The Wicked Girls

Chapter Fourteen

Busy, busy, busy. It’s what she’s always done when she’s wanted to avoid thinking: she finds something to do instead. It’s why the house stands out from its neighbours, a little oasis of maintenance and tidiness in a world where redundant washing machines suffice as garden ornaments. Washed windows, bright white nets, sills and woodwork freshly painted, hanging baskets colourful from spring to winter. Vic says it attracts attention, that standing out in a place like this is not a good thing, but she finds it hard to stop. On the days when she can’t get to sleep, she’ll be out there taking a busman’s holiday with a scrubbing brush on the path and the front step, pulling out the furniture to hoover behind it, walking the area round the front of the house with rubber gloves and a bin liner, collecting Greggs sausage-roll bags.

There are a couple more flapping on the pavement in front of the gate. Amber stands in the rain and struggles with the urge to clear them up. In the end she concedes defeat, pulls the plastic bag she habitually carries from her handbag, and sets about picking up, rain on her back, hair plastered to her face.

Next-door’s front door opens and Shaunagh Betts comes out, her toddler Tiffany strapped into her pushchair. ‘Ooh, Amber,’ Shaunagh says, ‘putting us all to shame again.’

Amber straightens up, forces a smile on to her face. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘someone’s got to do it.’

She sees Shaunagh take offence, realises too late that the comment has been taken as criticism, not self-effacement.

‘Yes, well,’ huffs Shaunagh. ‘I’m sorry we don’t all have time.’

‘No, no…’ Amber begins, but mother and child have already started off up the road. Amber sighs and goes into her safe house.

The back door is open and Jackie is huddled in the garden. Amber has a moment of stupid panic when she catches sight of her silhouette. She had briefly forgotten that she had a house-guest at all. Mary-Kate and Ashley have come indoors and are cuddled up together on the living-room sofa; they look up guiltily when she enters. Thank God I’ve got home before Vic, she thinks, scooting them back to their basket. He’s finding it hard enough having an interloper in the house without seeing that as well.

Fortunately, Jackie’s not an observant sort. Doesn’t notice Amber’s fraught state, just raises a hand in greeting. ‘You’re wet,’ she says.

‘So are you,’ says Amber. ‘For God’s sake come into the kitchen.’

‘No, you’re all right,’ says Jackie. ‘I’ll wait till I’ve finished this.’

‘It’s OK,’ says Amber. ‘Vic’s not back for hours yet.’

‘Yeah?’ She looks grateful. ‘OK.’

She comes in, stands dripping on the doormat, cigarette in hand. There’s a damp towel hanging over the back of a chair. She’s obviously been coming in and out all morning. Amber hands it to her. She rubs unenthusiastically at her hair. The kitchen steams up, smells of tobacco and unwashed fleece.

‘How was your morning?’ asks Amber.

Jackie shrugs. ‘OK. Bit boring. I watched Trisha and Jeremy Kyle.’

‘Might as well have just stood at the window and saved the leccy.’

Jackie laughs. ‘So is work back on tonight then?’

Amber nods.

‘Thank God for that,’ says Jackie. ‘It’s bad enough not being able to go home without being skint on top.’

‘Yeah, I can imagine,’ says Amber, who’s paid for every meal Jackie’s eaten since she got here, apart from the bag of chips she bought yesterday and left, unwrapped and half eaten, on the kitchen table.

At teatime she takes Jackie’s keys and walks the dogs up to her flat to get her a few changes of clothes. She’s been wearing the tracksuit she arrived in for two days and, now that it’s damp, that fact is impossible to ignore. And a walk is a good way to avoid thinking, anyway. There’s always stuff to see and do on the Wordsworth; always enough external input to keep her thoughts at bay.

The scarlet plastic lettering that marks Jackie’s block out from the identical grey structures around it has long since come loose. 1 3-19-g -OLE-IDGE -ESCEN-, it reads. An old mattress, stained with salt air and a thousand nocturnal incidents, leans against the wall by the dustbins. Everyone knows that if they don’t pay the bulky refuse fee, the council will come and fetch things away eventually anyway. By the end of each six-month waiting period, the estate’s pavements are strewn with legless beds, springless sofas and scorched coffee tables; teenagers gathering on them the way they used to on the Bench back in Long Barrow.

The lift isn’t working. She plods up the three storeys to Flat 191.

The place smells stale, though Jackie’s only been gone three days. Tobacco, old food and the same faint must that always rises off her fleece in the warm, all mixed in with the synthetic waft of a plug-in air freshener in the hall. A bin bag of dirty laundry sits inside the front door, waiting, top gaping open, to go to the launderette. Amber twists up the top and knots it. She might as well take it down, as she’ll pass the shop on her way home. She goes into the living room. An ashtray the size of a paddling pool overflows in the middle of an MDF coffee table. A couple of plates, traces of ketchup and grease dried on, lie crusted beside it with a pint glass that has clearly held beer, flecks of hardened froth up the interior walls.

In the kitchen, a couple of pans in the sink, an old ready-meal carton on the yellowish Formica. She’s no great housekeeper, Jackie, but she’s not filthy either. And you can’t judge someone by how they keep their house in moments of crisis. Amber’s seen enough interiors, in the bedsit life she led after they tipped her out of Blackdown, to know that Jackie has many rungs to slide down the ladder of self-worth. She chucks the carton and quickly washes up the pans and the plates, leaves them on the drainer to dry.

The bedroom is dim, the forty-watt-equivalent overhead bulb too weak to illuminate it properly. Amber throws open the curtains. Glances out and sees, with a jolt, the rainproofed figure of Martin Bagshawe standing beside the overgrown forsythia opposite. He must have arrived after she did; she certainly didn’t spot him as she was going in. Maybe he saw her coming and hid? No. Don’t be paranoid. He doesn’t know it was you on the phone.

For a moment their eyes meet. She ducks back into the room. Yes, but he knows now, she thinks.

She looks around at Jackie’s possessions, feeling guilty, as though she’s stealing, or reading her diary. A tumble of bedclothes, a half-empty water glass, a copy of heat, a bedside lamp in the style of Tiffany. Not much furniture: the bed, a bedside table, the built-in cupboard. She studies the hanging clothes, and is surprised to see that Jackie owns half a dozen pretty dresses: optimistic cotton with spaghetti straps and generous skirts. She’s so used to seeing her in work gear, or in her ubiquitous denim mini-skirt, she’s never thought she might have other moods. She scoops a couple into the red suitcase that lives beneath the bed, adds two pairs of jeans from the pile beneath the radiator, a couple of pairs of elastic-waisted trousers, some T-shirts. Snatches up the collection of cleansers and creams on the bathroom shelf, notices the toothbrush still in its mug. Adds it to the case, and doesn’t ask herself how Jackie’s been cleaning her teeth over the time she’s been staying. Maybe she just hasn’t, she thinks, fleetingly. God, I hope she just hasn’t.

He’s still there, in the drizzle. She studiously avoids his gaze, hurries past as though she’s not registered his presence at all. She can feel his eyes boring into her back as she strides up the road towards the launderette, bin bag in one hand, suitcase dragging behind her, the dogs’ leads hitched over her arm, but he says nothing.

5 p.m.

‘What do we do? What do we do?’

‘Shut up. Shut up. Let me think.’

They stare at the body.

‘She’s stopped bleeding.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it? She’s not bleeding. Maybe she’s…’

‘No,’ says Bel. ‘I don’t think so.’

Jade looks down at her hands, as if she’s never seen them before. As if they’ve suddenly been attached to her by magic. She wipes one – mud, blood, river weed – on her skirt, then sees that she’s just made it worse.

‘Fuck,’ she says.

It looks like someone’s stolen the scarecrow from the top field and dumped it at the water’s edge. Floppy, dirty, torn.

‘Chloe?’ says Bel, tentatively, though she knows it’s no use. She pokes at her with a toe.

‘Oh shit,’ says Jade, ‘I’m going to be in so much trouble.’

Bel’s head snaps up. ‘Shut up. Just shut up. Who cares about you? Who cares? Look at her.’

Jade looks again, then bends down and lifts a floppy arm by the wrist, watches it drop like dough into the mud when she lets go.

‘Chloe?’ She echoes Bel, as though the name were an incantation, as though it will restore life if they say it often enough. There’s a big gash in her scalp. It has barely bled. Don’t, don’t, don’t, she thinks. People don’t just die like this. Not when we hardly did anything. My nana took six months to die, up in the back bedroom; we could hear it every step of the way. How could she die so quickly? ‘Chloe?’ she says again.

The anger has drained from Bel’s face, leaving her as pale as ashes beneath her suntan. Jade notices the smattering of freckles across her nose; that ugly mole standing out like an ink blot. She goes to try the hand again. Bel grabs her wrist.

‘Don’t.’

‘We have to see,’ says Jade. ‘We can’t just leave her.’

Chloe lies like a rag doll, her legs still in the water. Bel feels as though she’s wallowing beneath the surface. Jade’s voice comes to her distantly, through the sound of rolling waves. She looks again at the small body, its face pressed into the riverbank where they turned it in a last despairing hope that the water would somehow drain out. ‘Let’s turn her over,’ she says.

It’s worse when they can see her face. They know she’s really dead now. There’s mud, got into her eyes. They lie open, unblinking, staring at the sun through a film of dirty brown. The face is a mosaic of mud and gravel, of leaves and tiny petals; a string of duckweed tangled in hair that itself resembles weeds and string.

Oh God, her eyes, thinks Jade. I will remember this. I won’t forget this, the way her eyes look, for the rest of my life.