The Wicked Girls

Chapter Thirty-six

Everyone who still reads a newspaper has their ritual for doing so: the place and time and posture they reserve for only this activity. Lunch hours, commutes, those snatched moments when the baby’s gone down for her nap; a ritual more personal than anything the television can offer. On a normal day, Kirsty and Stan and their peers skim them all online while the kettle’s boiling and the twenty-four-hour news channels play in the background. While they wait for conference to be over and commissions to come in, they fish through the Reuters and AP news feeds to give them a chance to get ahead of the game; then, mostly, they settle down with their favourite read, though they’d all pretend to the outside world that their favourite read is the paper that mainly employs them.

Martin Bagshawe usually does his reading at the library, but today he buys a bottle of chocolate milk, a Scotch egg, some cheese-and-onion crisps and a copy of the Sun, and reads it while he waits for Kirsty Lindsay to show her face so he can tell which of the five houses he’s looking at is hers. He’s rented a white van with his emergency credit card and bought navy-blue overalls from Millets, because no one ever, in his experience, questions someone in overalls snoozing in a van. He has no idea how long he’s going to be waiting; he just hopes he can spin out the sudoku.

Deborah Prentiss works the early shift at Asda, and reads the paper at two o’clock when she gets home, before she scoots through the housework and goes to pick the kids up from school. She has the same ritual every day: comes in, puts the kettle on and goes upstairs to change out of her hated polyester uniform. Deb takes pride in her appearance; always has, since she was a teenager. She never stays in that uniform for a moment longer than she has to. She reapplies her make-up, brushes out the hair that’s been squashed by the net hat she has to wear in the bakery and, once she’s in a skirt and a decent jumper, comes down and makes a pot of tea. Then she sits at the kitchen table and takes a precious half-hour out to scan the Mirror for scandal and disaster. Despite having been the subject of tabloid speculation herself in her time, she loves it; loves the window on a grim and ugly world from her nice quiet house, and believes every word. She calls it her ‘me-time’.

Millions of people, same blank expression. Soaking up the words and believing that, having done so, they are In the Know. Kirsty, still digesting her phone conversation, catches sight of herself in the mantelpiece mirror and observes that her own face betrays none of the emotions she feels. I’ve done what I can, she thinks. I’m mad to have even involved myself this far. I need to get a grip and call Features before all the assignments have been handed out for the rest of the week. I need to forget about Amber Gordon. It’s the past. She needs to mean nothing to me now.

Martin finds Jackie spread across the centre pages and feels his upper lip curl as he reads her account of herself. He winds the window down and spits on to the tarmac. The road is empty, not a sign of activity behind the neat suburban nets, but the self-employed don’t keep the same hours as the rest of the world. Kirsty Lindsay could come – or go – at any time, and he’ll be here to see it when she does.

Jackie looks old and slutty beneath the make-up. He finds it hard to believe that this woman can ever have excited such intense emotion in him; he feels nothing now, other than a faint contempt and an amused interest in what she has to say. He doesn’t want her back now, and as he reads and sees what a weak woman she is, how easily influenced, he wants her even less – but it feels good to have his suspicions confirmed. He wasn’t dumped because of himself, he was dumped because of other people. The story of his life. He’s been tripped up and blocked all his life, and Amber Gordon is just one in a long line of teachers, officials, bosses and so-called ‘friends’ who’ve stopped him ever, ever catching a break. And now this Kirsty Lindsay, accusing him of something he never did, on the smug assumption that her position would protect her. And all along she’s clearly been protecting Vic Cantrell, which means she’s been protecting Amber Gordon too. In collusion with him. In his opinion, she’s as guilty of his crimes as if she’d done them herself.

Except that she’s not reckoned with Martin. Amber Gordon can wait. For now there’s not a hope of finding her alone; though he hopes fervently that the company she’s in is giving her hell. The world is full of women with no morals. Jackie Jacobs, skirt hitched up to show her legs, is just the tip of the iceberg. You can only do one thing at a time. You have to prioritise. And right now Kirsty Lindsay is his priority. His anger has been building ever since his humiliation in DanceAttack; has become, once again, a gnawing, living thing. And now he’s had a taste of relief, he also knows the best way to get it.

It won’t be long now, he thinks. She’ll have to come out from behind one of these smug suburban front doors, and then I’ll know for certain where she lives.

He takes a bite of Scotch egg and reclines the seat so that only the top of his head, baseball cap and celebrity sunglasses can be seen from the road. He’s enjoyed his preparations, the crafty plans he’s made so that he will not be recognised. Feels like 007, like MI5 and Andy McNab, adrenalin coursing through his veins every time someone turns the corner. It may take a while, watching these houses till he identifies which one is his target’s home, but he’s in no hurry. He’s got it down to a postcode by the surprisingly simple expedient of calling the Tribune and asking for Minty (he remembers the name from overhearing it in the park) on the news desk, and pretending to be a PR with a goodie bag and only half an address. The fact that he knew she lived in Farnham seemed to be enough to satisfy the girl.

He polishes off his egg and smoothes out the page.

Deborah looks down on people who read the Sun with all the righteous scorn of someone who identifies herself as belonging to the left. She doesn’t know it, but the Mirror has gone as big on Whitmouth as its red-top rival, and in the same manner. Speculation, retrospective wisdom from the neighbours (the same big-gob neighbours they’re reading about in the Sun, if only she knew it) and the small amount of information that can be dug up about such anonymous figures as the Seaside Strangler and his harpy girlfriend. There’s only one thing the country loves better than a nice juicy serial killer, and that’s a serial killer’s wife. Deborah assumes the frown all right-thinking people have worn all day while wallowing in the sketchy, blown-up detail, and bites into a custard cream.

Her paper has much the same photo as the one adorning the Sun’s front page: dry, straw-like blond hair, dark glasses and a cheesy grin. In this one, though, she’s halfway through raising her hand to cover her face, so it looks like she’s waving. Who does she think she is? thinks Deborah, and polishes off her biscuit. Sharon bloody Osbourne?

Weird, she thinks. She looks familiar. Like I know her from somewhere. Not like I’ve seen her picture, though God knows it’s been smeared across the papers enough in the past couple of days, but like I’ve seen her in real life. There’s something about the way she’s holding herself, something about the nose and the jawline, and that bloody great mole on her face. I wonder if I’ve met her? It feels like it. Where was it? Certainly not Whitmouth. Absent-mindedly, she takes another biscuit from the pack and dunks it in her tea.

I know what it is, she thinks. It’s that bloody mole. I can’t help it. I see a mole like that on a woman and I just immediately dislike them. Because of Annabel Oldacre, I think of everyone with a mole like that as a killer in disguise. I remember staring at that mole for hours on end during the trial, watching that little bitch who killed my baby sister get her punishment. It’s obviously stuck. All the feelings I had are concentrated on that one facial flaw.

But it is very like, she thinks, sucking tea through the softened biscuit. It’s even in the same place as hers was.

Martin turns back to the front page. Gordon is all over that one as well. He chews his lip as he looks at her, grinning away as she walks down the street like she’s going to a party; he’s edited from his interpretation the fact that he was watching when the pictures were taken. I suppose she likes the attention, he thinks. She’s got her fifteen minutes and she’s making the most of it. But she’s not like Kirsty. At least she’s not dedicated her life to making sure her lies make their way into everyone’s homes.

Jim calls in to divert himself from his nerves before his meeting with Lionel Baker. He’s been reading the papers on the train and Kirsty can practically hear him shaking his head as he tuts over the Whitmouth coverage. ‘That poor woman,’ he says. ‘They’re crucifying her.’

‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’

‘You’re the only person who seems to have been even remotely fair.’

‘Yeah. God knows how that got past Back Bench.’

She hears the sound of folding paper. Jim always takes revenge on publications that have annoyed him by screwing them up and dropping them in the bin. She stares out of the window, notices that that damned Russian vine that next door planted three years ago is sprouting from a hole in the foundations of their shed. Dammit, she thinks. Life’s one long treadmill of fighting against nature, one way or another.

‘I think I’m going to give up reading the papers,’ he announces. ‘It just seems so… unnecessary. They’re just making things up as they go along. They don’t know anything, so they’ve just decided to turn this woman into a pantomime villain, to fill the space till they do. You see them doing it all the time. They just can’t bear to admit they don’t know any more than the rest of us.’

‘Steady on,’ says Kirsty. ‘And if everyone stops reading them, what am I going to do for a living?’

No one has been able to find out much about the Alleged Strangler himself. There’s maybe a page about him, but in the silly season a page is not enough. The Mirror’s photographer has followed Amber Gordon all the way to Funnland and then to the unremarkable ex-council house she lives in. There’s a picture of her walking a pair of those yappy, snappy little dogs you usually see tucked under the arms of the likes of Liza Minnelli. The house is clearly neglected, a wooden board nailed over a window, the flowerbeds trampled and muddy. Deborah reads the screed below the pictures, and wonders.

Seaside Strangler’s girlfriend, Amber Gordon, walks her dogs as though it’s an ordinary day. Gordon, a cleaning supervisor, refused to speak to the Mirror’s journalist when he confronted her after dropping off a bag of goodies for her lover, currently undergoing questioning at Whitmouth Police Station. Back at their scruffy house on the outskirts of the town, she swore at photographers. ‘Leave me alone!’ she said, when we attempted to ask her about her partner’s crimes. ‘I’ve not done anything!’

The making of a murderer, page 13.

In the doorstep picture, the woman is clearly shouting. About my age, thinks Deborah. Maybe a bit younger. I wonder what it’s like to be her? Did she know? She must have known. You can’t live with someone and not know something like that, surely?

She turns to the ‘making of a murderer’ feature and starts to read.

Martin looks up the road as he scans through the radio channels in search of Radio 2. Some classic pop, that’s what I need. Classic pop for the classic suburbs.

He’s surprised by the road she chooses to live on. He’d imagined something more modernist, more minimalist, the sort of thing favoured by Channel 4. A warehouse conversion, all naked brickwork and stark white plaster, or something whose walls are made of glass. What he hadn’t expected was an ordinary four-up-four-down in a medium-sized garden full of clematis and concrete dolphins. A series of near-identical 1930s semis, brave little flourishes – a garage, a brickwork turning-circle, a pergola, a porch – attesting to their owners’ individuality. If she lives somewhere like this, he thinks, she’s probably got a family. Two girls called something like Jacintha and Phoebe. A Weimaraner.

A dignified Burmese cat stalks out of a drive, sits on the pavement to survey his territory. Yeah, thinks Martin. Too normal. She’ll have one of those hairless sphinxes, or a Dalmatian. Something stupid and useless, designed to impress fashion victims.

He glances in the rear-view, sees the front door a couple of doors back open and Kirsty Lindsay emerge. She goes over to the dusty little Renault that sits on the drive and unlocks the door. She looks unguarded, innocent, filled with thought. Martin slides down in his seat, though there’s not a chance that she will recognise him like this, from behind, and watches as she scrabbles around in the glove compartment and comes back out brandishing a satnav and its lead. Of course she’s got a satnav, he thinks. Nice work if you can get it.

Funny, though. It’s the dullest house on the street, covered in wisteria, and that Renault’s eight years old if it’s a day. He would have bet his weekly budget that she lived in the one with the Jag.

There are more photos of Amber Gordon in the ‘making of a murderer’ feature: the implication clear that her contribution has been bigger than any other, even though she’s only known him for six of his forty-two years. It seems that there are very few photos of Victor Cantrell before he met her, just a couple taken in a caravan park in Cornwall where he worked before he came to Whitmouth. Deborah feels another twinge of visceral dislike as she eyes the woman. It’s that bloody mole, she thinks. It really is identical: same place, same shape, same colour. What are the odds? How many people can have that same blemish, in just the same place…

She feels a jerk of realisation… And be the same age?

Deborah hears the breath hiss from her body. She grips the sides of the paper in fisted hands, presses her face close to the image on the page. Oh. My. God. Under the bleach, the twenty-five years, the tense defiance, the celebrity sunglasses. She still has the same jawline, that same upper lip half the width of its lower twin, the eyebrows heavy and dark and at odds with the shade of the skin.

It can’t be.

She feels freezing cold. She went to the trial every day, with her mother: the bereaved, the living victims. She stared at Annabel Oldacre and Jade Walker as she sat on the witness stand on the first day and gave her testimony. They stole my little sister. I only asked them to take her to the shops, and they kidnapped her. Bitches. Those little bloody bitches. And later, when she was done, she stared at the backs of their necks, at their profiles as they looked up at their lawyers (they never looked at each other, not once through the whole four days); glaring into their faces, willing them to look at her as they passed in and out of the courtroom, willing them to see what they’d done. She memorised everything about Annabel Oldacre, but she never expected to see her again, with or without the changes of a quarter-century disguising the child within.

‘Fuck,’ says Deborah, and reaches out for the telephone. ‘Fuck.’