by Alex Marwood
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 an
d 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.
Chapter Forty-two
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.
‘Shit,’ she says again, and slams her hand down on the steering wheel. Fights back tears. Closes the window and allows herself a moment of release by screaming at the top of her lungs. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ She can’t call, can’t tell Amber she’s here, can’t verify her whereabouts, can’t organise a rendezvous. The pier gates are closed, high, forbidding, the rain beginning to step up, and Amber, if they’ve not found her yet, is counting down to Kirsty’s destruction.
I don’t want to go out there, she thinks. I’m afraid.
Then she opens the door and steps out into the night.
Martin watches in his rear-view as she gets out of the Renault. She stands beside it and stares up towards town. And then, as if she’s satisfied that she’s unobserved, she wheels on her heel and hurries past the foot of the pier on to the beach.
He’s caught off-guard. He’d been expecting her to go up to where the people are. Can’t believe she’s cut him an easy break like this. He rushes to get out of the van, closes the door as quietly as he can behind him. If she’s really down on the beach, the noise of the sea and her feet sliding on weedy pebbles will drown out most sounds, but there’s no sense in being careless. He jogs up the road, stays in the shadow of the Funnland fence and, pressing himself against the corner strut, peeps round the corner.
Her ears are pricked for sounds of company, but all is quiet, just the roar and rag of sand on shingle and the moan of wind in the wires of the switched-off fairy lights along the front. Twenty feet along the pier, small and inconspicuous, there’s a gate, let into the metal slats of the fence, which cleaning teams and maintenance workers use to get on and off the structure out of hours. Kirsty jumps on to the shingle, feels a stone slip over another beneath her foot and goes down on her knees. ‘Fuck,’ she mutters; looks over her shoulder with wild fear that she will have been heard. Stupid trainers: not made for any surface less steady than a treadmill. She steps carefully the rest of the way, holding on to the fence as she goes.
It looks locked. Is locked. But closer inspection shows that the lock is a Yale, more there for show than blow. She digs her Oyster card – she learned not to use her debit card for this sort of thing years ago – from her bag, slips her hand through the bars and has it open in seconds.
She looks behind her once more, checks that the coast is clear and steps through, pulling the gate to behind her, then limp-runs up the short flight of stairs to the pier top. Squinting through the gloom at the long walkway in front of her, she sets off to walk to the end.
Once again he feels the tug of an erection. The blood pumps as he watches her fall on the shingle, struggle to her feet and feel her way into the shadows under the pier. He’s really on to something. Whatever the outcome, it’s a win-win. Either Amber Gordon is hidden away somewhere out there in the dark and Kirsty Lindsay is walking up to find her, or she’s not there, and then Lindsay will be up there alone.
He hears the sound of a gate opening and footsteps mounting metal stairs. She’s found the service entrance and is going up to the boardwalk. Martin smiles. Perfect, he thinks. I can’t lose her now. There’s only one way on to the pier, and only one way off.
The little faux-steam train that plods its way up to the pier’s end and back from eight in the morning until the last patrons of the amusement arcade run out of fifty ps has been parked up in its shed, the doors secured with a chain-and-padlock extravaganza. It’s a quarter of a mile to the end. An easy walk under normal circumstances, less so when the boards are slippery with mounting drizzle and you don’t know what you’ll find when you reach your destination. She might not even be there. She might have fled already, found some other hiding place and be waiting for your call.
Come on, Kirsty, s
he tells herself. Get a grip. It’s a quick inand-out and once you’ve got her somewhere safe you’ll be safe as well. Never have to see her, speak to her, think of her again.
She starts to plod, wraps her scarf tightly round her head. Only August and the air, as she heads out to sea, is as dank as a cellar.
She hears her own footfalls, thick on the night air. Her nose is running. What am I doing? she wonders. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Corrects herself. Second most stupid. But in this case, I don’t have a choice. Because it’s not just me, is it? I fucking hate her now. I pitied her before, thought we shared some understanding, but now I hate her. Maybe I should just go back up into town and tell those zombie-people on the corners where she is. She can’t talk if she’s dead, after all. If I let her die, my problems are over …
She shakes her head, dismisses the thought. This is not who I am. I’m not like that, however much I’d like to be.
The railway line is punctuated by tiny, pointless stations, all white-painted iron and panes of greenhouse glass. Like everything here the pier is a relic of more elegant times, when travel abroad was only for the rich and their servants, and lawyers and doctors would come here and take their pleasures among the grocers and butchers. Now, the elegant lines of its railings are hidden by garish advertising hoardings. The moon filters weakly through a gap in the clouds, showing up the fact that half the windows of the station-stops are broken. A gust of wind drives raindrops against her cheek. The weather is getting worse.
She hears a sound behind her: metal hitting metal. The gate?
He waits five minutes – times it by his watch – before he follows her through the gate. No need to stay close. He knows where she’s going, after all. He crouches below the wall and sees her head, silhouetted above the railings at the top of the steps, turn left and walk out to sea. Then she’s gone, all sound buried by the crash of the waves.