The Wicked Girls (33 page)

‘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.’

Despite the fact that they lead down to the seafront, the botanical gardens are almost always empty, mostly because big signs
at the gates forbid alcohol, barbecues and ball games. The only people other than Martin himself who ever come here are pensioners
with foil-wrapped sandwiches and the odd mother with toddlers, though the formal flowerbeds and lack of swings don’t make
it particularly attractive to them. He likes to come here to think – and, after what he’s read in the
Tribune
, he has a lot of thinking to do today.

He takes his usual seat, on a bench on a hummock of earth that raises him high enough to see over the hedges that surround
the garden and watch the comings and goings without being forced to participate.

And the first thing he sees is Kirsty Lindsay, hurrying from the direction of town, her head bowed. He almost jumps out of
his skin. The bloody cheek of it. She’s the last person he expected to see. She shouldn’t come here ever again. Not after
what she’s done to his town; what she’s done to him. Then he thinks: If I can see her, she can see me, and ducks down on his
seat to take himself out of her line of vision. An old couple, toddling along below him, look up at the sudden movement and
cross to the other side of the path, as though the extra five feet will act as a barrier against lunacy.

He gives them a big wide smile to assure them that they’re
safe. It seems instead to make them more afraid. The woman clutches the man’s wool-wrapped arm and they march purposefully
towards the nearest exit.

He waits until they’ve passed, then pops his head up to see where she’s got to. Registers with amazement that she’s covered
a couple of hundred yards in the twenty seconds he’s been down, and is very nearly at the fence. She’s not looking around
her. Seems to be buried in thought. She crosses Park Road, reaches the fence and swings left towards the entrance. My God,
she’s coming in here, he thinks. Stoops down once more and scuttles for the cover of the hydrangea bushes behind him.

Through his screen of heavy foliage, he watches as she turns in through the gate and starts to walk along the path. She slows
her pace a little now she’s off the road, but still seems blind to her surroundings. She seems to be having trouble breathing.
Certainly, her chest is heaving like a character in a Victorian melodrama. Intrigued, he creeps round as she circles his mound,
and watches her progress. She does a full circuit of the park – it doesn’t take long, as it’s barely bigger than one of those
London residential squares – then flings herself down on a bench as though she’s simply run out of puff.

She does some strange things. Holds her hands out in front of her and stares at them. They seem to be shaking. Then she puts
them up to either side of her forehead and rocks back and forth like a child’s toy. Something’s upset her, he thinks. Good.
See how she likes it. Gingerly, he comes down the mound on the far side and works his way along behind the gardener’s hut
to where a big clump of rhododendrons looms darkly, covering him until he’s within hearing distance.