Cold Light (11 page)

Chapter 10

Emma had always been at the Valley School with me, but I’d not paid much attention to her. I’d kept my head down generally, until Chloe had arrived at the end of Year Eight and made the girls who’d been picking on me find someone else to torture. But one day when I hadn’t been looking, she started to get closer and closer to Chloe and because Chloe was my best friend, I started to see more of her. It started in the October half term when Chloe turned up with Emma at my house. It was the first time I’d really spoken to Emma, and the first time I realised that Chloe did things without me being there, things that I didn’t know about.

‘Let me in,’ she’d said, and thrown herself through the front door as if she was being chased. I held the door open and looked over the hedge and along the street, but nothing moved except the bits of
Evening Post
and flyers about personal safety and self-defence classes blowing about on the pavement along with the drifts of leaves in the gutter.

‘We ran all the way,’ she said, panting. ‘I’m knackered.’

Emma nodded at me seriously and hurried in after her. She’d never been in my house before. I shut the door. Chloe was leaning against the hall radiator with one hand resting on her chest. The ends of her fingernails were perfect crescents because she had a soft white pencil she used to colour in the undersides with. Emma went and stood next to her, then, after a minute’s thought, put her arm around Chloe’s shoulders.

‘What’s up with you two?’ I said.

Emma knew better than to tell Chloe’s story for her and Chloe didn’t answer – couldn’t speak, at first. She waved a hand at me to wait while she caught her breath. Her eye-liner was smudged and there was a streak of dirt on the sleeve of her pale jacket.

‘Shh,’ she said, and pointed at the living room door. Barbara was in there with Donald watching
Antiques Roadshow
. It was an old one. Barbara had a stack of them she’d taped off the telly because they kept Donald calm when they were on, and sent him off on harmless missions to the attic once the programmes had finished.

‘Can we go in your room?’ Chloe said eventually.

‘All right.’

The three of us traipsed up the stairs – Chloe first, leading the way, then Emma, then me, closing all the doors behind us. In my room, Chloe took the seat in front of my desk. Emma sat on the bed. She didn’t take her coat off. I hovered between them, and eventually leaned against the wall. It was an awkward place to be, having nowhere to sit in my own room. There were things lying around – open books and magazines, tapes without their cases, dirty clothes. Chloe was used to it, but with Emma there I realised the place looked shabby and uncared for. I was embarrassed about the peeling gloss on the windowsill, the broken chair fixed with brown tape and the tired anaglypta on the walls. Emma gathered the pages of a tattered copy of
Sugar
and laid it on my desk.

‘What is it?’ I said. I looked at Emma, who shook her head.

‘Let her tell you herself.’

‘Give me a minute,’ Chloe said, and I saw that she was pleased with herself: almost smiling and showing all the other signs that she was carrying a secret she couldn’t wait to be rid of. Something ‘confidential’ that she was desperate for me to ask her about.

‘I knew I was coming round to yours,’ she said, ‘so I decided to set off early and walk. I couldn’t remember if I was still grounded or not, and if I’d asked for a lift, or some money, it’d have reminded them. So I just came out the back way.’

‘What happened?’ I said.

This was Chloe’s soap opera and I knew the part I was supposed to play. She fed me my lines and I cooperated, halfamused at the state of her, and more curious than I wanted to be.

‘Did they catch you?’

‘You won’t believe it,’ she said and laughed helplessly. Emma smiled mechanically. Her mouth was dark and tacky with lipstick.

‘Let me get a grip of myself.’

It was a short walk between Chloe’s house and mine. I lived in a poky row of terraces in a warren of streets tucked into the north bank of the Ribble and quietly subsiding. Chloe lived on the south side of the river, at the top of the hill and around the corner from our school. Her house had a conservatory and a greenhouse. The road bridged the river and carried on in both directions – past Chloe’s house and out of the the City towards Southport, and past my house where it turned into Fishergate Hill and led you towards the train station, into town and the shopping centres. The walk might have taken her half an hour, but that day, Chloe said, she’d taken a detour that involved walking along the Ribble, over the tram bridge and through Avenham Park. She’d have come out of the park at the end of a long street about fifteen minutes’ walk from my house, and added an hour onto her journey.

‘Why did you take the long way round?’ I said. It was something we did sometimes – for fun, or to kill time – but not unless we really couldn’t think of anything else to do and hardly ever since the summer.

‘I wanted to smoke,’ Chloe replied. ‘I was hardly going to march down the hill with a fag hanging out of my mouth, was I?’

‘Long way to go for a fag,’ I said, and Chloe shrugged.

‘Walking’s good for you. You should try it next time you feel like a plate of chips, you porker.’

‘Fuck off.’

Chloe gave me the finger.

Emma giggled and I realised she’d been drinking. I couldn’t smell booze on Chloe so they hadn’t been out together, which was something. I never had Emma down as the type to hang about the park with a bottle though. ‘It’s not that far,’ she chipped in, ‘not if you’re fit. I’ve walked that way loads of times.’

I tried to stare at Emma coolly, keeping my eyes steady and without moving my mouth at all. She was wearing make-up – a lot of it – and I’d never seen her that way before. The thick mascara and brown eye-shadow made her look ill and bruised.

‘Not to my house, you haven’t,’ I said.

Chloe broke in. ‘Pack it in, you two. I was walking along that big line of trees to the side of the river, you know the path that goes behind the bandstand, yeah? I was going along there, and I heard something crackle. I thought it was a bird or a squirrel or something. I took my headphones off,’ she was still wearing them around her neck, the wire snaking down under her cardigan to the black box at the waistband of her jeans, ‘and I carry on walking. I’m not scared or anything, it isn’t like it’s the middle of the night, right?’

‘Okay,’ I said. Her eyes were bright and wet with amusement.

‘This guy steps out from the bushes,’ she laughed again, a strange, sobbing sound. ‘He didn’t jump out or shout or anything – just stepped out. If I hadn’t have heard the crackle first, and I only heard that because my tape was between tracks, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him. But I did notice him just step out. And you know what the first thing I noticed was?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘He was wearing a mask –’ she paused, and leaned forward, ‘and that’s not even the worst thing.’

I imagined the man in the cape from
The Phantom of the Opera
.

‘What sort of mask?’

‘Halloween,’ she waved her hands around her face, ‘bright green, flat head. Bolts. What did you say it was, Emma?’

‘Frankenstein,’ Emma said quietly.

‘Frankenstein’s Monster, actually. Frankenstein was the—’

‘Whatever he had a mask on. Every Spar in the City is selling them. Brown hair poking out the top. Jeans. Boots. Nothing special.’

I was getting impatient.

‘You tell her this bit, Em,’ Chloe said. I looked at Emma, who cringed. Chloe tapped her knee gently, and I’ve been there – I know it’s her way of dishing out her commands.

‘Well,’ Emma started eventually. Maybe she was feeling shy because Chloe and I were staring at her so hard. ‘He came out from the bushes, wearing his mask, and Chloe stopped and stared at him – like you would, you know? And then he gets a bit closer to her and says,
Trick or Treat?
And Chloe, she says, are you not a bit old for that, still walking over to him because she’s convinced it’s someone that she knows.’

‘One of the Year Elevens,’ Chloe interrupted, ‘pissing about.’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t,’ Emma said. She didn’t look at me, and spoke too quickly, the words running into each other as the blush spread up the sides of her neck. ‘Because when she got right close to him, he opened the front of his jeans and showed her his cock.’

Chloe leaned over her knees and sobbed with laughter. ‘Right out there,’ she said, ‘right in the park! It was just hanging out!’

Emma nodded urgently, as if I was about to accuse the pair of them of making it up.

‘Just lying there, like he expected me to do something with it. Why do they do that? Do you know why they get cheap thrills from that? I mean, it wasn’t a big deal to me.’

‘What did it look like?’ I said.

‘Just like you’d expect,’ she said, ‘only bigger.’ She stood up. ‘It was
massive
!’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told him,’ she said lightly, ‘it looked just like a cock, only smaller. Then I kicked a pile of leaves at him, and walked round the other way.’

She winked, stagily.

‘Did you see this?’

Emma was sitting on the bed, her hands pressed together and held between her knees. She jumped, as if she wasn’t expecting to be spoken to. When she looked at me she opened her eyes wide and I noticed her pupils – huge and glassy.

‘No,’ Chloe said quickly. ‘I ran into Emma afterwards.’

‘And was it – you know?’

Chloe grinned. ‘Was it what?’

‘Erect?’ I was whispering.

Chloe fell back over her knees and howled with laughter. ‘You perv!’ she squealed. Emma swayed slightly, and smiled a little too late.

I moved towards the desk, hurt.

‘You should tell the police,’ I said. ‘It’s that pest, isn’t it?’

‘He didn’t try anything,’ Emma said. She had her hair up – something complicated with Kirby grips and half a tin of Elnett. When she moved her head, her fringe stayed flat and stiff over her forehead. What was she doing dressed up like that and wandering around the park on her own?

‘No, I’m not going to bother.’

Chloe went and sat next to Emma. The divan rocked on its wheels. ‘He probably expected me to scream or something, but I didn’t. It was hilarious.’

‘What did he do? How did you get rid of him?’

Chloe glanced at Emma. ‘He just went away, back into the bushes. I didn’t follow him. I put my earphones back in, and carried on walking. Prick.’

‘She was hardly going to chase after him, was she?’ Emma said.

‘Ask him for a second helping!’

I looked at Chloe. ‘It
was
that pest.’

‘Probably.’

‘They’re appealing for any information. They said the smallest detail could be the key that unlocks the whole case.’

Chloe laughed. ‘It was a pretty big detail.’

‘She didn’t really get a good look at him, not even what he was wearing,’ Emma said.

‘She could give a description anyway,’ I said to Emma.

‘What of? A mask? There’s been nothing about a mask in the newspapers. Terry hasn’t said anything about a mask,’ Chloe said.

‘Well that proves it,’ I said, ‘they do that all the time. Keep one detail back so that they can tell if someone calls in with a hoax. I’ve seen it on
Crimestoppers
. That’s how they’ll know you’re telling the truth. It’s too weird to make up.’

‘She doesn’t want to go to the police,’ Emma said, ‘she’s already told you that.’

‘This is my room, thanks, Emma,’ I said, ‘and I’m not forcing her to do anything, am I? Just saying that they’re trying to catch this weirdo. If you know something, and don’t say it, you can get yourself into trouble. Barbara says they progress from one thing to another. He’ll be dragging girls into cars if he’s not caught.’

‘No one’s saying anything,’ Chloe said. ‘If I tell my mother about this she’ll never let me out of the house again. None of us will get out this side of Christmas. Is that what you want?’

‘If they catch him, she’ll let you out. And if you did go to the police,’ I paused, just for effect, ‘Terry and Fiona would interview you. Fiona talked to that other girl, didn’t she? They had an actress do her voice but it was still her in the studio. You’re fifteen in March – you could go on the telly and get interviewed for real.’

Chloe hesitated. I knew she was imagining herself ‘in make-up’, sitting in front of a mirror framed with lightbulbs. I think she might have changed her mind, except Emma said, ‘Then you’d have to tell your mum why you took the long way round –’ she smoked an imaginary cigarette, ‘where you got your fags from. How you find the money.’

‘She wouldn’t care about that,’ I said, but Chloe pursed her lips and shook her head. She’d made up her mind.

‘It’s not going to happen,
Laura
,’ Chloe said, ‘and we wouldn’t have come round here to tell you about it if we’d known you’d be such a granny.’

‘What did you tell me for then?’ I sat on the desk chair Chloe had vacated, and looked at the two of them together. Emma wasn’t pretty, not like Chloe, but they suited each other. Like negatives of each other, one brown, one blonde, in jeans, slouch socks and smudged make-up.