCD. There were no clothes strewn on the floor, no books scattered on the bedside table, no posters of ponies, actors or musicians on the walls. Even the cuddly cats were ordered in their slumber in the spare bed, ranged from large to small, but not large at one end, graduating to small on the other, Jessie realized. Jodie had arranged them so that the large cats were at the edges of the bed, the smaller further in, and the smallest, a pale blue kitten with a navy and white polka-dot bow around its neck, right in the middle. Looking at the arrangement, the word protected, occurred to her, the bigger protecting the smaller.

Sitting on the end of Jodie’s bed, Jessie pulled the iPad that Marilyn had given her from her handbag.

Instagram, he’d said. Have a look.

Typing in the password ‘Odie’, Jessie pressed ‘enter’. Wrong password. She tried again, typing carefully. Access still denied. She texted Marilyn. ‘What was the password to Jodie’s iPad?’

A few moments later, her phone pinged. Oddie. The dog in Garfield. As I said before!!

Jessie texted back. Thank you. Btw. The dog in Garfield is called Odie!

Another ping. Smartarse.

The little girl’s Instagram page was short, just twelve photographs and two videos. Most of the photos showed her on the beach with her mother, a few with friends. A couple of photographs, selfies from the closeness and angle, showed Jodie cuddling a peculiar-looking, splodgy black, tan and cream cat. It made the farm cat that was forever attempting to prostrate itself on Jessie’s under-floor-heated kitchen tiles look like a super-model feline, though from the way it was cuddling up to Jodie, it looked friendly enough. It was impossible to judge the location of the photographs, as little background was visible, but in one the cat was sitting on the bonnet of a car, a slash of silver paintwork beneath its paws, the reflection of the edge of the iPad visible in the windscreen over Jodie’s left shoulder.

The last photograph was one of Jodie sitting on her bed, drawing. For a moment, Jessie thought that Jodie had drawn one of her cuddly toys, but when she turned the iPad upside down, so that she could look at the drawing the right way up, she realized that Jodie had drawn the ugly tortoiseshell cat. The cat was sitting on a black-and-white tiled floor, tiles that reminded her of a butcher’s shop. The cat didn’t have a collar. Whose cat was it, if anyone’s? Did it matter?

48

Walking, determinedly, head bent, along the beach towards the car park, ignoring the few journalists trailing in his wake, hoping his ‘no comment’ had been a joke, that he’d suddenly feel a burning desire to unburden his soul, give them the journalist’s equivalent of manna from heaven, Marilyn mentally reviewed everything he’d achieved, or more accurately, failed to achieve, since Jodie Trigg’s murder two days ago, and what already felt like a lifetime of lost sleep and self-recrimination. He had once watched a film in which a man in a suit had committed suicide by walking into the sea. Just walking, calmly and purposefully, as if he was perambulating along the pavement in the City of London, until he had disappeared under the waves. He had pulled a few suicides from the freezing sea when he’d served in Brighton, the grim reality so different from the stylized film. And yet, when he had seen little Jodie’s pale, broken body on the beach, he’d had the overwhelming urge to walk down the sand and into the sea, keep walking across the Channel to France, emerge into a shiny new life. Buy a small vineyard and start a winemaking business, perhaps. Working with alcohol would suit him, as would pottering down to the pension in the local village to drink espressos, smoke Gauloise cigarettes and shrug his shoulders, impervious to the march of the rest of the world. Leave the demons that he had amassed from his time in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes behind. Over the past two days, he had thrown everything at the Jodie Trigg murder, but still they had achieved nothing concrete.

What had he missed with Zoe Reynolds? Why had he failed so spectacularly to nail anyone for her murder? Carolynn’s DNA had been all over her child, all over the doll left by her body, all over the shells. Her footprints had surrounded the crime scene, obscuring any others, if there were others to obscure. The forensic case had been impossible and beyond that, despite tens of thousands of man-hours, they’d found nothing solid enough to hang a conviction on.

Before the little girls’ deaths, he would have thought a touristy beach a crazy place to commit murder, but he now knew better. Was the killer as forensically smart as he or she seemed to be, or had he or she just been lucky? Yet another question to which he had no answer. It was becoming a nasty habit.

49

The back of Jessie’s neck prickled as the first of Jodie’s two Instagram videos began to play. From the angle of the video, which took in the doorway, the end of Jodie’s bed and the whole of the second bed, it was clear that the little girl had propped the iPad on the windowsill. The film