Two Little Girls. Kate Medina

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, the night sky, lit only by a sliver of moon, was so black that the stars dotting it seemed to be pulsing, alive with energy. The curtains framing either side of the window caught her eye. Caught and held it. The left curtain was flush against the window frame, but the right was half-drawn, truncating her view of the sky. The electric suit tingled against her skin.

      ‘Callan,’ she murmured. He was rock hard against her thigh now.

      ‘Yeah?’

      Usually, she loved making love with him, loved to mould herself around him as he moved inside her, loved to grate her nails down his back as she came. But now the curtains were lodged in her mind along with Carolynn’s lies, two little dead girls, and the electric suit was hissing and snapping.

      ‘Callan, I just want to, uh, to look at the stars quickly.’

      ‘Huh?’

      ‘I just want to look at the stars.’

      ‘What?’ Pushing himself up on to his hands, he stared down at her incredulously.

      Tilting her head so that she didn’t have to lock eyes with him, she slid out from under him. ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said.

      Rolling back to his side of the bed, Callan put his hands over his face and groaned. ‘Jesus Christ, Jessie.’

      ‘I’m sorry, but it’s such a beautiful night. It’s going to rain soon and then the stars will be obscured by clouds.’

      Her excuse sounded ridiculous, even to her ears, but on the spot she couldn’t think of anything more convincing. Climbing out of bed, she padded over to the window. Raising her arms as nonchalantly as she could manage, the electric suit hot against her skin, she ran her hand quickly down the edge of the right-hand curtain, pushing it back, aligning