Sliding under the covers, Carolynn closed her eyes ready for the long sleep.
94
Shrugging a coat carefully over her broken arm, sliding her feet into her ballet pumps, Jessie let herself out of her hospital room, thankful that understaffing meant the nurses at the station were heads down, too busy to notice one of their patients intent on going AWOL.
Due to the extensive bruising to her abdomen and the cramps in her stomach, she couldn’t straighten properly, had to hobble down the corridor in shuffling steps, stopping every twenty metres to lean against the wall and catch her breath. It would take her forever to get downstairs and find a taxi to take her to Guildford Cemetery, but she had all morning. She had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do.
When she reached the cemetery, she followed the tarmac path that led to the chapel and stood on its stone steps, looking out over the expanse of lichen covered graves, her gaze snagged here and there by bright pops of colour – flowers, toys – thinking of Zoe and Jodie, and of her little brother Jamie. Three children who had lost their lives far too soon. She had wanted to come to a graveyard to pay her respects, but now that she was here, she realized that she’d made a mistake. She hadn’t known either little girl. They weren’t her children, her relatives, and they weren’t her fight any more.
And Jamie – she carried him everywhere with her in the torn, ragged section of her heart. She hadn’t needed to come here to think of him, to mourn his death.
Turning away, she pulled the pregnancy test from her coat pocket. She hadn’t looked at it since that day on the beach, a week ago now, but it had followed her to hospital, tucked in the bottom of her handbag. The cross was still there. A cross for positive. The only tangible sign, now, that her baby had ever existed.
Finding a shady spot under a tree, across the tarmac path from the children’s graves, she crouched and dug a hole with her fingers, relishing the feel of the soil grating against her fingertips and the earthy smell of churned grass and soil after the antiseptic smell of the hospital. Dropping the pregnancy test into the hole that she had dug, she smoothed the earth back over it.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, feeling tears welling in her eyes and, for once, letting them come. It was fine to cry in a graveyard. Everyone cried in graveyards.
Jessie met Marilyn in the coffee shop in the hospital’s foyer, later that afternoon. She had expected him to look elated; Carolynn Reynolds, his nemesis of two years, banished, even if she had been innocent of both murders. But he just looked exhausted. Emotionally and physically wrung out. He grimaced when he saw her hobbling across the foyer to meet him.
‘Jesus Christ, you make a corpse look the picture of health.’
Lowering herself slowly into the chair that he had pulled out for her, she smiled up at him. ‘Thank you for your kind words, DI Simmons.’
‘Coffee?’
‘Large latte with full-fat milk and a muffin, please. Double chocolate. I need the energy. The two-hundred-metre marathon sprint from my hospital room to here has wiped me out.’
When he had returned with the coffees and her muffin and sat down opposite, Jessie said, ‘You don’t look happy, Marilyn.’
He hunched his shoulders. ‘Do I ever look happy?
‘Occasionally. Sometimes. When you’re feeling smug.’
He didn’t smile, not even a forced one to play along.
‘What’s up?’
Another irritable shrug. ‘It irks me that Carolynn caused all this – the death of those two little girls – by taking a baby away from its mother, so coldheartedly, and yet she escaped. Escaped the fallout.’
‘I don’t think that death can really be classified as escaping, Marilyn.’
‘Still. She chose. She got to choose, to call the shots – again.’
‘The trial, the fallout, the destruction of the picture-perfect life that she had constructed was the greatest punishment for her. It’s not as if she got off scot-free. Far from it.’
Marilyn nodded. He didn’t look convinced. ‘I wanted to look her in the eye.’
‘I looked her in the eye, Marilyn. And whatever you believe you would have seen – contrition, shame, regret – you wouldn’t have seen any of it. Nothing stuck to her conscience, not truly. You would have felt even more angry and frustrated than you do now.’
He sighed. ‘Perhaps.’
Jessie touched his arm, sensed him flinch at the unaccustomed physical contact.
‘I’m sorry – about Ruby,’ she said gently. More sorrys.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. She’s a double murderer and she’ll get what’s coming to her. End of.’
‘She won’t get justice though, will she?’ Jessie murmured. ‘Because justice doesn’t exist for people like Ruby.’
For the first time since she had known him, Marilyn wouldn’t meet her gaze. His odd mismatched eyes were fixed on the hospital entrance, as if he was suddenly fascinated by the motley stream of humanity shuffling in through its doors. Something about that woman, Ruby, had clawed its way deep under his skin.
‘Will you tell Ruby that Zoe was her daughter?’ Jessie asked.
Eyes still fixed on the doorway, Marilyn gave an unequivocally firm nod.
‘Yes, of course. It’s my duty to tell her.’
‘She won’t take it well.’
Her words felt like a ridiculous understatement, but she could sense that Marilyn didn’t need his nose rubbing in the gravity of the task ahead of him. Jessie couldn’t begin to imagine how Ruby would feel when she found out. She had lost a three-month-old foetus, a life that never was, the size of a bean, and she still thought about him …
