The Wicked Girls (39 page)

They don’t respond. No patter of paws, no claws clicking on the kitchen floor. They must be outside. They’ve gone out through
the cat-flap for some night-time dog life. She is afraid to follow. Wants to shelter in the safety of locked doors and a boarded-up
living room until the police come. But she has to find them, and now. There won’t be time after. Once she’s answered the door,
and the crowd is certain they have her, there will be time for nothing other than flight. She’ll need to scoop them up, grab
the bag she’s been keeping ready-packed in the hall, and run for the patrol car before outrage turns to action.

She snatches the back-door keys from the hook in the hall and creeps into the kitchen. Dark and still; familiar objects crouched
shadowy on countertops as though waiting to pounce. She stops halfway across the room, and scans the garden; wants to be sure
there are no unseen visitors before she lets the outside in.

And then she sees them.

They’re only little. Little and defenceless, and never did harm to anyone. Oh, my darlings.

Amber steps into the garden and realises that tears are pouring down her face. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. This is beyond
bearing. They’ve come and they’ve taken them and they’ve used their trusting natures, and they’ve punished them to punish
me.

She stands helpless and gazes at the tiny corpses. They’ve been strangled; had their souls squeezed out the way Vic did to
those girls. And they’ve left them dangling from the washing line by their collars, the breeze catching their feathery coats
and turning them, round and round, like gibbeted vermin. Dark saucer-eyes, bulging as they gasped for life.

An animal keening escapes her open mouth. Mary-Kate and Ashley, my friends. My poor friends. Oh, my darlings. They didn’t
have to do that to you. You never did a thing.

She drops the keys in her shock, falls to her knees to feel around in the shadows. Gazes up at the strangled faces, and weeps
and weeps.

The gate rattles on its hinges. Someone outside has heard her.

Amber freezes. Crouched below the bodies in the moonlight, she watches the gate bounce. They won’t bother to climb over, this
time; this time they’re coming straight through.

‘Annabel!’ shouts a voice: male, high, excited. ‘Zat you, Annabel?’

Amber jumps to her feet. No hope of help from the police now. They know she’s here. She’s given herself away.

The gate rattles again, and she hears something crack. Doesn’t wait, doesn’t really think. She runs to the neighbour’s fence
on the far side, and scrambles over. Lands hard in a flowerbed, feels the snap of brave perennials beneath her feet. Races
across the garden, towards the next fence. There’s no way she’s getting away through Tennyson Way. Her only way out is if
she can make it to Coleridge Close.

2.30 p.m.

Bel flops down on the doorstep. She wants to cry, but Jade looks like she might explode and she doesn’t want to rile her any
more than she’s riled already. Chloe plays with the toggles on her anorak and sticks out her lower lip. She’s got mud on her
face, somehow, and looks like she’s come down a chimney. Bel is soaked in sweat. The hunger has started to translate into
faintness. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, she thinks. I just want to lie down and sleep
.

‘Well, why didn’t you say there wasn’t nobody here?’ asks Jade
.

‘My mum’s gone to Chippy,’ says Chloe, as though this is an answer. ‘To the shops.’

‘Well, fuck’s sake,’ says Jade
.

‘I thought Debbie was here,’ says Chloe
.

‘Of course she isn’t here,’ says Jade crushingly
.

‘Where’s she gone?’ asks Bel. She knows she’s slow on the uptake, but even she had managed to work out that Debbie was getting
off with Darren Walker when they came across them on the bench. It seems logical to her that they would have come here to
have sex in her bedroom, because everybody knows that that’s where sex is done. ‘She’s not gone to
your
house, has she?’ she asks doubtfully
.

Jade bursts into sardonic laughter. ‘No, she’s gone to Buckingham bleeding Palace for a garden party.’

‘In a leather jacket?’ asks Bel doubtfully
.

Jade catches the look on her face and laughs again. She’s beginning to think that Bel is simple. She’s missed three of her
jokes now. ‘Joke,’ she says. ‘But I can guarantee you she’s not at ours.’

Chloe starts to whimper again. Both the older girls roll their eyes. ‘Don’t start that again,’ says Jade. ‘There’s nothing
we can do about it, is there?’

As fast as Chloe started, she stops again, and sniffs. She’s had an idea. ‘The river,’ she says. Her mum never takes her down
the river. She’s only been twice. The river, to Chloe, is as magical and magnetic as Disneyland. If she’s not going to get
her lunch, she’s going to get to paddle, at least
.

‘The river?’ Jade is suspicious
.

‘She went down the river.’

‘What’s she gone down there for?’

‘Swim.’

‘Why din’t she take you?’

Chloe starts to well up again
.

‘All right. All right. We’ll take you down the river,’ says Jade, rolling her eyes. ‘I’ll kill Darren. I’ll bloody kill him.’

‘You’re kidding,’ says Bel
.

‘What?’

‘It’s got to be three miles.’

‘All right then. Have you got any better ideas?’

‘I …’ Bel looks hopelessly round the deserted close. ‘When’s your mum coming home?’

Chloe shrugs. She has no idea; has very little concept of time. ‘Hours and hours and hours,’ she says. Her mother is, in fact,
standing at the bus stop in Chipping Norton right now and will be home in thirty-five minutes. But Chloe has no idea what
the time is; couldn’t read a clock even if they passed one. All she knows is that, when her mum comes home on the bus, it’s
always long gone lunchtime. And as she’s not had her lunch yet, it
must
be hours and hours. And the river is calling: its plashy depths and weedy paddling, and the picnics and the lollies and the
drinks people bring down in cool-boxes and sometimes share. She’s only ever gone by car. Has no more idea how far three miles
is by foot than how long it is till lunchtime. ‘Hours,’ she repeats, and waits
.

‘And your sister’s definitely down there?’

‘Yeah,’ says Chloe confidently
.

‘We’ll go over the fields,’ says Jade decisively
.

‘The fields?’ asks Bel. ‘But there isn’t a footpath, is there?’

‘Oh, it’ll be fine,’ says Jade. ‘Get a life.’

The last barrier before Coleridge Close is a yellow-brick wall topped by a trellis through which climbing roses twine. Amber
is panting with the effort of her flight, of climbing and running and stooping to stay out of the light; of throwing herself
backwards as number seventeen’s Rottweiler bellowed and hurled itself against its chain as she passed. The dog has alerted
her pursuers to the path of her flight. As she stares at the obstacle before her, she hears a crack and a stream of swearing
as a fence gives way beneath a muscled body, and the lights four doors down blaze into life.

‘Where’s she gone?’ A voice drifts over the night air, alarmingly close. She’d thought she’d put the best part of a road’s
distance between herself and them, but this one’s nearer than that. Maybe two plots away. ‘Where the fuck is she?’

‘Coleridge,’ shouts another. ‘She must be heading for Coleridge.’

‘Fuck,’ says the first voice. Takes two deep breaths. ‘Come on. Fuck.’

He raises his voice to a theatrical bellow. Lights are coming on in every house now. The people in this one must be away,
or she’d be a sitting duck. ‘Oi! She’s heading for Coleridge!’

In the distance, in her own garden, a yell of understanding.

Shit. Her pulse hammers in her ears. Amber takes a run-up at the wall and vaults, throwing herself bodily into the mat of
thorns. It’ll take them no time at all, if they come by the road. She can’t afford to be careful. Needs to be out of sight
by the time they turn the corner. She hears the trellis crack beneath her weight and draws blood on an exposed wrist. Feels
her shirt snag and catch. Doesn’t stop to think; just forces her way through the debris and hurls herself at the other side.

The shirt holds for a moment, leaving her dangling in dark air, face in the foliage, then it rips and lets go, dropping her
on an awkward foot-arch. She feels a sharp pain, something ripping deep within, and stifles a cry as the bones grind together.
Then she’s free, and hop-running, adrenalin killing the hurt as it propels her forward.

She glances over her shoulder as she runs, losing precious moments as she slips on the scrappy verge. They’ll be halfway up
Tennyson by now. She needs to get off this road; needs to drop out of sight. She limps to the corner of Marvell Street and
dives into its temporary sanctuary.

She knows this road well. It’s the route she walks to Blessed’s flat; an empty stretch of garages and feeder roads. Halfway
up, a kids’ playground, between the turns leading back to Browning and Tennyson, long since abandoned by families as the tidal
wave of crack washed over the south-east. The junkies have moved on, but the playground – and what remains of its slides and
swings and its crumbling jungle gym – has never been reclaimed.

The slap-slap-slap of boots on tarmac back in Coleridge, chillingly close behind. She can’t go on much longer on this foot.
She hesitates for a second, then dives through the playground gate and ducks below the hedge.

Litter, blown in and dropped; she crawls gingerly among the bricks and ragwort. She hears the footsteps turn the corner, hears
them slow as their owners find an empty road. Amber inches forward. Over beyond the sandpit there’s an old plywood climbing
frame in the shape of a train, water-warped and splintered and four feet high, buried in a clump of smutty nettles. She knows
they’ll look over the hedge, that they might even venture into the park. But they’d never think her fool enough to trap herself
like that. She hopes. Has to hope. She has nowhere else to go.

She reaches the train and squeezes through a circular hole designed for a six-year old. Snags, sticks, heaves herself through
and into the dark. Portholes throw light on the wall above her head, but down here on the floor, as she closes her mind to
the objects she’s sharing the space with, is reassuring darkness.

They come along the road with the swaggering stride of numbers, swipe at foliage as they pass. She hears them pause by the
gate, hears the click of a lighter igniting, smells the drift of cigarette smoke across the night air.

‘Fuck,’ says a voice. The man who tried the gate. ‘Where’s she gone? She can’t have doubled back, can she?’

A woman replies, the sound of the feminine more frightening because so unexpected. It’s Janelle Boxer, Shaunagh’s friend from
a few doors up. Amber can see her in her mind’s eye: squat, thick-set, a face to match her surname. ‘No time. She’s gone down
here. Down one of them two, there. She won’t have had time to get to the end.’

Someone swings the gate. The crunch of boots on gravel. She knows that eyes are scanning her hiding place, holds her breath
as though it will cloud the midsummer air. The concrete on which she lies is damp and piled with musty earth and leaves. It
smells of body fluids.

‘We could get the dog.’

‘Naah. She’ll be well gone by the time we do that.’

A swish of some long object – baseball bat? Scaffolding pole? – across the undergrowth an arm’s length from her head. Amber
stiffens, presses herself deeper into the dark.

‘Fuck,’ says the first man, and something hits the wooden wall. She shrinks away, bites her lip.

‘You think she’s gone home?’ His voice slightly quieter now; he’s moving away. ‘It’s up this way, innit?’

The others fall into step. She hears the gate drag across the
gravel, the clang of the broken latch. ‘Naah,’ replies someone. ‘You know where she’s gone? Pig farm.’

‘Well, let’s hope they keep her.’

Someone raises his voice. ‘Annabel!’ A chorus of laughs. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’

They laugh again, their voices fading as they walk away. ‘Can’t believe it. Can you believe it? Fucking right in the middle
of us all this time. I remember it. Poor little kid. D’you remember? All cut up. Covered in bruises. Broken bones. Fucking
little sadist.’

‘Someone should show her what it’s like.’

‘Can you believe it? It’s Rose bloody West all over again. I’ve got kids, for fuck’s sake. She could’ve …’

‘Let’s go down the police. She mightn’t’ve got there yet … maybe if we split up …’

‘C’mon then. If we get the cars we can beat her down there.’

‘Don’t be a div. There’ll be Plod all over the shop.’

A laugh. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. My cousin Ray’s on duty tonight. They’re fucking furious. Trust me. If anyone’s
going to turn a blind eye …’

The voices fade into the distance. Amber sits up, leans against the spongy wall, feels the shriek of pain in her foot. In
the darkness the image of Mary-Kate and Ashley, her darlings, her sweet friends, swims back into her mind and winds her. She
wraps her arms round her body and weeps.

She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t let daylight overtake her. The darkness is her only protection. She waits for what
feels like an interminable time before she dares to use her phone, afraid that someone will hear her voice, that the light
from the display will give away her location. Then she calls Blessed, because it’s the only thing she can think to do.

She counts the rings. Six, then Blessed’s voice, blurred with sleep, answers. She must have fallen asleep over the order books.
It happens to Amber all the time.

‘Blessed, it’s me.’

‘Who?’

‘Me. It’s Amber. It’s Amber, Blessed.’