‘When the foxes attack my bins and spread rubbish all over my front garden, I pick the detritus up in the tips of my fingers,’ Burrows added.
Marilyn dropped his head to the table and mimed banging it on the wood.
‘God help me.’
‘You and me both,’ Jessie said, sitting forward. ‘You and me both, Marilyn, because we’re nowhere, are we? It’s now … what …?’ Her eyes found the wall clock. ‘Seventy-two hours since Jodie Trigg was murdered, two years and seventy-two hours since Zoe was murdered, and we’re still virtually nowhere, despite you throwing everything at it. You have all those years’ experience as a major crimes detective, you’ve solved countless murders and yet we’re still nowhere on this one. We have a few of Jodie’s prints from inside the Reynolds’ rental house. But really – so what?’
Marilyn sighed. ‘I need certainty, Jessie.’
‘Psychology isn’t about certainty. It’s about probabilities. For heaven’s sake, medicine as a whole isn’t about certainty, and the brain is the least well-understood organ in the body. I can help you generate theories, possibilities, probabilities that we can then turn into certainties by fleshing them out with evidence.’
‘So, if your theory is correct and Carolynn was revolted by the doll, why did she have it? Why did she stow it in her bedroom cupboard?’
‘There are a number of possible reasons why, the most unlikely being that she intends to murder another child and wanted to prepare in advance.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘A compulsive disorder. She saw the doll somewhere and was compelled to buy it.’
‘How do you define compulsion?’
This definition Jessie knew like the back of her hand from her own OCD.
‘A compulsion is an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way or do a certain thing.’
Cynicism written all over his face, Marilyn held up the thumb of his right hand. ‘Possible reason one – compulsion. Driven by …?’
‘Driven by the doll’s significance in her daughter’s death. Perhaps because it was keeping her dead daughter company on the beach, or that with the exception of Zoe’s killer, that doll was the last one to see Zoe alive, and it was the last thing Zoe saw before she was murdered.’
‘That would be totally irrational.’
‘I don’t believe that Carolynn is rational.’
Marilyn raised an eyebrow. His look said: QED.
‘But it doesn’t mean that she’s a killer,’ Jessie snapped. I have a PhD in acting irrationally and I’ve never killed anyone, though at the moment I’m tempted.
‘What else?’
‘Perhaps someone sent it to her.’
He held up his index finger. ‘Two. Why?’
‘The killer, to taunt her.’
‘Zoe was also found in a heart of shells,’ Marilyn said. ‘Where’s the box of shells in the loft?’
Jessie sighed. She was finding this discussion hard going. Marilyn was being deliberately obtuse. At times like this, she found it difficult to justify every nuance of her trade. So much of psychology was about constructing and testing straw men, and her men were struggling to stand up in the face of Marilyn’s icy arctic gale. She remembered a quote that she had heard from the governor of Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, something about how he could let half of his patients out tomorrow and they wouldn’t reoffend, the only issue being that he didn’t know which half.
‘The shells were laid out in the shape of a heart, so I would suggest that the shape has more significance than the materials used to make the shape. The children were murdered on a beach. There are shells everywhere.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘So the heart signals love?’
‘Love. Hate. Loss. A combination, perhaps. I’d say that they’re all different sides of the same multi-faceted shape.’
‘Which does suggest that the killer had a personal connection to both children.’
Jessie nodded. ‘Certainly to Zoe. But neither of us have ever believed that these killings were random.’
‘Why just Zoe?’
‘Because she was the first.’
‘Meaning?’
She waved a hand in the air, in a gesture that she knew looked as ineffectual as her thought processes felt. ‘I’m not sure. But her murder precipitated all this. She definitely has a fundamental connection to the killer, while Jodie might just be fallout.’
‘Collateral damage?’
‘In a way, yes. Two years is a long time to wait, so I would suggest that the killer isn’t a serial killer or he or she would want to kill more often.’ She looked at Marilyn for confirmation.
‘Typically,’ he said. ‘And serial killers of children are usually sexually motivated and there was no sexual assault or rape in either case.’
‘So I’d suggest that something happened between the two murders, to precipitate Jodie’s.’
‘Like Carolynn befriending Jodie,’ Marilyn said. ‘Poor little sod.’
‘Yes, like that—’ She held up both hands to halt his interruption. ‘But that doesn’t mean that Carolynn killed her, or Zoe. We need to understand what the personal connection was between Zoe and the killer and why it was so dangerously negative.’
‘Motive,’ Marilyn said. ‘The classic – motive.’
‘When you interviewed Carolynn as a suspect in her daughter’s murder, did you ask her about the doll?’
Marilyn nodded. ‘Many times.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She repeatedly said that she had no idea why a doll would be left by her daughter’s body. She was adamant that Zoe wasn’t a girly girl, that she had never liked dolls.’
He glanced at Workman, who concurred.
‘She said that Zoe liked teddies, cuddly toys, but that she had never shown any interest in dolls and that she had never owned a doll,’ Workman said.
‘How did Carolynn know that Zoe didn’t like dolls if she’d never given her any?’ Jessie murmured, half to herself. She raised her voice: ‘Did you speak to the doll’s manufacturer?’
‘They’re made in China, surprise surprise. By a company in Shanghai, to be precise, who has been making those exact dolls since 2001. The dolls are all identical, except for the colour of their eyes. The company manufactures
