‘They were in a mess,’ she said, bouncing down on to the spare bed and wrapping her arms around the pile of soft toys in its middle. ‘So I’m rearranging them, tucking them under the covers so that they’ll be warm and safe.’ She mocked shivered. ‘Because it-is-freeeeezing in here.’ One of her upper incisors protruded at a forty-five-degree angle. She’d need braces … would have needed braces, Jessie corrected herself. Watching the video, it was almost impossible to believe that the little girl who was hugging and kissing each cuddly toy before she slipped them under the covers, spinning an orange tabby cat around to face the camera, holding its paw and waving to the viewer, was now a chilled eviscerated mannequin in Dr Ghoshal’s morgue. Almost impossible and impossibly heartbreaking.
‘It’s important that the little ones get looked after,’ she said. ‘That’s why I put them in the middle.’ Jumping up from the bed, she pirouetted on one leg and grinned at the camera. ‘So that the big ones can look after them. Like Mum does for me.’ Another grin, this one lopsided, lacking the conviction of the first. ‘’Cept it’s kind of the other way around. Well, both ways around, I suppose. She looks after me and I look after her, because it’s just the two of us.’
She pirouetted across the tiny room, looming large as she reached to switch off the video.
The second video was shot in the summer: Jodie and Debs Trigg walking on the beach, probably filmed with an iPhone that Jodie was holding on a selfie stick. Her other hand was clasping one of her mother’s and she was walking slightly in front of Debs, leading her, instructing her to be careful not to stand on the worm casts – because you’ll squish the worms underneath – guiding her around the collected puddles of seawater. After a minute or so, Debs reached into the pocket of her shorts and pulled out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.
‘Not here, Mum, not on the beach. You can’t smoke when the air is so clean and lovely.’
Jodie took the cigarettes from her mum’s hand, pushed them back into her pocket and started walking again, dragging Debs behind her, holding the selfie stick jerkily out in front, chatting, making jokes, her voice too high now, forced jollity, a tone that Jessie recognized from her own childhood, trying to break the tension in her parents’ marriage by clowning. She felt an intense twinge of sadness for the little girl. Debs looked puffy-eyed and tired, her dark hair limp and greasy, her skin wan and pasty. Jessie knew that if Marilyn resorted to putting her on an appeal, she wouldn’t make good TV. Unlike her daughter, she wasn’t photogenic. Jodie must have got her good looks from the father she had never known.
The video continued to play, but Jessie’s mind had moved to wonder who Jodie had been walking on the beach with two days ago. No selfie stick video of that walk to save them all the pressure and pain of an investigation. From the crime scene photographs, the only bruises on her body had been the strangulation marks around her neck. If she had been dragged along the beach against her will, she would have had bruising to her arms or torso. The rain had washed the footsteps around the little girl’s body to formless indents, but still Tony Burrows had found a trail that he thought could be the footprints of an adult and child walking side by side towards the site of her murder.
So Jodie had most probably walked voluntarily with her killer along the beach to meet her death. Perhaps, as they had strayed further from civilization, she had become concerned. Perhaps she had stopped and asked where they were going, why they needed to walk so far. Or perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps she had been entirely comfortable in her killer’s company, at ease and unworried. Or perhaps, Jessie thought, her gaze fixing on the frozen image of Jodie on the beach with her mother, the video finished now, her killer had been someone she’d felt she needed to look after. Perhaps she had walked, as she walked with her mother, holding her killer’s hand, playing the child carer.
Jessie liked Jodie Trigg. She wished that she hadn’t looked at the crime scene photos, that she could just hold an image of the living girl from the videos in her mind instead. Impossible now: the images of death would forever eclipse the images of life. It had been the same with her little brother, Jamie. That final static image she had of him hanging by his neck from the curtain rail in his bedroom dominating the seven years of moving images she had from his life.
Pressing the off switch on the iPad, Jessie stood. She smoothed her hand over the crumples in the duvet, erasing the imprint of her seated self, wanting to leave the little girl’s room exactly as she had found it. But as she cast a last look around Jodie’s bedroom, her gaze fell on the little kitten tucked in the middle of the bed – protected – and something stirred in her memory.
The kitten, a cat. The cat. That spoldgy black, tan and cream cat. Something niggled – what?
Switching Jodie’s iPad back on, she found Instagram again, that photograph of Jodie’s drawing. But it wasn’t the cat in the drawing that Jessie focused on. It was the tiles in the background. Black-and-white tiles that reminded her of a butcher’s shop. And instead of the cat, surrounded by that black-and-white checkerboard, an image of Marilyn’s suede Chelsea boot wedged firmly over a threshold rose in her mind.
I give you permission to go fuck yourself, DI Simmons.
50Past
Paulsgrove, Portsmouth
Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours
