by Alex Marwood
But it is very like, she thinks, sucking tea through the softened biscuit. It’s even in the same place as hers was.
Martin turns back to the front page. Gordon is all over that one as well. He chews his lip as he looks at her, grinning away as she walks down the street like she’s going to a party; he’s edited from his interpretation the fact that he was watching when the pictures were taken. I suppose she likes the attention, he thinks. She’s got her fifteen minutes and she’s making the most of it. But she’s not like Kirsty. At least she’s not dedicated her life to making sure her lies make their way into everyone’s homes.
Jim calls in to divert himself from his nerves before his meeting with Lionel Baker. He’s been reading the papers on the train and Kirsty can practically hear him shaking his head as he tuts over the Whitmouth coverage. ‘That poor woman,’ he says. ‘They’re crucifying her.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’
‘You’re the only person who seems to have been even remotely fair.’
‘Yeah. God knows how that got past Back Bench.’
She hears the sound of folding paper. Jim always takes revenge on publications that have annoyed him by screwing them up and dropping them in the bin. She stares out of the window, notices that that damned Russian vine that next door planted three years ago is sprouting from a hole in the foundations of their shed. Dammit, she thinks. Life’s one long treadmill of fighting against nature, one way or another.
‘I think I’m going to give up reading the papers,’ he announces. ‘It just seems so … unnecessary. They’re just making things up as they go along. They don’t know anything, so they’ve just decided to turn this woman into a pantomime villain, to fill the space till they do. You see them doing it all the time. They just can’t bear to admit they don’t know any more than the rest of us.’
‘Steady on,’ says Kirsty. ‘And if everyone stops reading them, what am I going to do for a living?’
No one has been able to find out much about the Alleged Strangler himself. There’s maybe a page about him, but in the silly season a page is not enough. The Mirror’s photographer has followed Amber Gordon all the way to Funnland and then to the unremarkable ex-council house she lives in. There’s a picture of her walking a pair of those yappy, snappy little dogs you usually see tucked under the arms of the likes of Liza Minnelli. The house is clearly neglected, a wooden board nailed over a window, the flowerbeds trampled and muddy. Deborah reads the screed below the pictures, and wonders.
Seaside Strangler’s girlfriend, Amber Gordon, walks her dogs as though it’s an ordinary day. Gordon, a cleaning supervisor, refused to speak to the Mirror’s journalist when he confronted her after dropping off a bag of goodies for her lover, currently undergoing questioning at Whitmouth Police Station. Back at their scruffy house on the outskirts of the town, she swore at photographers. ‘Leave me alone!’ she said, when we attempted to ask her about her partner’s crimes. ‘I’ve not done anything!’
The making of a murderer, page 13.
In the doorstep picture, the woman is clearly shouting. About my age, thinks Deborah. Maybe a bit younger. I wonder what it’s like to be her? Did she know? She must have known. You can’t live with someone and not know something like that, surely?
She turns to the ‘making of a murderer’ feature and starts to read.
Martin looks up the road as he scans through the radio channels in search of Radio 2. Some classic pop, that’s what I need. Classic pop for the classic suburbs.
He’s surprised by the road she chooses to live on. He’d imagined something more modernist, more minimalist, the sort of thing favoured by Channel 4. A warehouse conversion, all naked brickwork and stark white plaster, or something whose walls are made of glass. What he hadn’t expected was an ordinary four-up-four-down in a medium-sized garden full of clematis and concrete dolphins. A series of near-identical 1930s semis, brave little flourishes – a garage, a brickwork turning-circle, a pergola, a porch – attesting to their owners’ individuality. If she lives somewhere like this, he thinks, she’s probably got a family. Two girls called something like Jacintha and Phoebe. A Weimaraner.
A dignified Burmese cat stalks out of a drive, sits on the pavement to survey his territory. Yeah, thinks Martin. Too normal. She’ll have one of those hairless sphinxes, or a Dalmatian. Something stupid and useless, designed to impress fashion victims.
He glances in the rear-view, sees the front door a couple of doors back open and Kirsty Lindsay emerge. She goes over to the dusty little Renault that sits on the drive and unlocks the door. She looks unguarded, innocent, filled with thought. Martin slides down in his seat, though there’s not a chance that she will recognise him like this, from behind, and watches as she scrabbles around in the glove compartment and comes back out brandishing a satnav and its lead. Of course she’s got a satnav, he thinks. Nice work if you can get it.
Funny, though. It’s the dullest house on the street, covered in wisteria, and that Renault’s eight years old if it’s a day. He would have bet his weekly budget that she lived in the one with the Jag.
There are more photos of Amber Gordon in the ‘making of a murderer’ feature: the implication clear that her contribution has been bigger than any other, even though she’s only known him for six of his forty-two years. It seems that there are very few photos of Victor Cantrell before he met her, just a couple taken in a caravan park in Cornwall where he worked before he came to Whitmouth. Deborah feels another twinge of visceral dislike as she eyes the woman. It’s that bloody mole, she thinks. It really is identical: same place, same shape, same colour. What are the odds? How many people can have that same blemish, in just the same place …
She feels a jerk of realisation … And be the same age?
Deborah hears the breath hiss from her body. She grips the sides of the paper in fisted hands, presses her face close to the image on the page. Oh. My. God. Under the bleach, the twenty-five years, the tense defiance, the celebrity sunglasses. She still has the same jawline, that same upper lip half the width of its lower twin, the eyebrows heavy and dark and at odds with the shade of the skin.
It can’t be.
She feels freezing cold. She went to the trial every day, with her mother: the bereaved, the living victims. She stared at Annabel Oldacre and Jade Walker as she sat on the witness stand on the first day and gave her testimony. They stole my little sister. I only asked them to take her to the shops, and they kidnapped her. Bitches. Those little bloody bitches. And later, when she was done, she stared at the backs of their necks, at their profiles as they looked up at their lawyers (they never looked at each other, not once through the whole four days); glaring into their faces, willing them to look at her as they passed in and out of the courtroom, willing them to see what they’d done. She memorised everything about Annabel Oldacre, but she never expected to see her again, with or without the changes of a quarter-century disguising the child within.
‘Fuck,’ says Deborah, and reaches out for the telephone. ‘Fuck.’
Chapter Thirty-seven
They’re heckling the politicians on Question Time when her phone starts to ring in her bag. She considers not answering. Jim’s had a good day. He’s come home full of hope and grand cru Chablis consumed at the Paternoster Square Corney & Barrow, and it’s raised her own mood for the first time in days. She doesn’t want the world intruding any more. Wants to pretend, for this night at least, that life is sweet, and calm, and hopeful. Then she answers anyway.
Crackling, then shouting, down the line. ‘Hello? Hello?’
‘Stan?’
‘Hello?’ he yells again, then swears. ‘Hang on.’
She waits. His voice comes on, quieter, clearer. ‘Bloody hands-free,’ he says. ‘How are you?’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘You?’
He doesn’t bother to answer. ‘Where are you?’
‘Home,’ she says.
‘I’d’ve thought you’d’ve been down
at Whitmouth.’
‘No. Dave Park’s taken over there now. I’m home.’
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Dave bloody Park.’
‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘I think I’ve had my fill of Whitmouth, truth be told.’
‘Sod it,’ he says. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got his phone number, have you? No, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter.’
‘OK,’ she says. Shrugs pointlessly.
‘Anyway, it was you I wanted,’ he says.
Jim is frowning, and fiddling with the remote. He hates people talking on the phone while the telly’s on. Any second now, he’ll turn the volume up to make his point. She gets off the sofa and takes the call through to the hall. Plonks herself at the foot of the stairs, by the pile of laundry that always sits there, and starts sorting socks.
‘I was hoping,’ continues Stan, ‘we could do an information swap.’
‘Uh-huh?’ she asks.
‘I’m on my way down there now. For the Mirror.’
‘The Mirror? For real?’
‘Yeah, well,’ he says, ‘all they’ve got down there at the moment is some twelve-year-old on work experience. The rest are all chasing Jodie Marsh or something. They thought they might need someone with a bit more experience for this.’
‘This?’
‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Are you not checking the wires?’
‘Not since teatime. I’m off duty.’
She hears a twitch of astonishment. Stan’s never off duty. He’d be seeking out the broadband in intensive care. ‘Right. Well, there’s something come up,’ he says. ‘The Mirror’s got it as an exclusive, in that they’ve got the dobber on retainer ’cause that’s where she saw the photos and made the connection, but it’s been up on PA for an hour or so now. It’ll be everywhere tomorrow.’
Get to the point, Stan. ‘Uh-huh?’
‘Someone’s rung in and the whole Cantrell story’s gone a lot bigger. I need … you know. Her number, if you’ve got it. You know, ’cause you …’
‘Stan,’ she interrupts, ‘what are you on about?’
‘I’m going down to doorstep Amber Gordon,’ he says. ‘I’m giving you the heads-up. I thought you might want to come too. Being as … you know, you’re a mate. And freelancers have to stick together, sometimes, and I owe you a couple. And because I think I might need a chick. They all seem to think that doorstepping’s just a question of sticking it out for longer than anyone else, but sometimes, you know, you just need a woman, not a man, and …’
‘I don’t suppose,’ she says, ‘if she hasn’t wanted to say anything so far … if she’s going to talk it’ll have been negotiated.’
‘No,’ he says, ‘you’re not getting it. It’s not about her bloke. Well, it is, of course it is, ’cause no one would have spotted it otherwise, but …’
She knows what’s coming immediately. Feels fear wash through her like Arctic ice. Drops the socks she’s rolling into a ball and clutches the phone tightly because she’s afraid she’ll drop it too.
‘Turns out our Mrs Cantrell is actually Annabel Oldacre,’ he says.
A ‘no’ falls from her mouth. Not the ‘no’ he takes it for.
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘Can you believe it?’
‘No,’ she says again.
‘It’s a pretty definite ID,’ he says. ‘Victim’s sister, apparently.’
‘But she barely knew her,’ she blurts. ‘They only met when—’
She pulls herself up short before she lets any more out. She barely remembers Debbie Francis herself, she’s more of a blur of piercings and nickel-studded leather than she is a face. She feels her skin crawl at the thought of how close she’s come to exposing herself; feels iced water trickle down her back. In the other room, a burst of applause.
Stan continues as though he’s not noticed. ‘Well, yeah, but she went to every day of the court case, apparently. I guess they must’ve thought it would be some sort of closure, or something. But she certainly got a good chance to study their faces while she was there, didn’t she? Anyway, what are the odds?’
‘Not as long as you’d think,’ she says. ‘Surprisingly short, if anything. They’re the same odds it would be for anyone, actually, with her social status and where she lives factored in. The fact that she … has a history … makes no difference to the odds. There’s the odd violent death in Whitmouth every year, even without a serial killer. Someone’s got to be married to the people who do them.’
‘Mmm,’ says Stan. ‘You’re right, I suppose. Anyway. It’s a story, isn’t it? Thing is, once it’s pointed out to you, it’s obvious. You’d’ve thought they’d’ve got that bloody great mole taken off her face when they changed her name, wouldn’t you? It’s sort of like they wanted her to be recognised. And “Amber”. They didn’t exactly fish about for a name, did they?’
‘I …’ She catches sight of her reflection in the window by the front door. Stares into it, studying her face for signs of the child that once lived there. She sees little that she recognises: her face was always less individual, more common-or-garden, than Bel’s, even without that mole; the sort of face you see streaming from school gates by the score. And besides, I was fat then, she thinks. My features were blurred by years of chips and ketchup.
‘You coming, then?’ asks Stan.
Are you fucking kidding me? she thinks. I’ve got to be as far away from Annabel Oldacre as I can get. I should be on the next plane to Australia. Tell Jim I’ve been sacked, leave journalism, get a job selling pizza in Queensland or somewhere, except that no country worth living in would accept a residency application from the likes of me, and anyway that’s just the sort of job the papers have been spotting me in for years. Getting a career, getting a degree, being a social-services success story – that’s been the best cover I could have found. Hiding in among the jackals who seek me, the greatest camouflage. The only thing better would have been to find some way of joining the police.
‘I – shit, Stan.’ She scrabbles for excuses. ‘No. I’m sorry. I can’t. Even if it wasn’t Dave Park’s territory, now. We’re going up to Jim’s mum’s tomorrow. In Herefordshire. I’ve got to pack the kids’ stuff, get the house closed up …’
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Stan. ‘Priorities?’
‘Yeah, it’s called a family,’ she says, knowing how much it’ll annoy him, hoping it’ll make him hang up in disgust.
She hears him splutter. ‘Oh, come on, woman. What are you on about? You’ve been trying to get a regular gig on News for years. If you can get her to talk, it’s a picture byline. Good God, it’s probably a staff job, if you can scoop the Mirror.’
She stays silent. Doesn’t trust her voice not to betray her fear. Hears him light a cigarette, prepare to have one more go at persuading her. ‘Fish-and-chip wrappings, Kirsty,’ he says. ‘It’ll make fish-and-chip wrappings of that cock-up you made last week. They’ll forget all about it.’
She pretends to consider.
‘God, look. No, Stan. Thank you. I can’t tell you how grateful I am, but I’m sorry. I’ll give you Dave’s number, look. I’ll call him for you. And anyway, he’ll have it in for me for ever if he thinks I’ve stolen his glory. You know what he’s like.’
‘Well. OK. Don’t say I never did you a favour.’
‘I won’t,’ she says. She can barely breathe. Wants him gone, so she can think. ‘I’m sorry, Stan. I’m dead grateful. Really grateful. But I can’t do it. Gotta go. I’m sorry.’
‘Hang on—’ he starts, but she cuts him off. Sinks back against the step behind her. Sophie’s shed a sweatshirt, unwashed, in among the clean laundry. She picks it up, buries her face in its musky pre-teen scent and breathes deeply. Oh God, the kids, she thinks. What would it do to them?
She is frightened. A different fear from the fear she felt that night in Whitmouth, though the sense of something following, something approaching from behind, is similar: an ancient, long-suppressed fear that creeps through her viscera, leaves her hot and weak. You never k
now who’s watching, who’s waiting. You can never let your guard down, never feel safe. You can go a year, three years, without an incident, then one day you open your inbox to find that someone you’ve always thought of as reasonable, as civilised and thoughtful, has forwarded a round-robin email saying you’re about to be paroled and must never, ever get out. Or someone goes to the papers claiming to have been drinking with you in a theme bar on the Costa del Crime, or to have bought a house from you in Wythenshawe, or to have been the object of your predatory lesbianism in some random prison, and you’re terrified all over again: waiting for your husband to study those old photos one more time, and this time to look up with dawning recognition on his face. Waiting to wake up one morning with the mob on your doorstep.
They’re already there on Amber’s, primed and ready for action. Dear God, she’s already been thrown to the lions. Those pictures of her house – it was obvious they’ve been out there with their flaming torches and their pitchforks for days. It’s going to be a bloodbath.
She hears the Question Time music start up in the living room. Struggles to compose herself before Jim comes out to find her.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Amber wakes to the sound of breaking glass. She hadn’t realised she’d fallen asleep; had only lain down on the bed to rest for a few minutes at eight o’clock. She sits upright, fully dressed as she has been for the past few days, and ready to run. Wonders whether to turn the light on and decides against. Light will show that she’s home, and at-home is more provocative than away. Some irrational part of her has clung to the hope that, if she keeps a low profile, refuses to talk, refuses to cooperate, the watchers outside will give up and go away. And even as she was hoping, she knew she was fooling herself. This is the third window that’s been broken in the past twenty-four hours.
