‘Maybe someone planted it there?’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. That’s your job to find out.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ Matilda leaned forward and picked up the phone. ‘Do you know what I love about these iPhones? They’re so smooth and sleek and shiny. You only need to pick it up once and you leave behind a perfect fingerprint. These are a godsend to police. We find these, dust them for prints, and we always get a good set from them. We dusted this one too. Would you like me to tell you what we found?’
Jodie sat back and folded her arms. She shrugged her reply.
‘We found your prints. Well, we only found one. It was a thumb print on the home button. As you know, we took your prints for elimination purposes. They’re a complete match to the one on this phone.’
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ve never touched that phone.’
‘You have. Looking at the times and dates of the messages sent you’ll have been in bed, chatting on the phone to your father in the next room and when you’ve sent your final message with three kisses and told him how much you loved him, you turned the phone off and hid it beneath the floorboards.’
‘No.’
‘Your mum slept downstairs in the extension with Riley. Your father was in bed upstairs on his own. Many times you started your messages with ‘Would you like me to come in?’ You volunteered to go into your dad’s room and engage in sexual activity.’
‘You have no proof of that,’ the solicitor said. ‘Even if it’s true, she could have suffered years of abuse at the hands of her father, making her seem complicit to avoid other physical abuse or abuse enacted towards her brother or sister.’
‘I’ll let you have a copy of this conversation, including the pictures we downloaded, and the short video. Did I tell you what the video was of?’ Matilda asked, a smile on her face. ‘It’s of a young woman, a girl, using a vibrator on herself. The message that went with it said, ‘Happy birthday, Daddy’. Care to explain?’
‘That wasn’t me,’ Jodie said, firmly.
‘I’m going to put in a request to have a doctor examine you, Jodie. That doctor will be able to tell if you match the person in the video. They can tell by any veins that appear prominently on the leg, or by moles or skin defects.’
‘It’s not me,’ she said, a little less confidently.
‘Yes, your father may have instigated the abuse, but you enjoyed it. He made you believe what you were doing was perfectly normal. He forced you to fall in love with him. Then, when he turned his attentions to Keeley, you killed her because you thought she was going to replace you.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘You wanted him for yourself so you poisoned your mother so it could be just the two of you.’
‘No.’
‘And you killed Riley so you could move away somewhere and start afresh. Father and daughter living as husband and wife.’
‘You’re seriously sick in the head.’
‘You’re the victim of abuse, but the perpetrator of three murders.’
‘Wrong. You’re so wrong it’s unbelievable.’
‘Then why is your thumb print on this phone?’
‘It isn’t because I always wiped—’ She fell silent.
Matilda savoured the silence. ‘You always wiped it before you put it back under the floorboards. Is that what you were going to say?’
Jodie slumped in her seat as if the life had been torn out of her. She looked down. Her breathing was slow. Eventually, she looked back up at Matilda.
‘You tricked me.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m not proud of that.’
A silence descended. Matilda waited for Jodie to begin in her own time.
Her bottom lip began to wobble. ‘I never thought what Dad was doing was abuse. He was always so gentle, so kind. He made me feel safe and wanted. When it started, it was just kissing and holding each other. The first time we had sex, I told him I wanted my first time to be special. We went for a meal, just the two of us. Keeley was staying over at a friend’s house and Mum was in the extension with Riley. She never came upstairs. We made love for hours. It was … amazing,’ she smiled as she recalled the memory. Her face was one of contentment, but tears began to run down her face.
‘You must have known it was wrong,’ Matilda said.
‘I did. I told Dad we shouldn’t be doing it, but he said you can’t help who you fall in love with. He’s right. We’re taught at school about being tolerant towards people from other lifestyles and religions. We watched a video and there was this man who hated being a man. He hated everything about being male and changed gender. Yet, when he was a woman, he still wanted to sleep with women, so he entered into a lesbian relationship. I remember some of the lads in my class laughing at that. And I thought, yes, it is a bit weird, but he looked so happy. I was sleeping with my dad, but I was happy, so, surely that’s all that matters … that I’m happy.’
Matilda and Christian exchanged glances. Everyone in that room felt uncomfortable. Suddenly, they weren’t sitting opposite a cold-blooded killer, but a victim of prolonged sexual and mental abuse.
‘You killed Keeley, didn’t you?’ Matilda asked, breaking the heavy silence.
Jodie lost her grip on her emotions. The tears fell in a torrent and she struggled to keep her breath. She refused the offer of a break.
‘When Keeley told me what Dad had done to her,’ she eventually began, ‘I thought he’d finish with me and go to Keeley. I loved him so much. I just wanted him for myself. I loved Keeley, but she was getting in the way of my happiness,’ she wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands.
‘What happened on Monday evening?’
‘I bought Keeley an ice cream from the van outside the school. Then, when we went to the Co-op, I told her to wait there until she’d finished it, then go and wait for me in the woods and I’d bring her a treat. I told her not to speak to anyone. We’d have a little picnic, just the two of us. I quickly did the shopping, took it home, made some excuse to Mum about Keeley wandering off then went to look for her. I phoned Mum not long after I’d left and pretended to be a kidnapper. Then I went to find Keeley. She was there, waiting for me by the tree, drawing in the dry ground with a stick, acting all sweet and innocent as if she’d done nothing wrong.’
‘But she hadn’t done anything wrong,’ Matilda said.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw the way she flaunted herself around the house – dressing up like a princess, sitting on Dad’s knee. It made me sick. I had to get her out of the way.’
‘She was nine years old,’ Matilda exclaimed.
‘So? Don’t let someone’s age fool you. She knew exactly what she was doing.’
‘What did you do?’
Jodie picked up the plastic cup of water and took a lingering sip. ‘I smacked her over the head with a rock. It was easy. She didn’t scream. She just fell to the ground. She wasn’t dead though. I thought she was but suddenly she started to groan and squirm.’
‘Go on,’ Matilda prompted.