The Wicked Girls

Chapter Twenty-nine

‘Luke, please. Just turn the sound off.’

‘I need the sound,’ says Luke. ‘I can’t tell if there’s a troll coming if I haven’t got sound.’

‘You’ve played this game at least a thousand times,’ Kirsty says. ‘You must be able to remember by now.’

The noise is driving her mad. The beeps and boops assail her ears like tiny flaming arrows. With the tinny tinkle of JLS from Sophie’s earphones and Jim’s throat-clearing, she feels as though she is under assault from all sides. Her shoulder is stiff where she wrenched it, and a bruise on the back of her thigh makes sitting uncomfortable, moving more so, even without the wriggling fear of a deadline to hit and a forgotten car-insurance bill.

Luke doesn’t raise his eyes from the screen. ‘Just let me get to the end of this…’ he says, and swoops his arms out as a dwarf leaps out from behind a pillar and lobs a vial of poison. ‘Awww, Mum,’ he says. ‘Now look what you’ve done!’

‘Go and play upstairs,’ she orders. Wishes for the millionth time that she was the kind of parent who made her kids share a bedroom to make room for an office. She feels like a teenager doing prep. You’d never think I was this family’s main breadwinner. I’m the only person here who doesn’t have a space of her own. Even Jim’s got his shed, goddammit.

‘In a minute,’ says Luke.

‘Now. I’m working.’

‘It’s not my fault you didn’t do your work in time,’ says Luke. Hammers at the Fire button repeatedly. Leaps out of his seat, punching the air. ‘Yesssssss!’

Kirsty slams down the lid of the laptop. ‘Luke!’ she shouts. ‘OK, OK,’ he says, and presses the volume button, ostentatiously, for her benefit. ‘No need to get your knickers in a twist.’

He sits back down again and hunches over his screen. Kirsty takes a deep breath, counts to ten, lets it out. Opens the computer and stares at the pitiful collection of sentences she’s achieved since nine this morning. She can’t remember words being so hard to find before; but then she can’t remember having to write under such duress.

Jim’s been quiet and humble all day, staying pointedly out of her way and bringing her cups of coffee on the hour, and all it’s done is make her worse. I mustn’t resent him. It’s not his fault. He’s trying, God knows he is. But can’t he go and sit in that damn shed and give me some space?

The stuff I do for this family, and they don’t have the first idea. But why the hell did I stay? I didn’t need to go to that stupid club. I’ve seen enough of them to know what it would be like. I could’ve come home a whole day earlier and used my imagination instead of getting scared half to death for the sake of a bloody kill fee.

She’s got away lightly from her experience, she knows, but that doesn’t help her settle. The stags on Brighton Road piled down the alleyway, but her assailant was long gone, her bag and its contents strewn along the tarmac. So she’s got her phone and her notebooks and her MP3 player and all the accoutrements of her daily life still with her. That the guy’s motivation was clearly not robbery, she can’t afford to think about right now. She’s not told Jim. Not told anyone. She’s damned if she’s going to miss her deadline for the sake of being given an incident number and told to get in line.

She reads back what she’s written, fiddles with the cursor key as though doing so will magically conjure words on to the screen. Even by the standards of the Tribune, it’s pants. Repetitive pants. There’s not a phrase, an observation, an adjective she hasn’t already used last week. This is the bit of journalism she hates: the Groundhog Day of unresolved stories. She doesn’t want to think about Whitmouth again, doesn’t want to revisit it, even in her mind. And yet now, by default, because a staffer prefers the ongoing drama in Sleaford, she is the expert, and has to churn out holding copy until something happens.

I hate that place, she thinks. I can’t believe I actually liked it when I first went there. And it’s not just last night – it’s all of it. The fact that going there has brought back a past I thought I’d overcome, my unpayable debt. The fact that the people remind me of the family I’ll never see again, the fact that I feel my arse expand with every unspeakable meal in its grease-spattered outlets. The horizontal rain that soaks your pores with salt, the things that slide underfoot on Marine Parade. The blistering, blustering half-mile trudge to the end of the pier, the plastic seats in the pubs. The overwhelming smell of cooking oil. What can I say that’s new? I said it all last week. The place hasn’t changed.

She reads, again:

Despite it all, the crowds still come to Whitmouth. The council vans that ply the seafront remove five tons of rubbish from its bins alone each day: rubbish that includes 8,000 soft-drinks cans, 5,000 polystyrene food holders, 30 discarded shoes and 220 soiled nappies. No local business wants to discuss the specifics of their income, but it’s clear that business is good. Funnland, the theme park where suspected fifth victim Hannah Hardy’s body was found three weeks ago, claims gates of roughly 3,000 a day. 1,250 tickets are sold for the tiny electric train that goes to the end of the pier, half of them oneway, and The Old-Fashioned Sweet Emporium sells over 10kg of Whitmouth rock…

Blah, blah, blah. She highlights, deletes. Presses Control+Z to reinstate. It’s 116 words, and she needs 1,500; she can’t just waste it. Pulls up the STUFF file on her desktop, cuts and pastes into it, saves. Tries again.

In 2007, the most recent year for which there are statistics, 1.37 million people visited Whitmouth, spending, on average, £46 a head a day. Of those, 236,000 stayed a night, a weekend, a week – averaging four nights a head – in the town’s four sprawling caravan parks, its 17 hotels and 87 B &Bs. All in all, that’s an income, for the town, of £95m and change. Tourism is big business in Whitmouth – it’s the only industry of any real significance. Half the working-age element of the 67,000-person population is employed – mostly on minimum wage and mostly seasonally – by the tourist trade. So the impact of the Seaside Strangler’s reign of terror would be expected to be greatly more far-reaching than the devastation of the victims’ families and friends. The Strangler, one would have thought, would be threatening the livelihood of the whole community.

Apparently not.

She shifts in her seat, feels the shriek of broken blood vessels. Suppresses a groan. Does a word count: 160. This is bollocks. Why am I bothering? It’s taken me twenty minutes to turn that lot out, and that was the easy bit. And all for what? I know this is going to get pulled; that something more interesting will happen somewhere else in the country between now and Friday, when they finalise the news features. Unless the Strangler strikes again, Whitmouth will be old news, not even fit for Monday’s fish-and-chip wrappings.

‘Bollocks,’ she says out loud. Jim looks up from the City pages of Private Eye. ‘Sorry,’ she says. They have an agreement that salty hack language will not leak into family life.

‘Having trouble?’

She nods. ‘I’m tired. And knowing it’s probably not even going to run doesn’t help much.’

‘Shall I get you a coffee?’

‘I’ve got coffee leaking out of my pores.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Take this lot out and throw sticks for them,’ she says. She hasn’t got the will for tact any more.

Luke huffs and throws his Nintendo on to the table.

‘Luke!’ bellows Jim. Kirsty slaps her hands over her ears, chokes back a matching howl. ‘Don’t you dare treat your toys like that! Have you any idea how much that cost?’

‘Well, it’s not my fault!’ Luke shouts back. ‘She made me do it!’

‘We’re not buying you another if you break that one!’

Sophie unplugs an earphone, looks imperiously at her family. ‘Hello? Listening,’ she says. Kirsty feels a vein in her forehead begin to pulse. That’s all I need. I’ll have a stroke right here at this table, then see where your Nintendo money comes from.

‘We’re going for a walk,’ Jim tells her.

The phone rings. God save us from children. No wonder people have chihuahuas instead. ‘I can’t answer that,’ she tells her husband. ‘If it’s work, tell them I’m stuck in traffic.’

Jim picks up. ‘Walk?’ whines Sophie. ‘Who said anything about a walk?’

‘Hello?’ says Jim. Kirsty’s brain begins to throb. ‘Oh, hello, Lionel. Thanks for calling me back. No, no problem. It’s always hard to get much work done in the summer holidays. I guess that’s why we have offices. No, hang on. I’ll just take this somewhere quiet.’

He leaves the room. ‘I don’t see why I should have to go out just because you can’t do your work in time,’ says Luke, and glares at her.

Kirsty slams the computer shut and stamps upstairs to her bedroom, slamming the door pointedly.

She gets into bed and starts to write again.

Apparently not. In a bizarre triumph of human nature over survival instinct, Whitmouth is enjoying a boom year of a sort it hasn’t seen since the invention of the package holiday. A phenomenon that proves, once again, the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Becca Stokes, 23 and down from Coventry with a group of friends, sums it up: ‘I used to come here with my mum and dad when I was a kid and I loved it then. And then there’s been all this stuff in the papers, and me and my mates all thought, you know: look at that. I had no idea they had so many nightclubs, and the caravans are dirt cheap. So we thought we’d come down for the weekend, you know? Check it out…

I can’t, she thinks. I can’t encourage people to go there. I’m the hypocrite of hypocrites: writing disapprovingly about a phenomenon I’m helping to foster. It’s not safe. Every time they read statistics like this, see how many people are there, calculate the odds in their heads, they’ll think it’s safe. But he’s still out there. Still mingling in amongst them, and they’ve no idea who he is.

She checks her watch. She can string the features desk along for another hour, and after that every ten minutes is another year off her career. But, she thinks, I can’t do this ‘balance’ thing. They’re all so obsessed with balance that they forget that, sometimes, there is such a thing as simple, black-and-white truth. Whitmouth’s a horrible place. It’s dangerous and seedy and people should know. I can’t let them fool themselves that they can wander around it half-cut. I’ve got a story here.

And a small voice says: yeah, and if I tell it properly, they won’t spike it and I’ll earn actual wordage. And I’ve got to find the cash for that car insurance. Got to. There’s two days left to run, and after that I won’t be able to earn a bloody penny. Sod Whitmouth. Sod balance. I got scared to stupidity last night, and I’m bloody well letting people know. And if that weasel-man reads about himself and doesn’t like it, then maybe he’ll learn a lesson he needs to understand.

She highlights again, cuts until the page is blank. Then she begins:

Women have died in Whitmouth. And on Monday night, I almost became one of them…