by Alex Marwood
Amber stops short on the pavement and slaps her forehead. ‘Shit,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Sorry, Blessed. I forgot. I meant to give it to you at tea break. It’s in my office. I’d forget my head if it weren’t screwed on.’
‘You’re going to have to slow down,’ says Blessed. ‘I’m a few feet behind.’
‘The computer. I managed to get hold of a computer for Ben. Maria Murphy, believe it or not. They’ve bought Jared a Wii and he doesn’t need his old laptop any more.’
Blessed feels herself light up. ‘Really? You did that for me?’
‘I told you I was going to try.’ Amber smiles proudly. She really does look tired, thinks Blessed. Like she hasn’t slept. But praise Jesus, I prayed for a miracle and Amber Gordon has brought it to us.
‘You are an angel,’ she says. Life has rendered her dry-eyed and patient, but she feels the welling of tears in her throat. ‘I swear to God. He will be grateful. I know he will. But no more grateful than I am.’
Amber shakes her head. ‘It’s OK. It’s nothing. Just a couple of phone calls. Look. I’ll go and get it now, and you can give it to him when he gets up.’
She pulls her keys from her pocket, throws them to Jackie. ‘Let yourselves into the car,’ she says. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
*
They walk on in silence, Blessed rich with her blessings, Jackie full of her deprivation. Amber’s managerial position doesn’t extend to a space in the staff car park, so she always leaves the car at the Koh-Z-Nook, the Anglo-Thai tea rooms on the far side of the pier. They’re only open from breakfast through to six, so there’s always room in there, and it’s safer than leaving it out all night on the club strip. It’s a boring little walk, all concrete and shutters, but once they get past the high locked gates of the pier there’s a lovely view of the sea.
‘That’s nice,’ says Jackie.
‘So nice,’ says Blessed.
‘Why doesn’t anyone ever do anything like that for me?’ Jackie complains. ‘I haven’t got a computer neither.’
Because you wouldn’t know how to use it? thinks Blessed. ‘You could try giving it up to Jesus,’ she suggests.
Jackie snorts like a horse. ‘I’ve been asking Jesus to let me win the lottery for years,’ she says. ‘Maybe I’m just not the sort who gets their prayers answered.’
‘It doesn’t really work like that. You need to ask him for a solution. To help you help yourself. I asked every day, and he has sent me Amber. You never know what form your solution will take, but it is unlikely to come in the form of winning the lottery.’
Jackie shoots her an evil look. Blessed bounces it off. She’s used to the resentment of the unsaved, and nothing can puncture her happiness this morning. The question of the computer has weighed heavily on her shoulders. To be relieved of it is a miracle indeed.
She breathes deep of the morning air and smiles at the sky. This far down, the street is peaceful, the wash of the sea placid on the stones beyond the pier. There’s a nightingale in the botanical gardens; the town is so quiet that its song rings out, clear and true, caressing the back of her neck and stroking her cheeks. She pauses to listen. Jackie takes a couple of paces, then stops impatiently to look at her.
‘What?’
‘Listen,’ says Blessed.
Jackie frowns and cranes. Blessed sees her hear nothing, decide that it’s the quiet she’s meant to be listening for. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Very nice,’ and stomps on.
Blessed hangs back and listens for a moment longer, glad of the chance to do so without interruption. The bird sings with all the joy of summer. Thank you, God, for bringing me to Whitmouth. It wasn’t what I imagined when I started my journey, but I am glad it was here that I came.
She sees Jackie turn the corner into the Koh-Z-Nook’s car park, hears the sound of a scuffle and a bellowed swearword. Gives up on her reverie and shuffles forward as fast as her flipflops will take her.
Jackie sits on the ground, rubbing her knee and glaring at a shoe lying on the tarmac. It’s a peep-toe wedge, lime-green, the ankle strap snapped clean through. ‘Fucking fuck,’ she says.
‘Are you OK? What happened?’
She looks at the palm of her hand, brushes pieces of grit from her mount of Luna. ‘Fucking fell over that fucking shoe.’
‘Oh dear. Are you hurt?’
‘Yes,’ she snaps, then: ‘Not much. No fucking thanks to the fucking moron who just dumped that there. Fuck sake. Why can’t they just bloody pick up after theirselves?’
Blessed offers her a hand. Jackie stands and rubs her elbow, muttering. ‘Bloody accident waiting to happen. I’ll fucking brain them if I ever find out who it was.’
‘Come on,’ says Blessed. ‘Let’s get you to the car.’
She offers an arm to her colleague, who limps dramatically as they cross the car park. The Panda is tucked neatly into the far corner, in the shade of a scrappy hedge. It’s not until they get round the back of the car that they see that the owner of the shoe has been tucked as neatly away behind it, bare feet poking under the driver’s door, her battered face peering sightlessly out from a halo of gorse and sea-spurge.
Chapter Nineteen
Amber comes down the steps of the police station to find that there’s already a knot of onlookers on the pavement outside. News travels fast in Whitmouth. The car is taped off in the Koh-Z-Nook’s car park, jailed as an accessory after the fact. Blessed and Jackie, as the ones who actually found the body, are going to be in the station for a while longer. She’s going to have to take the bus home. She sets off to walk up to the Funnland stop.
It’s nearly ten, and the Corniche is full of strollers and mobility scooters: the morning demographic. Dodging around them, Amber doesn’t hear her name being called until she’s nearly at Klondike Junction. She looks around, confused, then spots Vic, arms brown and shapely in a white T-shirt, leaning against a minicab parked up in the layby fifty yards back. He waves. Her heart leaps. She crosses the road and walks back to him.
‘What are you doing here?’
He wraps an elbow round her neck, kisses her cheek. ‘I heard.’
‘You heard?’
‘Jackie called me. I came down to see if you were all right.’
‘Thank God you did. I was dreading the bus.’
‘C’mon.’ He opens the car door. ‘I’ll take you home.’
*
She sinks into the back seat and closes her eyes. She doesn’t recognise the driver and is slightly surprised, as most of them live on the estate. Vic gets in next to her and closes the door. ‘Back to Tennyson Way, please, mate,’ he says.
She feels the engine rev, and the car moves forward. Knows he’s watching her and opens her eyes to look. He’s smiling. ‘How are you doing?’
She sighs. ‘Oh, you know.’
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘That’s why I asked.’
Amber closes her eyes again and lets her head drop back against the headrest.
‘You must be starting to think someone’s got it in for you,’ he says.
Her eyes fly open again. ‘Vic! My God! What a thing to say!’
He shrugs his shoulders, all blue-eyed innocence. ‘I was just saying. You must’ve thought it yourself, Amber.’
The driver is watching her in the rear-view, a glint of amusement in his eye. Amber clams up and turns her face away. Vic slips a hand round the back of her neck and strokes her hairline. She shrugs him off, stares out of the window.
‘Don’t be like that, babe,’ he says. ‘I came to pick you up, didn’t I?’
Mary-Kate and Ashley come bounding out the second she opens the door, and the fact that he’s let them in tells her more about his mood when he got home than anything he’s said so far. They circle round and round on tiny paws, gazing at her with all the rapturous joy of the innocent. Amber scoops them up and rains kisses on their heads. She’s never felt such pure and simple affection as she feels for these loving little bei
ngs. Wishes that human relationships were as simple.
She goes through to feed them, notices that the washing machine is on and nearing the end of its spin cycle. Fastidious as ever, she thinks. Nothing stays in the laundry basket for long in this house.
‘D’you want a cuppa?’ he asks.
She shakes her head. ‘I’m dead beat, Vic. I’m going to have a wash and a lie-down.’
‘OK. I’ll just get this lot hung out,’ he says. ‘It’s good drying weather.’
She’s brushing her teeth when he comes in and stands behind her, looks at her in the mirror. She looks back, relieved that, despite everything, the row is clearly over. And then he touches the small of her back and she sees that Other Vic is not quite gone yet.
His arms slip round her and he folds her into a bear hug, presses her crotch against the basin. Shit, she thinks. He’s still here. This is not her Vic, this man with the manically cheerful grin, the sudden physical gestures. He does sometimes come home in moods like this, but she’s never learned to accept them. He won’t let her go. She doesn’t feel as though she’s being hugged, she feels pinioned.
‘Hey, Amber,’ he says quietly. She can feel his breath on her neck, feel his torso pressed against hers. He kisses her throat, just above her collarbone, and she has to struggle with the urge to push him off. He was so angry yesterday. She should be grateful that the mood has passed so quickly. She forces herself to relax, to raise a hand and caress his face. She can feel the beginnings of a hardening in his crotch. Oh shit, she thinks. Asks herself why she thinks it. It’s been weeks since he’s touched her like this, and God knows she’s longed for it to happen. She should be grateful. Should be glad.
‘How was your night?’ she asks, by way of distracting him. ‘I didn’t ask. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, babe,’ he mumbles, and turns her to face him. He’s fully hard now beneath his jeans. He grinds his groin against hers. She feels a stir in response, but it feels nasty, dirty. ‘It was OK. I went to a bar. Had a few drinks. Calmed down. I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t want to hurt my girl, you know that.’
‘You believe me?’ she asks.
Vic pulls his head back, looks down into her face with a strange, detached good humour. Starts to manoeuvre her towards the landing. She goes unwillingly, more to avoid new disagreements than from any desire to participate. ‘It doesn’t matter if I believe you.’
‘Oh, Vic,’ she says, ‘if you can’t trust me, then what’s the point?’ ‘Trust’s not the point,’ says Vic. ‘It’s whether I forgive you that’s the point. And I forgive you.’
He thrusts a knee between her thighs, pushes her against the landing wall. Puts a hand round one of her buttocks and humps himself against her, like a dog.
I don’t want this, she thinks. I want to talk. I don’t understand men. The way they can just ignore everything when their hormones are leading the way. I can’t just …
She can feel his hands working their way up, tugging at her trousers.
‘Vic …’ she says. ‘I’ve had a shitty night. I’m all sweaty. And I’m tired.’
He’s not looking at her any more. Has his jaw dug into her neck. ‘I’ll sort you out,’ he says. ‘I’ll make you sweat some more before we’re done.’
‘I …’
He’s got the trousers down to the tops of her thighs. Shit, she thinks, he’s going to do it anyway. Whether I like it or not.
The bear hug’s back, and he’s picking her up bodily, hauling her into the bedroom. ‘That’s it,’ he croons. ‘That’s right.’
Shit, she thinks, just go with it. Just get it done with and, maybe after, he’ll let you talk. Lucky Jackie’s not coming back any more, she thinks. Lucky she’s not going to walk in and see this. God knows what she’d think, after this morning.
By the bed, he puts a foot behind her ankle and pushes her so that she tumbles backwards beneath him. Hoicks down her pants and grips her pubis proprietorially. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’s it. You know you want it.’ With the other hand he unbuttons his jeans and pulls his cock out. It’s thick, engorged, purple.
He climbs on top and begins to thrust.
Chapter Twenty
Her name is Stacey Plummer, and she is a veterinary nurse. Was. At twenty-five she is older than the other victims, and the postmortem shows that she was stone-cold sober, to boot. At midnight on Saturday she tired of the company of her friends, who were intent on drinking the bar at the Hope and Anchor dry before hitting a nightclub, and set out to walk home to their B&B. Her body was found six hours later, in a beach-café car park, by yet another cleaner from Funnland on her way home from her night shift. Those women must be really starting to hate their jobs.
It takes almost two days to identify her, mostly because her friends were so hungover that they didn’t leave their room other than to eat their full English, and assumed that she’d gone home in protest. And partly because the killer has stepped up his game. Stacey’s face has been beaten so badly that her gamine features have been almost obliterated.
The other victim is a different type of person altogether, though the occurrence of two murders so close together has kicked off a frenzy of fear and speculation. Tina Bentham, a forty-five-year-old grandmother of four, an alcoholic and occasional prostitute. Found by council bin men on Monday afternoon in a gore-soaked alleyway off Fore Street, her body undamaged apart from a couple of old, probably unrelated, bruises, and a ragged double-puncture wound to the neck that has ruptured her carotid artery, causing her to bleed to death. The victims, and the manner of their deaths, are so different that the police – and, even more, the press – are beginning to speculate as to whether there’s a single killer at all.
Kirsty arrives on Tuesday afternoon, before Stacey’s name is released to the press. She doesn’t want to be within a hundred miles of Bel, but Dave Park has gone up to Sleaford, where Child F and Child M are due at the magistrates’ court, and work is work is work. I’ll keep my head down, she thinks. It’s not that small a town; I’ll probably never bump into her, especially if I stay away from the theme park. She wishes fiercely that she’d never handed over her number. Doesn’t know what temporary madness possessed her.
The town is buzzing, despite the images on the news-stands. The cash registers in the pubs and cafés ring red-hot as the press corps huddle behind their windows, getting news off each other between the ritual announcements. The sea thunders up the pebbles, washing evidence and bathers in its wake. Police tape turns quickly to streamers which whiplash over the promenade, catching the unwary with paper-cut edges.The streets are crowded with health-and-safety officers handing out Keep Yourself Safe leaflets, with feminist groups and opportunist politicians and churches and police liaisons and council tourism officers reassuring holidaymakers. Travelling burger vans park up on the double yellows on the seafront on the safety-in-numbers assumption. Hotel rooms are full and cafés are running out of bacon butties. Through the steamy atmosphere of the penny arcade, frustrated sunbathers huddle over slot machines, watching their what-the-hell money drain away at a pound a minute. Funnland, with its high walls and patches of shelter, is doing a roaring trade. There’s nothing, it seems, like a serial killer to foster a tourist boom.
Kirsty can’t find parking anywhere near the front and ends up leaving the car at the Voyagers Rest (no apostrophe; she wishes she were less sensitive to these things). With a scarf wrapped across her face she trudges a mile through the pedestrian maze of shopping streets to the sea.
There’s a queue outside Funnland, just as though it were another normal day. She looks at the people shuffling up the line and wonders if Bel is inside.
Amber studies Suzanne Oddie’s skin. It’s shiny and brown and taut, and holds no clue as to her age. And yet somehow she looks every year of it. That’s the thing with plastic surgery and all the rest of the stuff rich women spend so much on, thinks Amber. It’s not really about making you look younger. It’s to make you look more expensive.
‘Eighteen tampon-disposal units? Seriously?’
‘You need one in every cubicle,’ says Amber.
‘Why can’t we just have them out in the washroom? And leave bags on the cisterns?’
Amber shrugs. ‘Up to you. I’d’ve said it was a false economy. What with the plumbing, and the cleaners resigning. I think you’re overestimating the average punter’s sense of communal responsibility.’
‘Mmm,’ says Suzanne; looks suspicious that a cleaner should be using such long words. Drums her nails again on the desk. Then she looks up, sharply. ‘Well, we need to make economies somewhere, Amber.’
Why? She wants to shout. Why? Thanks to the murder, and its I’d-forgotten-about-Whitmouth effect, we’re having the best season in living memory. There’s queues thirty minutes long just to get in through the front gate. ‘Really?’ she asks, faintly.
‘Yes. We’re in a recession, you know.’
Ah, she thinks, yes. The recession. ‘But we’re doing well here,’ she argues, aware that she’s wasting her breath. ‘Just judging by the amount of rubbish we’re carting out, numbers must be well up.’
Suzanne doesn’t look at her. Has she always avoided my eye like this? wonders Amber. Was I just so keen to please that I didn’t notice? Suzanne flips the page as she speaks. ‘Yes, well, but these murders are upward blips in a general downward trend. We can’t rely on them for ever.’
