‘I saw you at that anorexic blonde’s house. The woman who used to spend time with the murdered girl.’
Though she had an overwhelming urge to keep walking, Jessie had no choice now but to turn back.
‘Jodie Trigg? Are you talking about Jodie Trigg?’
The woman had the most extraordinary lilac eyes, Jessie saw, as she met them again, sunk deep into shadowed, hollowed-out sockets. Jessie had expected the light in them to be hard, calculating, but it wasn’t. It was something else entirely, something she hadn’t expected. Bereft. Desolate. She realized now, as she focused properly on the woman’s face, that she was a good few years younger than she’d thought: late twenties. She would have been extraordinarily pretty, if it wasn’t for the pallid skin, the oily hair bleached a hard white-blonde, and that wretched look in her eyes.
‘What’s your name?’ Jessie asked.
‘DI Simmons knows. He knows me.’
‘Have you told him that you saw Jodie at that house?’
She shook her head. ‘There’s no benefit to me in telling him.’
‘So why are you telling me?’
She couldn’t get a handle on the unsettling mix of aggression, sullenness and intense sadness pulsing from the woman. Her fingers found Jessie’s wrist again. Perhaps because of the urgent look on her face and the desperation in her eyes, Jessie didn’t pull away this time, though she had the urge to claw her nails down her own skin to rid herself of the feel of the woman’s fingers, and the electric suit snapping across her skin.
‘Don’t let anyone take your baby,’ she hissed, right into Jessie’s ear. ‘Whatever they tell you, you’ll give your own baby a better life than anyone else can.’
They. Who are they?
Releasing her arm, the woman slipped past her. As she walked to the till, Jessie realized that she was shaking. She paid quickly, avoiding eye contact with the cashier. She felt deeply unsettled by the conversation. All she wanted to do now was to find somewhere private to take the pregnancy test and then finish the case, solve it, help those two little dead girls get justice – too little, too late – before she might have to deal with her own living child.
She couldn’t be pregnant. What would she say to Callan? A child didn’t feature anywhere in her, or Callan’s plans. She couldn’t look after herself properly, let alone a child, not with her history, her brother Jamie’s suicide, and her OCD. She needed to sort out her own brain before she could contemplate bringing a tiny human being into the world, and despite her profession, the window into the mind that it afforded her, her own psyche was more out of control than it had ever been.
60
The telephone-kiosk-sized toilet sported a trendy surf-shack door made from warped, reclaimed driftwood planks that started mid-calf, finished half an arm’s length above Jessie’s head and opened into the middle of the surf shop attached to the restaurant. She hadn’t used the toilet when she’d eaten here with Carolynn or Marilyn and if she’d known how exposed it was, she would have gone elsewhere.
As she inched back the cellophane wrapping and extracted a pregnancy test from the box, she felt as if every shopper and diner were privy to her secret. Her gaze hopscotched down the instruction sheet, picking out the essentials: urine, lay test flat to develop, two minutes. Flipping up the toilet lid, she did the necessary, feeling as if she was performing in a goldfish bowl. As she balanced the pregnancy test on the edge of the sink to pull up her knickers and rearrange her dress, she caught sight of her face in the mirror. Despite the faint tan her translucent Irish skin had somehow managed to absorb over the summer months, she looked as white as the plastic casing on the test, as the porcelain it was resting on. Shell-shocked and ghostly pale. She looked down at the test – no change. Glanced at her watch – only fifteen seconds gone. Oh God. She felt as if she’d aged a decade since she’d entered the toilet cubicle.
She knew that countless other women and girls had felt as she did now, alone and sick with anxiety, many of them far younger and much less well equipped to give a child a good life. Even if Callan wasn’t interested in being an active father, she had a good job and her child would have a stable family in Ahmose, her mother and Richard, if not in herself. Her mother would be delighted, not just her wedding to heal the family’s wounds, but a baby. The ultimate Band-Aid baby, plastering over the canyon-sized fissures in their history.
But what if her baby was a boy? Her little brother Jamie’s heart problems, his restrictive cardiomyopathy, had been hereditary, the condition inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, only one copy of the altered gene in each cell necessary to cause the disorder. Only one. No, she couldn’t let her mind go there. In that direction lay only madness.
Whispers outside the door suddenly and a young girl’s urgent voice, ‘I need to go now.’
Jessie washed and dried her hands.
‘Ask them to come out, Mummy. I’m desperate.’
A tentative knock. ‘I’m sorry, are you going to be long?’
‘No, I’m just—’ Just what. The desolate face of the strange young woman with the lilac eyes who had accosted her in the chemist rose up before her. Waiting to see if I’m knocked up. ‘I’m nearly finished.’ She looked at the test again – nothing – at her watch – only forty seconds gone.
‘Pleaseeeeee.’
If she hadn’t felt so close to tears, she would have laughed at the absurdity of her situation. Shoving the test into her handbag, pushing it right to the bottom so that it retained some semblance of ‘flat’, she unlocked the door, squeezed past the mother and her child, muttering a quick – ‘Sorry for taking so long’ – as she
