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

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СКАЧАТЬ Primary. I tracked down the school’s headmistress and she confirmed that Jodie was at school all day today, though she did mention that Jodie is not the best attendee and often turns up late. She also confirmed that the children wear a navy-blue uniform. Only the blazer has the school badge on it.’

      Marilyn nodded. ‘And the child wasn’t wearing a blazer. Thorough job, DC Cara. Thank you.’ His gaze moved from Cara back to the assembled team. ‘Have we had any other calls about missing children?’

      A mass shaking of heads. Marilyn raised a surprised eyebrow. Typically, when a serious crime made the news, their phones rang off the hook with people eager to get a slice of the macabre action. The over-helpful, the hoaxers, the gloaters, the ghouls and the common or garden nutters: the whole gamut. This was the reason he had only ever appealed one case on Crimewatch – Zoe Reynolds, driven by utter desperation after her mother had been released and all other investigative avenues closed. A Crimewatch reconstruction could be useful for jogging memories, but it inevitably resulted in a deluge of information, most of it entirely useless. But he had been surprised, back then too, at how few hoax calls they’d received when Zoe’s murder was re-enacted on BBC One: an unexpectedly compassionate response. It seemed as if this second murdered little girl – Jodie Trigg, he reminded himself, they had her name now – was engendering the same solicitude. The violent murder of a young child too tragic for even the crazies to wallow in.

      Marilyn took the piece of paper that Cara was holding out to him and read: Jodie Trigg, mother, Deborah (Debs) Trigg, Buena Vista, Seaview Caravan Park, Bracklesham Bay. It was a sprawling park of rectangular static mobile homes, a beige-hued blot on the landscape, half a kilometre eastwards along the beach from East Wittering, a kilometre from West. At its centre was a huge entertainment complex, jammed with arcade games and slot machines and serviced by a huge restaurant and a couple of snack bars which served anything that could be fried to within an inch of its life. There was a nod to health and fitness in the form of a swimming pool, resplendent with fake palms and a tiled beach that sloped into one side of the pool. He’d taken his own kids there once, so many years ago that it could have been last century – probably was – and he still shuddered at the memory of curly hairs clogging the drains in the changing rooms and the stench of chlorine masking eau-de-kiddies’-piss.

      Some caravans were holiday lets, others occupied by permanent residents whose number, he assumed, included Debs Trigg and her daughter Jodie. No mention of a father, he noticed, then immediately chastised himself for making an assumption about the structure of their family purely based on where they lived. He knew all too well that people held similar, uninformed prejudices about his own fifteen-year absence from his now adult children’s lives. Well-justified prejudices, in his case.

      ‘Listen up,’ he said, refocusing. ‘DS Dave Johnson will take the lead on organizing the uniforms. DS Workman and I will go to Seaview Caravan Park now to speak with Debs Trigg. Cara, you take the lead on the search for Carolynn and Roger Reynolds.’

      ‘Do you think the two cases are linked?’ Cara asked.

      Marilyn shrugged. Another awkward question he’d happily duck. Privately, he was iron-clad certain, given the location of the murder, the date, and the arrangement of the girl’s body in the heart of shells, an identical doll by her side, that the two cases were linked, but he wasn’t about to share that certainty this early on, even to his team. ‘It’s too soon to say for sure, but as a courtesy, if nothing else, we should get in touch with them. They’ll be seeing all this on the news and it will bring everything that they experienced two years ago straight back to the surface. I’d like to chat with them in person, reassure them that we haven’t forgotten little Zoe.’ It was an evasive answer, the best he was going to give at the moment.

      ‘What about Ruby Lovatt, the woman who found Jodie’s body?’ Workman asked. ‘She’s still in an interview room downstairs. We could divide and conquer.’

      Marilyn shook his head. After the Zoe Reynolds disaster, he wanted, needed, to be in on all the action on this new case. He couldn’t afford to miss anything, any nuance.

      ‘Send her home and ask her to come back first thing tomorrow, eight a.m. Cara, get a family liaison officer to meet us at the Trigg’s caravan, will you?’

      His gaze made one final circuit of the room and settled again on Workman.

      ‘Steel yourself, Sarah. We have a difficult house call to make.’

       11

      Jessie liked to leave the curtains open at night, to let the stars and the moon come into the bedroom with them. It reminded her of Wimbledon: of the winter evening she and Jamie had wrapped themselves up in blankets and taken their mugs of hot chocolate outside, lain on their backs on the lawn, Jessie pointing out the bear constellations, Ursula Major and Ursula Minor, to Jamie and Pandy, his beloved cuddly panda; of standing at her bedroom window at night, when the rest of the house was asleep, tracking the stars that made up her star sign, Gemini.

      When she’d lived with her father and Diane in their narrow terraced house in frenetic Fulham, all she had been able to see through her attic bedroom’s skylight was the sodium streetlights’ orange blanket, cloaking the moon and stars. She had hated the feeling, ever since, of being unable to see the night sky from her bedroom. Callan didn’t mind. He liked the outdoors, was happy to leave the curtains open and let the night flood into the bedroom with them.

      With the soft mattress underneath her, the warmth of Callan’s hard body next to her, she should have drifted easily to sleep, but her mind kept circling back to the television news, to Laura … Carolynn.

      ‘What’s wrong, Jessie?’ Callan murmured, his lips moving against her ear. She could feel him, warm and semi-hard against her thigh. Half-sleepy, half-aroused. Shifting on to her side, she shuffled the gap between them closed and slid her arms around his neck.

      ‘Nothing.’

      ‘Sure?’ His fingers moved absently-mindedly through her hair.

      ‘Sure.’ Linking her fingers with his, she guided his hand to her chest, placed it right over her heart. ‘Your hand would be more gainfully employed somewhere around here, I feel, Mr Callan.

      Shifting closer, moulding her naked body to his, she kissed him deeply, her tongue teasing his, felt him harden, fully awake now. And though she tried to lock on to the feeling of his lips against hers, his thumb circling her nipple, the sensation firing hot in her groin, all she could think of was Carolynn, her face plastered all over the television screen. Carolynn Reynolds and two murdered girls.

      I’d hate you to actually be able to read my mind. She had been a long way from a mind reader with that woman.

      She felt Callan’s hands on her shoulders, rolling her gently on to her back, and he moved on top of her, the muscles on his chest and abdomen hard against her breasts and stomach, his weight pinning her down.

      Another little girl murdered in the same place Carolynn’s daughter had been murdered two years ago. Two years to the day. September seventh. Lucky seven. Seven detestable sins.

      Callan’s knee eased between both of hers and she felt his hand stroke down her stomach, his fingers slip between her legs, slowly inside her. She gasped, moving her hands to his shoulders, simultaneously holding him away and digging her nails into his back, her body responding, her mind somewhere else, beyond her control, detached from the maelstrom of desire, obsessing.

      Outside, СКАЧАТЬ