The Wicked Girls

Chapter Forty-three

It’s called Dr Wax’s House of Horror, and it is well named. The place has a musty smell of damp cloth and hopelessness, and the sight that greets her as she plunges through the door is a tableau of an execution at the guillotine. It’s dark, lit by emergency lighting, and faceless forms loom from murky niches in the side walls.

The rain drums on the tar-paper roof and the floor shifts with the surge of the sea. Like being on a boat, she thinks, in a harbour, midwinter. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asks, peering through the gloom. ‘It was just drizzling when I got here.’

‘It happens all the time. It’s called the Whitmouth Wilding. Something to do with the Thames Estuary and the North Sea.’

‘We can’t go out in this.’

‘No,’ says Amber. ‘But it’ll die down in a bit. It never lasts long. Come on.’

She leads her between the heavy velvet curtains that divide the lobby from the main hall. The hall is cramped and crowded, lit eerie red; faces familiar-but-not-familiar stare frozenly into a mysterious otherworld, eyes blank and mouths forever frozen on the edge of words. More tableaux, more savage now they’ve passed the entrance hall: a man stretched on a rack, his face a screaming rictus; a Cambodian peasant holding a plastic bag – the striped kind, the kind you get from corner shops everywhere – over the face of a man in a suit; First World War soldiers wallowing in mud and barbed wire. MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN, reads the banner stretched from wall to wall. And all for an entrance fee of £9.95 inc. VAT, thinks Kirsty. A bargain.

‘Good God,’ she says, ‘it’s a cocktail party in hell. I’d’ve been crapping myself if I’d had to wait in here.’

Amber laughs humourlessly. ‘Strangely enough, I was crapping myself before I got here. To be honest, they’re the best company I’ve had in days.’

She slumps on to a cushioned seating platform in the middle of the room. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what I would have done.’

Kirsty’s anger returns. ‘Well, you didn’t give me much choice, did you?’

Amber looks away, ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Kirsty glares at her. Amber looks back, and meets her eyes. ‘I am,’ she assures her. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. There are people looking for me, everywhere, and no one to help me. I needed you.’

Kirsty remembers the crowds in town, the home-made weaponry and the absent police. Walks to a bench a few feet away and sits down. She knows that what Amber has said is true, but she doesn’t want to be near the woman. Doesn’t want to have to look at her.

‘How was your drive?’ Amber asks suddenly, in a bright social voice, as though Kirsty has simply turned up for brunch.

‘It was fine.’ Kirsty is amazed at the teatime voice she uses in return. ‘The roads are good at this time of night, of course.’

‘Yes,’ says Amber. ‘We – Vic and I – we always left at this time of night, when we went to Wales. Took about half the time, he reckoned.’

‘Right,’ responds Kirsty. It takes a couple of seconds for her to register that the Vic Amber refers to so casually is the same man that she and her colleagues are already automatically referring to by his formal title, the Alleged Seaside Strangler, Victor Cantrell (the ‘Alleged’ to be dropped after conviction, of course). She sees Amber’s face fall as she remembers her reality. She’s behaving like my mother-in-law, thinks Kirsty, after Jim’s father died and it hadn’t sunk in completely yet. She’d talk about things they would do together, opinions he would hold, things he’d said, and then her face would fall in the same way, and awkwardness would grip the room. It was a good couple of years before she, or anyone in her presence, could mention his name without the grief closing over their heads.

This must be how it is for Amber, she thinks. The same bereavement, without the sympathy. A widow’s state is essentially a noble one; there is no such solace for the intimates of the notorious. I was so busy crying for myself, all those years in Exmouth, that it never occurred to me to think about my family. It’s only since I had Soph and Luke that I’ve thought about what it really must have been like for them.

‘What was in Wales?’ she asks.

Amber sighs. ‘Oh, nothing, really,’ she says. ‘We just used to go there, sometimes. In the off-season. The Pembrokeshire coast. He – Vic – went there once with some needy kids’ scheme. He liked it there. Liked to go back.’

‘Yeah, it’s beautiful down there,’ says Kirsty.

‘You’ve been?’

They’re making conversation out of discomfort, the small-talk essential to fill the chasm between them. This is beyond abnormal, thinks Kirsty. We’re talking like strangers on a bus. Come on, rain, stop, God damn you. I don’t want to be here, doing this.

‘Jim’s grandparents retired to Saundersfoot. He’s got a lot of good memories.’

‘Jim…? Oh, yes. Your husband,’ says Amber distractedly. Kirsty remembers again the circumstances that have brought her here. ‘Yes,’ she says pointedly. ‘My husband.’

‘What did you say he does again?’ Kirsty hears echoes of Bel’s silly, social mother in the question. Talking constantly to keep intimacy at bay, training her daughter but never loving her.

‘It doesn’t matter what he does,’ she replies impatiently. ‘It has nothing to do with you. But if you’re going to ask questions, I’m going to ask one back. Did you mean it?’

‘What?’

Amber sees the look in her eyes and understands her meaning. ‘Oh. My threat. Do you want an honest answer?’

‘Yes. If you can give me one.’

‘OK. Then – I don’t know. I’m sorry. Probably not. I don’t think I’d’ve got anything from carrying it through, do you?’

Kirsty isn’t really listening; is more intent on sharing her feelings than on hearing what her blackmailer has to say. ‘Jim doesn’t deserve that. I can’t believe you’d do it. Nor my kids. What have they ever done to you?’

Amber breathes deep. ‘Nothing,’ she says.

‘So, what? It was revenge against me? Because of what your husband’s done, you’d destroy mine?’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Bel again. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I’m sorry I did that to you, but I was-’

‘Oh, I don’t care about me,’ Kirsty interrupts.

Amber looks sceptical. ‘Sure.’

Kirsty subsides. They eye each other suspiciously and listen to the wind. ‘Well, I’m here now,’ says Kirsty eventually. ‘What do you want me to do with you?’

Save my life? thinks Amber. It’s just a small thing, but-

Somewhere in the back, a door bangs; keeps banging. Kirsty jumps, stares at Amber, eyes wide in the gloom. Amber looks calm. This is weird, thinks Kirsty. This isn’t how I’d be, if I were her. It’s as though the fight’s gone; as though she can’t be bothered any more.

Amber shakes her head, as though she’s forcing thought back into it. ‘It’s OK. I sort of – had to break in. I thought it was better to do it round the back. The latch is probably a bit kaput now. That’s all it is.’

Kirsty raises her eyebrows.

‘What?’ Amber looks irritated. ‘Kirsty, I was cold. What did you want me to do?’

‘It’s OK,’ says Kirsty hastily. ‘It’s all right. Sorry.’

‘I guess we should shut it.’ Amber gets to her feet.

‘Yes. We should.’

Beyond the main hall, where Hitler jostles Stalin and Kim Jong Il jostles Mao, the museum splits into a series of rooms off a narrow, red-painted corridor, the signage above their doors denoting themes like MASS MURDERERS, PLAGUES and TORTURE. Amber leads the way with surprising confidence, Kirsty following timidly behind, glancing as she goes into the dark spaces beyond the doorways. Anyone could be in here. Anything.

The corridor ends with a fire door. Through it, the drumming of the rain and the roar of the sea comes louder, like a distant crowd. On the floor to their side of the door, a small puddle of water. The open exterior door bangs monotonously behind.

‘Wow,’ says Amber, clocking the water at her feet, ‘serious rain.’

She pushes the fire door open and wet wind bursts through, buffets their faces. Beyond, a storeroom-cum-rec-room: a shabby modular settee, a coffee table, discarded mannequin body parts piled in corners like the aftermath of battle, a coffee machine (switched off), polystyrene cups flying through restless air. On the far wall, the door flaps uselessly back and forth, knocks against a Formica-topped table pushed against the wall. Amber strides forward, catching a faceful of salt spray, and forces it shut.

The sudden quiet is almost deafening. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Nothing wrong with the lock, anyway. Phew. I was worried I might have damaged it.’

Kirsty laughs nervously. ‘We’ve already broken in, Amber.’

Amber gives her a look. ‘There’s a big difference between breaking and entering and trespass, Jade. How did you get to be so wet behind the ears?’

She leads the way back into the corridor. The water seems to have spread. There’s a trail of it leading all the way back up to the main hall. I must still be dripping, thinks Kirsty. Jesus, it’s wet out there.

‘Oh, by the way,’ says Amber, suddenly, ‘we’re in here. Did you know?’

Kirsty quails. ‘Really?’

‘Yuh.’

‘Where?’

‘We’ve got a category all of our own.’ She gestures at a doorway to her left. It’s labelled TOO YOUNG TO KILL.

‘No,’ says Kirsty.

‘Yes. Fortunately they’ve not actually put us in with the kiddie-murderers. Though I’m surprised they didn’t.’

Kirsty doesn’t really want to look, but she is drawn inescapably to the doorway, hovers in it with sinking heart. Amber flips on the light. It’s a poky little room, and contains few figures, which somehow makes it worse. Despite the fact that there are over a dozen murders by children each year, only five are represented here among the deliberately emotive trappings of youth – rocking horses and record players and party dresses on the backs of chairs – none of which she ever had. The same old five: John Venables, Robert Thompson, Mary Bell and, huddled conspiratorially by a five-bar gate, herself and Bel.

Kirsty walks over and studies her mannequin, feels her skin crawl as she sees herself again through the eyes of national condemnation. Five feet tall, it’s been based on her school photo – the only photo anyone ever got hold of other than her police mugshot, mostly because there weren’t really any others – but they’ve replaced the school uniform with a shapeless, childish dress designed to make the figure look even younger than her real years. The face is puffy, the hair cut in a pudding-basin bob, the lips turned down at the corners like an old woman’s; an old woman who’s lived a life of ill-humour and small-time cruelty. It’s a crude facsimile, like those medieval lion sculptures you see in museums, made by someone who had never seen a lion, had just heard them described by sailors. And yet it’s undoubtedly herself, most easily recognised by her proximity to the haughty, imperious blonde who stands beside her with a rock in her hand.

Jade Walker and Annabel Oldacre, reads the label. It is faded, the edges worn shiny by fingers over the years it has stood there.

Both aged 11, Walker and Oldacre shocked the world with the brutal murder of Chloe Francis, aged 4, in fields near the village of Long Barrow, Oxfordshire, on 17 July 1986. The girls had abducted the child by the village sweet shop and taken her to a number of locations, eventually bludgeoning and drowning her in a stream in the late afternoon. Chloe’s body was covered in cuts, grazes and bruises, and three broken ribs and a dislocated elbow showed that they had subjected her to a day of brutal torture. Her head wounds alone were so ferocious she would have been unlikely to have survived them. To cover up their crime, the girls then callously buried little Chloe’s body in woodland, where it was mutilated by wildlife – her family were forced to bury her in a closed casket – and feigned ignorance of their crime for days. Walker came from a deprived background, but Oldacre, seen by many as the dominant one of the pair, was the daughter of a prominent businessman and attended one of Britain’s top boarding schools, leading the detective in charge of the investigation to describe her as ‘the coldest creature he had ever encountered in all his years of police work’.

‘Is that how we looked?’ Kirsty asks, in a small voice. She still has difficulty associating herself with this long-ago child, the one who killed Chloe. ‘Did I really look like that?’

‘Christ,’ says Amber, disgust in her voice. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Well, yes, I – no. It’s just I… do you recognise yourself? From the things they say about us?’

‘Every fucking day,’ says Amber bitterly, and steps back out into the corridor. ‘Don’t you?’

‘I…’ Kirsty turns away from the statues, finds them too painful to look at. Switches off the lights as though doing so will make the image leave her mind. ‘We’re never going to get away from this, are we?’ she asks miserably. Hears a gasp that sounds like outrage from halfway down the hall.

‘This?’ cries Amber. ‘This? What do you mean, “this”?’

She steps out and sees anger and despair in her old conspirator’s eyes.

‘How come they ever let you out, Jade?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re in denial. That’s what they always said to me. If I kept on denying it, if I didn’t face up to my crime, they’d never let me out.’

‘Well, yes,’ protests Kirsty. ‘Of course! God, I don’t pretend for a minute that-’

Amber storms up the remainder of the hall, stamps back to her red velvet seat. ‘Oh yes you do. Every day you pretend. Same as I do. Go on, then. Tell me who you don’t pretend to? Tell me one person, apart from whatever trainee’s been assigned to supervise your licence compliance this month? Go on.’

Kirsty can’t answer. Amber has coloured up; spits the words out like they’ve been building for years.

‘Your husband – what’s he called, Jim? Ever shared it in your pillow talk? When you’re strolling hand-in-hand on the beach at Saundersfoot? When he takes you out to dinner on your anniversary? How about then? Over the candles and the bruschetta? The oh-go-on-let’s-have-a-glass-of-champagne? Well? Have you?’

‘Don’t, Bel. Please.’

‘“By the way, darling, did I ever tell you about the time I killed a little kid?”’

‘Shut up!’

‘You think… you think ’cause you’ve made something of yourself that it’ll all go away? You think ’cause you’ve got a husband and kids and you go to Christmas services and drink mulled wine and no one knows about you, that that means it never happened? You can’t wipe out history, Jade!’

‘No!’ she protests. ‘No, I never… but, Bel! I’m not her! I’m not that girl any more! I’m not, and nor are you!’

‘Bollocks,’ says Amber. ‘You’ll be her for the rest of your life. That filthy little shit who killed a kid is right inside you. Better get used to it.’

Kirsty stands in the doorway and takes a deep, shaky breath. She’s so angry, she thinks. I’m not sure I know how to cope with this. I find it hard to remember the child I was. What we did – it’s like a dream to me. A horrible, ugly, remembered nightmare.

Amber lies down and throws an arm over her eyes. Kirsty checks her watch. Gone four o’clock. They’ll need to get moving soon, storm or no storm. They can’t rely on the weather to keep the cleaners away. She walks over, sits down and lays a hand on Amber’s arm, a futile gesture of womanly comfort.

‘I think about it every single day,’ says Amber. ‘You know? All of it. How it happened. All the stupid… oh, God. I remember her face every single day. That stupid fucking anorak, the way she looked. The mud in her eyes. Jesus.’

Kirsty has a flashback: Chloe’s face vanishing beneath a double-handful of earth and leaves hoisted from the edge of the hole. She remembers an earthworm, surprised by sudden exposure to the evening light, squirming away, digging itself a speedy haven down beside where the child’s ear was hidden. She’s not forgotten. Has never forgotten. Sometimes, she has fantasies of violating the terms of her licence, of seeking out the Francis family, of trying to make amends. But how do you make amends? What possible payback could there be?

‘We were kids,’ she says.

‘It’s not an excuse,’ says Amber. ‘Adulthood is just more layers on top. Don’t you wish that there was some sort of time machine? Some way to turn the clock back? Just… if we’d left her, at the bench. That’s all. If we’d gone, “No, she’s not our responsibility, let’s just leave her.” D’you remember?’

‘Yeah,’ says Kirsty, and smiles ironically. ‘I said we couldn’t leave her, ’cause someone might come along and kill her.’

On the edge of her field of vision, Kirsty thinks she sees a statue move. She sits upright and gasps; peers into the gloom, expecting the comfort of hallucination. She’s exhausted; she’s starting to see things. It’s fine.

But no, it moves again. A slight, male figure steps out from among the murderous autocrats. At first she thinks he’s a ghost; still clings to the hope that he’s simply stepping out of her imagination. But when he comes into the light and she recognises the weird little man from the nightclub, she knows that he is real. And that he has heard every word they’ve said.