The Wicked Girls (41 page)

‘
What?
’ she replies aggressively.

‘The neighbours,’ he says.

‘Well
go inside
, then!’

He knows it’s hopeless. She’s not going to be talked out of anything. He still can’t believe she’s taken a phone call at two
in the morning and simply got dressed and headed for the car, but he’s known her long enough that he can tell when there’s
no point arguing. He knows, too, that she’s not telling him the whole story. Has known it over and over again through the
course of their relationship, the way her eyes glaze and her jaw sets when certain subjects come up. She’s a fucking oyster,
he thinks. And she can be such a bitch when she wants to head a subject off. And I’m so soft that I just let it pass because
I don’t want to distress her, even though everyone knows that sometimes you have to lance a wound to let it heal. I’ve got
to change. Once I’ve found a job and the balance is restored, I’ve got to toughen up, or we’ll be skating round stuff in our
eighties. I love her so much, but sometimes I think we’ve only got half a relationship.

He shakes his head. Turns back to the house. ‘OK. Well, there’s no point arguing. Just so you know. I’m not happy. I’m pissed
off, actually. You promised you’d be here, and I’m not happy.’

She almost relents. Remembers Amber’s threat and finds herself torn in half. ‘Jim,’ she says.

‘Whatever,’ he says.

‘Come on. Don’t let’s …’

‘I’ll see you in Hereford,
eventually
. Keep me posted. If that’s not too much trouble.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Kirsty. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Sure,’ he says, before he closes the door. ‘Sure you are.’

Kirsty waits in the drive until the hall light goes off. If I carry on lying like this, she thinks, we’re going to be in trouble
soon. He’s not stupid. Tolerant, but not stupid. I see him, sometimes, wondering, when he looks at me. It’s only because he’s
such a gentle soul, because he doesn’t want to push me, that we’ve survived this far. I’m so lucky I found him. I can’t think
of another man who’d leave me alone like this.

She gets into the car, pulls out the phone. It takes a few rings for Amber to answer, and when she does, it’s in a low voice,
as though she’s afraid of being overheard.

‘It’s me,’ Kirsty says. ‘I’m on my way.’

She hears Amber inhale heavily, hears tears in her voice when she answers. ‘Oh, thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’

‘Are you safe?’

‘Sort of … I think so. I’m on the pier. At the end.’

Kirsty sees her in her mind’s eye, huddled on the benches in the bullring of faded Edwardian amusements beyond the train terminus,
her face periodically lit by the orange warning light on top of the shabby helter-skelter. Maybe I
should
call someone, she thinks, do her a favour by betraying her. But no: there’s no way she can call anonymously, not in a world
where phone calls are routinely traced. And just because it would be the better thing to do doesn’t mean that Amber will see
it that way and keep quiet about her.

‘It’s going to be an hour and a half. Will you be OK?’

‘I hope so,’ says Amber. ‘No one ever comes here at night. The
gates are locked. I used my Funnland ID card to break through the lock on the staff entrance. It’s only a Yale.’

‘OK,’ says Kirsty. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

She hangs up and turns the key in the ignition. She has no idea what she’s going to do once she gets to Whitmouth. Hopes she’ll
drown her rage and resentment long enough to formulate a plan on the long drive over. Otherwise, God knows, the chances are
that Jim’s wish that she’d open up more might come appallingly true.

Martin watches the Renault back out of the drive and start down the road. He puts his seat upright and starts his engine,
but leaves the lights off as he pulls out of his parking space, to avoid alerting her to his presence. Waits till she’s turned
the first corner before he pulls out and flicks on his beams. The roads are empty enough at this time of night that he will
have little trouble finding her again, and he figures that the most powerful weapon he will have when they reach their destination
is the element of surprise.

4.15 p.m.

The gate is locked and an electric fence runs through the hedge. The farmer’s keeping sheep on the field this year, and everyone
knows that sheep are a bugger to keep in. The gate, meanwhile, is rickety: half off its hinges, all splinters and creosote,
the crossbars too close together to allow even their undersized bodies to slide between
.

‘Right, well,’ says Jade, ‘we’ll have to climb over.’

She eyes Chloe appraisingly. The kid seems to have gone wobbly in the last fifteen minutes, as though her legs are losing
the ability to hold her up. Has fallen down every hundred yards, and takes longer, each time, to get up
.

‘You should take that thing off,’ she says, tweaking at the strings on the anorak. ‘You must be boiling.’

Chloe is sluggish, unresponsive. She seems to have lost the will even to cry. Even when she caught her shin on the barbed
wire two fields back, she let out little more than a dull moan of pain. Only another four fields till we reach the river,
thinks Jade. A good thing. I don’t know what to do with her. I think she’s getting ill
.

She has severe doubts that they will find Debbie at their destination, but they’ve come this far and the shrieking, splashing
party that takes place on the Evenlode every afternoon of the summer is the nearest source of help she can think of. She and
Bel unzip the anorak, peel the passive child out of it. Her thin white arms are covered in bruises, her skinny-rib top stained
with sweat. For the first time they see that her hair is a bright, golden blond, curls plastered to her scalp like astrakhan.
She staggers slightly; her eyes seem to have gone blank. She snatches the jacket from Jade and clutches it to her chest like
a teddy bear
.

‘Come on,’ says Jade, in a tone more gentle than she’s used all afternoon. ‘See over there?’

She points to a line in the grass that emerges from the woods to their right and slashes across the heat-scorched meadow.
‘See it? That’s the stream. When we get there, we can have a paddle and a drink. Cool you off a bit. And then we just have
to go along it till we get to the river.’

Chloe looks ahead without interest. ‘Come on,’ says Jade again. She puts a foot on the bottom rung of the gate, grabs the
top to show how it’s done
.

‘I’m not sure …’ says Bel
.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Jade. ‘I’ve been climbing gates since I was three.’

She’s not sure how much truth there is in this statement, but she knows she’s been doing it for years, and anyway, it’s not
as if climbing gates is a highly rated skill. Besides, there’s no other way through she can think of, short of breaking it
down. She scales the gate like a ladder, swings her leg over as though she were mounting a horse. Sits astride it, looks down
at the others. ‘Easy-peasy,’ she says. Swings her other leg over and drops to the ground. Chloe stares, her mouth half open
.

‘Go on,’ prompts Jade. ‘Give her a hand.’

Bel shuffles the kid forward. Her feet seem to be made of concrete. They drag and catch on the ground as though they’re too
heavy for her legs. Bel gets to her knees and lifts one of Chloe’s feet on to the bottom bar. Tries to clamp the child’s hands
on three bars up, but Chloe refuses to let go of the anorak. After several goes, Bel unpeels a single arm and hooks it through
the rungs. ‘See?’ she says. ‘It’s like a ladder.’

Chloe just stands there. Presses her face into the anorak and inhales, deeply, for comfort. Stares at Jade like she’s visiting
the zoo
.

Eventually Bel puts her hands under Chloe’s bum and heaves. Unwillingly, the leg on the bar straightens up. The other just
hangs in the air. The kid wobbles. Looks scared. Says nothing
.
She’s been silent since they waded through the dock leaves on the edge of the Hundred-Acre
.

‘It’s OK. Go on. Put the other one on the next bar. You can do it.’

Bel stands up and leans her body against Chloe’s, takes the weight against herself. Wow, she thinks again. I thought she was
heavy before, but now she feels like a bag of sand. She unpeels Chloe’s anorak hand and puts it on the top of the gate. It’s
a weak grip, for the child is pressing her elbow into her side so as not to lose the sacred garment. ‘There you go,’ says
Bel. ‘Almost there.’

It takes for ever to manoeuvre Chloe to the top. But eventually her crotch is on a level with the bar and she’s wibble-wobbling
at the hips. ‘Lift your leg up,’ says Jade. ‘Go on. Just swing it over.’

Chloe looks down, as though she’s noticed the ground for the first time, then she bends at the waist and lies the length of
her body along the top bar. The anorak slips between her torso and the gate; a sheer, slippery base to take her weight
.

‘Come on,’ says Jade. Chloe stares at her, frozen. Grips her perch with chunky thighs
.

‘Oh, come
on
, Chloe!’

Bel has a rush of rage. Doesn’t know where it comes from, just knows that she wants this afternoon over. She’s sick of being
patient, sick of the way her day’s turned out, sick of thistles and cowpats and nobbles of hardened earth that get into shoes,
and can’t bear the sight of the kid any more. She wants her off the gate. She jumps forward and shoves, with all the strength
she has left
.

Chloe slithers round the bar and pitches forward, head-first, through the air
.

It seems like a very long time until she lands
.

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.