by Alex Marwood
‘I know you’re busy,’ says Penny. ‘But we’d give you plenty of notice. Everything needs plenty of notice now, because it takes months for the CRB checks to go through.’
Instantly she’s blushing and stammering. She’s on a lifetime licence. A disclosure form won’t reveal who she is, but it will certainly show that she’s got a record. And Jim knows nothing. Not about her past, not about the reality of her present.
Penny smiles. ‘I know. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Lots of people feel offended, but honestly, it’s just another piece of bureaucratic form-filling.’
‘Another job-creation scheme,’ says Jim.
Lionel takes a drink. ‘That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about,’ he says. ‘It’s all upside-down nowadays. The government squandering millions of pounds of our money making out that innocent people like you are suspects when we all know where the problem actually lies.’
‘Well, you don’t actually know for sure,’ jokes Jim. ‘My wife could have a long criminal history, for all you know.’
Lionel gives him the patient look of someone with no sense of humour. ‘I’m just saying,’ he says slowly, ‘that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’
Kirsty rises to the bait. Grabs the chance to take the focus away from school visits.
‘Seriously? You’d just chuck them on the scrapheap?’
‘Well, let’s face it. You can pretty much predict which kids are going to turn out feral, just from looking at their parents.’
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Wow.’
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You can’t deny it. I bet you’ve got apartheid at your own school gates. Don’t try and pretend you haven’t.’
‘I …’ she says.
‘It’s hardly a new phenomenon. Generation after generation like that. Where there’s a fat slattern mother feeding her kids McDonald’s and shouting at the school staff, you can guarantee there’s a fat slattern grandmother necking cider and fighting with the neighbours.’
‘Gosh,’ Kirsty says again. Remembers her maternal grandmother’s neat cottage: ceramic dancing ladies lined up on the windowsill, not a speck of dust anywhere. She probably thinks – thought? Kirsty has no idea, even, which members of her family are still alive – that the problem stemmed from her daughter having taken up with a gyppo. She certainly wouldn’t have seen that there was a connection between her respectable chapel-going rigidity and the unwashed, thieving grandchildren who swarmed off Ben Walker’s pig farm. ‘So you’re saying it’s genetic, then?’
‘Well, you can’t deny it runs in families.’
Kirsty suddenly remembers that there’s mustard in the kitchen; excuses herself to go and fetch it. She can’t hear any more for the time being.
11 a.m.
‘No! Out!’
Bel looks up, expecting to see that a dog has wandered into the shop. A girl her own age stands in the doorway. Shorter than she is, with a pinched look of resentment on her face.
Mrs Stroud comes out from behind the counter and advances on her, waving one hand ceilingwards. ‘Out!’ she barks.
‘Oh, come on,’ says the girl. ‘I only wanted a Kit Kat.’
‘I’ll bet you did,’ says Mrs Stroud. ‘Out!’
The girl is plump, in a malnourished sort of way. A faded red polka-dot ra-ra skirt, frills above the knees, and an overtight striped halter top. Pierced ears, from which dangle a pair of lowcarat gold hoops. Her brown hair, slightly greasy, has been given a rough kitchen-scissor cut at chin level. Bel carries on selecting her pick-’n’-mix as the scene unfolds. Tries not to look like she’s watching, but doesn’t manage well.
‘No, look.’ The girl opens her palm to show a twenty-pence piece. Certainly enough for a Kit Kat, and probably a few Fruit Salads as well. ‘I’ve got money.’
‘Oh yes?’ The woman has reached the door and is holding it open. ‘And where did you nick that from?’
The girl looks livid.
‘Come on. Out. You know there’s no Walkers allowed in here.’
Ah. Bel understands now. She’s a Walker. She’s not actually seen one close-up before, apart from the straggle-haired, enormously fat mother who occasionally pushes an empty pram up to the bus stop. But the whole village knows who the Walkers are.
‘Ah, c’mon!’ The girl tries again.
‘No! Out!’
The Walker girl turns on her heel and trudges from the shop. Mrs Stroud slams the door behind her hard enough that the bell clangs for three full seconds. Then she squeezes back in behind the counter, perches on her stool and returns to leafing through a subscription copy of True Life Stories that’s not been collected yet.
‘How’s your mum and dad?’ she asks suddenly.
‘Stepfather,’ corrects Bel.
‘Whatever,’ says Mrs Stroud. She’s a shrewish woman, even without the irritation of a Walker in her shop. She likes to describe the place as ‘the heart of the village’. Which means that it’s the place where most of the local malice and rumour is collected and disseminated. And she knows that, as the owner of the only shop in the village, she has an audience that needs to keep on her good side and tolerate her mark-ups and nasty tongue, for convenience’s sake.
‘In Malaysia,’ says Bel.
‘Malaysia, eh? What’s that then? A holiday?’
Bel grunts.
‘So, what? Taken your sister, have they?’
Bel sighs. ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Half-sister,’ she adds.
‘I’m surprised they didn’t take you then?’ The question is pointed, sharp. How she loves an opportunity to get a dig in at a child.
Bel feels a twinge of irritation. ‘Yeah, well,’ she says. ‘I don’t suppose they did it with you in mind.’
Mrs Stroud takes offence. Offence is her default position. ‘Well!’ she says. ‘No need to speak like that!’
Bel says nothing. Mrs Stroud licks the tip of her tongue and flips a couple of pages, noisily.
‘I can ban you just as easily as I can ban a Walker,’ she bursts out. ‘Don’t think just because you come from the manor that that’ll make a difference.’
Her back turned, Bel rolls her eyes. She turns back to face the shop and gives the old bat a broad smile. ‘Sorry, Mrs Stroud,’ she says, her voice full of oil and honey.
‘I should think so,’ says Mrs Stroud. ‘I can’t believe your father would like to hear you talking to a grown-up like that.’
‘Stepfather,’ says Bel.
‘Whatever,’ says Mrs Stroud. Leans her chin on her hand and glares at her magazine.
Bel looks at her aslant. Turns her back and shifts her bag across the shelf to cover her hand movements. She picks up a Curly Wurly and balances it on the pick-’n’-mix pot. Then quickly, surreptitiously, she snatches up a four-finger Kit Kat and drops it into the depths of her bag.
‘How much are the Flying Saucers?’ she asks, casually.
‘Two p,’ says Mrs Stroud, not looking up.
Two p? They’re a penny each over in the shop at Great Barrow. God, Mrs Stroud knows how to rip every last penny out of people too young to drive a car. Bel selects one in each colour and drops them into the pot, then goes up to the counter to make her purchases. The Kit Kat seems to be generating heat through the walls of her bag. She has the money to pay for it, but that’s not the point.
Out in the silent village day – too early for teenagers, the grown-ups at work or fiddling away being house proud – she finds the Walker girl sitting on the Bench, glumly drumming her heels on thin air. She sits down next to her.
‘Hi,’ she says.
The girl ignores her.
Bel feels around in her bag – not much in there apart from a copy of Jackie and her purse – until her fingers close on the stolen Kit Kat. She pulls it out, offers it.
‘What?’ asks the girl.
‘I got you this.’
The girl looks suspicious. Glares at Bel.
‘What for?’
‘Whatever. D’yo
u want it or not?’
‘How much?’ she asks doubtfully.
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’ve got money,’ she says, aggressively. ‘I’m not a bloody charity case.’
‘Yeah,’ says Bel, ‘but I didn’t pay for it, you see.’
The girl looks stunned. Then admiring. Then curious.
‘Silly cow,’ says Bel.
The girl laughs. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Silly cow.’
She takes the chocolate, finds a trench beneath the wrapper and runs a thumbnail down it. Snaps off a finger. ‘D’you want some?’ she asks, unenthusiastically. Offering stuff to someone else comes uneasily to her. She doesn’t get much chance to practise.
‘No thanks,’ says Bel airily, and shows her paper bag of sweets. ‘I’m fine.’
The girl is relieved, but doesn’t say it. The two sit quietly for a while in blazing sunshine, savouring the twin pleasures of sugar and summer holidays.
‘I’m Jade,’ says the girl, eventually.
‘I’m Bel,’ says Bel.
Chapter Eleven
Martin tries Jackie again. He’s been ringing all day, and all evening, ever since she vanished in that minicab. Knows she’ll answer eventually; and if she doesn’t, he’ll go back up there and wait for her to come home.
He fills in a couple of hours by googling Kirsty Lindsay, the journalist who tried to chat him up on the beach. A bit of him had expected to find that she was just pretending to be a journalist – he’s never heard of her and thought she seemed pretty unprofessional, the way she just started talking to him like that, without identifying herself – but to his surprise he finds that she does exist; that she has scores of bylines, in fact.
He trawls through the Google hits to learn the nature of the beast while he waits for Jackie to answer. He knows that her phone is working again, because he dialled it once when he was following her down Fore Street, heard it ring in her pocket and saw her pull it out and check the display. It’s only a matter of time before she responds, he thinks. All women want a man who’s loyal. They say so all the time. Well, if she wants loyal, he’ll show her loyal. No matter how long it takes. The phone rings out, again and again. He wonders if she knows that her voicemail has been deactivated.
He wonders about journalists as he reads. About their intrusive nosiness, their assumptions, the way they damn entire groups with a single sentence. The hacking scandal was just the tip of the iceberg, really. Lindsay doesn’t seem much worse, or much better, than the rest of them. She doesn’t seem to have any specialist knowledge, or cover any particular subjects, other than that most of what she writes about happens in the south-east. But she’s certainly got opinions. Plenty of those.
He rings Jackie. He waited, after she left in the minicab, until it got dark, until all the lights were on in her block and the doors firmly locked, and then he left. He doesn’t give up easily, but he’s not a fool. She’s gone away for the night. Has she got a new man? Replaced him that easily, that casually? No. It can’t be that. He’s seen enough of her life to know that she’s not been dating.
He sits with the phone between his knees and glances at the clock radio: 10.45 – news over, Question Time in full swing. He’ll ring her once more, then he’ll watch to the end of that and try her again. She has to answer eventually.
He carries on reading Lindsay’s bylines as Question Time plays in the background. She’s very patchy, he notices. Sometimes she seems capable of doing her job and just reporting actual news, but a good half of the time she inserts herself, shows her partisan attitudes, even makes jokes. It’s those articles, he notices, that seem to carry her picture at the top.
‘Unprofessional,’ he mutters as he mouses and clicks. The way she digs and exposes and thinks it’s OK to be flippant about her subjects. Maybe I ought to take up journalism. Maybe I should start by doing an exposé on her.
Jackie’s still not answering. He puts the phone on to Speaker and Automatic Redial and continues his search for Kirsty Lindsay. She doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Doesn’t seem to show up at all much before 1999. Degree from the Open University, 1998, then a slow trickle of bylines from a local paper in the Midlands. He starts searching backwards. Tries Facebook, Myspace, Friends Reunited, Genes Reunited. She has no presence on any of them. Doesn’t get a mention attached to any school, any reunions, any relatives; clearly never won a prize, never distinguished herself in any way, and no one has been looking for her.
Suddenly he realises that a voice is coming from the handset. She’s picked up. He snatches it up and puts it to his ear. ‘Hello?’
A woman’s voice, cold and hard; suspicious. ‘Who is this?’
‘Who is this?’ he asks.
‘Who did you want to speak to?’
‘Jackie. Jackie Jacobs,’ he says. ‘Have I dialled the wrong number?’
A fractional pause. ‘Who’s calling?’
‘Martin,’ he says.
‘Martin who?’
‘Martin Bagshawe.’
He hears her breathe. The voice is faintly familiar. It’s someone he’s met before, someone he knows. Not well, but he doesn’t know anyone well, really.
‘OK, Martin,’ she says, ‘I need you to listen to me very carefully and pay attention to what I say.’
A surge of adrenalin makes him dizzy. She’s dead. Something’s happened to her.
‘Is Jackie OK?’ he asks. ‘What’s happened?’
‘She’s fine,’ she says sharply. ‘And Martin, in answer to your question, you’re what’s happened.’
Her voice changes, as though she’s reading a pre-prepared speech off a piece of paper. ‘Listen, Martin, you need to understand. Jackie is not your girlfriend. She’s not your friend. In fact, she finds your behaviour aggressive and frightening.’
‘I—’ he begins to protest, but she ploughs on, ignoring him.
‘Martin, I want you to listen very carefully. Jackie wants nothing to do with you. What you’ve been doing, all this following and watching, it’s harassment. It’s not a show of devotion and it won’t persuade her to change her mind. You need to stop it. Now.’
Who is this woman? He knows the voice; it’s maddeningly familiar. Now he hears his own breath, coming fast.
‘I don’t know who you are …’ he begins.
‘It doesn’t matter who I am. All you need to know is that Jackie is in a place of safety and she wants you to leave her alone.’
‘Place of safety …? What are you—’
‘You heard me, Martin. And I’m telling you now, you’d be well advised to listen to what I’m saying. You need to leave Jackie alone. You need to stop.’
‘If Jackie wants that,’ he snaps, abruptly angry, ‘she can tell me herself. Who are you? Who are you to tell her what to do?’
‘No,’ says the woman. ‘She’s not coming to the phone. I’m going to hang up now, Martin. And when I do, you’re not to call this number again. You’re not to call, or send any other type of message, to this number. You are not to come to her house, not to come to her place of work, not to follow her in the street. Do you understand? Because if you do, we will be calling the police. Do you get that?’
He can barely articulate. His lips are cold and numb, his throat constricted. ‘Yes,’ he mumbles. Whoever this woman is, she’s not going to listen to reason. She’s got to Jackie and she’s going to destroy everything, twist it till it looks ugly, deformed. He won’t argue with her. People like that – it’s not worth wasting your breath.
The line goes dead. He dials again. It goes straight to the plummy robot woman, who tells him that the mailbox has been deactivated.
His hands are shaking.
Chapter Twelve
He’s a cocky young sod. Kirsty can tell by the swagger, by the imperious curl of the lip, by the way he wears his hat slightly offcentre, as if to make a point. By the fact that he’s got his nightstick out as he patrols up and down the line and slaps it against his palm, rhythmically, as he eyes the w
omen with an expression somewhere between a sneer and a leer. There’s a few of them in every town. He reminds her of her brother Darren: his air of sex with a predatory edge. A nasty young man, but he might well be useful.
She can’t wait to be done with this piece. She wants to get home and sort things out with Jim. And she still has the remains of her two-day hangover. She wants to be at the dining-room table that doubles as her office, back in Farnham, with a cup of proper coffee and the laptop open and her husband mollified. She will be, soon. Just needs to mingle, like the rest of the press pack, with the first trippers back into Funnland, and she’s out of here. She has fifteen hundred words to file by lunchtime tomorrow and needs to get writing.
The queue edges forward. She’s amused to see that a lot of her colleagues are also mingling undeclared among the civilians in the hope of picking up some juicy, usable quotes without having to seek permission, studiously ignoring each other though they will all be buying each other drinks in a couple of hours. Stan shambles up the street, looking as hungover as she feels. The landlord of the White Horse will probably be able to take the rest of the summer off. Few drinkers are as free-spending as a journalist on expenses.
He walks past the straggly queue and straight up to her.
‘Sorry about that,’ he says loudly, for the benefit of the people behind. ‘Took ages to find a parking space.’
He slots himself in beside her, lowers his voice. ‘Of course, it’s less about the queue than the company.’
‘Is that you being roguish?’ she asks.
He slide his specs down his nose, twinkles at her over them. ‘I wouldn’t know how.’
He offers her an Extra Strong Mint and they shuffle along companionably.
‘Get back to your room all right the other night?’ she asks.
‘I should be asking you that,’ he says. ‘You were so many sheets to the wind I thought you might go flapping off across the Channel. And how was your room, after you dodged the Ripper?’
‘Thanks for that, Mr Pot. It was great. It had a sink in the corner for throwing up in. But tell you what, I’m in such bad odour at home, I should be wearing a hazard label. I completely forgot we were having some City cheeses over to dinner to try and oil them up for a job for Jim.’