Marilyn arched a suspicious eyebrow. He hadn’t been expecting that response. Good.
‘Why do you think they’re Carolynn’s?’
‘Because you have a self-congratulatory look on your face and, as you don’t like losing, I assume that the fingerprints have affirmed your viewpoint.’
‘No flies on you, Doctor Flynn.’
‘So I’m right?’
He nodded. ‘The doll bears Carolynn’s fingerprints.’
‘And Roger’s?’
‘No. Just the print of his flat hands on the sides of the box, and his index finger and thumb on the lid.’ Raising a hand, he pressed his thumb and index finger together. ‘Pincer fingers.’
Jessie took a moment to think. ‘Where were Carolynn’s prints?’
‘As I’ve already said, on the doll.’
‘Yes, but where specifically? On which part of her— its anatomy?’
Marilyn narrowed his eyes. ‘Does it matter?’
‘From a psychological point of view, I think it does.’
Her gaze moved from Marilyn to Burrows. ‘Tony?’
‘The prints were on the doll’s ankle,’ Burrows said.
‘The ankle?’
‘Yes. The doll’s left ankle.’ He pressed his thumb and index finger together as Marilyn had done. ‘Pincer fingers. The index finger and thumb.’
Jessie nodded. ‘Did you find Carolynn’s fingerprints anywhere else on the doll?’
‘No.’
‘Is it possible that her prints are somewhere else on the doll that you weren’t able to lift, such as on the doll’s dress?’ she asked. ‘The dress covers most of her body.’
‘Thanks to my counterparts at the Scottish Police Services Authority and the University of Abertay, Dundee, who pioneered the technique a few years ago, we can now lift fingerprints from some clothing materials using VMD – vacuum metal deposition,’ Burrows said. ‘The dresses are nylon, one of the materials that works with this technique. There were no fingerprints on the doll’s dress, not Carolynn Reynolds’ or anyone else’s.’ He held up his hand, to stop Jessie from interrupting. ‘But I have detected fingerprint residue on the doll’s hair.’
‘You couldn’t lift a traceable print?’
‘Not yet, but I’m working on it. I need to lay the hairs in exactly the same position they were in when the prints were left, or at least enough hairs to get an adequate section of fingerprint to enable us to match it. I’m working on it.’
Sitting back, Jessie ground the tips of her fingers into her eye sockets. Though she had lain in bed for eight hours in the B & B, the curtains open, surrounded by stars, she had barely slept. There had been too many disturbing images, too much information careering around inside her skull: Zoe; Jodie; Carolynn; Roger; Oddie, that ugly, splodgy cat; Callan; her mother’s wedding; the inescapable feeling that she was letting everyone down. She had finally come to the realization that it was fine to let the others down temporarily – but not Zoe and Jodie. She refused to let them down. Whatever it took, however much she’d have to disappoint everyone else, she was determined to get a result for them. A robust result, and justice.
‘Revulsion,’ she said, dropping her hands.
Marilyn frowned. ‘Revulsion? You’ve lost me.’
‘The way Carolynn held the doll. I believe that it signals revulsion.’
As she verbalized the thought, a memory from fifteen years ago rose in her mind: coming home from school and running straight upstairs to her attic bedroom as she had done every day since she had been sent to live with her father and his new wife, Diane. She would shut herself in, make herself invisible, not there, for hours, until she heard the sound of her father returning from work.
But on this one day, she had jogged silently up the stairs to find Diane in her room. Diane’s arm was outstretched and something black-and-white dangled from her pincer fingers. Pandy. She was holding Pandy, Jamie’s beloved teddy bear, by its ankle between her thumb and index finger, her arm perpendicular to her body and ramrod straight. Even now, fifteen years later, every detail of the expression on Diane’s face was seared into Jessie’s memory. It had been a look of pure revulsion. She had thought, back then, a naive, disturbed fourteen-year-old, that Diane had been revolted by how smelly and grey Pandy was. The only reality Jessie still had of Jamie, beyond static two-dimensional photographs, was his scent caught in Pandy’s dirty fur and so she’d never washed him. But as an adult, with the benefit both of hindsight and her professional training as a psychologist, she realized that Diane’s revulsion had not been directed at Pandy but at everything he represented: her new husband’s past, his family, his children, whose existence, if only in memory for Jamie, she could never erase. Jessie had snatched Pandy from Diane’s pincer fingers and shouted right in her face: Get out of my bedroom.
Diane’s response: It’s not your bedroom. It’s a room in my house that you have temporary use of until we can find somewhere else for you to go.
Jessie’s: It’s my father’s house. He bought it. You don’t even have a job.
The acrimony between them as thick and black as tar. As Diane’s angry clatter receded down the stairs, she had tucked Pandy back under her duvet, his ratty head resting on her pillow. Naive. So naive. She should have known then what Diane would do next, how there was no way that she would let Jessie win.
‘Revulsion,’ she repeated, her gaze travelling from Marilyn’s cynical expression to take in Burrows’ non-committal one, to Workman who had looked back from the window and was nodding. ‘Isn’t that the way you hold something if you’re revolted by it? If it disgusts you? By the ankle, in pincer fingers.’ She reached across to Workman’s notepad, the nearest thing to her and lifted it by the corner. ‘By the corner, the tip, the ankle, so that you touch as little of it as possible. And holding the doll upside down is dismissive, devalues it.’
Marilyn rolled his eyes. ‘Where do you hold a straw if you’re clutching it?’
Jessie ignored him. ‘What do you think, Sarah? Tony?’
‘I can see where Jessie is coming from,’ Workman said. ‘When my husband leaves his boxer
