The Wicked Girls

Chapter Thirty-one

Martin knows he needs to do something, but he doesn’t know what. The shock was too great last night: the discovery of the links within links, the awful plots he doesn’t understand, left him reeling helplessly, whirling in rage and impotence. His anger was so fierce, so near-erotic, that he almost went up Mare Street again to see if anyone had taken over Tina’s patch, but at the last moment self-preservation held him back. He got lucky last Saturday. Can’t expect for a moment that such dumb luck will hold again. If he’s going to repeat the experience, he needs to be a lot more careful.

So he plans and he thinks, and in the meantime he sticks to his usual routine. Which, on a Sunday morning, is to treat himself to a sausage roll and a bar of chocolate while he does his washing.

Sunday morning is a good time to go to the launderette. The usual trade – holidaymakers and families whose washing machines have broken down – don’t make it down there on a Sunday morning, and he usually gets a machine straight away. And the warm, steamy benches make for a cosy, intimate atmosphere. Once, he struck up a friendship with a young woman called Carly, who worked as a cashier at the amusement arcade on the pier. They talked three Sundays in a row, but just as he was about to invite her to dinner her shift changed and her laundry routine with it. He dropped in to the arcade a few times, hoping to find her working, but he never saw her again.

It’s a beautiful morning. Weak sunshine breaks through last night’s clearing clouds and a million hanging raindrops glitter on the promenade balustrade. It’s one of those days when Whitmouth, washed clean by the rain, looks its sparkling best. Martin hoicks his bag of bedclothes over his shoulder and hurries through the sharp air. The street is surprisingly busy. There’s a knot of people outside the police station, just staring at the door as though they expect it to burst into flames. He doesn’t think anything of it. The station has had a magnetic effect on the press at start and close of play every day this summer. He brushes past and turns up Canal Street, skirts round a pile of uncollected cardboard boxes outside the gift shop on the corner.

The launderette is empty. A couple of machines churn in the middle of the row, but no one is about. Through the bubbled window of the office door he can see the pixellated version of the overalled Romanian woman who runs the place. She’s talking on the phone and he sees her throw her head back and laugh. Martin chooses a machine, puts the open mouth of his bin bag into it and tips. He never has to sort: you only have to sort if you don’t plan ahead. Everything he owns has been deliberately chosen to fit within the narrow spectrum of dark blue, grey and black. He adds the measured-out freezer-bagful of powder from his anorak pocket, dials it up to sixty. He’s about to slam the door when he catches a whiff of his anorak and realises that it must be a year since he bought it. He turns out the pockets on to the bench – coins, a couple of sticks of chewing-gum he remembers buying before his first date with Jackie Jacobs and a spare chip fork – and throws the coat in on top of the rest. Then he goes to the shop to buy his treats for the day. The wash cycle will take an hour. Martin would never waste money on a service wash, but he’d never waste time either.

As he steps out into Canal Street, he almost collides with someone hurrying along the pavement. It’s Amber Gordon – but not as he knows her. She’s a strange shade of pale grey, and hasn’t brushed her hair. She’s walking so fast she barely avoids him; lurches as she passes. For a moment he thinks that her backwards jump is a personal slight, but then he sees that she hasn’t clocked his face at all. He waits for her to acknowledge him, feels piqued when she doesn’t. Her eyes are rimmed red, and she looks as though she’s got dressed in the dark.

‘Sorry,’ she mutters absently, and hurries on down the road. Shaking his head, he walks on. Doesn’t really care what’s going on in the woman’s life, but feels a tweak of pleasure at having witnessed her distress. I hope something’s happened. It would serve you right. Bring you down to earth.

The newsagent is almost out of papers, unusually for this time of day. There’s only a couple of Mail on Sundays and a Tribune left. He can’t see why: the front-page headline on one is something to do with immigrants and house prices, and the other, faintly more left-wing, has led on a minor Tory spanking scandal. He snatches up the Tribune just before another customer. Is dying to know what Kirsty Lindsay has to say for herself this week.

He takes a sausage roll and a small bottle of Sunny Delight from the chiller cabinet. Then he lingers for a full five minutes over the chocolate bars and eventually chooses a Snickers. There’s twenty per cent extra free on the Snickers bar, and it will fill more time as he waits for his wash to be done.

He has to wait while one of those tedious local-shop transactions wends its way to a close. A stout woman is counting up the change to pay for a two-litre bottle of full-fat Coke while Mrs Todiwallah waits impassively behind the counter.

‘Have you heard who it is yet?’ asks the stout woman. Finds a fiver in the corner of her purse. ‘Ooh. And a pack of Amber Leaf and some menthol filters while you’re there.’

‘No,’ says Mrs Todiwallah, turning to the shelves and picking up the tobacco. ‘There is a difference between a newsagent’s and a news agency, you know. We sell newspapers. They gather news.’

‘And the filters?’ says the stout woman. Mrs T bends creakily down in her plus-size shalwar kameez and collects the box. This, thinks Martin, is why people shop in supermarkets. You don’t have to do chit-chat in supermarkets. You just buy your stuff and get out.

‘No.’ She straightens up slowly, slaps the goods down on the counter. ‘There’s been nothing on the radio. Just that a man’s being questioned and will be charged maybe later today.’

‘And no one’s been in that knows anything?’

‘I daresay,’ says Mrs Todiwallah, ‘they’d go to the newspapers before they came to the corner shop if they did. I don’t pay for news, you see. I just sell it.’

Martin wonders vaguely what they’re talking about. He’s not the sort to intrude into someone else’s conversation. He shifts from foot to foot, wishing that, if they insist on gossiping, the shopkeeper would carry on serving while she did it.

‘Well, it’s good news anyway,’ says the stout woman.

‘Yes, indeed it is,’ says Mrs T. ‘That’s five pounds twenty-three, please.’

The stout woman starts counting out her change again, penny by penny.

Martin glances down at his paper and sees, tucked down on the bottom right, a small headline that might explain what they’re talking about: HOLS RESORT MURDERS BREAKTHROUGH. Breaking news, 3 a.m., says the text below: Whitmouth police arrest Seaside Strangler suspect. More details: page 2.

He burns to open it and read it right now, but waits patiently to pay and get out. He has plenty of time. The printed word won’t change if it takes him five minutes longer to start reading it. Nonetheless he finds himself hurrying along Canal Street, eager to fill himself in.

He sits on a bench, unwraps his sausage roll and takes a bite. Opens the page and sees, to his disappointment, that the details are very sketchy indeed. Police arrested a man suspected of the Seaside Strangler murders at 1 a.m., says the report, written by someone called Staff Reporter.

Officers were called to the scene of a disturbance on waste ground off Whitmouth’s main road, and arrested a man being held by passers-by. A young woman was taken to a nearby hospital and treated for cuts, bruises and shock. The man, after treatment in the same hospital, was taken to Whitmouth Police Station and charged with assault, GBH and threatening behaviour, and is expected to be remanded in the next 48 hours. No names have been released.

Is that it?

I must get down the station. See what I can find out. That’s why all those people were there. He’s actually being held inside, whoever he is.

He reads the piece again, takes another bite of roll and washes it down with a gulp of drink. At the bottom, in bold, a teaser catches his eye: My night of terror in Whitmouth’s sleazy back streets, page 27.

Yes, he thinks, there she is. He leafs through showbiz stories to find the page, and feels a rush of blood to his cheeks. Here she is again, smirking in the postage-stamp picture beside the headline; there’s a picture of the back of some other woman’s head, looking down an alleyway, clutching her handbag, as illustration. It’s not even Whitmouth – or not any Whitmouth he’s seen; it looks like one of those bin-lanes you find up north. He starts to read, feels the flush spread across his cheeks as he sees himself – his unflattering portrait – spill out before his eyes.

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