by Alex Marwood
‘So how are you, Amber?’ asks Jackie, her voice syrupy with unaccustomed sympathy. ‘Are you holding up all right?’
You know what? thinks Amber. I’m shit, thank you very much. I found a murdered body thirty-six hours ago and I keep seeing it when I’m trying to get to sleep. ‘I think I prefer it when you’re being a hard-faced cow, Jackie,’ she says. ‘At least it’s sincere.’
Jackie lets out a cackle.
‘It’s true, though,’ says Blessed, who is sitting on a cushion she’s brought down specially, and knitting a jumper to protect her precious son from the bitter winds of winter. ‘It’s not really appropriate, is it? For us to be taking advantage of the situation like this.’
‘Oh, Blessed,’ says Jackie, ‘what were we going to do? None of us killed the girl, and none of us knew her. It’s not our fault that we’re not allowed to go to work, is it?’
Blessed takes a sip of her ginger beer. Picks up the tongs and pokes at the coals of the barbecue. ‘I think this is ready,’ she announces. ‘No, I know what you mean, Jackie. But a party … is this the appropriate response?’
Maria Murphy rubs sun cream into her skin as though she were on the Costa Brava, and watches her boys frolic on the shingle. ‘It’s not really a party, is it, Blessed? It’s just, like, everyone who lives here actually getting to use the beach for a change, isn’t it? It’s not like anyone planned it. Oh God, he’s going to send that ball into the sea, I swear he is.’
They follow the direction of her gaze. The men from the estate are playing a scuffly, laughing game of six-a-side, sliding about on the shingle, breakwaters for goals. Funnland’s backbone, unexpectedly at leisure, rioting like schoolkids on a snow-day. It was Jackie’s idea in the first place, though it was Vic who told Amber about it, and who persuaded her that staying locked in the house wasn’t going to bring the girl back, or make Amber’s part in it go away. And she’s glad he did. He’s right, of course. Nothing will undo what she’s seen, but life has to go on. She doesn’t spend enough time with her colleagues as friends, these days, and it sometimes feels as though a clear glass barrier has dropped between them since she took her management position.
‘It’s true, though,’ says Amber. ‘Staying indoors isn’t going to change anything, is it? Lying in a darkened room crying isn’t going to make me unfind her.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ says Maria. ‘I wish I could have a bit of whatever you’re always on.’
‘Ray of sunshine, that’s me,’ says Amber, and beams.
Maria sits up sharply and glares at her eldest son. ‘Jordan!’ she shouts. ‘If that ball goes in the sea, you’re going in to get it!’
Jordan Murphy glances over his shoulder with all the insolence of fourteen. His brothers – matching no. 3 cuts and a real diamond earring in each left ear – are romping in the sea with other boys off the estate, fighting for primacy over the old inner tube from a juggernaut.
Jackie narrows her eyes. ‘Hah. Who wants to see his skinny little bod? I’m holding out for Moses or Vic. In fact,’ she drains her tinny and throws it carelessly on to the pebbles, ‘if I thought your Vic was going to get his top off, I’d kick the ball in myself.’
‘Steady,’ says Amber.
‘Oh, come on,’ says Blessed. ‘Even I would be happy to see your husband go into the sea. You have to admit that he’s quite beautiful.’
Amber laughs uncomfortably. She knows their intention is harmless, but people referring to Vic’s good looks – and invoking the marriage they never had – has always made her feel like she’s dancing on the edge of a precipice. I know he loves me, she thinks. I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me that. And I know I’m just paranoid. Vic’s as loyal as the day is long. But I wish other women wouldn’t keep reminding me how many of them would be in the queue if there was ever a chance. ‘He’s not just a pretty face, you know,’ she says. ‘There’s more to him than that.’
‘Yeah, but he is a pretty face,’ says Jackie. ‘And Jesus, the arms on him.’
‘Arse?’ asks Maria. ‘Jacks, did you really just talk about Amber’s bloke’s arse? You’re awful. You just don’t know when to stop, do you?’
‘Arms,’ protests Jackie. ‘I said arms!’
‘Yer, right,’ says Maria. ‘C’mon. We should start cooking, if we’re going to.’
Amber gets up on her haunches, and the dogs, lying on a corner of the rug, prick up their ears. She shushes them down and flips the top of the cooler. She’s been to Lidl; she’s the only one who has a car. And besides, she wants to do something for them all. The loss of wages will hit them hard in a couple of days, and she feels strangely responsible. As though she didn’t just find the girl, but planted her there.
‘OK. Burgers, chicken, sausages. Blessed, there’s rolls in that placcy bag over there.’
‘Amber Gordon, I love you. What would we do without you?’ says Jackie.
‘Find someone else to twist round your little finger, I should think,’ Amber replies. But she feels warm and pleased. Glad she made the effort. She separates out the burgers and lays them on the grill of the nearest barbecue. They’re fatty. A cloud of cheap-meat smoke rises from the coals.
Maria waves a hand in front of her face and lights a cigarette. ‘Oi oi,’ she says, looking up the beach towards the pier, ‘you’ve got company, Jacks.’
They turn to look, and see Martin Bagshawe standing by a waste-bin, watching them.
‘Dear God,’ Maria frowns at him, watches him catch her stare and look away, ‘does he never take that anorak off?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ says Jackie. ‘Never seen him without it.’
Even when you were fucking in the Cross Keys car park? wonders Amber. Slaps her own wrist.
‘He still calling you?’ she asks.
Jackie nods. ‘Yup. Creepy little fuck. I wish he’d just – go away.’
‘We could get the boys to have a word,’ says Maria, ‘if you want.’
‘No worries,’ says Jackie. ‘Looks like your steely glare’s done the job anyway.’
Martin turns away, trudges off towards the manky dark bit under the pier. There are steps on the other side, leading up on to the boardwalk, and an exit on to the Corniche. Doesn’t want to walk past us, thinks Amber. Afraid we’ll say something. And he’s probably right too. Behind them, Moses executes a sliding tackle on Vic, shingle showering out on either side. The women roll, as one, to their knees. ‘Whoa!’ shouts Jackie. ‘Oh my Gaad!’ yells Maria. Amber leaps to her feet. ‘Are you OK? Baby?’
The two men sit up, look at the women with surprise, pull each other upright and barrel away towards the far goal.
‘Don’t you want to play, Ben?’ Amber turns back to Blessed’s fourteen-year-old son, who leans silently against the breakwater, reading a biology textbook. Benedick glances up, shakes his head and goes back to the page. He’s a serious, slightly pudgy child. Amber suspects that the weight of his mother’s hopes for him hang heavy on his shoulders. He’s got the MP3 player plugged into his ears; he shrugs without taking the earphones out to hear what she’s said, and carries on reading. I hope he’ll be OK, thinks Amber. I hope he gets to be happy.
‘How’s he getting on at school?’ she asks his mother, flipping the burgers as she speaks.
‘OK,’ replies Blessed. ‘He’s high in his class,’ she adds proudly.
‘That’s good. He’s clever.’
‘He’ll be a doctor one day,’ says Blessed firmly.
‘I’m sure.’
‘And he’s good with computers.’
‘Is he?’ She’s not surprised. Benedick is just the sort of solitary child you’d expect to spend his free hours indoors. ‘Likes the internet, does he?’
‘Yes,’ says Blessed. ‘I suppose it’s a good thing we don’t have it at home, or I’d never see him.’
‘You don’t have the internet? I thought they all used it for their homework these days.’
‘He goes to the library for that. They have comp
uters there.’
‘You don’t have a computer?’
Blessed shakes her head. ‘He had one, but something called the motherboard died. That’s what they said. Anyway, something that can’t be mended, and only one week after the guarantee ran out.’
‘Oh, Blessed,’ says Amber, ‘that’s a bummer.’
‘I’m saving for a new one,’ says Blessed. ‘Maybe for Christmas. They’re so expensive.’
‘Oh, wow,’ says Amber. ‘I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?’
Blessed shrugs. Takes up her knitting again.
‘Well, it’ll keep him off the porn sites anyway,’ says Maria. ‘My Jordan’s a bugger for those. I can’t go into his room most nights, I’m so scared of what I’ll find.’
Behind her, Jason Murphy punts the ball as it flies towards the goal. It’s a wild shot, and hard. The women watch as it flies high and wide over the beach and bounces on the surface of the water.
‘Aah,’ says Jackie, and opens another can. ‘Showtime.’
Chapter Eight
Kirsty looks up at the rusting network of struts and pillars that supports the walkway from the turnstile on the seafront to the pier’s end. It’s dark here, dank and smelly – not just the brine-and-fish tang of rotting seaweed, but the fug of generations caught short, of picnics half eaten and discarded, of a leaking something pooling beneath the rocks.
It’s not the nicest town she’s ever been in. But in terms of why she’s been sent here, that’s no bad thing. Her job is to find fifteen hundred words of the sort of Sunday feature that makes readers feel better about their own lives. To skim over the rides and the ices and the bright animal-shaped inflatables, the exquisite pleasure of chips hot and salty from the packet in a stiff sea breeze, the joyous shock of Channel water on naked skin, and show instead the mile upon mile of grey post-war prefabs blotched back into the marshland around the estuary, the crumbling plastic fast-food shopfronts, the stressed lives of a largely itinerant population whose employment prospects are seasonal, the Georgian façades peering out between plastic and neon. To make Balham look balmy in comparison. No town where a killer is on the loose is allowed to be a nice town: it’s an unwritten law. If things like this happened in nice towns – the places where people buy Sunday papers and read them – then who would be safe?
And yet, she can’t help liking it. Despite the run-down, ill-stocked shops. Despite the pallor of skins that should be brown from seaside living, the fact that there’s not a colour that occurs in nature to be seen on the Corniche. Despite the tears on the faces of Hannah Hardy’s hungover friends when they discovered why she’d never made her way back to their static caravan last night, despite the fact that everyone here who is over fifteen looks closer to forty, there’s a gaudy, gutsy bravery to Whitmouth that she finds surprisingly charming. Part of her, despite the grim nature of the work that brought her here, feels like it’s on holiday. She likes Whitmouth and she thinks she likes its people.
Like the big group fifty feet from where she stands: one of those working-class parties where the women sit together while the men play a rough, elbowing game of football with frequent breaks to drink fizzy lager from the can and pass a fat, rough-rolled joint between them. The sort of gathering, she reflects, that I would have been grateful to be included in, once upon a time. Maybe that’s the reason I like it here. In another life, I would have thought it was heaven.
And yet here she stands at the spot where Nicole Ponsonby, this summer season’s first victim, was found. Nicole was lying, quite peacefully, face-up, with one arm thrown back behind her head. She would have looked for all the world like another teenage sun worshipper, were it not for the fact that she was lying on a heap of rags and bottles in the deep shade of the breakwater, and that her face was blue.
That was 13 June. Nicole had been in Whitmouth for four days at the time she met her death. She’d last been seen stumbling off from the Sticky Wicket pub, a skinful of snakebite and a lovebite on her neck, in search of chips. She was from Lancashire. She was nineteen years old and had left school the previous year with A levels in catering sciences and business studies. She had wanted to go into the hotel trade, and had been working as a receptionist at the Jurys Inn in Manchester for the previous three months. The trip to Whitmouth had partly been a scouting expedition to see if she couldn’t move a bit further up the food chain in one of the hotels along the Kent coast. She didn’t have a boyfriend, hadn’t had one since the sixth form.
She had come here as a child two or three times, with her parents, Susan and Grahame, and her two brothers, Jake and Mark. A nice, clean, respectable girl the vast majority of the time – not out of control habitually, but cutting loose with her mates the way teenagers do. No one had noticed her between her leaving the pub and turning up strangled twelve hours later. Of course they hadn’t: she was unremarkable, and the streets were crowded.
As Kirsty stands thinking about the girl and the circumstances of her death, a man in an anorak – he’s got the look of a stoat or a ferret, she thinks, all pointy teeth and beady little eyes – pauses as he passes her.
‘Can I help you?’ he asks. His voice is flat, nasal, toneless.
‘No. Thank you,’ she says, trying to sound kind and friendly, but clear. Then, ‘Well, yes, actually, as you ask. Are you from around here?’
‘Yes,’ he replies with an edge of annoyance, as though the answer is so obvious a child could see it.
‘Oh, good. I’ve been having trouble finding anyone who isn’t a tourist.’ This is a minor lie. Truth is, the locals she’s found have shown admirable loyalty to their home patch and she’s alarmingly short of attributable scared-to-go-out, quaking-in-bed quotations that will make the people of Cheltenham grateful for their property prices. If she can’t get some soon, she’s going to have to make them up. ‘Do you mind if I ask you how you feel about all this? These murders? As a local resident?’
The suspicion dials up. ‘Why do you want to know?’
Kirsty adjusts. Turns the transparent charm up a notch. ‘Yes. Sorry. I should have introduced myself.’ She offers him a hand to shake, though the thought of touching his greyish skin makes her feel uncomfortable. ‘Kirsty Lindsay. The Sunday Tribune. I’m writing an article about—’
‘I know what you’re writing about,’ he says, and he puffs with pride as he says it. You get this sometimes. Though most people are nervous around journalists, afraid of letting out too much information about themselves, unsure of where a question will lead, there’s always the odd one who sees an approach as evidence that they are important, and that the journalist has seen it where their neighbours have not.
‘Sure. OK, yes, of course you do,’ she says. ‘So I was wondering—’
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he says. ‘I think the lot of you should go away. No one wants you around here.’
‘Oh, look,’ protests Kirsty. ‘We’ve got to report the news.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘if you call it reporting. I know what you’ll do. You won’t ask anyone who actually knows. That’s not what you want, is it? You just want to bring your London sneering down to the provinces. We’d be fine if you’d all just go away and leave us alone.’
‘I—’ She looks at the tufty hairs on his carelessly shaved cheeks, the tight lips set in stubbornness, the unreasoning knee-jerk dislike in the eyes, and knows her answer. She’s not going to get anything useful out of this guy. Just the sort of formless disapproval that blames the media rather than the man who’s actually killing people. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘thanks anyway.’
‘You can’t quote me,’ he says. ‘I didn’t give you permission to quote me.’
‘I don’t have your name anyway,’ she says. Walks away up the beach before he can prolong the encounter. Feels, nonetheless, his eyes bore into her back as she skirts between the barbecue and the perimeter fence of Funnland, a festoon of yellow police tape marking out the hole in the short run of wire fence behind a bucket-and-spade stall.
From this side, the amusement park’s concrete fortifications make it look a bit like a prison camp. The front wall, on the blowy road everyone jokingly calls ‘the Corniche’, is bright with hoardings and coloured lights.
Besides the big party, a few knots of young people talk and doze away their hangovers, and play Frisbee in T-shirts and long shorts. A camera team wanders among them, recording vox pops. Kirsty wonders how the lure of appearing on television can overcome the horror of doing so without make-up or preparation.
‘Yeah, of course I’m scared,’ says a young woman as she passes, ‘but what am I supposed to do? I only get a week’s holiday. I’ve got to have fun, innit?’
‘So are you going to come to Whitmouth again?’ asks the reporter.
‘Probably not,’ she replies. ‘It’s a bit pants, really. The booze is dead expensive and, did you know?, that amusement park’ – she gestures at the hulking wall of Funnland, where the police are spending their second day sweeping every inch between the fence and the death site with camelhair brushes – ‘has been closed ever since we got here. And in high season too!’
She visits the Antalya Kebab House, where the second victim, Keisha Brown, was last seen. The owner is Turkish, voluble and unfriendly. ‘So why are you suddenly interested?’ he asks. ‘You know what? This happened twice last year as well. There were two girls last year, and they were just as dead then, and you didn’t give a toss. Not one reporter, not one newspaper, apart from the Whitmouth Guardian, nobody from the telly then. They were invisible then. Might as well never have existed. But now … you’ve got some glamour now. You’re all looking for your Hannibal Lecter and now it matters, isn’t it?’
