Two Little Girls: The gripping new psychological thriller you need to read in summer 2018. Kate Medina

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       7

      The figure in the background was unmistakable, his black suit and hair so stark against the white quartz sand that he resembled an overgrown crow. His presence made it impossible for her to take in what the reporter speaking to camera in the foreground was saying.

      West Wittering beach, wasn’t it? Jessie recognized it from a couple of months ago, when Callan had booked them a day of kite-surfing lessons. It had been a disaster. She had been unable to grip the bar properly because of her ruined hand and had ended up storming off in a fury – blaming Callan, of course, transferring all her frustration, her anger at her own impotence, on to him.

      It was raining down there too. The sky above the beach was metallic and wetly luminous, water pooled in shallow dips in the sand. Her eyes moved from Marilyn to the InciTent, where Tony Burrows, his lead CSI, toddler-rotund in his white forensic overall, was massaging his bald spot with a latex-gloved hand. Though she had only met him once, she recognized the tic as tension. Yellow ‘Police Do Not Cross’ tape flapped in the wind, sealing a section of the dunes off from the press and a handful of local gawkers.

      So, it was suspicious death or confirmed murder – must be, to get the police and press out there. Christ, that will keep Marilyn happy, she thought cynically, recognizing a moment after the notion entered her head how the last six months had coloured her attitude to everything, hating herself for that negativity. She was good at helping her patients move on from trauma, pitifully poor at heeding her own lessons. Physician heal thyself – what a joke that was.

      ‘ . . . the body of a young girl has been found in sand dunes at West Wittering beach …’

      Oh God. A dead child. Now I really hate myself.

      The picture switched suddenly to the Channel 4 News studio and Jessie froze. The view of the beach on the screen behind the presenters had been replaced by a photograph of a woman. A confident, healthy-looking woman, late-thirties, size ten or twelve, a sensible weight, blonde hair cut in a glossy bob, clear brown eyes focused on something just to the left of the camera. Her head was tilted and she was smiling, showing a perfect row of pearly white teeth.

      The name displayed beneath the photo – Carolynn Reynolds – was not the name Jessie knew her by. The face and body had changed, too. In fact, the woman in the photo was barely recognizable as the woman Jessie had seen five times in her consulting room, the fifth time only this morning; the woman who had never met her gaze directly with those lightless brown eyes.

      Nevertheless, she was sure that it was Laura. She had spent five hours studying her facial features, every nuance of her expression, her body and its language.

      ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’

       Laura.

      She held up a hand to silence Callan. ‘Shhhh, I’m listening.’

      ‘I’ll take that as a rude, ungrateful yes,’ he muttered, planting a soft kiss at the base of her neck, which made her shiver despite her focus on the television screen. Then he padded barefoot into the kitchen, naked except for a pair of white boxers, his sandy blond hair dishevelled from bed. He’d worked forty-eight hours straight on a trafficking case, had got home at lunchtime and retired to bed for the afternoon. When she’d got home from work, she had stripped off and slid under the duvet, waking him up by sliding her hand into his boxers. They had made slow and languorous love before he had crashed and she had pottered downstairs in his dressing gown to flick through some patient files with the television turned on in the background.

       Laura.

      ‘… the death of this young girl echoes that of little Zoe Reynolds, whose body was found in the dunes at West Wittering beach two years ago today, only a hundred metres from where this child’s body has been found. Zoe’s mother, Carolynn Reynolds, was tried for Zoe’s murder, but acquitted nine months ago due to lack of evidence. No one has been charged with Zoe’s murder. Detective Inspector Bobby Simmons of Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, who led the investigation into the murder of little Zoe and is now on the scene at West Wittering beach, told us that it is too early to confirm a connection between the two cases.’

      Jessie scrambled for the remote to freeze the screen on Laura … Carolynn’s photograph so that she could study it, be sure, only remembering, as her finger jabbed impotently at the pause button, that the news was live. Shit.

      ‘… we will update you as soon as we have more on this story.’

      The woman’s photograph was replaced by the picture of a graph in freefall, the story something financial that Jessie immediately tuned out.

      ‘Callan.’ She still called him by his surname, even though they had been dating for nearly six months and he had virtually moved into her tiny farm worker’s cottage. Gulliver in Lilliput, still hitting his head on the door frames, when he wasn’t concentrating. ‘One of my patients … clients was just on the news.’

      A glass of Sauvignon and a bottle of beer in his hands, he came to stand next to her, passed her the wine.

      ‘Did you hear what I said?’

      He smothered a yawn with the back of his hand. ‘Yes. What? Some woman? There’s only one woman I’m interested in and she’s not on the TV.’ He planted another lingering kiss on her neck, which she twisted СКАЧАТЬ