The Wicked Girls (25 page)

‘How can you be so …?’ she begins, falters, loses her thread. ‘Why are you being like this?’

‘You look like shit,’ says Vic. ‘It’s no wonder, really.’

‘No wonder what?’ She hears an edge of panic in her voice. ‘Vic, what have you done?’

He slams the mug down on the counter; hot tea splashes urgently into the air. She starts, then registers the momentary hiatus
between the action and his face assuming a matching expression. He’s playing me, she thinks. He’s just pretending to be upset.
He’s not feeling anything at all.

‘You’re sure you want to know? You won’t get to unknow it, Amber. Once you know, you’ll know for ever.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I do. For God’s sake …’

He pauses for effect. Looks at her, gleefully. ‘You actually think it,’ he says. ‘You think I’ve killed those girls, don’t
you?’

She feels it like a punch to the solar plexus. Feels the air hiss from her lungs, hears her back teeth clash together. It’s
what’s been going through her head all night and all day since they fetched him away. How could it not be? Only a lunatic
would refuse to countenance the idea, in the circumstances.

‘I don’t know,’ she replies guardedly. ‘Would you blame me if I did?’

A mirthless, bitter laugh: ‘True love, eh, Amber?’

‘Well, what would
you
think? If you were me?’

He smirks. Triumphant. Ready to pounce.

‘Do you want to know then?’ he says again.

‘Yes,’ says Amber, ‘I do.’

‘Go on, then. Ask.’

She fights for control. He’s loving this game. I don’t know why, but he’s loving it.

‘Right,’ she says, slowly. ‘Why did the police arrest you?’

The smirk again. ‘They didn’t arrest me.’

Deep breath. Count: one, two, three, four, five. ‘OK. Why did the police want to question you?’

Vic picks up his cooling tea and slurps a mouthful off the top, his eyes never leaving her face. ‘Why do you think they wanted
to question me?’

‘Because they found your fingerprints on the mirrors …’

‘Right,’ says Vic. ‘So if you knew, why did you ask?’

She can’t stop a swearword leaking out. ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘Don’t be like this. I have a right to know.’

Vic laughs.

The tension is unbearable. She feels as though the tendons in her neck are going to snap in two. Again she breathes, again
she counts. Vic really does seem high on something. Maybe it’s just adrenalin.

‘OK.’ She starts again. ‘Right, OK. Can I ask why they let you go, then?’

‘Because I told them why I was in there,’ he says.

‘Looking for me?’ she asks sardonically.

‘Hah!’ His laugh barks out. ‘No. But I was looking for
something
.’

‘Fuck sake, Vic,’ she says. ‘Stop talking in riddles.’

‘You’d better sit down,’ he says.

‘Why?’

No one ever tells you to sit down when it’s good news.

*

She leans her elbows on the tabletop and watches the tears drip on to the Formica. ‘Why?’ she asks, hopelessly. ‘Why, Vic?
You don’t even
like
her.’

She’s never known him so cruel. What would they think now, all those people who tell her what a gentleman he is, how lucky
she is, what a catch she’s got? Would Jackie be so keen to brace herself against the mirrors and hitch her skirt up if she
could see him now, reclining against the cooker, smiling as she cries, as though he’s won a victory?

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she shouts. ‘Are you some kind of fucking
psycho
?’

Vic shrugs. The smile hasn’t wavered.

‘Why?’ she asks again. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Dunno, really,’ he says. ‘Because she was there? No, I’ll tell you what it was. Because she wasn’t you. That’s why. It was
because she wasn’t
you
.’

She hears her own weeping as though it is coming from the far end of a tunnel. As though she’s hearing it from underwater.
The dogs jitter in the doorway, unsure whether to offer comfort or run away. ‘But you don’t even
like
her,’ she says again.

‘You don’t have to like a woman to fuck ’er,’ he says crudely. ‘Surely you know that, by your age?’

‘
Vic!
’ she protests.

He shrugs again. ‘I told you I didn’t want her staying here,’ he says.

‘But you didn’t
shag
her here.’

Silence. She looks up. He doesn’t even have the grace to look discomfited.

‘Oh
shit
,’ she says. ‘Not in my
bed
. Tell me you didn’t … in my
bed
.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not in your bed. Even
she
thought that was beyond the pale.’

Why am I crying?
Why am I fucking crying?
I should be roaring, I should be yelling and throwing things. Not behaving like some broken reed.

She heaves a breath into her lungs, feels it shudder through her body.

‘So,’ he says. ‘Now you know. I told you I didn’t want her here.’

‘How long?’ she asks.

He shakes his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does to me.’

‘It doesn’t
matter
, Amber.’

‘Fuck,’ she says. Snatches up his tea mug and lobs it at his head.

The tears stop the moment the door closes. She’s astonished at the speed at which they dry. She watches him walk down the
path, then pulls the curtains. She doesn’t want the world seeing in.

Amber collapses into the sofa. Lies full out and puts her feet, still in shoes, up on the arm. He hates that. Hates it. Well,
who gives a fuck? She drags the blue fleece throw down from the backrest and pulls it over her. She lies there, dry-eyed and
weary, and stares at the ceiling.

She’s got an image in her head now, and it won’t go away. Jackie Jacobs in the hall of mirrors, impaled against the wall by
her common-law husband. For some reason her mind has dressed her in a red polka-dot halterneck dress, the sort of thing Marilyn
Monroe would wear. She’s got scarlet nails, and they’re clutching on to the back of his strong, familiar neck. Her face is
screwed up into a snarl as she bucks against him; a million howls of orgasm, a million pumping buttocks.

Fuck.

She closes her eyes, presses her palm and fingers across them.

Come on. It didn’t look like that. She’s rarely seen Jackie in anything other than trackies and a T-shirt. The night they
all went out for Vic’s birthday, she wore a short, tight denim skirt; meant to be white, but more like grey. She’s not got
a double life as a glamourpuss, a secret identity that seduced him with surprise.

Shit. Her mind’s eye sees her now, with that skirt hitched up over her hips. She’s not even bothered to take her knickers
off properly; just kicked her pink stiletto heel through one leg for ease of access. And she’s going unh-unh-unh-unh as he
hammers away between her thighs.

Stop it. Stop torturing yourself. What are women like? Why do we have to dwell, when the facts are sufficient without the
detail? She doesn’t need these images, conjured up from the interior of her brain, getting in the way when she needs to think,
needs to make decisions.

What am I going to do? Do I even care that much? When I strip away the humiliation, the outrage, the disgust that my good
nature should have been abused this way, do I honestly, really care?

She’s stunned by how indifferent she feels, in her core. Part of her simply watches herself, fascinated like a scientist watching
a bug. Six years lost, and a part of her knows only too well that her tears earlier were as much to do with doing what would
be expected as with actual pain.

Shit.

Mary-Kate comes in and stands by the sofa. Sniffs. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Hey, honey.’

The dog stands up on her hind legs and scrabbles to get up beside her. Amber reaches out and puts a hand round her tiny, surprisingly
round belly, and pulls her on to her chest. She stands there wagging, smiling her doggy grin; Amber moves her after a couple
of seconds, because her paw is digging in to one of the bruises Vic left the other day, during his quickie.

I hate him.

Do you? Or are you just thinking that because you think you ought to? Seriously, do you care enough to hate him? Have you
just been hanging on here for the sake of getting to stay in one place for a while? God. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s not
just saying it to justify himself. Maybe I
have
brought this on myself.

A voice from the past – her mother’s:
What do you expect
,
Annabel? All the things he’s done for you, and this is how you repay us. You’re such an ungrateful, nasty child …

Amber closes her eyes and scratches behind the dog’s ears. ‘At least,’ she says, ‘now I can sack
her
without feeling shitty about it, eh, Mary-Kate?’

Mary-Kate wriggles forward and covers Amber’s cheeks with wet doggy kisses.

‘Fucking bitch,’ says Amber, though she’s not sure, really, who she’s talking about.

Although he thinks he might have a talent for it, Martin decides against a career as a private detective, because he quickly
discovers that following people is seriously expensive.The bottom’s dropped out of the private detective market anyway, since
the Milly Dowler scandal.

Kirsty Lindsay is a very busy woman. Since he located her outside the daily police briefing, he has followed her all over
town, and laid out what would usually be a week’s living money on entrance fees and related expenses. He has followed her
into the amusement park, ridden the train on the pier three carriages behind her, bought five cups of tea, two glasses of
cola, a bacon sandwich, a chicken burger, three pounds’ worth of tokens for the machines in the arcade, two newspapers and
four bus tickets and now, after a trip to the cash dispenser, has spent fifteen pounds on the entrance fee to DanceAttack.
But he still hasn’t worked up the courage to talk to her and, to his astonishment, she’s acted like she’s not noticed him
at all.

He waits by the dance floor and watches as she works the room.

She stands out like a nun in a brewery in a crowd whose average age barely brushes the legal drinking limit. He nods with
approval as she buys fizzy water at the bar. Anyone weaker than her, or himself, would have to get slammed to bear the relentless
thump-thump-thump, the sweat-haze hanging
beneath the too-low ceiling, the flashing dance floor, the jangling earrings, the blue alcopops, the pinprick irises, the
jerking pelvises and faint sense of menace that characterise Dance-Attack or any of its clones around the country. The noise
and the crowded isolation would normally fill him with despair, but tonight he is not alone.

Though she, it would seem, is. Her colleagues have left her to it. It’s been four days since the last murder, and now that
Vic Cantrell – Vic Cantrell, who’d’ve thought it? – has been released, the nation is drifting back to Britney and Katie and
how-dare-they spending cuts and inner-city looting. Now it’s a quarter to midnight and she’s standing on the edge of the dance
floor, opposite him, and glancing at her watch. It looks like she’ll be joining the other journalists any minute now. He needs
to act, or lose her.

He walks across the dance floor towards her, sees her clock him and a look – recognition, speculation – cross her features.
He doesn’t turn his eyes away, as a stranger would do; holds her gaze until a group of teenage girls totters across his path
and obscures his view. When he catches sight of her again, he sees that she is dripping, her plastic water glass on the floor,
and two yobs are lurching unsteadily, propping each other up in trainers that must be sizes too large for their feet as they
gesticulate apologetically. Kirsty waves, shrugs, dismisses them. Nice, pleasant; far nicer than he would have managed.

This is his opportunity, though, to be her knight in shining armour. He hurries forward as she gets a Kleenex from her bag
and dabs ineffectually at her damp thigh. Positions himself in front of her close enough that, when she straightens up, the
only thing she will see is him.

She comes upright, jerks back slightly as she sees his smiling face. Recovers her composure and looks at him seriously.

‘Hello, Kirsty,’ he yells.

Kirsty takes a step back, and he follows.

She takes her time to reply. Polite if chilly interest, no fear. ‘Hello,’ she says carefully.

‘Let me get you another of those,’ he says, his best suave voice.

‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you. I was only drinking it out of … politeness.’

She waits for him to say something; they stare at each other while the ceaseless bim-ba-bim-ba-bim-bim-bim-bim of the identikit
techno track shakes the air.

‘What can I do for you?’ she asks eventually. Cool and in control. He’d expected, somehow, more pleasure at his presence.

He can’t hide his surprise. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ he asks. It’s unthinkable that their encounter on the beach would have
no significance for her. Not after the way she made it so clear she wanted to talk.

A flicker of something. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought it was a flicker of incomprehension. ‘We’ve met before
…’ she ventures.

‘On the beach,’ he says, the subtext of the statement so clear that she can’t fail to remember.

‘Ah, right,’ she says. Glances over her shoulder as though she’s expecting someone, then looks back at him again, with seeming
indifference. Playing her cards close to her chest. Fair enough. ‘I remember. And you were down at the town hall earlier.’

He feels satisfied. He knew she’d remember. ‘That’s right. That’s me.’

Kirsty feels increasingly vulnerable. It’s not that often you find yourself face to face with a green-inker, especially one
who seems to have been following you. ‘Mmm,’ she says, and tries to edge backwards again. She glances over her shoulder once
more, vainly hoping that someone will have noticed her plight, but, lost in the crowd, she and her unwanted companion don’t
exactly stand out. The bouncers have drifted to the other side of the dance floor and are watching, cross-armed, a couple
of lads square up to each other. The bar staff, sweating, never raise their eyes from the beer pumps, except to register the
features of their current customer in case they try to do a runner.