The Wicked Girls

Chapter Forty-two

He guesses almost as soon as they set off that she is heading for Whitmouth and, with the radio rolling news out constantly as he drives, he’s got a pretty good guess as to what is bringing her there. By the time they arrive, at half-past three, he almost feels cheated. Every journalist in the country must be converging on the town right now; there’s not a hope of getting her alone, and it’s clear to him that, whatever it is he plans to do – and he’s not entirely clear in his mind what he does plan, just that she won’t enjoy a moment of it – he needs to be alone with her to do it. He’s tempted to throw the towel in for the night, to go and get some sleep, because after all she’ll still be here in the morning, but then she does something that surprises him. Instead of leaving her car in her usual slot at the station, or checking herself in at the Voyagers Rest, she continues straight on down Brighton Road and into the town centre. Intrigued, he follows her.

It’s slow going. A fine drizzle hangs in the air and the bars are closed, but the town is full of people. And not the usual young crowd, but middle-aged men and women with determined faces and cricket bats. Even through tightly closed windows, he can feel that the atmosphere is as thick as soup. He smiles as he understands that the whole town has heard the news about Amber Gordon. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person, he thinks.

They seem to be concentrated around the police station, though someone stands on virtually every street corner they pass. T-shirted, muscle-bound men with necks like tree trunks and arms that bulge their seams; women whose default expression, from early youth, has been disapproval. They stand, still and watchful, glaring into the dark as though expecting a squadron of Daleks to materialise from thin air. Outside the police station there’s a gloomy, angry party going on beneath the blank gaze of shuttered doors. Press, of course, in search of the morning scoop – but more, far more, ordinary people. His neighbours, roused from their dens by the scent of the hunt.

He expects Kirsty to pull up somewhere near by, but she carries on driving, crawling past the massing bodies, winding her window up as she goes, as though she expects to be robbed. Martin frowns and drops back a few yards. They’re the only vehicles on the road, and he doesn’t want to have come this far for her to spot him now.

Kirsty drives slowly, wonders if she has something – a scarf, a stole, a hood – in her overnight bag with which she can hide Amber’s face, if she finds her. There’s no way they’ll make it back through town without it, with all these eyes staring suspiciously through her windows as she passes. As she approaches the sea, the crowds thin out. A few stragglers from the bars lurch through the escalating rain, but down here they’re not looking at anything other than their own feet. The Corniche itself is an empty sea of fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts. Even the death-burger van has moved up to Brighton Road to make the most of the unexpected glut of customers. Maybe, she thinks. Maybe we just might get away with it. If I put her in the boot, or lying down on the back seat.

She pulls in to the loading bay at the foot of the pier and kills the engine. Cracks her door and realises that, for the first time since she came to Whitmouth, she can actually hear the sea more than she can hear anything else. It sounds huge as it thunders on to the beach, dragging great cobblestones one over the other with its suck. To disguise the sound of a sea as wild as this, the daily cacophony must be more deafening than she had realised. She scans the road as she feels for her bag. A couple snog against the window of WHSmith, but otherwise the Corniche is empty. As she pulls on her jacket, a white van cruises slowly past and pulls in to the space vacated by the burger van. She peers through the distortion of rain on windscreen, but sees no one get out.

She grabs the phone off the passenger seat, slides it open and hits redial. It thinks for a moment, flashes up the number, goes blank.

‘Shit,’ says Kirsty, out loud. Presses the Call key again. Nothing. She’s made the most basic of schoolgirl errors: forgot to plug it in to charge before she got into bed, despite the fact that she’s been melting the battery all day.

‘Shit,’ she says again, and slams her hand down on the steering wheel. Fights back tears. Closes the window and allows herself a moment of release by screaming at the top of her lungs. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ She can’t call, can’t tell Amber she’s here, can’t verify her whereabouts, can’t organise a rendezvous. The pier gates are closed, high, forbidding, the rain beginning to step up, and Amber, if they’ve not found her yet, is counting down to Kirsty’s destruction.

I don’t want to go out there, she thinks. I’m afraid.

Then she opens the door and steps out into the night.

Martin watches in his rear-view as she gets out of the Renault. She stands beside it and stares up towards town. And then, as if she’s satisfied that she’s unobserved, she wheels on her heel and hurries past the foot of the pier on to the beach.

He’s caught off-guard. He’d been expecting her to go up to where the people are. Can’t believe she’s cut him an easy break like this. He rushes to get out of the van, closes the door as quietly as he can behind him. If she’s really down on the beach, the noise of the sea and her feet sliding on weedy pebbles will drown out most sounds, but there’s no sense in being careless. He jogs up the road, stays in the shadow of the Funnland fence and, pressing himself against the corner strut, peeps round the corner.

Her ears are pricked for sounds of company, but all is quiet, just the roar and rag of sand on shingle and the moan of wind in the wires of the switched-off fairy lights along the front. Twenty feet along the pier, small and inconspicuous, there’s a gate, let into the metal slats of the fence, which cleaning teams and maintenance workers use to get on and off the structure out of hours. Kirsty jumps on to the shingle, feels a stone slip over another beneath her foot and goes down on her knees. ‘Fuck,’ she mutters; looks over her shoulder with wild fear that she will have been heard. Stupid trainers: not made for any surface less steady than a treadmill. She steps carefully the rest of the way, holding on to the fence as she goes.

It looks locked. Is locked. But closer inspection shows that the lock is a Yale, more there for show than blow. She digs her Oyster card – she learned not to use her debit card for this sort of thing years ago – from her bag, slips her hand through the bars and has it open in seconds.

She looks behind her once more, checks that the coast is clear and steps through, pulling the gate to behind her, then limp-runs up the short flight of stairs to the pier top. Squinting through the gloom at the long walkway in front of her, she sets off to walk to the end.

Once again he feels the tug of an erection. The blood pumps as he watches her fall on the shingle, struggle to her feet and feel her way into the shadows under the pier. He’s really on to something. Whatever the outcome, it’s a win-win. Either Amber Gordon is hidden away somewhere out there in the dark and Kirsty Lindsay is walking up to find her, or she’s not there, and then Lindsay will be up there alone.

He hears the sound of a gate opening and footsteps mounting metal stairs. She’s found the service entrance and is going up to the boardwalk. Martin smiles. Perfect, he thinks. I can’t lose her now. There’s only one way on to the pier, and only one way off.

The little faux-steam train that plods its way up to the pier’s end and back from eight in the morning until the last patrons of the amusement arcade run out of fifty ps has been parked up in its shed, the doors secured with a chain-and-padlock extravaganza. It’s a quarter of a mile to the end. An easy walk under normal circumstances, less so when the boards are slippery with mounting drizzle and you don’t know what you’ll find when you reach your destination. She might not even be there. She might have fled already, found some other hiding place and be waiting for your call.

Come on, Kirsty, she tells herself. Get a grip. It’s a quick inand-out and once you’ve got her somewhere safe you’ll be safe as well. Never have to see her, speak to her, think of her again.

She starts to plod, wraps her scarf tightly round her head. Only August and the air, as she heads out to sea, is as dank as a cellar.

She hears her own footfalls, thick on the night air. Her nose is running. What am I doing? she wonders. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Corrects herself. Second most stupid. But in this case, I don’t have a choice. Because it’s not just me, is it? I fucking hate her now. I pitied her before, thought we shared some understanding, but now I hate her. Maybe I should just go back up into town and tell those zombie-people on the corners where she is. She can’t talk if she’s dead, after all. If I let her die, my problems are over…

She shakes her head, dismisses the thought. This is not who I am. I’m not like that, however much I’d like to be.

The railway line is punctuated by tiny, pointless stations, all white-painted iron and panes of greenhouse glass. Like everything here the pier is a relic of more elegant times, when travel abroad was only for the rich and their servants, and lawyers and doctors would come here and take their pleasures among the grocers and butchers. Now, the elegant lines of its railings are hidden by garish advertising hoardings. The moon filters weakly through a gap in the clouds, showing up the fact that half the windows of the station-stops are broken. A gust of wind drives raindrops against her cheek. The weather is getting worse.

She hears a sound behind her: metal hitting metal. The gate?

He waits five minutes – times it by his watch – before he follows her through the gate. No need to stay close. He knows where she’s going, after all. He crouches below the wall and sees her head, silhouetted above the railings at the top of the steps, turn left and walk out to sea. Then she’s gone, all sound buried by the crash of the waves.

He takes a chance and scuttles, crabwise, into the shelter of the pier. Now there’s no way she’ll glimpse him. He’s safe and hidden and she has no idea he is behind her. He has a sudden urge to laugh out loud. Slips and slides to the gate and gives it a push. She’s left it on the latch and slipped a torn-off piece of the cardboard backing of a spiral-bound notebook between latch and frame. He hasn’t expected it to give, and fails to stop the gate from swinging back against the fence behind. Grabs it just as it hits, but not in time to prevent the clank of metal ringing out into the air.

Martin stoops down and waits, statue-still, at the bottom of the steps.

Kirsty ducks in behind the building. Waits, breathing shallow, and watches. Nothing. No one emerges from the staircase. Just the flutter of a poster advertising the magician whose matinées are the council’s contribution to calling the shack at the end of the structure a theatre. You’re jumping at shadows, she tells herself. Because you know what you’re doing is stupid. Because you got yourself scared out of your wits the other night in Tailor’s Lane, and now you’re expecting to be followed.

She crosses over the railway line and carries on along the other side of the tracks, as though doing so will somehow cover her progress.

I hate you, Amber Gordon. When I see you, it will be hard to be civil, however frightened you are, however much you need my help. Because of you, I too am afraid. Because of you, the corrosive, acid terror of discovery is eating away at my mind, eating away at my marriage. I love him. Oh, God, I love him, and you don’t care. It wasn’t me who killed her, Amber, it was you.

A blustery gust snatches at her scarf, leaving her gasping at the sudden bitterness of the sea-wind. How this town ever managed to be somewhere people came for pleasure is beyond her imagination. The boards are slippery, and there are tools and materials lying around where the walkway is being mended. Bloody great hammers and crowbars, lying about for anyone to find.

Over halfway now. She can’t shake the feeling that she is being watched. CCTV? She hasn’t noticed any cameras, but it’s practically compulsory to have them these days. But Amber’s been up here for a couple of hours now, though; if she’s still here, then no one’s turned out to turf her off. Either there aren’t any cameras, they’re not working or not manned.

Of course you think you’re being watched, she thinks. Because being watched would mean the end of the world. Stop it, Kirsty. It’s a situational fear, not a real one.

But she stops and looks behind her again anyway. An empty walkway, the steps to the gate barely visible in the distance. Stupid, she thinks. I’ve never been any good at telling the difference between imagined dangers and real ones. Perhaps if I had, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

He crawls on hands and knees to the top of the steps and looks out on to the boardwalk. She’s not come back. Stupid woman’s walking on, has crossed to the other side of the railway track to make his own progress easier. All he has to do now is duck-run ten feet to the cover of the station, and he can follow her as closely as he likes.

The moon breaks through the cloud for a second and makes a river across the sea. For a brief moment, Whitmouth looks beautiful, bathed in mournful light, the starkness of the Sixties blocks behind the seafront softened by the encroaching haar. Then, as quickly, another gust of wind slaps pinprick raindrops into her face, sends her scuttling for the shelter of the penny arcade’s stingy awning.

Deep darkness inside; machines hunched and lurking, the floors damp and sticky, awaiting the arrival of the dawn cleaning team. Two huge pillar ashtrays overflow on either side of the double door. As she huddles below the five-inch overhang, the heavens open like someone’s turned a tap on, and rain starts to sluice through the gutters. The sea changes mood; the dull roll and suck becomes a growl of annoyance. She feels the ground tremble beneath her feet.

Kirsty dashes the last fifty feet and hits the central square. It’s empty. No sign of Amber, just full bins and empty benches. She splashes to a halt, looks wildly around. No one. Only herself and the beating rain, and the flashing light on the helter-skelter. The theatre looms, Edwardian-grand, in front of her, box-office windows like black eyes, Marvo the Magnificent sneering, twenty feet tall, from a poster. She half expects to see Amber sheltering beneath the canopy, but the area is empty.

‘Shit,’ says Kirsty out loud, rain running off her face. Knew I should’ve stayed at the car. Knew I shouldn’t have come. She could be bloody anywhere. For all I know the police have taken her in and there’s no need to be here at all…

She opens her mouth and yells at the top of her lungs. Yells to be heard over storm and sea and the flapping canvas of the tarot tents among the flowerbeds, the clatter of something caught by the wind behind the arcade. ‘BEL! BEEEELLLLL!’

Movement, out of the corner of her eye. She whirls, ready to defend herself, sees that the front door of the cruddy little waxworks has come open. Amber’s head appears: frightened, hopeful.

‘Fuck!’ shouts Kirsty and splashes over the boardwalk, into the dry.