Tarnished (27 page)

It was her first memory where the bungalow was something other than a place of refuge to her, and, while Loz smiled wryly at her, she noted it into her voice-recorder, just in case it was useful later.

She went over to one of the busy checkout desks and waited until the librarian was free. She showed her work identity card and explained their situation. Without a moment’s hesitation, the librarian gave them each a membership card so they could use the Internet.

‘What an influential girlfriend I have,’ Loz said, as they crossed the room to the computers. ‘She can get me my heart’s desire.’

‘If it’s in a library, it’s yours.’

They set themselves up on the only two free computers – one at each end of the long bank of terminals. Logging on to her webmail, Peg was surprised to find that she had indeed received a reply from Raymond. It was brief, but it said what she wanted it to say:

Glad youv seen sense girl. Your apologys aceppted. It was tough for both of us, meeting like that. Lets say bygones be bygones. Give me your bank details and I’ll see your OK. Hope your coming this way soon. Paulie talks about his big sister lots
.

The fish had bitten.

Peg replied with a formal thank-you and her sort code and account number.

‘Dad’s sending me money,’ she said, as she went over to Loz, who appeared to be engrossed in something on her screen.

‘That’s great.’

‘I’ll be able to pay for Nan’s hospital room, and we can fix the roof, get the electrics overhauled.’

‘Brilliant.’ Loz didn’t seem able to pull her eyes away from her computer monitor.

‘What are you looking at?’ Peg pulled over an empty chair and sat beside Loz. Then she looked at the screen. ‘Oh no,’ she said.

There, smiling up at her from a web page, her blond hair whipped by the wind as she stood by the Thames, Tower Bridge looking like it was growing out of her head in the background, was a young blonde woman in a zigzag-patterned coat. The word UNSOLVED was written over her photograph in red, as if it had been rubber-stamped.

‘Mary Perkins. It’s her, isn’t it?’ Loz said. ‘Unmistakably. They call her a “party girl”. I hate that, as if women bring it on themselves by going out and having fun.

‘Look,’ she went on. ‘The coincidences come thick and fast. She grew up right here, in Tankerton, but had moved to London a few months before she went missing. And guess where she worked? Club by the name of Flamingos.’

Peg thought of the photograph of Mary and Raymond at the club doors.

‘She was last seen in February 1992, walking on the docks east of London Bridge. Wasn’t that where you said your little brother died?’

‘I’m sure lots of people have died there. It’s a place with water and high drops in the middle of a big city.’

‘But your dad obviously knew her. Perhaps he can shed some light on what happened to her?’

‘The deal I have to take on for Raymond’s money is that we don’t talk about the past.’

‘So he’s buying you off,’ Loz said.

‘No, but—’

‘Or Aunty Jean’s made you feel all dirty about nosing around and you’re just being good little girl Meggy and doing as you’re told.’

‘But—’

‘You’re a grown-up now, Peg, and if you think something’s off, you should follow your instinct. I mean, what right have either of them got telling you what to do or think?’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Yes it is.’

‘Could we keep it down a bit, please, girls?’ the librarian had appeared at their shoulders and was standing over them, smiling but firm.

‘Yes. Sorry,’ Peg said.

The woman left and Peg stared at the screen in silence, feeling big, soft and blurry.

Loz scrolled down the page. For a second Peg thought she glimpsed something – a hunger – in her expression. The part of her that liked to read that creepy, exploitative stuff about real girls being ripped to pieces by real murderers was really enjoying this.

‘Ugh,’ Loz said. ‘It says here that although initially she vanished without trace, they did eventually find something. Listen to this:

‘“Three months later, poor Mary’s head – and only her head – was found by a beachcomber on The Street, a spit of shingle that protrudes into the Thames Estuary right by her home town of Tankerton, Kent”.’

‘I know that story!’ Peg gasped. ‘That was Mrs Cairns’s son. Colin.’

‘Mrs Cairns?’

‘You know, Nan’s nosy neighbour. Her son was that beachcomber.’

Loz looked at her. ‘It’s getting really close to home, isn’t it?’

‘Colin found the head and the police arrested him.’

‘Arrested him?’

‘Or took him in for questioning. I’m not too clear on the details. In any case, he was a bit simple. The shame was too much for him and he hanged himself in the cells.’

Loz frowned. ‘When did they move down here?’ she asked Peg.

‘Who?’

‘Doll and Frank and Jean.’

‘When I was two. So, what, 1990?’

‘So Raymond would have known the area by ’92. He would have come down here and visited. Perhaps with you, too,’ Loz said, moving the cursor around the web page. ‘I’m printing this lot off.’

‘What is this website anyway?’ Peg said.

‘It’s connected to this book I’ve got called
Unsolved
, about people whose disappearances are still a mystery. Any new information that’s come up since publication can be found on here. Look.’ Loz clicked on the home page, which showed a grid of photographs of faces, some colour, some black and white.

Peg’s eye was drawn to one of the colour pictures. Her stomach clenched as she looked at the school portrait of the sharp-featured, red-haired girl in the blue blazer and striped tie. ‘Who’s that?’ she said, her voice barely audible.

Loz clicked on the picture and, as the larger file slowly unfolded on the screen, Peg stopped breathing.

‘No!’

‘What?’ Loz said, looking up at her.

‘She’s the girl from my school.’

‘What girl?’

‘There was a photo of her in the Gordon’s box back at Nan’s. I thought it had got there by mistake, but . . .’

‘Are you sure?’ Loz bent closer to look at the picture. Her nose was practically against the screen.

‘What’s her name?’

Loz clicked the info button. ‘“Anna Thurlow. Pupil at thirty thousand pound per year St Wilfrid’s school, Wiltshire.” Thirty grand? Jesus.’

Peg put her hand over her mouth. Seeing the name of the girl was like a punch to her stomach.

‘“Vanished from the £3m family home in Hampshire during the summer of 2000 . . .” Shit Peg. And her picture was in the same box as the Mary Perkins photos?’

Peg nodded.

‘And you knew her?’

‘I think so. I don’t know, Loz.’

Loz pressed
print page
.

Anna Thurlow, Anna Thurlow.

Peg ran the name over in her mind, but the pathways to understanding why it so shocked her were buried.

‘Can’t we forget about all this?’ she asked Loz as they crossed the library to the printer. She could hear the shake in her own voice.

‘I think the answer to that is no, Peg. Two missing girls in one box?’

‘What’s that?’ Peg asked her, pointing at a map on top of the pile of paper Loz pulled out of the printer tray.

‘Heyworth Court.’

‘Eh?’

Loz took the key and label from her back pocket. ‘There’s only one Heyworth Court in the whole of the south-east, and it’s a block of flats in London SE1.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Day trip for tomorrow, I reckon. Don’t you?’

Anna Thurlow, Anna Thurlow
.

Peg regretted ever getting Loz involved in all this. With her love of a mystery, she was getting carried away, making too many connections based on the flimsiest of evidence.

It was beginning to look dangerous.

Peg had so wanted to find out the truth. But now she wished she was back where she had started – knowing nothing, and suspecting no one of anything.

And then she remembered why the name Anna Thurlow was so familiar to her.

Then

Anna Thurlow was the girl who made my life hell.

Breathe.

I can feel the shame now.

Of all the tricky moments during my days and nights at school, the worst was being in the changing room after gym when Miss Humphrey, our foghorn-voiced gym teacher made us pull our leotards right off our sweaty little eight-year-old bodies – we weren’t allowed to wear underwear – to take a shower.

She said if we didn’t we’d make the whole school stink to high heaven all afternoon.

It was open season on Margaret Thwaites.

‘Boing,’ goes Anna Thurlow, the girl who because of the alphabet has the peg next to mine. She springs her index finger from behind her thumb, sharply flicking my breast bud, the only curve, apart from my own buttocks and hips, in the otherwise flat-chested room.

I try to ignore her as I edge towards the shower, my hands held tight in front of me, but it’s too late.

‘Look,’ Anna says, too quietly for Miss Humphrey to hear, but loud enough to share with the four or five girls between me and her. ‘Margaret’s got hairs on her bum.’

‘Erk,’ one of the others says, and they all look at my offending area like it’s somehow diseased. Which it might as well be, so freakish is it in someone of my age.

Nan told me when she ran me a bath the Christmas before this that some girls mature very early and, although she couldn’t vouch for my mum, Aunty Jean was certainly fully developed by the age of ten, and that I reminded her of her in so many ways.

While I’m ambivalent about Aunty Jean now, I loved her with all my heart when I was younger.

But, even back then, I remember not finding this a particularly comforting thought.

Twenty-Six

Peg knew she appeared preoccupied and sulky in the Spanish delicatessen Loz had swooped on in Whitstable High Street, but she lacked the art to conceal it. After all that in the library, she just couldn’t drum up much enthusiasm for the lovely olives and the gorgeous Manchego and membrillo.

Loz, on the other hand, seemed only to have drawn energy from her discoveries.

‘I’d
love
to meet Raymond,’ she said as she added peppers and rice to the pile of things on the counter that she wanted to buy. ‘Ask him some questions about those missing girls.’

‘I don’t know . . .’ Peg said, hanging back, leaning against a row of wooden shelves stacked high with fiercely expensive but insanely beautiful tins of tuna.

‘Oh, I’m sure it would be all wrong and it’d all end in tears. But just think.’ She turned to Peg, her eyes shining in the dimly lit shop. ‘Just think. If he did it and we found him out.’

‘For God’s sakes, Loz. He’s my father.’

‘Myra Hindley’s brother-in-law shopped
her
, you know.’

Wincing at the total – carried away, she hadn’t looked at the prices – Loz paid and piled her shopping into the string bag she always carried with her.

‘It’s probably all just coincidence,’ Peg said, opening the door for Loz. They stepped outside onto the narrow pavement. ‘There’s probably some really rational explanation.’

Drawing their coats tight, they set off up the dark hill towards Tankerton. The end-of-day traffic was still quite heavy, and moving much faster than it should in a town. A white van cruised past them, slower than all the other vehicles. The driver, who looked over at them as he passed, was bald, big and black.

‘What?’ Loz said, feeling Peg shudder next to her.

Fearing that she would only add material to Loz’s dramatic construct, she said nothing. But the very presence of that white van reinforced her sense that the rational explanation behind photographs of two missing girls turning up in the same box at Raymond’s mother’s house was not one she particularly wanted to confront.

Just how closely
was
Raymond watching over her? And had he always been quite so attentive?

She knew now that all through the years she thought he had deserted her, he had in fact been keeping tabs.

But just how much did he know?

For example, did he know about what Anna Thurlow did to her?

‘I wonder what the police would say if we told them what we’ve found?’ Loz said, cutting across Peg’s thoughts.

‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

‘Let’s go and visit this Heyworth Court first.’

‘We’re not going to the police, Loz.’

‘What if it was your sister, though, that had disappeared, Peg? Or your friend? Or
me
? If we have any information that we think would be useful to the police, then we have a duty to take it forward.’

Peg sighed and looked away. All she could think about was what it would do to Doll. ‘We’d be wasting their time. It’s only because we’ve nosed around in a couple of boxes that we shouldn’t have. You’re putting two and two together to make five.’

‘I’m surprised at you, Peg. I always thought you were the Little Miss Moral in this relationship.’

By the time they had lugged the ingredients for a fine vegetarian paella back to the bungalow, it was gone seven. Julie’s little car was parked in the driveway, and the usual easy-listening music and complaints seeped with the Marlboro smoke from Jean’s extension.

Peg opened the door to the bungalow and they were met by a stink that, disappointingly, despite all their work, seemed to be worse than ever.

‘Ugh. It’s as if we’ve made no impression whatsoever in here,’ Loz said, wrinkling her nose.

As Peg flicked on the hall light, a dark shape flew out of the bedroom, across the hallway and bowled into the kitchen, where it barrelled into something clattery.

‘Lexy?’ Peg said, following it through. The cat cowered by the door, scratching as if it were trying to dig its way out. ‘Poor thing,’ she said, unlocking the back door to let the panicking creature make its escape. ‘How on earth did he get in here?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Loz said from the bedroom. ‘Come and look at this, Peg.’

‘Oh God,’ Peg said, then she retched in the doorway. The cat had emptied itself, from both ends and, from the look of it, quite violently, all over Doll’s bed. The stench was overwhelming.