Workman, whom Marilyn had tasked with securing Ruby’s flat and keeping the neighbours at bay while Burrows and his CSI team went to work inside, was standing stiffly by the gate, three uniforms behind her, supressed tension etched in their expressions.
Marilyn met her gaze. ‘Call for backup if you feel you need it,’ he murmured, as he passed. ‘Don’t hesitate.’
Hauling open the rear passenger door of Cara’s marked car, Marilyn placed his hand on Ruby’s head to guide her inside, averting his gaze from the flash of cleavage her gaping top revealed as she tilted forward to duck, then slid in next to her. A tense balloon of air emptied from his lungs as he pulled the door shut, dampening the swelling noise from outside. A sudden crack as an egg smashed against the windscreen. Another crack, harder, louder as someone launched a stone at the passenger window on Ruby’s side of the car.
‘Get moving, Cara, before this turns into a proper shit show,’ Marilyn shouted, as someone tossed the contents of a dustbin over the car’s bonnet.
Sliding his arm around Ruby’s shaking shoulders, Marilyn pushed her head down below the level of the window and grabbed the door handle with his other hand to steady himself. Cara pulled hard on the steering wheel and carved a swift U-turn in the narrow cul-de-sac, the rubbish from the bonnet streaking out both sides of the car in the slipstream. He could feel Ruby trembling under his palm, though she made no sound. A volley of cracks against the windows and bodywork as more stones were hurled, hands slapping the car’s bonnet and boot, a sudden jeering, contorted face against Ruby’s window as a man ran alongside screaming obscenities through the glass before Cara accelerated away, tyres screeching as he spun on to the main road.
Marilyn removed his arm from Ruby’s back and helped her upright.
She sat rigid, staring straight ahead through the windscreen, the fingers clutching the doll – Zoe’s doll – bloodless.
‘You’ve been good to me over the years, DI Simmons,’ she murmured, turning her head stiffly to look across, meeting his gaze. ‘And I’m sorry that I let you down. I’m sorry that I never became the person you hoped I’d become. The person you thought I might become back then, the first time we met in that police station in Portsmouth.’ Lifting the doll to her face, she breathed, sucking in its scent. Dropping it back to her lap, she gave a choked, mirthless laugh. ‘But Pretty Woman was never going to happen to me, not where I came from. I was destined to be fucked – literally and metaphorically.’
Marilyn didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say. He was tired, strung out to the point of hysteria, and he knew that whatever his dulled brain found in reply would be facile, pointless, not enough. She’d never had a chance, despite what he had hoped for. The course of her life had been mapped out for her at the age of fourteen, when she’d been shut in that trick pad to be used and abused, hot young meat, her body nothing more than a tradable commodity; her mind, her brave, sparky personality, whatever hopes and dreams she might have had for herself, had been an irrelevance to the men who trapped and sold her, those who paid to rape her. There were always the outliers who managed to confound their fate, but beyond those, rare as hens’ teeth, were only fairy stories and trite Hollywood endings.
But at the same time he was aware of a simmering fury that he was struggling to keep a lid on. For some reason, he felt furious and unreasonably betrayed, as if she had owed him something, some fairy-tale morality, even though he knew it was a nonsense. He had never felt this way about someone he was arresting. Torn – so ridiculously torn. He would have given anything to have been right about Carolynn Reynolds.
‘I told you about that advert I used to watch when I was a kid, didn’t I?’ she murmured. ‘That washing powder advert? That little girl in her white dress in a field of wild flow—’
‘Why the fuck did you do it, Ruby?’ he snapped, unable to contain himself. ‘They were little kids. Both of them – little girls.’
Those soft violet-blue eyes were misted with tears, he noticed now; tears she would fight tooth and nail to hold back.
‘Because Zoe was her fucking kid. Her girl, wasn’t she?’ she hissed. ‘So I did it for revenge. I did it to get even. Fucking simple as that.’
91
Jessie tried to push herself upright, but she couldn’t coordinate her limbs, and every time she moved, the room began to spin and she felt a crucifying pain in her left arm. The pounding of feet on stairs and a shape loomed over her.
‘It’s over, Carolynn,’ she managed. ‘DI Simmons knows you weren’t Zoe’s mother. He’s coming here … in a minute.’
She was slurring her words, but nothing seemed to be working properly: not her brain, her arms, her legs or her lips, and her tongue felt like a wad of damp cotton wool in her mouth. Carolynn’s face hung over her, her features blurred, the look in her eyes rabid.
‘Everyone I knew betrayed me. Everyone,’ she hissed. ‘I thought that you were different. I thought you’d have a heart buried in there somewhere, because you’ve known loss as I have, but I can see now that I was wrong.’
Digging her teeth hard into her bloody lip again, trying to use the pain to focus her mind, Jessie pushed herself to sitting with her good arm,
