He had thought about both dolls – one brown-eyed, one blue-eyed – when he’d driven to Lambeth Cemetery on Thursday to visit Zoe on the second anniversary of her death. He had bought a cuddly tortoiseshell cat to leave on her grave, to keep her company in death as Oddie had kept her company in life. But when he’d got to the cemetery it had been raining, stair rods of water cutting down from a heavy grey sky, and the cuddly animals on the surrounding graves had looked pitifully forlorn. But it had been the dolls left on some graves, like grotesque plastic effigies of the children buried beneath, that had cut him to the core. Tucking the cuddly cat back inside his coat, he had run across to St George’s hospital and bought a bunch of white roses from the florist in the reception area, handed the cuddly cat to the woman manning the hospital’s main desk to be gifted to the children’s ward, run back, soaked by then, and arranged the roses in the black marble vase on Zoe’s grave.
That had been Thursday.
And yesterday?
Yesterday, he’d driven into Chichester to consult a divorce lawyer. He didn’t want this life any more and he didn’t want Carolynn. Their marriage was nothing, a sham. Their lives nothing. Built on lies, deception.
But as he sat on the bed, staring at Carolynn’s bedroom cupboard and thinking about the doll, his mind took him somewhere much darker. Took him to doubt, to that pygmy voice in his head, goading him with a question:
What if Carolynn did murder Zoe? What if you let it happen?
80
Marilyn’s mobile rang.
‘DI Simmons,’ he barked.
‘Detective Inspector.’ The desiccated voice, instantly recognizable as Dr Ghoshal’s, echoed down the line as if it was coming from inside a cave. Marilyn’s mind filled with an image of the pathologist clutching his phone in one viscera-covered hand, a scalpel in the other, as he multi-tasked over a dissecting table in the chilled, white-tiled autopsy suite.
‘What can I do for you, Dr Ghoshal?’
‘This call is about what I can do for you, DI Simmons.’
Other senior detectives in Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes found Dr Ghoshal’s attitude patronizing and hard to stomach, but Marilyn had worked with him for so long that everything bar the hard content he delivered, invariably excellent, was water off a duck’s back.
‘I’m listening,’ Marilyn said, pulling the window shut to dampen the sounds of life drifting up from the street below.
‘I have completed Jodie Trigg’s autopsy. I’m sorry that it has taken me so long, but I wanted to be absolutely sure of every detail.’
Marilyn waited, in silence, for him to continue.
‘I can confirm that Jodie Trigg was, as you suspected, killed by manual strangulation: compression of the ceratoid arteries and jugular vein causing cerebral ischemia. The pattern and size of the contusions around her neck would suggest that the murderer was either a small man or, more likely, a woman.’
Not Roger then. He was big: six-two, with large, calloused workman’s hands.
‘Are you sure about that last bit? The woman?’
A moment of silence. ‘No, I am not sure, DI Simmons, but, as I said, it is likely.’
‘How likely?’
‘If I was a betting man, which I am not …’
Was Marilyn imagining the castigation in Dr Ghoshal’s dry tone? Probably. Since learning that Carolynn Reynolds was unlikely to have been Zoe’s biological mother, his paranoia radar had been twitching wildly. Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you – he still wasn’t sure what Jessie Flynn had meant by that.
‘… I’d say odds of two to one for it being a woman, twenty to one for a small man.’
‘So almost certainly a woman.’
‘The child would have fallen unconscious within twenty to thirty seconds,’ Dr Ghoshal continued, as if Marilyn hadn’t spoken. ‘And death would have occurred within a couple of minutes.’
‘Would she have been able to scream?’ Marilyn asked. Not that it mattered. There had been no one on the beach to hear her.
‘No. Her death was caused by vascular obstruction, but her larynx was damaged and the hyoid bone in her neck broken, which is consistent with significant pressure being applied to her airways. That pressure would have made it very difficult for her to breathe, let alone to scream.’
‘How much knowledge would her killer have needed?’
‘The right episode of Silent Witness, not even that. Unfortunately, DI Simmons, it is not hard to kill a child via strangulation. Wrap your hands around their neck, apply a reasonable amount of pressure, and there you have it.’
Marilyn had sensed a change in Dr Ghoshal’s tone as their conversation progressed, a change that he would venture to say sounded alarmingly like emotion, and he remembered the sombre tableau around the dissecting table on which the little girl’s body had lain. Despite a significant weight of evidence to the contrary, there was a beating heart somewhere inside that hypothermic hide of Dr Ghoshal’s.
81
Jessie inched the key into the lock and eased open her front door, making no sound. Stepping over the threshold, she stopped, the door open behind her, caught between the silent wall of darkness in front and the whispering wall of darkness behind her in the lane. Stupid. Nothing to be frightened of here. This was her cottage, her place of refuge, and it felt empty, just as Ahmose’s had. There was doubtless a reasonable explanation as to why Ahmose hadn’t been home. Perhaps Callan had taken him out for dinner. Ahmose didn’t have a mobile and though she had called Callan’s twice on the drive up here, and again a few minutes ago when she’d parked outside, it had gone to voicemail each time. She wasn’t Ahmose’s keeper,
