‘She looked different from before.’
‘She didn’t look that fucking different. She still had that same face, that same hard face that’s branded on to my brain. Her hair was different, longer and she weighed half what she used to weigh, but I knew it was her.’
‘And Jodie?’
‘She met Jodie five, six months ago, when the kid was hanging around on the beach with nothing to do. I got the feeling she loved Jodie in a way she’d never loved her own flesh and blood.’
‘And that was justification enough for you to kill Jodie?’
Ruby gave another careless lift of her shoulders, though Marilyn sensed that a large part of the carelessness was playacting.
‘What chance did the poor little sod have, coming from a home like that? She would have lived a shit life same as I’ve done, preyed on, exploited, despised There’s so many girls like me out there, girls who fall off everyone’s radar, and for every one of us there’s a hundred men who want to abuse us. I would have preferred to have died when I was a child than to live the life I’ve lived. Her last hours were spent on a beach, not being screwed by some old man. I did the kid a favour.’
‘Why the heart of shells?’
Ruby shrugged. ‘Because everyone deserves to be loved, even when they’re dead, and I’m not sure that either of those girls had much love in life. Zoe didn’t, I can tell you that much. And it made me feel better, leaving them like that, surrounded by love. I’m not hard, DI Simmons. I did feel for them girls – but I had to get revenge. I had to fight back for a change. Just once in my sorry fucking life, I had to fight back.’
Marilyn felt Ruby’s eyes searching his face, kept his gaze fixed on the narrow strip of tarmac unfurling in front of them through the windscreen, over Cara’s shoulder.
‘I dressed my daughter in white, like the little girl in that advert I used to watch when I was a kid. White for purity, white for hope. Anna. I called her Anna. I never told you that, did I? It’s such a pretty name, but strong too. She’d never end up a drug-addict whore like her mum, not with a name like Anna.’
Tears were running, unchecked, down her cheeks. She raised a hand and batted them roughly away, a look of fierce pride moving across her face, washed away by a new flood of tears as soon as the first were streaked into the back of her hand.
‘I thought that, after a few years, the memory of her would fade. That I wouldn’t think about her any more, that she’d just be in my past. I thought the pain would stop. But it hasn’t. It’s never, ever stopped. My Anna is the first thing I think about the second I wake. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, if I’ve had a drink or a hit, there might be a second or two when I don’t think about her, when life is good, just for a couple of seconds. Then the pain hits me, and it stays with me all day, every day, right here—’ She laid a hand over her heart, dropped it dispiritedly back to her lap, to clasp the doll in bloodless fingers. ‘This is my life.’
Marilyn continued to stare straight ahead through the windscreen. Should he tell her why Carolynn hadn’t cared about Zoe? Should he tell her who her baby had become? He felt sick to his stomach with the information he was withholding. Information that would sit on his shoulder, alongside little Zoe’s ghost, until he felt the time was right to tell Ruby. It would sit on his shoulder long after the telling. He knew that he would have to tell her at some point, that it would be unforgivably cruel to let it come out at her sentencing hearing, but he couldn’t do it now. Not now. Because he knew that it would kill her – psychologically for certain, and probably physically as well. She’d find a way to make it physical. To end her life.
Why did he care so much, after what she’d done?
Because the proud, feisty, broken, fourteen-year-old Ruby he’d met all those years ago deserved so much better? Because so many people, who started off so much nastier than her, had gone on to live diamond-encrusted lives? One of life’s great ironies is that it isn’t fair. He knew that. He didn’t believe in fairness and he wasn’t sure that he believed in justice either. In his experience, justice seemed only to serve the privileged.
‘I would have made a great mum, if I’d been given the chance,’ he heard Ruby say. ‘I know that I would, because I really loved her, like my mother never loved me, like that ice-cold bitch never loved her daughter. And that’s all that really matters, isn’t it, DI Simmons? Love. Proper love.’
93
She had imagined this moment many times over the past two years, since she had been wrongfully accused of Zoe’s murder, since the life she had craved so badly as a child, worked hard for so many years to create, had come crashing down. She had designed the perfect stage setting in her mind, toying endlessly with each and every detail. She had imagined that she would be lying on a sun-drenched bed in an airy room, soft white pillows to rest her head on, a smooth white sheet, untouched by human hands, underneath her, another draping her naked body. The window would be open, a breeze billowing the sheer white net curtains into the room and beyond them, a view of the sea. Not the sea at
