The Wicked Girls

by Alex Marwood

  But here they are, their names inextricably linked in the minds of the world. And banned by law from ever seeing each other again, as long as they live. Venables and Thompson; Mary Bell; Walker and Oldacre – back in the days before Child Protection took them out of public circulation, child murderers’ names were as well known – better, often – as the names of their victims. If she quoted their names at a dinner party, the majority of the guests would nod knowingly. Chloe Francis? They’d probably need prompting.

  Her mouth is as dry as the desert. She screws her eyes up and forces more scalding liquid between her lips, holding it on her tongue and breathing in, hard, to cool it.

  It’s a condition of your licence, Kirsty, she says to herself. No one around you even knows there’s such a thing as a probation order in your name, but it’s there nonetheless. For the rest of your life. You are not to see, or speak to, or have contact with each other ever again. Like you’d ever want to.

  Oh, but I do, shrieks a small, angry voice inside. I do. More than anything. More than anything on earth. She’s the only one who knows. The only one who knows how it feels. The only other me in the world. Twenty-five years I’ve been holding this in, living with my guilt, mastering the art of dissimulation. Twenty-five years with no family, lying to the friends I’ve made, lying to Jim, lying to my children. How would they look at me, if they knew? He’s a forgiving man. But could he still love me, if he knew he’d married The Most Hated Child in Britain?

  Bel Oldacre. Kirsty doesn’t even know her new name.

  It’s raining by the time Amber works up the guts to leave. She’s hidden away for hours: first in the empty mirror maze, then in her office, among the files and the boxes of J Cloths, until the afternoon shift is over; scared to come out, scared to show her face in the park. Outside, the rumble of the rollercoaster, the screams of its passengers; inside, the silent scream in her ears. Then, as an English summer storm sets in, the sounds die down and the music, ride by ride, is switched off. It’s not worth wasting the power, as the crowds drop as the rain gets up. Any punters who want to stay are given a refund, or offered free entry another day. Most of them don’t even think to ask; just rush their wailing kids off to the weather-proofed arcades on the Corniche.

  Still, she is afraid. She scuttles from her office towards the staff gate as though she expects Jade to be lurking in the shadows; pulls her fleece tight round her breasts and wraps her scarf – everyone who lives in Whitmouth carries a scarf with them wherever they go, even at the height of summer – round her head to hide her face. Crazy, she knows: even if Jade had been hanging around, she would have been cleared out with the rest of the stragglers an hour ago. But still, she is afraid.

  Jason Murphy is sheltering in the hut, eating a cheese-and-onion pasty with his feet up on the desk. He looks at her, all insolence in his navy sweater, peaked cap shoved to the back of his head, as she swipes her card across the reader, clocking out.

  ‘All right?’ he says.

  She feels a surge of annoyance. She knows perfectly well how Jade Walker found her way to the mirror maze. And the fact that he knows that something else has happened has given him some edge, some stupid sense of power. He smirks as he watches her.

  ‘No,’ she says, turning to him, ‘I’m not all right, actually, Jason.’

  That look, that ugly sense of entitlement, the refusal to accept that ‘respect’ is a two-way street. Jason wants respect all the time: she’s seen him squaring up to neighbours, to kids, to random men in the street, demanding it. She’s never seen him do anything to earn it.

  ‘If you ever do anything like that again,’ she says, ‘I’m going to put you on report.’ She’s not his direct boss, but she’s management, and has authority of sorts over everyone who isn’t. And she’s damned if she’s going to let him forget it.

  ‘Do what?’ he says – whines – though he knows what she’s talking about.

  ‘You know what,’ she says. ‘You’re here to provide security, not take beer money off anyone who wants to give it you. There’s computers here, Jason, and cash, and it’s your job to see they don’t get stolen.’

  ‘She got past me,’ he says sulkily.

  She waits two beats, giving him the gimlet eye. ‘Don’t give me that,’ she says. ‘If I ever find out you’ve been up to that sort of trick again, I’ll be reporting you, do you get me?’

  He tries to give her the eye back. Fails. Amber perfected the art of outstaring the enemy at the Blackdown Hills detention centre. It was necessary for survival then, and it’s a skill she has never allowed to fade.

  ‘And get your feet off that desk,’ she says.

  Slowly, sulkily, he drops one foot, then the other, to the ground. Links his fingers over his vulnerable crotch.

  Amber says nothing more. Lets herself out of the street door and closes it behind her.

  ‘Skanky cow,’ mutters Jason, putting his feet back up on the desktop and picking up the remains of his pasty. ‘Skanky cow,’ he repeats, and rips off a mouthful with his teeth.

  Out on the Corniche the rain is horizontal; there’s barely a body to be seen. Amber swings right, hurrying for the bus stop.

  A voice calls her name. Her old name. She freezes.

  ‘Bel!’ it calls again.

  Jade Walker emerges from the doorway of The Best Fish and Chips on the South Coast, walks towards her. She must’ve been waiting for her to come out. Shit.

  Amber hurries forward again. Pretends she doesn’t hear.

  Jade raises her voice. ‘Bel! Please!’

  She swings round, catches a blast of rain-shards full in the face. It blinds her for a second. When her vision clears she sees that Jade is still there, blinking at her, hair rat-tailed on to healthy pink cheeks.

  Amber has to stop her. Has to shut her up. The woman has lost her mind, isn’t thinking things through at all. She needs to shock her into understanding. She races towards her, raging; sees her recoil and feels pleasure in making her do so. Jade’s smaller than she is. Bearing down, she knows she could take her out with a single fist.

  She grabs her upper arm, clamps down on the muscle like a vice, digging in her fingertips to make it hurt.

  ‘Go away!’ she hisses. ‘Do you hear me? Don’t call me that. Don’t follow me. Just fuck off. We have nothing to say to each other.’

  ‘Bel …’

  Amber shakes her head, side to side, over and over like an angry dog. Hears her voice rise to a shriek to combat the wind. ‘No!’ she shouts. ‘I don’t know that name. That’s not my name. Just – shut up! Shut up! You know we’re not meant to see each other. You know! Are you mad? Go away!’

  She throws the woman’s arm away like a chicken bone. Pushes her for good measure. Jade stumbles back a pace, stands staring at her with what looks like despair. Good. Bloody good.

  She forces her voice back under her control. She can’t afford this level of agitation. Even here, on this empty boulevard, eyes will be watching. She can’t let anyone see. Right outside work, for God’s sake. What is she thinking?

  ‘I’m not Bel,’ she says. ‘I haven’t been Bel for years, you know that. Just like you. What are you doing?’

  ‘I didn’t mean …’ begins Jade. ‘I – if I’d known I’d’ve—’

  ‘Well, what are you doing now? You should have gone. What do you think they’d do if they …? Shit. Just go. Don’t follow me. Just fuck off back wherever you’ve come from.’

  She turns on her heel and walks towards the bus stop. There’s a bus due in three minutes and she’s damned if she’s going to miss it.

  She is jittering by the time she enters the shelter – anger, fear, shock, all turned to adrenalin. Her breath rasps in her throat and she has to sit down, hard, on the graffitied bench. There’s no one here, thank God – no one who knows her, anyway, just a couple of kids wrapped in teenage lust in the corner. They glance up briefly, his hand inside the front zip of her jacket, then turn back, indifferent.

  Amber breathes
. Holds her hands out, palms down, watches them tremble. I can’t do this, she thinks. It’s too much. I can’t lose this life. Not because of a stupid coincidence. No one’s going to believe we just met by accident. It would never happen. Shit. Am I going to have to move on again? What’s she doing here, anyway? What the hell is she doing here?

  She sees the bus approach, pushes herself up and goes outside to hail it. It pulls in: crowded. The smell of damp hair and Persil bursts out as the doors open.

  She feels a hand grip her arm. ‘I don’t—’ says Jade. ‘I’m not … look.’

  She presses something into Amber’s hand. Amber looks down. It’s an old cigarette packet; a telephone number is scrawled on it in black biro.

  ‘I just …’ says Jade; looks her in the eye.

  Amber shakes the hand off her arm and mounts the steps of the bus.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Busy, busy, busy. It’s what she’s always done when she’s wanted to avoid thinking: she finds something to do instead. It’s why the house stands out from its neighbours, a little oasis of maintenance and tidiness in a world where redundant washing machines suffice as garden ornaments. Washed windows, bright white nets, sills and woodwork freshly painted, hanging baskets colourful from spring to winter. Vic says it attracts attention, that standing out in a place like this is not a good thing, but she finds it hard to stop. On the days when she can’t get to sleep, she’ll be out there taking a busman’s holiday with a scrubbing brush on the path and the front step, pulling out the furniture to hoover behind it, walking the area round the front of the house with rubber gloves and a bin liner, collecting Greggs sausage-roll bags.

  There are a couple more flapping on the pavement in front of the gate. Amber stands in the rain and struggles with the urge to clear them up. In the end she concedes defeat, pulls the plastic bag she habitually carries from her handbag, and sets about picking up, rain on her back, hair plastered to her face.

  Next-door’s front door opens and Shaunagh Betts comes out, her toddler Tiffany strapped into her pushchair. ‘Ooh, Amber,’ Shaunagh says, ‘putting us all to shame again.’

  Amber straightens up, forces a smile on to her face. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘someone’s got to do it.’

  She sees Shaunagh take offence, realises too late that the comment has been taken as criticism, not self-effacement.

  ‘Yes, well,’ huffs Shaunagh. ‘I’m sorry we don’t all have time.’

  ‘No, no …’ Amber begins, but mother and child have already started off up the road. Amber sighs and goes into her safe house.

  The back door is open and Jackie is huddled in the garden. Amber has a moment of stupid panic when she catches sight of her silhouette. She had briefly forgotten that she had a house-guest at all. Mary-Kate and Ashley have come indoors and are cuddled up together on the living-room sofa; they look up guiltily when she enters. Thank God I’ve got home before Vic, she thinks, scooting them back to their basket. He’s finding it hard enough having an interloper in the house without seeing that as well.

  Fortunately, Jackie’s not an observant sort. Doesn’t notice Amber’s fraught state, just raises a hand in greeting. ‘You’re wet,’ she says.

  ‘So are you,’ says Amber. ‘For God’s sake come into the kitchen.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ says Jackie. ‘I’ll wait till I’ve finished this.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ says Amber. ‘Vic’s not back for hours yet.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She looks grateful. ‘OK.’

  She comes in, stands dripping on the doormat, cigarette in hand. There’s a damp towel hanging over the back of a chair. She’s obviously been coming in and out all morning. Amber hands it to her. She rubs unenthusiastically at her hair. The kitchen steams up, smells of tobacco and unwashed fleece.

  ‘How was your morning?’ asks Amber.

  Jackie shrugs. ‘OK. Bit boring. I watched Trisha and Jeremy Kyle.’

  ‘Might as well have just stood at the window and saved the leccy.’

  Jackie laughs. ‘So is work back on tonight then?’

  Amber nods.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ says Jackie. ‘It’s bad enough not being able to go home without being skint on top.’

  ‘Yeah, I can imagine,’ says Amber, who’s paid for every meal Jackie’s eaten since she got here, apart from the bag of chips she bought yesterday and left, unwrapped and half eaten, on the kitchen table.

  At teatime she takes Jackie’s keys and walks the dogs up to her flat to get her a few changes of clothes. She’s been wearing the tracksuit she arrived in for two days and, now that it’s damp, that fact is impossible to ignore. And a walk is a good way to avoid thinking, anyway. There’s always stuff to see and do on the Wordsworth; always enough external input to keep her thoughts at bay.

  The scarlet plastic lettering that marks Jackie’s block out from the identical grey structures around it has long since come loose. 1 3–19–g -OLE-IDGE –ESCEN-, it reads. An old mattress, stained with salt air and a thousand nocturnal incidents, leans against the wall by the dustbins. Everyone knows that if they don’t pay the bulky refuse fee, the council will come and fetch things away eventually anyway. By the end of each six-month waiting period, the estate’s pavements are strewn with legless beds, springless sofas and scorched coffee tables; teenagers gathering on them the way they used to on the Bench back in Long Barrow.

  The lift isn’t working. She plods up the three storeys to Flat 191.

  The place smells stale, though Jackie’s only been gone three days. Tobacco, old food and the same faint must that always rises off her fleece in the warm, all mixed in with the synthetic waft of a plug-in air freshener in the hall. A bin bag of dirty laundry sits inside the front door, waiting, top gaping open, to go to the launderette. Amber twists up the top and knots it. She might as well take it down, as she’ll pass the shop on her way home. She goes into the living room. An ashtray the size of a paddling pool overflows in the middle of an MDF coffee table. A couple of plates, traces of ketchup and grease dried on, lie crusted beside it with a pint glass that has clearly held beer, flecks of hardened froth up the interior walls.

  In the kitchen, a couple of pans in the sink, an old ready-meal carton on the yellowish Formica. She’s no great housekeeper, Jackie, but she’s not filthy either. And you can’t judge someone by how they keep their house in moments of crisis. Amber’s seen enough interiors, in the bedsit life she led after they tipped her out of Blackdown, to know that Jackie has many rungs to slide down the ladder of self-worth. She chucks the carton and quickly washes up the pans and the plates, leaves them on the drainer to dry.

  The bedroom is dim, the forty-watt-equivalent overhead bulb too weak to illuminate it properly. Amber throws open the curtains. Glances out and sees, with a jolt, the rainproofed figure of Martin Bagshawe standing beside the overgrown forsythia opposite. He must have arrived after she did; she certainly didn’t spot him as she was going in. Maybe he saw her coming and hid? No. Don’t be paranoid. He doesn’t know it was you on the phone.

  For a moment their eyes meet. She ducks back into the room. Yes, but he knows now, she thinks.

  She looks around at Jackie’s possessions, feeling guilty, as though she’s stealing, or reading her diary. A tumble of bedclothes, a half-empty water glass, a copy of heat, a bedside lamp in the style of Tiffany. Not much furniture: the bed, a bedside table, the built-in cupboard. She studies the hanging clothes, and is surprised to see that Jackie owns half a dozen pretty dresses: optimistic cotton with spaghetti straps and generous skirts. She’s so used to seeing her in work gear, or in her ubiquitous denim mini-skirt, she’s never thought she might have other moods. She scoops a couple into the red suitcase that lives beneath the bed, adds two pairs of jeans from the pile beneath the radiator, a couple of pairs of elastic-waisted trousers, some T-shirts. Snatches up the collection of cleansers and creams on the bathroom shelf, notices the toothbrush still in its mug. Adds it to the case, and doesn’t ask herself how Jackie
’s been cleaning her teeth over the time she’s been staying. Maybe she just hasn’t, she thinks, fleetingly. God, I hope she just hasn’t.

  He’s still there, in the drizzle. She studiously avoids his gaze, hurries past as though she’s not registered his presence at all. She can feel his eyes boring into her back as she strides up the road towards the launderette, bin bag in one hand, suitcase dragging behind her, the dogs’ leads hitched over her arm, but he says nothing.

  5 p.m.

  ‘What do we do? What do we do?’

  ‘Shut up. Shut up. Let me think.’

  They stare at the body.

  ‘She’s stopped bleeding.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it? She’s not bleeding. Maybe she’s …’

  ‘No,’ says Bel. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Jade looks down at her hands, as if she’s never seen them before. As if they’ve suddenly been attached to her by magic. She wipes one – mud, blood, river weed – on her skirt, then sees that she’s just made it worse.

  ‘Fuck,’ she says.

  It looks like someone’s stolen the scarecrow from the top field and dumped it at the water’s edge. Floppy, dirty, torn.

  ‘Chloe?’ says Bel, tentatively, though she knows it’s no use. She pokes at her with a toe.

  ‘Oh shit,’ says Jade, ‘I’m going to be in so much trouble.’

  Bel’s head snaps up. ‘Shut up. Just shut up. Who cares about you? Who cares? Look at her.’

  Jade looks again, then bends down and lifts a floppy arm by the wrist, watches it drop like dough into the mud when she lets go.

  ‘Chloe?’ She echoes Bel, as though the name were an incantation, as though it will restore life if they say it often enough. There’s a big gash in her scalp. It has barely bled. Don’t, don’t, don’t, she thinks. People don’t just die like this. Not when we hardly did anything. My nana took six months to die, up in the back bedroom; we could hear it every step of the way. How could she die so quickly? ‘Chloe?’ she says again.