Читать книгу Two Little Girls - Kate Medina - Страница 13

‘It could be a copycat, sir,’ Workman said, in a tone of forced calm. ‘Zoe Reynolds’ murder was a fixture in the press for months, and the spotlight was shone again when Carolynn was on trial. You’d have to have spent the last two years living in a mud hut in Papua New Guinea not to have read about it, not to know all the details.’ A pause. ‘Everything.’

Eyes fixed on the misty hummock that was the Isle of Wight fifteen kilometres across the Solent to the south, the curved grey back of a breaching whale, Marilyn nodded, hoping she wouldn’t notice that his hands were shaking.

Everything.

Workman was right. The column centimetres the Zoe Reynolds case had occupied would add up to kilometres, every sordid bloody detail raked over countless times, however hard he had tried to keep some things back, just a few elements of the poor little girl’s murder, to preserve some dignity for her memory if nothing else. Zoe Reynolds. That name forever seared into his memory as if it had been cattle-branded on to his temporal lobe. The statistics of child abductions and murders in the UK branded there also, from the many hours he’d spent trawling through the data, buttonholing experts, interviewing convicted paedophiles to try to understand their thought processes, eliminating paedophilia as a possibility, cycling back again and again to the conviction that it must have been the child’s mother, that he had been right to pursue her as hard as he had done, despite being unable to amass enough evidence to nail a guilty verdict.

In the twenty-two years since he joined Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, Zoe Reynolds’ murder was the only case that he still took to bed with him at night; his own personal abject failure. Around two hundred children were unlawfully killed in the UK each year, with at least three quarters of those deaths due to abuse or neglect by a parent – filicide – or other close relation. And those were only the reported cases. The woman he’d spoken with at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children had told him that the statistic was an under-estimation, that each year some parents literally got away with murder. Not all parents who kill their children live on benefits in some sink estate, she’d told him. Affluent parents have tempers too. Affluent parents lose control. The inference wasn’t lost on Marilyn: fall down the stairs in a middle-class household and you’ve slipped; do the same in a tower block with alcoholic parents and your mum or dad threw you down them.

‘A copycat,’ he murmured, finally acknowledging Workman’s comment, yanking on the knot to loosen his tie, lessen the tightening in his airways. Copycat crimes were far from uncommon. Two years to the day. ‘Yes, it could be.’

The soft sigh that he wasn’t supposed to have heard over the shore breeze told him that she had noted the lack of conviction in his tone. She’d been by his side throughout that first case, had been affected by little Zoe’s murder – in truth, even more than he had been. She hadn’t, though, shared his dogged conviction that the mother, Carolynn Reynolds, was responsible. Despite knowing the statistic on child murders as well as he did, she found it hard to accept that a mother could kill her own daughter. Not that pretty, polished mother. Not that daughter. Not in that cold-blooded way. Given Workman’s personal history – her struggle to come to terms with her own childlessness due to infertility – he had doubted her ability to remain objective. He’d come close to having her sidelined for the duration of the investigation, but eventually decided against because losing DS Sarah Workman would have been akin to hacking off his right arm. He had needed her support, particularly with so public a case, his work under such close scrutiny, so he’d kept her with him but monitored her closely, tempering her opinions with a spade full of salt. He’d caught her a few times, studying the crime scene photographs of the dead child, wallowing unhealthily in them, he’d thought at the time. He’d done the same, but privately, and even as he was looking for the umpteenth time, he knew that what he was doing was mentally destructive, the visual equivalent of sticking needles under his fingernails.

‘We owe it to this little girl to—’

Marilyn raised a hand, cutting her off.

‘We do indeed. And we will.’ He dropped his hand to her shoulder. ‘And I don’t need a lecture about objectivity, thanks, Sarah. Come on, let’s leave Burrows to it, get back to base and brief the team. I’ll start jibbering if I don’t get away from the noise of these bloody seagulls.’

* * *

The journalists who had thronged the crime scene on the beach seemed to have made it back to the station in Chichester quicker than he had, which, given he was still driving his beloved Z3 – sixteen years old, 143,000 miles on the clock and performing to every bit of its age and mileage – he had to acknowledge wasn’t surprising.

Monitoring police radio frequencies 24/7 for the first whiff of a heinous crime, the press piranhas had gone into a frenzy the moment they found one. Marilyn was engulfed as soon as he stepped from the car: voice recorders and cameras, like the black eyes of Cyclops, shoved into his face. Shouldering through them, he made it to the concrete steps into the station, where at least his back was covered by the closed front door. Stopping, he turned under the stone arch, squinting against the sinking sun’s rays, knowing that he might as well face the pack now than delay it. Pain now, double pain with bells on later when they’d had a chance to feed off each other, speculate, the process always made more creative, the conclusions more fantastical and inflammatory when they had no factual information to work with. He wasn’t a natural politician, preferred just to get on with the job and let his success rate speak for itself. He didn’t want to become one of those policemen who always had their eye on the main chance, on creating good impressions over delivering results, on the next promotion, but even he’d realized, in a flash of deeply uncomfortable clarity out on the beach, that he would need as many people on his side as he could get, given the high-profile disaster that the Zoe Reynolds case had been. His personal high-profile disaster.

Moreover, he would never forgive himself if this little girl’s killer escaped justice as Zoe’s had. One ghostly child remonstrating with him in the early hours was already one too many. He held up his hand to silence the chatter and still the jostling.

‘The body of a young girl was found in the sand dunes at West Wittering beach by a passer-by late this afternoon. Dr Ghoshal, the Home Office pathologist, estimates her to be nine or ten years old.’

Shouted questions:

‘Who found her?’

‘Where exactly was she found?’

‘How long has she been dead for?’

‘How was she killed?’

He noticed a few elbows connecting with ribs as they vied for the best spot. No raised hands or other such decorum, the press pack aptly named. Stray dogs being tossed a roast chicken would behave better. Ignoring the questions, he pressed on:

‘We have not yet identified the child and so far no one has come forward to tell us that their daughter is missing. My first priority is to identify her.’

Questions coming thick and fast:

‘What does she look like? Hair colour, eye colour—’

‘How are you going to identify her?’

‘What kind of family do you think the kid comes from if no one has noticed she’s missing?’

Fair question that one, but he ignored it too. It wasn’t his job to speculate or criticize. His ex-wife would fall about laughing if she caught him casting judgement on bad parenting on television.

‘How was she killed?’

‘Are there any suspects?’

And then the question, the one he knew would come:

‘Do you think that this second girl was murdered by the same person who murdered Zoe Reynolds? It’s too much of a coincidence, surely, otherwise? A couple of hundred metres from the spot where she was found, two years to the day?’

Two years ago, to the day.

The visceral memory of coming upon Zoe’s strangled body, that vile doll lying beside her, black felt-tip marks around its neck aping the strangulation bruises on Zoe’s. The image visited him often, with unrelenting clarity, as the image of this second little girl’s body would no doubt visit him also.

Another dead child. Another doll.

The same doll – make and model – he was sure of it. The doll’s image was something he’d never forget. It had been so lifelike, but at the same time not, like one of the countless bodies he’d seen on dissecting tables, a lifelike carcass without life or soul. The doll’s eyes, particularly, had stuck in his mind. Brown – the same colour as little Zoe’s eyes.

And the doll found beside this child?

Green.

It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, back on the beach, but both the child and the doll had green eyes. He saw them now in his mind’s eye: the child’s eyes a deep sea green, already clouding over, the doll blinking its glassy green eyes at Burrows as he lifted it with gloved hands and slid it into an evidence bag.

Brown to match Zoe’s eyes. Green to match this second little dead girl’s eyes. Jesus, what the hell am I dealing with? Had that detail been in the press? Would a copycat know? Or was it just coincidence that the dolls’ eyes matched the girls’?

Coincidence?

Whatever he was about to tell the press in an effort to defuse tension around the possibility of a double child murderer being on the loose in this sleepy seaside town, he didn’t believe in coincidences.

The restless increase in volume from the press pack brought him back to the moment.

‘It is far too early to make any judgements as to whether the murder of this little girl and the murder of Zoe Reynolds, two years ago, are connected. However, I would like to speak with Zoe’s parents and would ask them to get in touch with me as a matter of urgency.’

Holding up a hand to signal that the impromptu press conference was over, receiving a barrage of new questions in reply, he backed up the stairs, still facing them. Never good to turn your back on a journalist, unless you want a knife between the shoulder blades.

‘We will hold a full press conference in due course to update you all properly on the progress of this case,’ he concluded. ‘Now if you will excuse me, I have a child murder to solve.’ A second child murder …