The Wicked Girls

Chapter Eight

Kirsty looks up at the rusting network of struts and pillars that supports the walkway from the turnstile on the seafront to the pier’s end. It’s dark here, dank and smelly – not just the brine-and-fish tang of rotting seaweed, but the fug of generations caught short, of picnics half eaten and discarded, of a leaking something pooling beneath the rocks.

It’s not the nicest town she’s ever been in. But in terms of why she’s been sent here, that’s no bad thing. Her job is to find fifteen hundred words of the sort of Sunday feature that makes readers feel better about their own lives. To skim over the rides and the ices and the bright animal-shaped inflatables, the exquisite pleasure of chips hot and salty from the packet in a stiff sea breeze, the joyous shock of Channel water on naked skin, and show instead the mile upon mile of grey post-war prefabs blotched back into the marshland around the estuary, the crumbling plastic fast-food shopfronts, the stressed lives of a largely itinerant population whose employment prospects are seasonal, the Georgian façades peering out between plastic and neon. To make Balham look balmy in comparison. No town where a killer is on the loose is allowed to be a nice town: it’s an unwritten law. If things like this happened in nice towns – the places where people buy Sunday papers and read them – then who would be safe?

And yet, she can’t help liking it. Despite the run-down, ill-stocked shops. Despite the pallor of skins that should be brown from seaside living, the fact that there’s not a colour that occurs in nature to be seen on the Corniche. Despite the tears on the faces of Hannah Hardy’s hungover friends when they discovered why she’d never made her way back to their static caravan last night, despite the fact that everyone here who is over fifteen looks closer to forty, there’s a gaudy, gutsy bravery to Whitmouth that she finds surprisingly charming. Part of her, despite the grim nature of the work that brought her here, feels like it’s on holiday. She likes Whitmouth and she thinks she likes its people.

Like the big group fifty feet from where she stands: one of those working-class parties where the women sit together while the men play a rough, elbowing game of football with frequent breaks to drink fizzy lager from the can and pass a fat, rough-rolled joint between them. The sort of gathering, she reflects, that I would have been grateful to be included in, once upon a time. Maybe that’s the reason I like it here. In another life, I would have thought it was heaven.

And yet here she stands at the spot where Nicole Ponsonby, this summer season’s first victim, was found. Nicole was lying, quite peacefully, face-up, with one arm thrown back behind her head. She would have looked for all the world like another teenage sun worshipper, were it not for the fact that she was lying on a heap of rags and bottles in the deep shade of the breakwater, and that her face was blue.

That was 13 June. Nicole had been in Whitmouth for four days at the time she met her death. She’d last been seen stumbling off from the Sticky Wicket pub, a skinful of snakebite and a lovebite on her neck, in search of chips. She was from Lancashire. She was nineteen years old and had left school the previous year with A levels in catering sciences and business studies. She had wanted to go into the hotel trade, and had been working as a receptionist at the Jurys Inn in Manchester for the previous three months. The trip to Whitmouth had partly been a scouting expedition to see if she couldn’t move a bit further up the food chain in one of the hotels along the Kent coast. She didn’t have a boyfriend, hadn’t had one since the sixth form.

She had come here as a child two or three times, with her parents, Susan and Grahame, and her two brothers, Jake and Mark. A nice, clean, respectable girl the vast majority of the time – not out of control habitually, but cutting loose with her mates the way teenagers do. No one had noticed her between her leaving the pub and turning up strangled twelve hours later. Of course they hadn’t: she was unremarkable, and the streets were crowded.

As Kirsty stands thinking about the girl and the circumstances of her death, a man in an anorak – he’s got the look of a stoat or a ferret, she thinks, all pointy teeth and beady little eyes – pauses as he passes her.

‘Can I help you?’ he asks. His voice is flat, nasal, toneless.

‘No. Thank you,’ she says, trying to sound kind and friendly, but clear. Then, ‘Well, yes, actually, as you ask. Are you from around here?’

‘Yes,’ he replies with an edge of annoyance, as though the answer is so obvious a child could see it.

‘Oh, good. I’ve been having trouble finding anyone who isn’t a tourist.’ This is a minor lie. Truth is, the locals she’s found have shown admirable loyalty to their home patch and she’s alarmingly short of attributable scared-to-go-out, quaking-in-bed quotations that will make the people of Cheltenham grateful for their property prices. If she can’t get some soon, she’s going to have to make them up. ‘Do you mind if I ask you how you feel about all this? These murders? As a local resident?’

The suspicion dials up. ‘Why do you want to know?’

Kirsty adjusts. Turns the transparent charm up a notch. ‘Yes. Sorry. I should have introduced myself.’ She offers him a hand to shake, though the thought of touching his greyish skin makes her feel uncomfortable. ‘Kirsty Lindsay. The Sunday Tribune. I’m writing an article about-’

‘I know what you’re writing about,’ he says, and he puffs with pride as he says it. You get this sometimes. Though most people are nervous around journalists, afraid of letting out too much information about themselves, unsure of where a question will lead, there’s always the odd one who sees an approach as evidence that they are important, and that the journalist has seen it where their neighbours have not.

‘Sure. OK, yes, of course you do,’ she says. ‘So I was wondering-’

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he says. ‘I think the lot of you should go away. No one wants you around here.’

‘Oh, look,’ protests Kirsty. ‘We’ve got to report the news.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘if you call it reporting. I know what you’ll do. You won’t ask anyone who actually knows. That’s not what you want, is it? You just want to bring your London sneering down to the provinces. We’d be fine if you’d all just go away and leave us alone.’

‘I-’ She looks at the tufty hairs on his carelessly shaved cheeks, the tight lips set in stubbornness, the unreasoning knee-jerk dislike in the eyes, and knows her answer. She’s not going to get anything useful out of this guy. Just the sort of formless disapproval that blames the media rather than the man who’s actually killing people. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘thanks anyway.’

‘You can’t quote me,’ he says. ‘I didn’t give you permission to quote me.’

‘I don’t have your name anyway,’ she says. Walks away up the beach before he can prolong the encounter. Feels, nonetheless, his eyes bore into her back as she skirts between the barbecue and the perimeter fence of Funnland, a festoon of yellow police tape marking out the hole in the short run of wire fence behind a bucket-and-spade stall. From this side, the amusement park’s concrete fortifications make it look a bit like a prison camp. The front wall, on the blowy road everyone jokingly calls ‘the Corniche’, is bright with hoardings and coloured lights.

Besides the big party, a few knots of young people talk and doze away their hangovers, and play Frisbee in T-shirts and long shorts. A camera team wanders among them, recording vox pops. Kirsty wonders how the lure of appearing on television can overcome the horror of doing so without make-up or preparation.

‘Yeah, of course I’m scared,’ says a young woman as she passes, ‘but what am I supposed to do? I only get a week’s holiday. I’ve got to have fun, innit?’

‘So are you going to come to Whitmouth again?’ asks the reporter.

‘Probably not,’ she replies. ‘It’s a bit pants, really. The booze is dead expensive and, did you know?, that amusement park’ – she gestures at the hulking wall of Funnland, where the police are spending their second day sweeping every inch between the fence and the death site with camelhair brushes – ‘has been closed ever since we got here. And in high season too!’

She visits the Antalya Kebab House, where the second victim, Keisha Brown, was last seen. The owner is Turkish, voluble and unfriendly. ‘So why are you suddenly interested?’ he asks. ‘You know what? This happened twice last year as well. There were two girls last year, and they were just as dead then, and you didn’t give a toss. Not one reporter, not one newspaper, apart from the Whitmouth Guardian, nobody from the telly then. They were invisible then. Might as well never have existed. But now… you’ve got some glamour now. You’re all looking for your Hannibal Lecter and now it matters, isn’t it?’

‘Fair point,’ she says. There are two murders every day in the UK. Only a third of them make much more than a downpage NiB in the papers. You’ve got to have a stand-out quality, or a determined family, for your death to get past the news editors. ‘But I’m here now. At least it’s a chance to put that right now, eh?’

‘You gonna buy something?’ he asks gruffly, glaring with deep dark eyes.

‘What’s good?’

‘Everything’s good.’

‘I’ll have a doner and a Coke, please.’

‘Chips?’ he barks.

‘No,’ she begins, then hurriedly assents. No point in blowing her chances for the price of a bag of chips. ‘And a receipt, please.’

She waits a couple of beats as he turns to the fryer and plunges the basket into the oil. ‘So do you remember her?’

He has his back turned. She can see his reflection in the mirrored wall behind the grill, napkin-scrawled, sellotaped-on specials framing his black hair. He’s fifty-something, and looks older. Everyone looks older around here.

Stop it, she thinks. You’ve turned into the worst sort of bourgeois snob while you weren’t looking. Just because you write for an audience doesn’t mean you have to share their views.

He shrugs. ‘Not really. Yes, sort of. But only because of what happened. I wouldn’t have remembered anything about her except for the fact that I found her body in among my dustbins. Then I remember her. Sort of.’

‘Was she with people? Alone?’

‘I don’t know. A lot of the time it’s hard to tell, especially on a Saturday. Sometimes they’re alone when they come in and not when they leave. They’re like animals on Saturday night. You’d think, what with them being on holiday, Saturday wouldn’t be such a big deal, but you’d be surprised. They still get dressed up, get drunker, stay out later. Don’t know how to queue, don’t know how to wait. Must’ve been twenty, thirty, hanging around, inside, dropping stuff on the pavement. Chips, chips, chips. Twenty alcopops and then they think chips will put them right. I’ve got CCTV. Something kicks off every Saturday. CCTV saves me hours giving statements.’

‘So she’s on it?’

He nods. ‘Yeah. Like I say, nothing remarkable. She comes in, she gets her chips, she talks to some boys while she waits. She liked vinegar. Must’ve used up half a bottle. Fanta. She drank Fanta.’

‘And the boys?’

‘I don’t know. Ask the police. They must’ve told you anyway. It wasn’t them. They were too drunk to stand up, most of them, let alone strangle someone. Except by accident maybe. So she gets her chips, she leaves, I carry on serving. We’re open till four on Saturday. I can turn two hundred kilos of chips on a good night, high season. We’re the only shop that’s open when the clubs let out, and most of them would sell their aunties for a bag of chips.’

‘So then?’ she prompts.

‘Half-four I’m taking out the trash, waiting for the oil to cool down enough to drain the fryer, and…’ He shrugs again. As an obituary, it’s not much.

‘It must have been awful,’ she says sympathetically.

‘Yeah…’ He starts to wrap her kebab in paper. ‘It’s not something you see every day. You want chilli sauce?’

‘Thanks.’

‘Thanks no or thanks yes?’

‘Thanks yes. Thanks.’

‘Open or closed?’

‘Closed, please.’ It’s only going to go into the first bin she passes when she gets out of sight.

He slaps the bundle down on the counter.

‘Twelve pound fifty.’

‘Twelve fifty?’ she squeaks.

‘Twelve fifty,’ he says firmly. ‘And a receipt.’

Kirsty suppresses an eye-roll and hands over the money. The press aren’t the only people for whom serial murder represents a business opportunity.

She can’t get into Funnland. A notice on the staff gate, where a handful of cold-looking hacks and snappers huddles among piles of cellophane-wrapped carnations, says that it will reopen tomorrow. She’s worked with one of the photographers a few times before, and wanders over. ‘Anything much?’ she asks. ‘Seen Stan Marshall?’

He shakes his head. ‘I should think he’s in the pub. Nothing much here. Managing director, that Suzanne Oddie, and some other suits.’

‘Anything to say?’

‘Blah blah unprecedented, blah blah sympathies to family, blah blah cooperating with the police to the fullest extent, blah blah reassure our customers. There’s a press release.’

Jeremy from the Express hands it to her. There’s not much. Park open again asap, Innfinnityland closed, probably to be demolished. Heartfelt sympathy. She takes a picture with her phone. She’ll read it off the jpeg later.

‘What are you doing here anyway? I thought Dave Park was here for the Trib.’

‘He is. He’s Mr Hard News. I’ve got the colour feature. Town in torment. Lock up your daughters. Price of beer. You know.’

‘Ah, the Sunday stuffies,’ says a hack from the Mirror. ‘Nothing new to say, just more of it.’

‘Still,’ says the snapper, ‘nice work if you can get it.’

‘Someone’s got to use the five-syllable words,’ she says. ‘To give the rest of you something to sneer at. So what do we know? Anything new on the vic?’

She quails faintly inside as she says it. The vic – a life reduced to flippancy.

‘Nothing new. The mum and dad are doing an appeal this arvo in the town hall.’

‘Is that where everybody else is?’

The man from the Mirror tuts. ‘Don’t be stupid. It’s not till four. They’re all in the White Horse, up on Dock Street.’

‘News-gathering,’ says the photographer, and winks.