The Wicked Girls (28 page)

Bel opens the barn door and leads her inside. Through the gloom, Jade can see that the same pristine tidiness prevails here:
a collection of lean, chromey cars that gleam, rustless and smearless, in rows so neat they might have been measured with
a ruler. Walls and rafters are whitewashed and cobweb-free. Not a drop of oil or a tyre mark besmirches the swept golden concrete
of the floor
.

‘Bloody hell,’ says Jade. ‘How many cars has he got?’

‘Ten,’ says Bel. ‘Michael’s a
collector
.’

‘And they all work?’ asks Jade, thinking of her father’s own collection
.

‘I think so. He doesn’t drive them. Except for car shows. He takes them to car shows, but only on a transporter. The Range
Rover’s at the airport. And yeah, Romina’s car’s gone. She has to park it over there.’ She gestures to a dark corner
.

‘Jesus, she must work hard.’

‘What?’

‘Keeping all this lot clean.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ says Bel. ‘Romina’s a nanny. Ramón and Delicious do the house stuff.’

‘Delicious?’ Jade starts to laugh. ‘What sort of name is Delicious?’

‘A Philippines name,’ replies Bel loftily. ‘They’re all called things like that.’

‘Where’s Philippine?’

‘The. The Philippines. They’re near Hong Kong. That’s where Michael picked them up. Hong Kong. That’s where he used to live.
That’s where he made his money.’

Jade shrugs. Hong Kong means no more to her than France; both, she knows, are abroad, and she’s only ever been as far as Oxford
twice. London is as strange and as foreign – and as uninteresting – to her as either of the countries Bel has named. ‘Well,
why don’t you get them to let you in?’

‘They’ve gone home for their holidays. While the house is empty.’

‘But it’s not!’

‘You know what I mean,’ says Bel, and goes over to where a pile of tyres, clean and unmarked as though they have never seen
a road, is stacked neatly in a corner
.

‘Who looks after the horses?’

‘Suzi Booker,’ she says
.

‘Can’t she let us in?’

Bel tuts. ‘She’s outdoor staff. The gardeners don’t have keys either.’

She puts a hand over the top of the topmost tyre, and feels around inside the rim. ‘If you tell anyone,’ she says, ‘I swear
I will come and get you.’

‘I won’t,’ says Jade. Her tummy is rumbling. She’s beginning to feel slightly faint. All she can think about is the huge collection
of luxury foods she imagines to be sitting in the fridge indoors. They’ve probably got real ham, on the bone, she thinks.
And Coca-Cola; not Co-op
.

Bel rummages about, then looks surprised. Brings her hand back, clutching a piece of folded paper. ‘Hunh,’ she says. She unfolds
it and reads Romina’s scrawl, frowning. ‘Oh no.’

‘What?’ asks Jade
.

Bel shoves the letter at her. Jade pushes it back. ‘I can’t read that,’ she says
.

‘Why not?’ Bel looks at her for a moment, then a look of notso-nice comprehension crosses her face. ‘Can’t you read?’

‘Course I can read,’ blusters Jade. ‘I just can’t read that sort of joined-up writing. You read it.’

Bel looks down at the capitalised words on the page. Romina’s not so literate herself, especially in a language that is not
her own. ‘“You say you back eleven o’clock,”’ she reads out loud, ‘“and you not back. I go Bicester. Take key. You know you
not allowed in house without me. You are bad girl. Now you wait I come back. You see how is feel.”

‘Bugger,’ she says
.

The noise level halves when Kirsty turns the corner from Mare Street. By the time she’s reached Fore Street, it’s as though
the world has come to an end and she is the sole survivor. She’s in the pedestrian arcade: chain stores and pound shops and
discount chemists – all of them closed by six o’clock – and office suites on the floors above. A zoning desert, created by
idealists from an era in love with the internal combustion engine and the garden suburb.

Not a light shows in a window. The shops are protected by grilles and shutters, as though awaiting a globalisation protest.
Whitmouth got off lightly in the riots, mostly because it’s not the sort of town that can support a Foot Locker. The only
illumination comes from sodium arc lights which shine weakly through the foliage of weedy, salt-stunted saplings. She checks
her watch. Half-past twelve, and cold enough to be autumn.

She hurries forward, uncomfortable with her solitude and keen to reach the station and the safety of her car. Her encounters
in DanceAttack have left her buzzing, jumping at her own shadow. It’s been a long time since she last attracted that sort
of random hate, and the memory is as disturbing as the experience. Her heels scrape over the paving stones, the sound bouncing
off the blank façades above. A couple of times, the echo sounds like there are two of her. She stops, twice, and glances sharply
over her shoulder to check that that isn’t the case.

Stupid, she thinks. What kind of idiot walks by herself at night in the base of the Seaside Strangler? I should have waited
at the taxi rank. I had plenty of time, really. It’s not like I’ve got a deadline to get home. There were only twenty people
in front of me, for God’s sake.

She can hear the rush of sea on cobbles half a town away, but she’s not heard a voice in three minutes. How can this happen?
In a town so full it takes ten minutes to walk a hundred yards, where a parking space is as rare as diamonds, how can the
crowds simply vanish?

The same way those women vanished. Everyone’s been speculating about morals and stupidity and how this man, whoever he is,
can be so plausible that all these girls have ended up alone with him, and in the end it’s a matter of town planning. You
take an old town, its higgledy-piggledy people-on-people centre, and you zone it and control it and pedestrianise it, and
you move the people out and up and away, and suddenly, when night falls, you’re on the set of
I Am Legend
. How can anyone be safe when there’s no one around to hear you scream?

She has another half-mile to cover. As she hurries along, she digs in her bag, looking for her key chain and her purse. She’ll
tuck them into her bra: make sure that, whatever else, she can get into the car and buy the petrol to get home. It’s an old
habit from early adulthood, living anonymously on the Stockwell Park Estate, filing housing applications for Lambeth Council
by day and doing her Open University course at night. She didn’t go out much at night back then, but if she did she always
made sure that she, and not some lurking junkie, had the means to get back into the flat.

She wonders about the creepy little man. They’re always the ones who attract the attention of the police. Neighbourhood pests,
hanging about in the shadows, bothering women, playing with replica guns and, now, finding ‘communities’ to share their rotten
little fantasies with on the internet. They don’t necessarily act them out, but they make other people uncomfortable, and
often that’s enough. You can’t change human nature.
Outsiders have always had a hard time of it. They disturb people.

She finds her purse, tucked where it is supposed to be, in the interior zip pocket of the bag. The keys have found their way
out of the compartment into the general jumble. Her frustration mounts as she scrabbles in the depths; touches, loses, touches,
loses again. Who is he? What did he want? Would I have found out, even if that other man hadn’t got between us? I don’t suppose
he knows, himself. He’s just one of those lone nutters who thought he had something to say to me.

Shit. I don’t suppose he followed me again, did he?

She reaches the market cross halfway along Fore Street. She can go the short way – carry on up the hill through another half-mile
of this wasteland to the station at the end. Or she could turn left, up Tailor’s Lane, and work her way through to the lights
and population of Brighton Road. It’s a longer route, with a nasty little detour, but there will be people at the end of it.
And right now people are what she craves.

She peers into the ill-lit depths of Tailor’s Lane, trying to recall her daytime impressions. It’s hardly a street – more
an upgraded alleyway: narrow, and with a turn in the middle. A hundred yards to the corner, then another hundred to the main
road. Behind her, the street is so silent, she feels as though it’s listening.

She doesn’t want to go up there. Doesn’t like the thought of plunging into the dark. A couple of mews – if the rubbish storage
for a bunch of shops can really be called a mews – lead off to left and right: pools of the unknown, lit only when the shops
themselves are open. Because it’s mainly blank walls and refuse containers, the road is perfunctorily lit: she can see the
lamp that marks the corner, and the small pool of light cast by the one in between, but they are old Victorian lanterns that
don’t look as though they have been updated since they were converted to electricity. And, in between, deep, malodorous shadow.

There could be anything up there, Kirsty. Anyone.

Yes, but … at least you know what’s at the other end. Fore
Street is half a mile of the unknown, no turnings off after this; just the choice of forward or back and a hell of a long
way to run either way. It’s two hundred yards, Kirsty. A two-minute walk. Just go confidently; don’t look left or right, don’t
peer into the shadows. Don’t think about what’s in those alleyways. Just walk and look certain. Why would anyone hide on a
road no one goes up? Just two minutes and you’ll be out where the people are again.

She starts to walk.

The going is rough underfoot, the tarmac deteriorated by bin lorries and neglected because it’s not a popular cut-through.
She nearly turns her ankle twice before she reaches the mews. They keys still evade her grasp, distracting her from her surroundings;
the chain is wrapped round something and the fob keeps slipping from her fingers when she pulls on it. She’s loath to go further
into the dark without at least the comfort of these sharp metal objects protruding from between her knuckles.

‘Shit,’ she says out loud, and stops.

Somewhere in the dark behind her, a single footfall sounds out into the silence.

A jagged shard of fear strokes its way down the back of her neck. She is all muscle, all tendon, her back pressed to the wall
before she is aware that she has moved. She stands rigid, wide-eyed, and listens; strains to see the path she has already
covered.

Nothing.

Against the lights of Fore Street, the silhouetted dumpsters crouch like dragons. She has no way of knowing what is hidden
in the shadows. But she knows, too, that she must go forward. Further into the dark.

She forces herself to wheel and walk on deliberately, steadily, though her legs are liquid and her hands shaking. She slots
the keys between her fingers, palm gripping on the ring that holds them together. They’ll be little use as a weapon, but they
might be enough to shock. Leave marks on a face. DNA on their jagged edges …

Jesus. Stop it. Don’t make plans for how you’ll help the police from beyond the grave.

External sound is blocked out by the swoosh of her circulation, the hiss of her breath. Her heart feels like an angry feral
animal; threatens to punch its way through her sternum. Breathe. Breathe. Keep walking.

She counts her footsteps, concentrates on keeping them even, on maintaining her balance, on projecting a sense of calm control.
If he doesn’t know she’s heard him, she might buy herself a few extra feet of head-start. Breathe. Breathe. One footstep,
then another. The light on the corner dancing before her eyes, nothing but black around it.

Someone’s foot catches a can in the road behind her. Sends it scuttering emptily along the pavement, closer than she had imagined.

Kirsty runs. Hears a sound – half moan, half shriek – burst from her throat, catches a heel in a pothole, staggers, bangs
her shoulder against the wall, belts on. Heavy footfalls, no need for subterfuge, barrelling towards her, a splash as he stamps
in a puddle, damp frogman tread as he slaps his way out the other side.

He grows, in her mind’s eye, as he gains on her. Has transformed from a little rat-man into an ogre eight feet tall, with
teeth of razors. Her bag weighs her down, slap-slap-slapping against her buttocks. She thinks about simply shedding it, decides,
no, if it’s the first thing he can reach, it’ll be the first thing he grabs, and that will buy me one more precious second.

Help, begs her brain. Help me.

Her momentum carries her past the corner, bouncing off the far wall as she makes the turn. The man behind gains more ground
as she recovers. She can hear his breath now: heavy, but not laboured. Not frayed like her own. More garbage hoppers here;
piles of cardboard boxes, stacked wooden pallets and the lights of Brighton Road a million miles away. If he gets me behind
one of those, no one on the street will ever see …

Fingers brush against the bag; a promise of things to come. Kirsty lets out a gasp, finds a reserve of speed and hurls herself
forward. Godjesus help me. Should I scream? Shout for help? She can hear the cacophony of Brighton Road – howls and laughs
and cackling hens – and knows that any breath she wastes will go unnoticed.

‘FUCK!’ she shrieks, despite herself, and feels a hand clamp down on her bag strap. Feels it tighten and yank her body back.

Her response is rage. Fear, yes, but overwhelming it fierce, animal rage. She lets out a yell, whirls round with full-stretch
arm and slaps the keys through the air. They connect with scalp; thick coarse hair under her fingers. She hears a grunt, then
feels his other hand snatch at her head.

She slips her shoulder out from the bag strap, shakes her hair like a pony. She has never been so grateful for her practical
haircut; there’s not enough for him to clutch a forceful handful. Strong, hard fingers dig through, slither, snag in a knot
and then, ripping a hank out by the roots, slip free. She pushes the bag towards his face and runs. Hurtles up the road, sees
the tarmac fall into relief as the light begins to penetrate the gloom.