Stripping off his overalls and overshoes and handing them to a CSI officer, Marilyn turned his collar up against the spitting rain and slid down the dunes on to the tidal flats, sucking the salt-laced air deep into his cigarette-ravaged lungs, grateful to be out of that claustrophobic InciTent and away from the sad, desecrated little body. Her green eyes were clouding over with a death film already, wide open, but seeing nothing, recognizing nothing.
Though civilization was barely five hundred metres away – £5,000,000 houses owned by city bankers who had cashed in their chips and retired down here with their families for the quiet life, others heading here at weekends – it always surprised him how startlingly remote this peninsula was, tied to the main stretch of the beach by a narrow bar of sand and extending like a bloated finger into the mouth of Chichester Harbour. Fifty acres of silky soft sand dunes topped with knee-high marram grass where children could play for hours, disappear for hours, even when the beach in front of the dunes was packed with holiday-makers. The local police had fielded many calls over the years from frantic parents whose children had gone missing on this stretch of coast. Most turned up an hour or two after they’d disappeared, having simply lost track of time. Years ago, when he was starting out in the force as a PC, before he’d had his own children and experienced parental worry first-hand, he’d done his fair share of trudging through these dunes, sand penetrating his brogues and gritting between his toes, calling out Noah or Amelia’s name, itching to clip the little sod’s ear when he or she was finally found.
The location should have been God’s gift for footprints, but that forensic avenue had been frustrated by the time of year and the weather: a rainy afternoon following on from a sunny morning and a string of sunny days before that, at the end of the summer holidays. Adults and children’s footprints criss-crossed his crime scene as if a herd of demented cattle had passed through; it would have taken forever to process each and every one, had the rain not obliterated the whole lot.
What was the little girl doing all the way out here anyway? Had she been in the dunes when she met her killer? Had she come under her own steam, playing with friends or wandering alone, or had she been brought here? And if she’d come with her killer, had she done so voluntarily, or had she been bribed or coerced? Easy to bribe a child of that age with sweets, easy to force them with threats. Simple for an adult to convince a child who knew them well to come and play on the beach for an hour.
According to the initial estimate from Dr Ghoshal, the pathologist, she had been dead for between one and two and a half hours, which meant that she had been killed sometime between three-thirty and five p.m. Whoever the child’s killer was, he or she had chosen well, both in terms of location, weather and timing.
He didn’t even know who she was. Only nine or ten years old and yet no one had come forward to claim her. For Christ’s sake – what kind of home did the poor little mite come from?
Just one glass. There was nothing wrong with having a small glass of red wine before Roger came home. It was a quarter-to-seven – perfectly respectable. She used to drink all the time in her old job: nip to the pub at lunchtime with her colleagues, pop out for drinks after work on Fridays as a reward for making it through another emotionally draining week dealing with all those traumatic cases.
Cupping the wine glass, she wandered into the sitting room and switched on the television. It was an early-evening chat show, five glossy women with expensive highlights, dressed in clothes that Carolynn would have worn for a night out in central London, in the days when she had friends to go out in the evening with, sitting behind a pink panelled desk. The women, all her age or older, looked immaculate even under the harsh studio lights; they were so removed from the image she saw in the bathroom mirror every morning, they might as well have been aliens from another planet. She had looked like that once though, hadn’t she? Dewy-skinned, bright-eyed and sleek. Before the pain took its toll …
At the sound of the front door, her shoulders stiffened, the muscles under her skin bunching into tense knots. Roger’s footsteps echoed across the tiled hall as he walked into the kitchen, then stopped. She heard the sound of his breathing and, though he said nothing, she knew he was surprised that she wasn’t in the kitchen preparing dinner. A good meal was important to him after a long day at work. Uneasy, Carolynn looked quickly for somewhere to stow her wine glass, out of sight. But before she’d taken a step, she sensed rather than heard him standing in the lounge doorway, felt his eyes on her.
‘I, uh, I didn’t expect you back,’ she murmured, pasting on a poor impression of a smile as she turned.
A shadow crossed his face when he saw the glass in her hand. ‘I left early so that I could be with you. Because of … you know.’ Because of today.
Carolynn nodded, feeling like a reformed drug user, caught sneaking a hit. ‘I … I just fancied a small glass,’ she said.
‘It’s a bit early, Caro.’
They stood, facing off against each other across the living room. ‘It’s nearly seven, Roger, and it’s only a small glass.’ Her tone sounded like that of a child defending the state of their room.
‘I don’t think you should be drinking alone.’
‘It’s just one.’
‘One leads to two, then three.’ He puffed air into his cheeks and blew noisily out of his mouth, like a balloon deflating. ‘What did you do today?’
I went for a run. I go every day. You couldn’t expect me not to go today of all days.
She didn’t say it. She had changed out of her running clothes, as she did every day before he got home from work, had taken a shower, put on a dress. He liked her to look pretty, feminine. He hated to think of her punishing her body with that obsessive running. He didn’t realize how much she needed it, how it was the only thing keeping her sane.
‘I popped to the supermarket,’ she said. ‘I bought steak for dinner. I thought it would be nice to have something tasty, expensive.’
‘I’ll look forward to that.’ His tone was flat.
When had their relationship become more about what wasn’t said, the undercurrent, than the words actually spoken?
Carolynn chewed a fingernail. ‘I want to integrate a bit, Roger,’ she said. ‘Make some friends … a friend, at least.’ Dr Flynn. Jessie.
His forehead creased. ‘We came here precisely because we didn’t want to integrate.’
‘I know, but I’m lonely.’
‘You have me, Caro.’
‘You’re out at work all day.’
He shook his head. ‘We have each other.’ There was an edge to his tone. ‘You don’t need anyone else.’
Carolynn nodded, feeling like one of the spring-necked plastic animals in the box on the counter in the pound shop, placed there to tempt small children as their parents were paying at the till.
‘We came here to escape, to protect you.