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.
He was a pot calling the kettle black, pulling Debs Trigg up on her parenting skills, particularly as he recognized that she had little choice, but at least his own parental failings had been compensated for by his ex-wife, a caring, responsible woman. Even so, his daughter had gone off the rails. It sounded as if poor little Jodie had had no such stability and his heart went out to her, to her memory. Many nine-year-old kids he’d dealt with in his career had had it far worse, but he still felt that every child deserved a fairy tale childhood. Adulthood was tough enough, without hard times starting long before.
‘Would she have gone to West Wittering beach voluntarily?’ he asked.
Trigg gave an evasive shrug. ‘What reason would she have to go?’
‘I was hoping that you would be able to help me with that.’ A sharp edge to this tone that he was struggling to suppress. ‘She has four and three-quarter hours from when school finishes to when you expect her home and another three hours after that, before you actually get home. It’s a long time.’ A very long time, particularly for a nine-year-old child.
Trigg waved the stub of the cigarette towards the corner of the caravan. ‘We’ve got the telly and often as not she’s got homework.’
Marilyn nodded. ‘But she could have gone down to West Wittering voluntarily. She could have been meeting someone without you knowing.’
Trigg’s red-rimmed eyes remained fixed on the blank square of the television screen in the corner, looking but not seeing.
‘Couldn’t she, Miss Trigg?’ he prompted.
‘Yeah, I suppose she could ’ave.’ The words drew a little jerk out of her, as if the effort of acknowledgement hurt her.
‘I’ll need that list of her close school friends and everyone else she knew and saw around here on a regular basis. Detective Sergeant Workman will give you a hand with it.’
Trigg gave a dull nod. All the aggression, the fight had leaked from her. Tears welled in her eyes and a barely audible voice came from the back of her throat. ‘How was she killed, Detective Inspector? How was my baby killed?’
‘She was strangled,’ Marilyn said plainly. There was no benefit in sugar-coating, not for anyone.
‘When?’