The Wicked Girls

by Alex Marwood

  The cleaner, wife of Seaside Strangler suspect Victor Cantrell, dropped off a bag of treats for her husband at Whitmouth Police Station yesterday morning and spent some time closeted away with him before emerging. Amazingly, she then walked on through the town to spend the day at the Funnland theme park on the beach. Families riding the famous rollercoaster unawares would have been shocked to know that they had such a notorious figure in their midst.

  Works there, thinks Kirsty. She works there, for God’s sake. And you know it. You all know it. You were all making up quotes from her ten days ago when she found that body.

  Cantrell is awaiting charges over a series of murders in the town. For Gordon, though, it’s business as usual. See page 5.

  Kirsty opens the paper, finds the rest of the story, accompanied by a smaller, older picture of Amber and Victor together on the beach. ‘Said a neighbour, Shaunagh Betts, 21,’ it continues:

  ‘It’s amazing. You’d have thought she’d have some shame. She’s always been weird – a snob, always interfering in other people’s business as though she was better than the rest of us – but the way she goes on, you would have thought she was completely innocent.’ Holding her daughter, Tiffany, 2, tightly, she continued: ‘If it was me, I’d be on my knees apologising to the people round here, but she behaves like she’s done nothing wrong. I can’t believe I’ve been bringing my kids up next door to people like that all this time. What if something had happened? I would never have forgiven myself.’

  Another neighbour, Janelle Boxer, 67, said: ‘She always treated him really badly. They kept themselves to themselves most of the time, but sometimes you’d hear her having a go at him, really belittling him. I heard her doing it only the other day, right out in the garden where anyone could hear. It’s hard to believe she didn’t know anything. She must have noticed something. Some of those girls fought back, and there must have been marks on him. I know no one wants to believe they’re living with a monster, but there must have been more to it than that.’

  Cantrell is expected in front of Whitmouth magistrates tomorrow, charged with the murders of Nicole Ponsonby, Keisha Brown, Hannah Hardy and Stacey Plummer, and the attempted murder of a young woman, whose identity we are protecting out of concern for her recovery, on Friday night. The women’s bodies were found dumped heartlessly in spots around the south-coast resort after being attacked and violated. More charges, related to unsolved murders in the town in previous seasons, are expected later in the week.

  Gordon (pictured with Cantrell, above, at a seaside barbecue earlier this year), meanwhile, is unrepentant. ‘I’ve not done anything,’ she told our reporter yesterday. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’

  In bold type beneath the story, a puff for another: My nights in strangler’s lair: centre pages.

  Kirsty stares at the picture and recognises Victor Cantrell as the man who rescued, then abused, her that night in DanceAttack. God, she thinks. Was it him all along? Did I finger Rat Man in the Trib when I really was being followed by the genuine article?

  She feels sick: ashamed of her colleagues and their ability to use words to throw any light they choose to on a situation. Innuendo, allusion and false connection: the staples of a media that’s still awaiting facts. She feels ashamed of herself for having indulged the same faults in her own piece on Sunday. It’s hardly the first time she’s done it – you can’t avoid it when an editor’s had an idea and is paying you to establish it as fact – but she doesn’t think she’s done it by mistake before.

  God, we’re all such liars, she thinks. Is that what made me decide to do this for a living, because I’m the biggest liar of all? I lie to my husband, lie to my children, every single day, and it’s only going to get worse. Even after a quarter of a century, Bel and I are linked by an unbreakable thread, and I can no more forget about it than I can tell the truth.

  She looks down at the paper. Wonders what other delights it has in store.

  Blessed turns up with food and a copy of the paper, her face solemn with sympathy. Amber almost doesn’t let her in, but she knocks and shouts for so long that eventually she peeps through the curtains and sees her there among the crowd. She opens the door and a photographer immediately slips a foot into the gap, hoping to prise it open long enough to get an interior shot. Maybe a picture of Amber looking dishevelled: the woman who spent so much time in her dressing gown she drove her man to murder.

  There’s a scuffle, and Blessed starts haranguing the man in ringing evangelical tones. And then she’s inside, and stabbing at the foot with an umbrella, shouting, ‘You will not pass! You will not pass!’ Mary-Kate and Ashley yap furiously by her ankles as she slams the door and turns to Amber, brushing herself off as though she’s just emerged from a sandstorm. ‘There,’ she says. ‘That was easy.’

  Amber bursts into tears.

  Blessed puts down her shopping bags and gives her a hug. The first hug Amber can remember receiving in years. Vic was never a hugger: too keen, she understands now, on carrying his embraces through to death. It makes her cry harder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Blessed. ‘I would have come before, but you weren’t answering your telephone and I thought maybe you’d gone away. Until I heard you’d been at Funnland.’

  ‘No,’ says Amber. ‘No, I’ve been here all the time.’

  ‘I brought you some food,’ says Blessed. ‘I didn’t know what you liked, so I got a bit of everything. You must tell me what you need, and I’ll bring it.’

  Amber sniffs and wipes her eyes. ‘Maybe some … I’ve run out of dog food. They’re living on tuna and toast.’ She’d really like a bottle of whisky, but knows it’s too much to ask of a woman who thinks that drinkers go to hell.

  ‘OK,’ says Blessed. They carry the bags through to the kitchen. Baked beans. A cauliflower. Some plantains. A bacon joint. Chocolate mousse. Wonderloaf. Peanut butter. Cheddar. Some tomatoes. Some chicken nuggets, which Blessed makes haste to put in the freezer compartment. Full-fat milk.

  ‘This is … you’re so generous,’ says Amber. ‘Can I give you some money?’

  Blessed shakes her head vehemently. ‘Absolutely no. It is my duty. I cannot take money from someone who is in trouble. You must tell me what you need, and I will bring it for you, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. Can I make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘No,’ says Amber, ‘I’ll make it.’

  Blessed lowers herself into a chair as Amber fills the kettle. ‘How’s work? What are they all saying?’

  She tuts. ‘The things you would expect, Amber.’

  ‘Who’s supervising?’

  Blessed looks slightly uncomfortable. ‘They have asked me to do it, in the hiatus. I hope that this is all right with you.’

  The kettle clicks off. ‘Yes. Of course. I should think you’d be good at it. You’ve always had an organised mind.’

  A flash of teeth. ‘Thank you,’ says Blessed. ‘Your confidence means a great deal to me.’

  ‘Milk and sugar?’

  ‘Yes please. Two, please. Amber?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have something I must show you. I was unwilling to do so, but then I thought, Perhaps she should know.’

  Amber feels weak. Steadies herself against the kitchen counter. ‘OK. What is it?’

  *

  Kirsty comes back to the table with another cup of coffee, and turns to the centre pages. A young-middle-aged blonde, plastered in make-up – thick blusher, scarlet lips – and sporting an obviously new haircut sits on a studio floor on a sheet of white background paper, weight thrown back on one hand, in high heels and a wrap dress. Her legs are crossed at the ankles.

  THE LUCKIEST WOMAN ALIVE, says the headline. Blonde tells of bizarre life inside Strangler’s home, says the strap.

  A woman told of her incredible escape from the clutches of alleged Seaside Strangler Victor Cantrell yesterday. Attractive blonde Jackie Jacobs, 38, was ensnared by the womaniser’s charm and spent four months secretly dating him earlie
r this year.

  If that woman’s thirty-eight, thinks Kirsty, I’m Kate Moss. And, wow: if they’re only describing her as ‘attractive’, that stylist must be one skilled worker. There’s only one step down from ‘attractive’ on the tabloid beauty scale, and it’s the simple description of hair colour. Under the slap, Jackie Jacobs must look like a bulldog.

  ‘I’m in shock,’ said Jackie yesterday. ‘I never thought, when I got involved with him, that Vic would turn out to be a cold-blooded killer. He was the most charming man I’ve ever met. And good-looking too. I couldn’t help fancying him. He really knew how to look after himself!’

  Jackie met Vic when they both worked together at the Funnland theme park on Whitmouth’s seafront – Jackie as a hygiene consultant and Vic as a jack-of-all-trades working the rides. ‘He was a bit rougher than what I’m used to,’ says Jackie. ‘I usually date men in the professions – my last partner was an IT consultant – but there was something about him that just drew me like a moth to a flame.’

  Jackie knew that Vic was living with a woman who at the time she thought of as a friend – Myra Hindley lookalike Amber Gordon, a cleaner at the same park – but she was unable to stop herself from getting involved. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of,’ she says, ‘but I couldn’t stop myself. Vic was so charismatic I was helpless around him. And besides, later on I realised that there was a lot more to the situation than I had thought.

  ‘I keep thinking,’ she says, ‘that I should have realised at the time. It wasn’t like I didn’t notice that things were weird in that house. No one could fail to notice it. They hardly ever talked, and he was always out in Whitmouth’s famous bars while she worked the night shift. And Vic wasn’t exactly a gentle lover. You wouldn’t call it romantic. Sometimes he’d just come and find me at the park and get me to perform a sex act on him in one of the rides that was closed for maintenance, or in an area that was closed to the public. He liked that: the sex acts. He’d put his hands round my neck, sometimes, and it makes me shake to think about what he must have been thinking about.’

  Things took a turn for the weirder, though, when Cantrell’s common-law wife began to take an interest in Jackie herself. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time,’ says Jackie. ‘I just thought she was being friendly. I didn’t think she knew that anything was going on between me and Vic. But now I look back on it, I think there must have been more to it. But she was weird anyway. Always sticking her nose into other people’s business. Controlling. Always coming up to other people at work and asking them how they were, like she had something on them.

  ‘I felt uncomfortable around her, of course, because I thought I was sleeping with her man behind her back, but now I wonder if she didn’t know all along. And not just about us, either.’

  The piece is illustrated with more photographs. Amber and Vic at a pub table, and Jackie – a far less glamorous Jackie, she notes – standing at the entrance to the helter-skelter on the pier. The captions are gems of innuendo and twisted information. Weird: Cantrell and Gordon enjoy a drink at the seafront; Innocent: Jackie in happier times with lover Cantrell. She had no idea of the secret he was hiding.

  Kirsty doesn’t really understand why the paper seems to have cast Amber in the role of villain’s sidekick. Probably the fact that she’s given no interviews, that she’s not made a PR company her first stop en route to Cantrell’s holding cell. The reasoning of the papers, in their invention of villains and innocents, has always been a mystery to her. It’s often, she suspects, something as simple as the baddie involved reminding an editor of their school bully or an unpopular politician: the ‘lookalike’ tag they often earn gives the game away a bit. Or there’s another agenda, like the Sun’s fawning attempts to get the city of Liverpool to drop its fatwa twenty years after the Hillsborough disaster. Or something as basic as a story happening on a slow news day when no one wealthy has poked a prostitute. But she knows all too well what it’s like to be a Celebrity of Evil.

  A few months into her secret relationship with Cantrell, Jackie started having relationship problems with a man she had also been dating publicly. Gordon, however, took it upon herself to make the situation untenable. ‘It wasn’t anything, really. Silly stuff. I’m sure I could’ve handled it, but she insisted on getting involved. She took over completely.’

  Gordon even insisted that Jackie move into their twobedroomed ex-council house so she could ‘keep an eye on her’. Jackie’s suitor was keen to patch things up, but Gordon was having none of it. ‘It was as though she didn’t want me to have a boyfriend,’ says Jackie. ‘Now I look back on it, the whole thing was bizarre. She used to follow me everywhere.’

  Jackie soon found that she wasn’t allowed a moment to herself, in the house or out of it. Gordon escorted her to and from work, and even insisted on going along when she went out in the evening. ‘I guess she didn’t want me bumping into him,’ she says. ‘She wanted me all to herself. Or maybe she’d guessed about me and Vic, and wanted to keep an eye on me.’

  Cantrell, meanwhile, had withdrawn and become distant. He seemed as keen to get Jackie out of his house as Gordon appeared to be to make her stay. ‘I don’t know what was going on between them. Maybe he was getting jealous,’ says Jackie. ‘There was something not right about Amber’s behaviour. I think she thought I’d see it as protective, but it felt like there was more to it than that. I think she wanted control over me. I think maybe she fancied me. She certainly didn’t fancy her boyfriend, from what I saw.’

  There it is. The old lesbian accusation. There’s not a female villain in the land who can’t be made more villainous by hints of Sapphism. We’ve a long way to go still, thinks Kirsty.

  Jackie had experienced a similar situation before, continues the piece.

  When she was a teenager, an older couple seduced her into taking part in a threesome. ‘I don’t know what it is about me,’ she laughs, ‘but I’ve obviously got something. But after I turned Amber down and moved out of the house, she turned against me big-time. Suddenly she was always finding fault with my work, picking arguments with me, making trouble for me with management. Eventually it got so bad I had to leave. She drove me out of my job, and I’d worked there for years.’

  The news of Cantrell’s arrest came as a surprise. ‘It was a terrible shock,’ she says. ‘I remember standing there in the newsagent’s, shaking and shaking. I kept thinking: What if it had been me? I’d been alone with him so many times, and he’d had so many opportunities.

  ‘I don’t know why he didn’t choose to kill me, but what I do know is that I’m the luckiest girl alive.’

  Amber had thought there were no tears left, but they pour from her as she reads; choke her, drip on to the page. Blessed sits quietly and watches, her hands folded on the tabletop. She’s not touching me, thinks Amber, because she knows I couldn’t bear it. I feel dirty, betrayed and totally alone.

  She opens her mouth to speak, and all that comes out is a low moan of misery.

  ‘Oh, Amber,’ says Blessed. ‘I’m so sorry. I wasn’t sure whether I should show you.’

  ‘No, no,’ she says. ‘I was going to find out anyway. I needed to know.’

  ‘You need to get away from this place,’ says Blessed. ‘Those people outside – this will kill you. Don’t you have anywhere you can go?’

  She shakes her head. Hopes against hope that Blessed will open her own door to her, but knows it’s impossible. I don’t have friends, she thinks. Thirty-seven years old, and the number of friends – real, brave, damn-the-rest-of-them friends – I’ve amassed is literally zero. A few friendly colleagues, like Blessed, good people who hate to see others in distress, but not one person who would go beyond the call of decency, or who will miss me when I’m gone. No friends, no family. I am still alone, after all these years.

  ‘But surely the police …?’ Blessed asks. ‘This cannot be … there must be a …’ she pauses as she considers the phrase, ‘safe-house?’

  Amber shakes he
r head again. Feels misery break over her like a wave. ‘They sent a uniform down to stand on the door for a couple of days, but mostly because the neighbours couldn’t get into their houses.’

  ‘But Victim Support …?’

  ‘Victim Support’s for victims. Anyway, I’ve got to stay put. I have to be available for questioning.’

  And because the terms of my probationary licence say I have to. I can’t just go – I have to register the fact of my going. And it’s the same old story every time I ring, month on month: the last officer I dealt with has left – it’s department policy to keep them moving – and the person who’s replaced them has no idea who I am, until they pull up my file and I hear their voice change as they realise, and then they don’t know what to do and have to call me back. I may still be a high priority in the eyes of the world, but I got lost in the system years ago. Even if I tried, nothing would happen before this time next week. People like me stay put, because we don’t have much choice about it. Probation aren’t there to help you if you get into trouble. They’re there to punish you if the trouble’s your fault. A lifetime licence: it’s not about supporting you, it’s about keeping an eye.

  Blessed looks shocked again. ‘For questioning?’ Amber can see the thought forming in the back of her mind. She blurts it out. ‘Surely they can’t think you’re … that you were involved in this?’

  And now you’re wondering too, thinks Amber. Before, you were on my side, all righteous indignation, but now I’m under a cloud of suspicion, even from you. She feels the cold come over her. The old, old coping mechanism.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘And Blessed? I’m not.’ She pushes herself back from the table, goes to the sink to start washing up. Dishes have piled up on the draining board. I don’t know how, she thinks. I don’t remember eating.

  ‘No!’ stumbles Blessed. ‘No, that wasn’t what I meant at all. No, I—’

  ‘Don’t worry, Blessed,’ she says. ‘It’s only natural. I lived with the man, after all. I could be Rose West for all you know.’