The Wicked Girls

Chapter Thirty-three

She’s crying before she sits down. Humiliating, gopping, overwhelming tears that stream from her eyes and her nose and the corners of her wide-open mouth and fill her with shame. She searches in her pockets – they’ve taken her bag off her at the front desk – for a snot-rag, but finds nothing. Turns in appeal to the constable-chaperon who stands impassively by the door and realises that she’ll get no help there.

They’ve broken his nose. His face is a mass of purple-yellow bruises, but it’s still him, staring at her unblinking across the table. It’s all still there: the fine, noble bone structure, the rich dark hair and the lock that curls down over his high, intelligent forehead, the strong hands with their long artist’s fingers. His face suddenly breaks into that wide blue social smile with which he keeps people at arm’s length.

‘Hey, babe,’ he says. ‘I was beginning to think you’d forgotten all about me.’

She’s so stunned that the tears stop dead. She stares at him open-mouthed – partly because of the surprise and partly because she has been unable to breathe through her nose for the past thirty hours. She didn’t believe it while he was still in custody, while she wasn’t allowed to see him; could still persuade herself that there had been some terrible mistake, that she’d wake up and find it had all been a dream. But now that she’s here, and he’s charged – with, they say, more to come – and she can see that sunny smile, she believes it all, every word of it.

‘What?’ she asks.

The smile again, the hand reaching across the table top for hers.

‘Did you bring my shirts?’ he asks. ‘Like I asked?’

‘I…’ She’s lost for words. It’s as though she’s visiting him at a day-spa. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’re outside. I left them at the desk. They wouldn’t let me bring them in.’

‘That’s my girl,’ he says. ‘I knew I could rely on you. Did you put the Elvis in there? With the embroidery?’

‘Yes,’ she says. Finds herself adding, as though this were a normal situation, ‘And the green one. You know. The cord. You always thought that suited you.’

‘You’re a gem,’ he says. ‘A good girl.’

My God, she thinks. I don’t know you at all.

‘So how are you keeping?’ he asks, as though she’s a maiden aunt come in from Sevenoaks. ‘What have you been up to? How’s work?’

She wants to shout, to punch him. What do you think I’ve been up to, you arsehole? Throwing cocktail parties? I’ve not been to work. How do you think I’m going to go to work? I can’t get out of the front door, for God’s sake.

‘Seen anyone? Anyone been round?’

‘I…’ she blurts. ‘I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are. I thought I knew you, but I don’t.’

Vic sits back, presses his hands palms-down on the tabletop and raises his eyebrows. ‘What do you want me to say?’

She feels another fit of weeping sweep over her. It’s like a hurricane – destructive, unstoppable. ‘You – oh my God, Vic. What have you done?’

‘I dunno,’ he says calmly. ‘What have you done, Amber?’

She wants to slap him, add her marks to those of his assailants. But she knows she’ll get halfway across the table before their minder pulls her back. Now he’s safely locked up, Vic is protected. Amber’s got the curtains closed; she’s got the phone pulled out from the wall and the mobile on mute; she’s living on tins and pulses because the trip to the car, let alone the supermarket, is already a terrifying rat-run of accusation and flash photography – and he’s still, in theory at least, only a suspect.

He is studying her the way a scientist studies a bug, fascinated by her display of emotion as though it were some unusual mating ritual. It’s like being stabbed with an icicle. He isn’t bothered at all; doesn’t look as though any of this – the crowd, the charges, the trouble he’s in – is affecting him. Is this the way I looked? she wonders. I was frozen with fear. Maybe I was like this too; maybe that was why they hated me so much. If I’d cried, or struggled, or had hysterics… would that have made them see me differently?

‘My God, Vic. Those poor women.’

Vic tuts and rolls his eyes, as though she’s sentimentalising insects.

‘Don’t you feel anything at all? My God. Five of them. Or seven? Don’t you feel anything about what you’ve done?’

The eye-roll again. ‘Fuck sake,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe they’re still counting that old bag on Fore Street in with the rest. It’s a fucking insult. Did you ever see me covered in blood? Did you?’

She gulps, hauls air down her frozen throat. Realises it’s the first breath she’s taken since he started talking.

‘Fucking cheek,’ he says. ‘As if.’

She stares for a moment.

‘They’re saying I must have known. I can’t get out of the house.’

‘Well you’re here now, aren’t you?’

She drinks in the look of mild entertainment on his face, understands that this – this flaw in his character, this inability to empathise, to put himself in someone else’s shoes – is, in fact, one of the things that made their relationship work, after its own fashion: that she never had to deal with viscous, frightening, dangerous emotion. Emotion has signified pain her whole life; and Vic, with his distanced, empty soul, seemed like an oasis in the desert when she stumbled across him. I am empty myself, she thinks. A killer too. No wonder I thought he was a kindred spirit.

‘Why me?’ she asks suddenly. ‘Why did you choose me?’

The smile again. Playful. Candid. ‘Oh, I think you know.’

‘I don’t. I really don’t.’

‘Oh, Annabel,’ he says, reprovingly. ‘I think you do.’

For a second she thinks she’s misheard him; that her distress and the similarity of the two names has made her ears play tricks on her. Then she sees his open smile and knows that he knows. That’s he’s always known. That he’s waiting for the gloating pleasure of seeing the knowledge dawn that the lie she’s been living is not the lie she’d thought.

The room swims. ‘How long have you known?’ she asks. No point denying it. Not when he’s looking at her like that.

His smile widens now he’s extracted his confession. ‘I thought you were familiar before,’ he says. ‘I used to see you about, and think, I know that woman. Like attracting like, I guess. But I’ll tell you when I knew for sure. It was when I saw you with the kid. Bending over that kid. It all became blindingly clear when I saw that.’

‘The kid?’

He nods, prompting. ‘You know. The kid.’

She knows what he’s talking about. Knows exactly, because it was the first time she noticed Vic – really noticed him, not simply enjoyed his good looks. The first day that something passed between them – the first day, she realises now, that she read him wrong. It was back when she worked the day shift, and some kid who’d ignored the rollercoaster’s height restriction had slid free of the safety bars, flown off on a bend and plummeted head-first into the side of the shooting gallery. She was standing nearby with her trash bag full of discarded drinks cartons, heard the sound of splintering wood and the rising screams for what felt like an age before she took in what had happened. The kid’s head had split open like a watermelon. It was obvious that he was dead, or soon going to be.

‘Oh my God,’ she says. Glances over her shoulder at the copper to see if he’s noticed. But though she knows he must be listening, he shows no sign that he has any clue as to what they’re talking about, or that he has any interest. Why would he?

‘You were great,’ says Vic. ‘You were so great. So calm. Like nothing could get through to you. That was when I knew for sure.’

Someone’s turned the air-conditioning on full-blast. The cold crawls over her skin like leeches.

‘Was that what it was like the first time, Annabel?’ he asks. ‘I always wanted to know. I was just waiting till you wanted to…’ he rakes his fingers through the air to look like inverted commas, ‘share.’

The child lay like a broken doll, half propped against a broken wall whose garish red and green stripes were smirched with blood, his jaw opening and closing automatically as though he were being operated by strings. Amber dropped her bin bag and started towards him through the crowd, the old familiar feeling of icy calm washing over her. Even from here, and above the screams of the crowd around her, she could hear the rising wail of the kid’s mother, the feckless bint who’d finally learned that sometimes rules are there for a reason, still strapped into her seat on the coaster, forced to sit out the corkscrew, the loop-the-loop, the whole of the rest of her ride, while her offspring leaked white matter from what was once his head. His eyes stared straight ahead. He seemed to see Amber as she approached; seemed, strangely, to recognise her.

Her hearing changed focus. Distantly she registered someone throwing up, sparking a chain reaction. Walked, unaffected, through a morass of gagging, sobbing, screaming people, and heard it all as background. All she could hear clearly was the kid’s voice: the nonsense syllables that spilled from his tongue as his mangled brain struggled to function. She dropped to her knees beside him: the two of them in a pool of quiet, his eyes fixed on hers.

She was wearing an oversized belted cardie that came down to her knees; it was the beginning of the season and the weather had yet to warm up. She gazed into his rapidly darkening eyes as she sat back and stripped it off. Shaved head, puffy arms, grey cheeks as full as a hamster’s. He was wearing a Liverpool strip: she remembers the horrid blue and yellow nylon, the Carlsberg logo, the dark damp patch that grew and grew as cerebrospinal fluid dribbled down his neck.

‘Oh look,’ she said, as kindly as she could, ‘you’ve got cold.’ She draped the cardie over him – she never saw it again once the ambulance had taken him away – and took his hand; felt the weakening pulse, knew that he was dying. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m here. I’m with you.’

‘Ak-haaaaaaaaaa,’ said the boy. He couldn’t have been more than eight. What a way to go. Rides and candyfloss and – death. She wondered, randomly, what he had had for breakfast that morning. A last meal of Coco Pops and milk, eggs and soldiers, half a pack of Hob Nobs?

She tore her eyes away for a moment, looked over her shoulder. A couple of hundred gawpers now: the sort of people who slow down to look at car crashes. Faces wide-eyed and full of speculation as they formed the words to make the anecdotes. Poor little mite. Blood everywhere, people screaming, and there was nothing we could do.

‘Ambulance,’ she cried out hoarsely. ‘Has anyone called an ambulance?’

Vic suddenly bursts out laughing. ‘Oh my God,’ he says, imitating her. She gapes, recoils.

‘You didn’t know,’ he says. ‘All this time you didn’t know. Oh my God, you thought you were keeping a secret from me!’

She can feel a scalpel-edge of panic slice at her skin. They’re not alone. He can’t – he mustn’t – carry on like this. ‘Don’t,’ she pleads. ‘Vic, don’t-’

He’s tickled pink. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Ambel,’ he says, the mispronunciation deliberate and obvious only to her, ‘your secret’s safe with me. It’s just – hah! – all this time I’ve been thinking we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t need to. Because we understood. And those presents I’ve been leaving you…’

‘Presents?’

‘Oh, come on,’ he says. ‘You know.’

And she does. She should have seen it before. Two of those bodies were left where she would find them, and it was only pure chance that prevented her being the first upon the second. And his questions. Those little probing, gloating, prurient enquiries as to how she’d felt, what she’d seen.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No, no, no. No.’

Vic stepped forward, his face a portrait of calm under pressure. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘It’s on its way.’

The kid began to flap his hand in hers, dragging her eyes back. Drool pooling at the corner of his mouth. Some pointless urge to preserve his dignity drove her to dab at it with the sleeve of the cardigan. The syllables had deteriorated, now, to formless gurgles. A woman sobbed hysterically in the crowd. She noticed it; thought, with irritation: If you can’t handle it, just go away. Do something useful, or fuck off. Even in a situation like this, there are people who think that it’s all about them. Who parade their distress for others’ benefit to demonstrate their greater sensitivity.

As if he could read her thoughts, Vic turned and spoke over his shoulder. ‘Can someone take that woman away please? She’s not helping.’

A stir. A ripple of comprehension. Someone led the woman away and a straggle of gawpers, chastened, followed. Vic knelt down beside her. ‘How is he?’ he asked.

Amber shook her head, because words wouldn’t come. Held the child’s hand and felt the pulse flutter, weaken.

He came closer, put his face next to the child’s. ‘Hello, mate,’ he said. ‘You’ve had an accident. Don’t worry. The ambulance is on its way.’

Then he stared into his eyes, as though drinking in the last of his life.

‘You thought I was your hero?’ asks Vic. ‘Oh, Amber. I’d thought better of you than that.’

She feels sick. Sweaty. Afraid.

‘I noticed you noticing me, you know,’ he says. ‘That day. It wasn’t just me recognising you. You recognised me back. I saw it. That was the start of everything, wasn’t it? When you noticed me.’

The smile flicks back on like a searchlight.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That was a good one. I was a bit late to the party, but it was fun.’