by Alex Marwood
‘Ah, right,’ says Stan. Starts to edge aside; knows that being remembered for being helpful can swing the odds in his favour later on. ‘C’mon, guys!’ he shouts. ‘Let the lady through!’
Grudgingly the crowd edges apart and the blond head starts to progress. A couple of flashbulbs go off: opportunity photos, the sort that, in the digital age when no one has to worry about wasting film, everybody takes by the thousand just in case they turn out relevant later.
‘Christ,’ says Stan, who’s taller and can see better.
‘What?’
‘Bang on the nail, as ever,’ he boasts. ‘That’s Victor Cantrell’s missus. For definite.’
And Kirsty guesses, with plummeting dread – before the grey-white, tear-streaked face comes fully into her field of vision – that Victor Cantrell’s missus is also Amber Gordon.
1.30 p.m.
‘I’m hungry.’
Debbie Francis shoots her sister a look so filled with venom it almost burns. ‘Shut up, Chloe,’ she says.
Chloe squats, troll-like, on the verge on the other side of the road, sucking on a Chupa-Chups lolly. ‘Mum said you was to look after me,’ she says.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ says Debbie, and climbs off Darren Walker’s lap. She pulls her T-shirt down under her leather jacket – it’s too hot for leather, but this black, studded blouson is the coolest item of clothing she’s ever owned, and she’ll take the discomfort for the sake of style. She stalks across the tarmac in her four-inch heels and towers over her sister.
‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll pinch you,’ she says. ‘Mum left me in charge and that means you have to do what I tell you. All right?’
‘But—’ begins Chloe.
Debbie sticks out two hard red-nailed fingers and pinches the skin above her elbow. Chloe yelps, then begins to cry. Debbie made her take her anorak off an hour ago, and her skin is already lobster-pink; stings hard enough where the pinch was to make her eyes dazzle.
‘Now shut up,’ she hears Debbie’s voice through the haze of pain, ‘or there’ll be more where that came from.’
‘But she said. She said!’
She sees the fingers come up again and feint towards her, and shrinks back into the grass. ‘And. I’m. Bloody. Busy,’ snaps Debbie. ‘Just sit there and eat your lolly and I’ll get you some dinner when I’m good and ready, OK?’
She turns her back on the weeping child, and her stalk becomes a sashay as she sees her Romeo, legs apart on the bench, his arm laid out along the length of its back. With his crotch thrust forward, she can see the outline of his erection and feels a rush of teenage pride. Not everyone can get Darren Walker. He may be rough, but he’s choosy. She reaches the bench, glimpses his self-satisfied smile as she climbs on board. I shouldn’t like him, she thinks. No girl should like a boy who look at her like that. But I do, I can’t help it. There’s something about him that does something to me.
There are no subtleties, no niceties, with Darren. The boys she’s known before are fumblers; apologetic and tentative. They’d never simply return to where they were before an interruption. Within ten seconds his hand is back up inside her shirt, inside her bra, stroking her nipple with his thumb. She’s used to the squeezing, probing, poky fingers of her peers. The sensation makes her melt, makes her shift her purchase on his lap the better to feel his tumescence. She hears a surprising, delicate sound – half sigh, half moan – escape from somewhere deep inside her, and wonders: where did that come from? Sees the smile – that look of triumph – return to his face and feels him bury his free hand in the hair at the back of her neck. He smells of cigarette smoke and chewing-gum.
Thighs astride his, she presses herself crotch to crotch with him, feels that familiar twitch deep inside. ‘Nice,’ says Darren Walker. ‘Now, where were we?’
‘What are you doing?’ asks Chloe. Gives a huge snotty sniff as emphasis.
‘Never you mind,’ says Darren, and shifts beneath Debbie on the bench. He moves his hand round to attempt to unsnag her bra at the back, and she slaps it away.
‘Someone’ll see,’ she says.
Darren laughs at her nastily. ‘Bit late to worry about that now. And besides, they’re all down at the river, ennit?’ Most of the population of the village has taken off to a stretch of the Evenlode by the railway tracks a couple of miles away: a chunk of broomy watermeadow that’s gradually turned into a communal swimming-hole since the embankment rendered it unfit for grazing anything but sheep.
‘Not all,’ says Debbie.
‘Yeah,’ he says, and throws her sister a look of disgust. He’s finished with trying to impress Debs by getting the kid rides on the swings and tuppenny chews; she’s served her purpose and now she’s nothing more than an annoyance. ‘We can go up Chapman’s barn, if you like,’ he offers.
Debbie sneaks a look around her to hide her excitement. Chapman’s barn is one of the village teens’ most fabled places, somewhere the grown-ups rarely go. She knows that Chapman’s barn has been the venue of many of Darren Walker’s conquests; that girls older and more experienced than she is have been pinioned by him on its dusty straw bales. And because she knows it, the very mention of the place is enough to produce a musky, salty taste in her mouth. She knows this will be a brief and feral coupling; that it will be accompanied by no protestations of affection or even much effort to ensure any satisfaction for herself, but the thought of Darren Walker’s thick, stubby cock inside her, of the scratch of straw on her buttocks and the breathlessness as he crushes her carelessly beneath him makes her weak with lust, impatient of anything that will get between her and its satisfaction. She’s sixteen years old, been on the pill for a year, and it’s about time she started living.
As if reading her mind, he bucks sharply against her pelvis, making her yelp.
‘What are you doing?’
Now they both speak together. ‘Shut up!’
‘That boy’s called Darren Walker,’ announces Chloe. ‘Mum said you wasn’t to go near him.’
They break apart, sit angrily side by side on the bench and glare at her.
‘You don’t know nothing about it, Chloe Francis,’ says Debbie. ‘You best keep your mouth shut or you’ll be sorry.’
‘Take me home,’ says Chloe. ‘I’m hungry.’
Darren groans. ‘Fuck sake,’ he says. ‘Can’t you get rid of her?’
‘You know I can’t.’
‘How old is she anyway?’
‘I’m four,’ says Chloe. ‘Well, fuck sake,’ he says again. ‘I’m thirsty,’ says Chloe. ‘I want my dinner.’
Darren reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and produces a single cigarette. He lights it with an Army Surplus Zippo and sits there looking up at the sun, flipping the lid open and closed. ‘Don’t give me one then,’ says Debbie.
‘You’re not old enough to smoke,’ he replies.
‘Am too,’ says Debbie. ‘Have been since April.’
Darren takes a long, long drag, holds it deep in his lungs, joint-style, and exhales a thick stream of smoke into the air. ‘Sixteen, huh? Not jailbait no more then.’
Debbie doesn’t know whether to laugh or snarl, so she settles for something in between. Chloe glares at them from her perch on the verge, digging the heels of her sandals over and over into the turf to expose a pair of brown earth runnels. She’s a pretty child – fair in a pink, formless fashion, dimples in her cheeks – but she looks like a grubby hobgoblin right now, glowering under the hedge. ‘I’m telling Mum on you,’ she says.
‘Telling her what?’ says Debbie. ‘Who d’you think she’ll believe, anyway?’
Christ, she thinks. I’m sixteen. I’m starting work in two months. This should be the best summer ever, and instead I’m stuck being a babysitter because Mum couldn’t be bothered to take her on the bus to Chipping Norton. Shouldn’t have had another kid if she couldn’t be bothered to look after it.
Darren takes a small curl from behind her ear and twists it round his finger. She feels
that small rush of liquid lust once more.
‘I want a drink,’ says Chloe. ‘Take me home.’
‘Why don’t you just go home?’ asks Darren nastily. ‘Go on. Shoo.’
Chloe looks stubborn.
‘Bloody hell,’ says Debbie. ‘I’ll give you ten p.’
‘You haven’t got ten p,’ says Chloe doubtfully.
‘Yeah, but I do,’ says Darren grandly. His erection is painful in his drainpipes and he’s afraid they might cut off his circulation altogether. ‘Here. You can buy a Mars Bar.’
‘Don’t like Mars Bars.’
‘I don’t care,’ he says, and throws the coin at her. ‘Just bugger off, will you?’
Chloe is torn between crying and collecting the money, so she does both. ‘I’m telling Mum,’ she assures her sister again. ‘You said bugger.’
‘Didn’t,’ says Debbie. ‘He did. Now, you go straight home after the shop, yeah?’
Chloe unbundles her anorak from under the hedge and starts to slowly put it on. ‘Come on,’ says Debbie. ‘Seriously. I’m going to have to start throwing stones in a minute.’ Darren’s hand has slipped under her skirt and a single finger is working its way inside her knicker elastic.
Chloe starts to plod up the road. Gets about twenty yards, then stops uncertainly. ‘I don’t know the way,’ she says.
‘Gaaaah!’ Debbie’s eyes roll back into her head with frustration. ‘Chloe! We come up this way every day! Just go, will ya?’
Chloe’s eyes fill with tears. ‘I don’t want to! Mum said you was to look after me!’
‘Oh Christ,’ says Debbie, defeated. ‘Well, you can’t keep the ten p.’
‘Chrissake,’ says Darren, and slings himself across the bench temperamentally to change the pressure on his ’nads. ‘We’ve got to get rid of her,’ he says. ‘I’m not taking her with us.’
‘Yes, but, Darren,’ says Debbie, torn. ‘Mum’ll rip me to shreds if anything happens to her.’
‘Oh yeah – Mummy,’ says Darren, and turns his back on her.
Silence. They can hear how summer-sleepy the village is; can hear the cattle lowing all the way down at the home farm.
‘You’re just a kid anyway,’ he says sulkily. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking.’
Debbie heaves a sigh. She hates her sister, hates her mother. This is meant to be my summer. They’re all so selfish.
She gazes up the road despairingly, feeling the moment slip away. He’s the sexiest boy I’ll ever go with, she thinks. And bloody Chloe …
Two small figures round the corner from the war memorial. One sturdy, brown-haired and wearing red, the other willowy in comparison, and blond.
‘Oi, Darren,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that your sister?’
Chapter Thirty-three
She’s crying before she sits down. Humiliating, gopping, overwhelming tears that stream from her eyes and her nose and the corners of her wide-open mouth and fill her with shame. She searches in her pockets – they’ve taken her bag off her at the front desk – for a snot-rag, but finds nothing. Turns in appeal to the constable-chaperon who stands impassively by the door and realises that she’ll get no help there.
They’ve broken his nose. His face is a mass of purple-yellow bruises, but it’s still him, staring at her unblinking across the table. It’s all still there: the fine, noble bone structure, the rich dark hair and the lock that curls down over his high, intelligent forehead, the strong hands with their long artist’s fingers. His face suddenly breaks into that wide blue social smile with which he keeps people at arm’s length.
‘Hey, babe,’ he says. ‘I was beginning to think you’d forgotten all about me.’
She’s so stunned that the tears stop dead. She stares at him open-mouthed – partly because of the surprise and partly because she has been unable to breathe through her nose for the past thirty hours. She didn’t believe it while he was still in custody, while she wasn’t allowed to see him; could still persuade herself that there had been some terrible mistake, that she’d wake up and find it had all been a dream. But now that she’s here, and he’s charged – with, they say, more to come – and she can see that sunny smile, she believes it all, every word of it.
‘What?’ she asks.
The smile again, the hand reaching across the table top for hers.
‘Did you bring my shirts?’ he asks. ‘Like I asked?’
‘I …’ She’s lost for words. It’s as though she’s visiting him at a day-spa. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘They’re outside. I left them at the desk. They wouldn’t let me bring them in.’
‘That’s my girl,’ he says. ‘I knew I could rely on you. Did you put the Elvis in there? With the embroidery?’
‘Yes,’ she says. Finds herself adding, as though this were a normal situation, ‘And the green one. You know. The cord. You always thought that suited you.’
‘You’re a gem,’ he says. ‘A good girl.’
My God, she thinks. I don’t know you at all.
‘So how are you keeping?’ he asks, as though she’s a maiden aunt come in from Sevenoaks. ‘What have you been up to? How’s work?’
She wants to shout, to punch him. What do you think I’ve been up to, you arsehole? Throwing cocktail parties? I’ve not been to work. How do you think I’m going to go to work? I can’t get out of the front door, for God’s sake.
‘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 emot
ion. 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.