Two Little Girls: The gripping new psychological thriller you need to read in summer 2018. Kate Medina
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Название: Two Little Girls: The gripping new psychological thriller you need to read in summer 2018
Автор: Kate Medina
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9780008214029
isbn:
Bending down, she fingered the necklace around the girl’s neck. It was a silver locket; antique, from the look of it, engraved with two sets of footprints: those of an adult and, next to them, the smaller prints of a child. The silver was cold and her thumb pushed the wet from the engraved metal and left a dull print that was swallowed by raindrops the instant she pulled her thumb away. It would be worth something that, but she wasn’t going to take it. She had her reasons for not stooping to that. For not taking a necklace off a dead child. Beneath the necklace’s chain of silver coiled another, the thick dark chain of a bruise. Apart from the bruise, starkly black and purple against the soft white skin, the little girl looked untouched. Alabaster.
The woman stared down at the dead child and thought that she would feel something.
Sadness? Horror? Anger?
Or nothing? At least – nothing.
But what she felt was worse. It was a feeling that she recognized as satisfaction. Satisfaction that someone else would hurt the way she hurt every moment of every day. Cruel. When had she become so cruel as to enjoy someone else’s grief?
Little girl, far away in a world of your own, in a world built of dreams that are yours and yours alone. Though I cannot share your dreams, you are still my very own.
A small part of who she was – who she used to be – hated herself for the feeling. But that person was so far gone that she existed in another life, a life that had happened to someone else, and the tiny nugget of self-hatred was easy to ignore.
She looked down at the bruised tracks on the underside of her forearm, the soft skin there almost as white as the dead child’s, the needle marks dark as the snake of bruises coiled around the child’s neck. The woman had lived by the sea all her life and she recognized weather patterns like she recognized those self-inflicted patterns on her arm. The rain had set in for the evening, at least. There would be no one else to disturb the quiet of the dunes today, walking where she had walked. She didn’t need to rush. There was no urgency to tell the police. The little girl was dead. She would stay right here in her heart of shells and the doll with the matching eyes would keep her company.
Pushing herself to her feet, stepping carefully around the prone child, the woman walked on, the wet sand clinging to her bare soles, rainwater slopping around her toes. A packet of cigarettes caught her eye, damp, sodden, but she could dry them. Bending, she slipped them into the pocket of her jacket. A little further on, a two-pound coin, spilled from a purse or pocket. Lucky. A lucky day, for her at least. September seventh. Lucky seven.
Straightening, she walked on, eyes grazing the sand for treasure, leaving the dead child behind her alone in the dunes, staring up at the sky, staring up at nothing.
Icy water stung Carolynn’s cheeks as she fumbled the front-door key into the lock with one hand. The plastic handles of the grocery bags cut into the wrist of her other arm; usually she would have set them down on the ground, but the path at her feet was sodden. It hadn’t been raining when she’d left the house mid-afternoon for her run, but the sky had been a uniform ceiling of grey, so she had slipped her waterproof cagoule over her lycra tights and tank before she’d set out.
Roger’s car wasn’t on the drive so he must still be at work. Though she preferred it when he wasn’t home, the thought of stepping into that oppressive little house, alone once again, made a sick feeling balloon in her stomach. Today of all days, she couldn’t bear to be out among the crowds – couldn’t trust herself to be in enclosed spaces with families, bracing herself against the sound of children’s voices rolling in from down the street, or from another aisle in the supermarket. But now that she was alone, with no external stimuli to distract her, her mind was flooding with memories, pictures so vivid that she felt faint, knocked sideways with the pain.
Unbidden, an image from her visit to the beach that morning rose in her mind: the little girl in a pastel pink bathing costume. Where would she be now? With her parents and sisters, eating Nutella pancakes at the surf café? Tucked up on a sofa in a rented holiday home watching cartoons? Playing board games in a hotel lounge? Normal rainy-day holiday activities that she would never again do with a child of her own. Her goal when building her family had been to have pretty, bright, well-mannered children, to want to spend quality time in each other’s company, to relish every single, simple moment. The thought of that dimpled little girl on the beach hurt like a weeping sore.
It wasn’t my fault, she screamed inside. You need to believe that it wasn’t my fault.
Grocery bags knocking around her bare ankles, she staggered into the kitchen and laid them on the clay-tiled floor. On a dull early evening like this, even with all the ceiling spots on, the kitchen was unbearably claustrophobic. Dirty cream walls and dark wood kitchen cabinets topped with black laminate work surfaces shrunk it to half the size it actually was, making her feel as if she’d squeezed herself into a cardboard box.
The house was a rental. A small white house jammed between the gate of a static caravan park on one side and a boarded-up, crumbling bungalow on the other. It was right by the sea, but you wouldn’t know it, except for the stream of tourists wandering past in the summer, shouldering beach bags and clutching ice creams, and the brutal weather that rattled the window panes in winter. From the kitchen window, she could see the road and beyond that the concrete sea wall that wouldn’t have looked out of place bordering a military bunker. It had been built head high and a metre thick to prevent the sea from eating up more land, but she couldn’t see the point of being by the sea if you couldn’t appreciate its beauty. And she did love the sea. Cheap and faceless, this was a running-away-to house, a hiding-away-in house. They had only planned to be here a couple of months until the furore surrounding the court case had died down and they’d decided how and where to rebuild their lives. But their London house hadn’t sold – prospective buyers put off by having seen it on television for all the wrong reasons – so their hands were tied.
Hauling the fridge door open, Carolynn listlessly filled it with the shopping, every bend and straighten a gargantuan effort. She felt physically and mentally exhausted, wrung out like a damp dishcloth. She had eaten nothing all day and yet she wasn’t hungry, was rarely hungry these days. She had to force herself to eat enough to keep her body grinding along.
As she flicked the kettle on to make herself a cup of tea, the cat jumped on to the island, leaving a trail of dusty paw marks from its litter tray across the black laminate surface. Revolted, Carolynn fought the urge to swing the full kettle from its stand and knock the bloody animal to the floor with it. The cat had been Zoe’s, a Burmese, bought for her by Roger’s mother because ‘every child needs a pet’. Carolynn hadn’t needed to ask the subtext. Every child needs someone or something they can love unconditionally, that loves them back without reserve or judgement.
Didn’t your husband become so alarmed about your ambivalence towards your daughter that he asked his mother to move into your house to look after her?
No.
And did his mother not live with you for a full eighteen months, from when Zoe was a year old until she was two and a half, until her husband, your father-in-law, became ill and she had to move back to her home to look after him?
No. It wasn’t like that.
She’d СКАЧАТЬ