Kate Medina - Two Little Girls

An animal yelp of pure pain rooted Marilyn to the spot. Jack-knifing on to the sofa, Debs Trigg scratched clawed fingers down her cheeks, raising bloody red weals in their wake. Workman shoved past Marilyn, knocking his shoulder in the cramped space, and caught Trigg’s wrists.

‘Don’t, love, don’t do that. Please don’t hurt yourself like that.’

He should have stepped forward himself, he knew, should have grabbed her wrists himself, but from the moment he had set eyes on her all he could think of was Zoe Reynolds, his mind spinning back to Carolynn on her knees in the beach car park cradling Zoe’s limp body and howling, and later, sitting opposite him in the interview room at Chichester police station, so composed by then, so closed-down. He had been wholly unable to see anything in those dark eyes, or to decipher the secrets buried in the brain behind them. A second child was dead because of his ineptitude.

His gaze moved past Debs Trigg and Workman to the photograph of Jodie on the shelf behind the sofa, a ten by eight colour shot of a laughing child, arms spread wide, wind flapping her yellow summer dress around her thighs, the white sails of yachts in the background. Unmistakably West Wittering beach. Unmistakably the little girl he had seen dead this morning, a chain of bruises around her neck, that vile doll by her side, the last chink of uncertainty closed. Heartbreaking. Utterly heartbreaking and his responsibility. His fault. His failure.

It took Debs Trigg a long time to stop crying. Marilyn and Workman had exchanged tense glances and he had resumed staring through the nets at the blank white backside of the static caravan next door while Workman did her best to comfort the distraught woman. Slipping his mobile from his pocket, Marilyn fired off a quick text to DC Cara, asking him to chase the family liaison officer pronto. The sooner he could escape from this hellhole of emotion and get back to investigating little Jodie’s death, the better for all concerned.

Rising from the sofa, Trigg scrabbled for the packet of Superkings on the table and lit a cigarette, sinking back beside Workman, hunching her shoulders and folding an arm across her chest – defensive body language, Marilyn recognized, inwardly allowing himself a brief, cynical smile at the knowledge and terminology he had absorbed from Jessie Flynn.

‘It’s definitely her, isn’t it?’ she muttered, on a stream of smoky breath. ‘Definitely?’

‘We’ll need you or a relative to formally identify her, but yes, we’re pretty certain that the girl found this afternoon in the dunes at West Wittering is your daughter, Jodie,’ he said, in the businesslike tone he resorted to when faced with emotionally charged situations. ‘She was wearing a navy-blue school unform, white shirt, navy jumper and trousers. She also had a pendant necklace, with two sets of footprints engraved on it, around her neck.’

Hauling smoke into her lungs through pale lips, Trigg nodded, tear-stained eyes fixed on the floor. ‘She loved that necklace. Found it on the beach one day when she was walking home from school, she did, a couple of months ago. I told her she should hand it in, but—’ she broke off with a shrug. ‘You know, and she loved it an’ all, so I just let her keep it.’

Workman pulled a black notebook from her pocket and Marilyn noticed her shift sideways, expanding the space between her and Debs, subtly re-establishing a professional distance. She made a note about the necklace in the book.

‘I need to ask you a few questions, Mrs Trigg,’ Marilyn continued. ‘To help us with the investigation.’

‘Miss. There isn’t a Mr – though I think you already worked that out, didn’t you, Inspector?’ She took another tense drag of the cigarette. ‘Ask away.’

‘Why didn’t you report Jodie missing earlier?

‘I was at work, wasn’t I.’

‘Where do you work?’

‘F & G Foods in Chichester, on the packing line.’

Workman wrote the name of Debs’ employer in her notebook.

‘What time did you get home?’ Marilyn continued.

‘I’m on lates this week. My shift is midday until ten p.m., so I didn’t get home until eleven.’

‘What did you do then?’

‘I went into Jodie’s room to check on her and found her bed empty. I could tell that it hadn’t been slept in.’

‘What time does she usually get home?’

‘School finishes at three-fifteen.’

‘And she walks home alone?’

Debs frowned. ‘She’s nearly ten years old, for Christ’s sake – Year Five. So yeah, of course she walks alone. There and back. It’s only half a kilometre along the beach.’

‘Where is she a pupil?’

‘East Wittering Community Primary.’

‘So, she would have been on the beach alone yesterday afternoon?’ Marilyn confirmed. ‘Walking home from school.’

‘Not down there. Not as far as West Wittering. School’s East Wittering. West Wittering is a good kilometre further on, in the wrong direction to home.’ Anger flared in Debs’ eyes. ‘If you’re gonna have a go at me, you can get out.’

Marilyn saw her aggression for what it was: grief transfigured as anger. For a woman like Debs Trigg, every day would be a fight, for money, for food, for time, for a job that paid more than £7.50 an hour, subsistence living. Fight – anger – would be her ‘go-to’ emotion and it would be far easier for her to process than grief. Whatever her relationship with Jodie, which he had yet to clarify, he knew that she would be hit by a freight train of misery when they left. He wouldn’t want to be in her or the family liaison officer’s shoes for anything.

‘Would Jodie have had any cause to go to West Wittering beach yesterday afternoon?’

Rubbing the back of her hand across her nose, Trigg sniffed. ‘No, of course not. Like I already said, it’s in the opposite direction to home.’

‘Did she like to meet friends on the beach?’

‘School friends, sometimes. They all like to hang out on the beach, don’t they? What kid wouldn’t?’

‘We’ll need a list of their names.’

‘Fine. The school will know better than me.’

‘What about adults? Was she friends with any adults?’

Her lip curled as she looked up and met his gaze with her tear-stained eyes. ‘What, like nonces?’

Marilyn shook his head. ‘Anyone.’

The lit tip of the cigarette glowed as Trigg sucked hard, her chest expanding as she drew the smoke deep into her lungs. Marilyn would have killed for a cigarette right now, but lighting up in the middle of an interview could hardly be called professional, whatever the interviewee was doing, and he was going to play this one by the book. Page, line, word and letter.

‘People who work around the caravan park,’ she murmured, exhaling. ‘It’s friendly like, and we’ve lived here since Jodie was born. She knows everyone on the site. The staff and full-timers, that is, not the holiday rental lot.’

Marilyn nodded. ‘Do you give her a time she needs to be home by?’ he continued, using the present tense deliberately, following Trigg’s lead, to minimize her stress and upset. Faint hope.

‘I tell her she needs to be home by eight, latest.’

‘And you finish work at ten p.m.’

‘Depends if I’m on an early or late shift, but yeah, yesterday was a late, ten p.m., and then it’s an hour bus-ride home.’

‘So, what does Jodie do between three fifteen and eight?’

‘She stays out and plays with schoolkids on the beach, or kids from the caravan park. Sometimes she goes to hang out at the entertainment centre, watches people play the arcade games.’

Marilyn nodded. The list of people the little girl had known and the time that she had spent alone both seemed to fall into the category ‘how long is a piece of string?’ The only certainty: another murder of another little girl, two years ago, the link between them, in his mind at least, concrete. The colour of the doll’s eyes a detail that he was sure hadn’t been in the papers.