‘… we will update you as soon as we have more on this story.’
The woman’s photograph was replaced by the picture of a graph in freefall, the story something financial that Jessie immediately tuned out.
‘Callan.’ She still called him by his surname, even though they had been dating for nearly six months and he had virtually moved into her tiny farm worker’s cottage. Gulliver in Lilliput, still hitting his head on the door frames, when he wasn’t concentrating. ‘One of my patients … clients was just on the news.’
A glass of Sauvignon and a bottle of beer in his hands, he came to stand next to her, passed her the wine.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
He smothered a yawn with the back of his hand. ‘Yes. What? Some woman? There’s only one woman I’m interested in and she’s not on the TV.’ He planted another lingering kiss on her neck, which she twisted out of, but not before she’d shivered again at the feel of his lips on her skin.
‘Stop trying to distract me and listen,’ she said, nudging his bare stomach with her elbow. ‘It’s the woman I saw this morning, the one who is so weighed down by guilt that she can hardly force herself to grind through the days.’
She flicked through the TV channels on the remote, BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 5, all showing other programmes or advertisements. Switching to BBC News 24, she laid the remote on the coffee table, aligning its long edge with the edge of the table, corner with corner, before she straightened.
Callan noticed, said nothing.
‘The woman whose daughter died in a car accident?’ he asked, stroking his hand down her arm, lacing his fingers through hers, the movement casual, sensual. But she knew why he’d done it.
Glancing at the remote, she felt the tension rise, the electric suit shiver across her skin, bit her lip to stop herself from pulling her hand from his so that she could adjust its top a few millimetres to the left, align it perfectly, absolutely perfectly, with the table edge. It was catching her eye, dragging her attention from the television and she needed to concentrate for when the child murder story, Laura … no … Carolynn, cycled around again. Her OCD had worsened, driven by the stress and disappointment of the past six months. She was making up for the lack of control over her life’s bigger picture by controlling what she could, the minutiae of her environment, tidying, aligning, ordering. But the knowing didn’t help with the stopping.
‘Are you talking about the woman whose daughter was killed in a car accident?’ Callan’s voice pulled her back.
‘Yes, but Zoe didn’t die in a car accident. She was murdered. Laura— Jesus, Carolynn … she’s actually called Carolynn, lied to me. She lied about her identity and she lied about the death of her daughter.’ She looked over her shoulder and met his searching amber gaze. ‘But why? Why lie?’
‘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