by Alex Marwood
The clock tells her it’s gone eleven. She’s been out for the count for three hours. She feels for the table-leg she’s been carrying around for comfort – wishes dearly that she lived in a country where baseball was commonplace – and gets carefully out of bed. Her shoes – easy slip-ons for speedy exits – are on the bedside rug; she finds them, in the dark, in seconds.
She creeps through to the spare room. Even from the landing, she can hear the sound of movement out in the front garden: feet shifting and the rasp of a throat being cleared. She can see the curtains wafting in the tiny breeze, a brick lying in a mess of glass in the middle of the bed. They’re back. The neighbours, the drunks, the people who want her to know their Values: they like to come down when the pub closes and share their feelings once the press have gone to bed. The teenage policeman who occasionally stands outside is obviously gone, again. No one to take pictures, so no need to be there. No one throws stones when the police are around.
She retreats to the bedroom, sits against the door and turns on her phone. Thirty-three missed calls, twelve messages. My God, it’s got worse, she thinks. That’s more than yesterday. Has something happened? Something new? Or is it just that my number’s getting passed around, from person to person, until by Thursday the whole country will have it? She ignores them; scrolls through the address book to find the police station. No point dialling 999. It’ll come through to the same people in the end, anyway.
She hunches against the door, listens to the empty ring. Registers, puzzlingly, that the dogs aren’t with her. They’ve been reliable as the sunrise, since Vic was arrested. They follow her upstairs at bedtime to settle, comforting and thoughtful, at the foot of the duvet, and are there to greet her in the morning: the we-have-survived-the-night awakening that gives her the strength to go on. I must be sleeping more deeply than I’d thought, she thinks idly as she counts the rings. I’ve never noticed that they get up in the night and do their own thing.
On the twelfth ring, a voice comes on the line: casual and unconcerned, for someone whose job it is to answer the phone in the middle of the night. ‘Whitmouth Police?’
‘It’s Amber Gordon,’ she says, keeping her voice low, as though the people outside might be able to hear her through wood and stone.
He doesn’t seem to recognise the name. ‘Victor Cantrell’s …’ she prompts.
‘Ah. Hello,’ he says, but his voice doesn’t sound friendly.
‘There’s someone outside my house. They’ve broken a window.’
‘OK,’ he says, but he doesn’t sound unduly concerned. ‘Give me a moment.’
Amber goes back to the corridor and listens. There are definitely people outside. They’re being quiet, deliberately so – she hears a voice stage-whisper and another shush it quiet – but she can feel the presence, not just of people, but of a crowd. Thinks she hears the metallic chink of someone trying the garden gate, tenses as she wonders if the bolts will hold. It’s a feeble protection, she knows. The gate and fence would give under a couple of kicks. She just has to hope they know that there’s a line that can’t be stepped over, a line where protest becomes trespass.
Though that’s not stopped them when it comes to criminal damage. It can’t be long now before someone decides that, with the breaking already done, the entering is the next logical step. She can’t stay here.
‘Ms Gordon?’
Her heart jolts. She’d almost forgotten what she’d been waiting for.
‘We’re sending a patrol car round. They should be there in twenty minutes or so.’
Twenty minutes? I could be dead by then. ‘Can’t they get here sooner? What’s happened to the lad who was on my door?’
‘Limited resources,’ he replies. ‘Maybe you’d like to take it up with the Home Secretary. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but half the forces in the country have been providing backup to the Met this summer.’
How much am I supposed to bear? She feels her eyes fill with tears.
‘If you like,’ he says, ‘they could bring you down here.’
‘What for?’
‘We’ve been calling you all evening. You might want to consider protective custody. For the time being. It’s up to you.’
Cells and locks and corridors; the echo of painted concrete, the long, empty waits before the brief highlights of bland meals. Solitary confinement without the human rights. The crushing memory of guilt, and Vic three rooms down. She jerks, like a dreamer who’s found themselves falling. His ’n’ hers jail cells: partners in everything.
‘Why?’ she asks. ‘There must be some other … somewhere else. It can’t be a choice between here and a cell …’
‘Like I say. It’s up to you. But it might be best,’ he says, and adds again, significantly: ‘Under the circumstances.’
‘The circumstances’. What a lovely way to put it. ‘Can’t I … isn’t there somewhere else? I … you can’t really expect me to … can’t you take me to a hotel or something?’
‘Well, Ms Gordon,’ he says, drawing out the name so it’s no longer a simple address but some insult she doesn’t understand, ‘it’s the only way we can guarantee your safety, under the circumstances. We’ve been calling. You didn’t answer. And anyway, I very much doubt there’s a hotel that’ll be prepared to take you.’
‘You couldn’t guarantee my safety yesterday either,’ she protests. ‘Why are you suddenly so …?’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You don’t know.’
Creeping disquiet. ‘Know what?’
‘They know who you are, Ms Gordon. The papers.’
Her mouth goes dry. ‘Who I am …?’
‘Annabel Oldacre,’ he says. Then adds, spitefully: ‘But of course, you know that already.’
Amber hangs up.
She crawls, hands and knees, across the spare room and cracks a curtain aside. Peers into the darkened road, the glass-strewn front garden. Jumps back, gasping for air. There must be thirty of them out there: standing, hands in pockets, staring at the house like extras in a zombie movie. Oh God. I’m dead. By morning there will be hundreds.
She has to accept the policeman’s offer. The moment the squad car turns up, she’s got to be out of here, and damn what happens next. If they come in, she will never survive.
She creeps downstairs, gets a hooded fleece and pulls it on. Calls, in a whisper, for the dogs. They have to come with her, there’s no way she can leave them. Once the crowd has seen her the house is done for, and its contents with it. She knows they won’t let her keep the dogs in the station, but once she’s brought them in, they will become someone’s responsibility: they can’t just chuck them on to the steps to fend for themselves. They’ll have to find something to do with them. The RSPCA. Something. Anything is better than being left to the tender mercies of the mob.
They don’t respond. No patter of paws, no claws clicking on the kitchen floor. They must be outside. They’ve gone out through the cat-flap for some night-time dog life. She is afraid to follow. Wants to shelter in the safety of locked doors and a boarded-up living room until the police come. But she has to find them, and now. There won’t be time after. Once she’s answered the door, and the crowd is certain they have her, there will be time for nothing other than flight. She’ll need to scoop them up, grab the bag she’s been keeping ready-packed in the hall, and run for the patrol car before outrage turns to action.
She snatches the back-door keys from the hook in the hall and creeps into the kitchen. Dark and still; familiar objects crouched shadowy on countertops as though waiting to pounce. She stops halfway across the room, and scans the garden; wants to be sure there are no unseen visitors before she lets the outside in.
And then she sees them.
They’re only little. Little and defenceless, and never did harm to anyone. Oh, my darlings.
Amber steps into the garden and realises that tears are pouring down her face. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. This is beyond bearing. They’ve come and they’ve taken them
and they’ve used their trusting natures, and they’ve punished them to punish me.
She stands helpless and gazes at the tiny corpses. They’ve been strangled; had their souls squeezed out the way Vic did to those girls. And they’ve left them dangling from the washing line by their collars, the breeze catching their feathery coats and turning them, round and round, like gibbeted vermin. Dark saucer-eyes, bulging as they gasped for life.
An animal keening escapes her open mouth. Mary-Kate and Ashley, my friends. My poor friends. Oh, my darlings. They didn’t have to do that to you. You never did a thing.
She drops the keys in her shock, falls to her knees to feel around in the shadows. Gazes up at the strangled faces, and weeps and weeps.
The gate rattles on its hinges. Someone outside has heard her.
Amber freezes. Crouched below the bodies in the moonlight, she watches the gate bounce. They won’t bother to climb over, this time; this time they’re coming straight through.
‘Annabel!’ shouts a voice: male, high, excited. ‘Zat you, Annabel?’
Amber jumps to her feet. No hope of help from the police now. They know she’s here. She’s given herself away.
The gate rattles again, and she hears something crack. Doesn’t wait, doesn’t really think. She runs to the neighbour’s fence on the far side, and scrambles over. Lands hard in a flowerbed, feels the snap of brave perennials beneath her feet. Races across the garden, towards the next fence. There’s no way she’s getting away through Tennyson Way. Her only way out is if she can make it to Coleridge Close.
2.30 p.m.
Bel flops down on the doorstep. She wants to cry, but Jade looks like she might explode and she doesn’t want to rile her any more than she’s riled already. Chloe plays with the toggles on her anorak and sticks out her lower lip. She’s got mud on her face, somehow, and looks like she’s come down a chimney. Bel is soaked in sweat. The hunger has started to translate into faintness. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, she thinks. I just want to lie down and sleep.
‘Well, why didn’t you say there wasn’t nobody here?’ asks Jade.
‘My mum’s gone to Chippy,’ says Chloe, as though this is an answer. ‘To the shops.’
‘Well, fuck’s sake,’ says Jade.
‘I thought Debbie was here,’ says Chloe.
‘Of course she isn’t here,’ says Jade crushingly.
‘Where’s she gone?’ asks Bel. She knows she’s slow on the uptake, but even she had managed to work out that Debbie was getting off with Darren Walker when they came across them on the bench. It seems logical to her that they would have come here to have sex in her bedroom, because everybody knows that that’s where sex is done. ‘She’s not gone to your house, has she?’ she asks doubtfully.
Jade bursts into sardonic laughter. ‘No, she’s gone to Buckingham bleeding Palace for a garden party.’
‘In a leather jacket?’ asks Bel doubtfully.
Jade catches the look on her face and laughs again. She’s beginning to think that Bel is simple. She’s missed three of her jokes now. ‘Joke,’ she says. ‘But I can guarantee you she’s not at ours.’
Chloe starts to whimper again. Both the older girls roll their eyes. ‘Don’t start that again,’ says Jade. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it, is there?’
As fast as Chloe started, she stops again, and sniffs. She’s had an idea. ‘The river,’ she says. Her mum never takes her down the river. She’s only been twice. The river, to Chloe, is as magical and magnetic as Disneyland. If she’s not going to get her lunch, she’s going to get to paddle, at least.
‘The river?’ Jade is suspicious.
‘She went down the river.’
‘What’s she gone down there for?’
‘Swim.’
‘Why din’t she take you?’
Chloe starts to well up again.
‘All right. All right. We’ll take you down the river,’ says Jade, rolling her eyes. ‘I’ll kill Darren. I’ll bloody kill him.’
‘You’re kidding,’ says Bel.
‘What?’
‘It’s got to be three miles.’
‘All right then. Have you got any better ideas?’
‘I …’ Bel looks hopelessly round the deserted close. ‘When’s your mum coming home?’
Chloe shrugs. She has no idea; has very little concept of time. ‘Hours and hours and hours,’ she says. Her mother is, in fact, standing at the bus stop in Chipping Norton right now and will be home in thirty-five minutes. But Chloe has no idea what the time is; couldn’t read a clock even if they passed one. All she knows is that, when her mum comes home on the bus, it’s always long gone lunchtime. And as she’s not had her lunch yet, it must be hours and hours. And the river is calling: its plashy depths and weedy paddling, and the picnics and the lollies and the drinks people bring down in cool-boxes and sometimes share. She’s only ever gone by car. Has no more idea how far three miles is by foot than how long it is till lunchtime. ‘Hours,’ she repeats, and waits.
‘And your sister’s definitely down there?’
‘Yeah,’ says Chloe confidently.
‘We’ll go over the fields,’ says Jade decisively.
‘The fields?’ asks Bel. ‘But there isn’t a footpath, is there?’
‘Oh, it’ll be fine,’ says Jade. ‘Get a life.’
Chapter Thirty-nine
The last barrier before Coleridge Close is a yellow-brick wall topped by a trellis through which climbing roses twine. Amber is panting with the effort of her flight, of climbing and running and stooping to stay out of the light; of throwing herself backwards as number seventeen’s Rottweiler bellowed and hurled itself against its chain as she passed. The dog has alerted her pursuers to the path of her flight. As she stares at the obstacle before her, she hears a crack and a stream of swearing as a fence gives way beneath a muscled body, and the lights four doors down blaze into life.
‘Where’s she gone?’ A voice drifts over the night air, alarmingly close. She’d thought she’d put the best part of a road’s distance between herself and them, but this one’s nearer than that. Maybe two plots away. ‘Where the fuck is she?’
‘Coleridge,’ shouts another. ‘She must be heading for Coleridge.’
‘Fuck,’ says the first voice. Takes two deep breaths. ‘Come on. Fuck.’
He raises his voice to a theatrical bellow. Lights are coming on in every house now. The people in this one must be away, or she’d be a sitting duck. ‘Oi! She’s heading for Coleridge!’
In the distance, in her own garden, a yell of understanding.
Shit. Her pulse hammers in her ears. Amber takes a run-up at the wall and vaults, throwing herself bodily into the mat of thorns. It’ll take them no time at all, if they come by the road. She can’t afford to be careful. Needs to be out of sight by the time they turn the corner. She hears the trellis crack beneath her weight and draws blood on an exposed wrist. Feels her shirt snag and catch. Doesn’t stop to think; just forces her way through the debris and hurls herself at the other side.
The shirt holds for a moment, leaving her dangling in dark air, face in the foliage, then it rips and lets go, dropping her on an awkward foot-arch. She feels a sharp pain, something ripping deep within, and stifles a cry as the bones grind together. Then she’s free, and hop-running, adrenalin killing the hurt as it propels her forward.
She glances over her shoulder as she runs, losing precious moments as she slips on the scrappy verge. They’ll be halfway up Tennyson by now. She needs to get off this road; needs to drop out of sight. She limps to the corner of Marvell Street and dives into its temporary sanctuary.
She knows this road well. It’s the route she walks to Blessed’s flat; an empty stretch of garages and feeder roads. Halfway up, a kids’ playground, between the turns leading back to Browning and Tennyson, long since abandoned by families as the tidal wave of crack washed over the south-east. The junkies have moved on, but the playground – and what remains of its sl
ides and swings and its crumbling jungle gym – has never been reclaimed.
The slap-slap-slap of boots on tarmac back in Coleridge, chillingly close behind. She can’t go on much longer on this foot. She hesitates for a second, then dives through the playground gate and ducks below the hedge.
Litter, blown in and dropped; she crawls gingerly among the bricks and ragwort. She hears the footsteps turn the corner, hears them slow as their owners find an empty road. Amber inches forward. Over beyond the sandpit there’s an old plywood climbing frame in the shape of a train, water-warped and splintered and four feet high, buried in a clump of smutty nettles. She knows they’ll look over the hedge, that they might even venture into the park. But they’d never think her fool enough to trap herself like that. She hopes. Has to hope. She has nowhere else to go.
She reaches the train and squeezes through a circular hole designed for a six-year old. Snags, sticks, heaves herself through and into the dark. Portholes throw light on the wall above her head, but down here on the floor, as she closes her mind to the objects she’s sharing the space with, is reassuring darkness.
They come along the road with the swaggering stride of numbers, swipe at foliage as they pass. She hears them pause by the gate, hears the click of a lighter igniting, smells the drift of cigarette smoke across the night air.
‘Fuck,’ says a voice. The man who tried the gate. ‘Where’s she gone? She can’t have doubled back, can she?’
A woman replies, the sound of the feminine more frightening because so unexpected. It’s Janelle Boxer, Shaunagh’s friend from a few doors up. Amber can see her in her mind’s eye: squat, thick-set, a face to match her surname. ‘No time. She’s gone down here. Down one of them two, there. She won’t have had time to get to the end.’
