‘We have a photograph of Jodie Trigg stroking a cat which looks as if it could be him. And the password to her iPad was Oddie.’
‘Oddie’s a tart. He spends half his day on the wall outside, begging passers-by to pet him.’
‘Jodie Trigg drew a picture of herself and the cat sitting on a tiled floor that looks very much like the one in your hallway.’
‘Have you not noticed the state of this house?’ Reynolds snapped. ‘It’s a nasty, cheap rental. I can’t imagine that the hall tiles would be expensive or rare. I’m pretty sure that the butcher’s in East Wittering has the same. Why don’t you pop down there and ask them about their bloody cat.’
‘A witness saw a blonde woman walking along the beach with a child who was most probably Jodie Trigg on Thursday afternoon.’
‘Have you nothing concrete, Dr Flynn?’ His voice was taunting, though Jessie registered the high note of unease running through his tone.
‘It was enough to get the search warrant.’
‘Of course it would have been,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t doubt that just our names were enough.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jessie said plainly. And she meant it, felt it, genuinely.
Reynolds swung around to face her. There was a vicious light in his eyes.
‘Are you, really, Dr Flynn? Because what exactly is your role? To feed that bastard DI information my wife shared with you in confidence?’
Jessie forced herself to hold his gaze, weathering the pulsing hatred. ‘As I told you before, everything that your wife shared with me in our sessions is confidential. I have not, and will not, pass any of it to the police, or anyone else, even you. You have my word on that.’
‘Your word?’ he spat. ‘I have learnt from bitter experience to trust no one’s word, Dr Flynn, and that decision has served me … served us very well for the past nine months. Unfortunately, it seems that my wife didn’t learn that lesson well enough.’
Jessie sat forward. ‘Carolynn is allowed to associate with people, make friends, Mr Reynolds. Her associating with Jodie doesn’t necessarily mean anything significant.’
‘If she associated with Jodie Trigg, then of course it fucking means something. It means that, whatever the truth is, our lives will get ripped to shreds all over again.’ He pointed his index finger at the ceiling. ‘This is just the beginning.’
‘DI Simmons is very experienced,’ Jessie said lamely.
‘He’s not objective,’ Reynolds snapped.
Should she contradict him? She should, perhaps, out of loyalty to Marilyn if nothing else, but she believed that Reynolds was right. Marilyn wasn’t objective on this case. He had seized on the information that Jodie Trigg was on first-name terms with the Reynolds’ cat with the unbridled glee of a vulture tearing into a fresh carcass. Could she best help solve these murders by defending Marilyn, a lost cause in Reynolds’ eyes, or by trying to convince Reynolds of her impartiality? Marilyn was clearly right – Carolynn had run. If Jessie had any hope of convincing Reynolds to help her locate Carolynn before she entirely hung herself in Marilyn’s eyes, it had to be the latter.
‘I’ve spent a lot of time with your wife and I don’t believe that she’s a killer and I am objective. But running isn’t going to help her case. Please help me find her and convince her to turn herself in before this gets completely out of hand.’
His lip curled. ‘Listen, love, I have as much idea of where she is as you do. Now why don’t you just run along and join your mates crawling all over my bloody house, so I can watch the football.’
55
Jessie went out into the hallway, each step in the forensic overalls and over-shoes making her feel as if she was encased in a supermarket’s plastic bag. The forensic locusts had spread downstairs. She almost tripped over Burrows in his white onesie, squatting by the front doormat, dusting fingerprint powder on to the tiles.
She felt nauseous again. The house was close and claustrophobic: low ceilings, the wall colours dense sixties beiges and browns that shrank the space to doll’s house proportions and thickened the air. She wanted to haul open the front door and step outside, gulp in sea air to calm her stomach, but a quick glance around the edge of the kitchen blind told her that the rubberneckers’ ranks had been swelled by a few journalists and that whoever ventured out would be fresh kill for the pack.
Skirting back around Burrows, she tried a couple of other doors off the hallway and found the downstairs toilet. Climbing on to the toilet seat, she cracked the window open and pressed her nose to the gap, sucking in air. Feeling no better, she dropped to the floor, lifted the toilet lid, and felt her stomach heave. She vomited twice, took a couple of sucking breaths and vomited again until her stomach felt as if it had been turned inside out. She closed the lid, flushed and washed her mouth out with water from the tap. Emerging from the bathroom, she saw Marilyn descending the stairs, clutching a dusty cardboard box.
‘Join me in the sitting room, please, Dr Flynn.’ His tone was formal, his voice loud enough to carry and not for her benefit.
Reynolds was still determinedly watching the television, an advert for baby formula now. Marilyn dropped the box on the floor at his feet.
‘Don’t touch,’ he snapped, as Reynolds leant forward. No surprise on his face this time, Jessie noted; he already knew what the box contained. As Marilyn lifted the cardboard flaps with a latex-clad hand, it took all of Jessie’s professionalism not to recoil.
The box contained a doll. A plastic doll in a cheap, pink nylon ballerina dress, identical to the ones found by the little girls’ bodies. Except that this doll had blue eyes. Brown for Zoe. Green for Jodie. Blue for …?
‘You
