The Wicked Girls (42 page)

‘Shit,’ she says again, and slams her hand down on the steering wheel. Fights back tears. Closes the window and allows herself
a moment of release by screaming at the top of her lungs. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!
Shit!
’ She can’t call, can’t tell Amber she’s here, can’t verify her whereabouts, can’t organise a rendezvous. The pier gates are
closed, high, forbidding, the rain beginning to step up, and Amber, if they’ve not found her yet, is counting down to Kirsty’s
destruction.

I don’t want to go out there, she thinks. I’m afraid.

Then she opens the door and steps out into the night.

Martin watches in his rear-view as she gets out of the Renault. She stands beside it and stares up towards town. And then,
as if she’s satisfied that she’s unobserved, she wheels on her heel and hurries past the foot of the pier on to the beach.

He’s caught off-guard. He’d been expecting her to go up to where the people are. Can’t believe she’s cut him an easy break
like this. He rushes to get out of the van, closes the door as quietly as he can behind him. If she’s really down on the beach,
the
noise of the sea and her feet sliding on weedy pebbles will drown out most sounds, but there’s no sense in being careless.
He jogs up the road, stays in the shadow of the Funnland fence and, pressing himself against the corner strut, peeps round
the corner.

Her ears are pricked for sounds of company, but all is quiet, just the roar and rag of sand on shingle and the moan of wind
in the wires of the switched-off fairy lights along the front. Twenty feet along the pier, small and inconspicuous, there’s
a gate, let into the metal slats of the fence, which cleaning teams and maintenance workers use to get on and off the structure
out of hours. Kirsty jumps on to the shingle, feels a stone slip over another beneath her foot and goes down on her knees.
‘Fuck,’ she mutters; looks over her shoulder with wild fear that she will have been heard. Stupid trainers: not made for any
surface less steady than a treadmill. She steps carefully the rest of the way, holding on to the fence as she goes.

It looks locked. Is locked. But closer inspection shows that the lock is a Yale, more there for show than blow. She digs her
Oyster card – she learned not to use her debit card for this sort of thing years ago – from her bag, slips her hand through
the bars and has it open in seconds.

She looks behind her once more, checks that the coast is clear and steps through, pulling the gate to behind her, then limp-runs
up the short flight of stairs to the pier top. Squinting through the gloom at the long walkway in front of her, she sets off
to walk to the end.

Once again he feels the tug of an erection. The blood pumps as he watches her fall on the shingle, struggle to her feet and
feel her way into the shadows under the pier. He’s really on to something. Whatever the outcome, it’s a win-win. Either Amber
Gordon is hidden away somewhere out there in the dark and Kirsty Lindsay is walking up to find her, or she’s not there, and
then Lindsay will be up there alone.

He hears the sound of a gate opening and footsteps mounting metal stairs. She’s found the service entrance and is going up
to the boardwalk. Martin smiles. Perfect, he thinks. I can’t lose her now. There’s only one way on to the pier, and only one
way off.

The little faux-steam train that plods its way up to the pier’s end and back from eight in the morning until the last patrons
of the amusement arcade run out of fifty ps has been parked up in its shed, the doors secured with a chain-and-padlock extravaganza.
It’s a quarter of a mile to the end. An easy walk under normal circumstances, less so when the boards are slippery with mounting
drizzle and you don’t know what you’ll find when you reach your destination. She might not even be there. She might have fled
already, found some other hiding place and be waiting for your call.

Come on, Kirsty, she tells herself. Get a grip. It’s a quick inand-out and once you’ve got her somewhere safe you’ll be safe
as well. Never have to see her, speak to her, think of her again.

She starts to plod, wraps her scarf tightly round her head. Only August and the air, as she heads out to sea, is as dank as
a cellar.

She hears her own footfalls, thick on the night air. Her nose is running. What am I doing? she wonders. This is the stupidest
thing I’ve ever done. Corrects herself. Second most stupid. But in this case, I don’t have a choice. Because it’s not just
me, is it? I fucking hate her now. I pitied her before, thought we shared some understanding, but now I hate her. Maybe I
should just go back up into town and tell those zombie-people on the corners where she is. She can’t talk if she’s dead, after
all. If I let her die, my problems are over …

She shakes her head, dismisses the thought. This is not who I am. I’m not like that, however much I’d like to be.

The railway line is punctuated by tiny, pointless stations,
all white-painted iron and panes of greenhouse glass. Like everything here the pier is a relic of more elegant times, when
travel abroad was only for the rich and their servants, and lawyers and doctors would come here and take their pleasures among
the grocers and butchers. Now, the elegant lines of its railings are hidden by garish advertising hoardings. The moon filters
weakly through a gap in the clouds, showing up the fact that half the windows of the station-stops are broken. A gust of wind
drives raindrops against her cheek. The weather is getting worse.

She hears a sound behind her: metal hitting metal. The gate?

He waits five minutes – times it by his watch – before he follows her through the gate. No need to stay close. He knows where
she’s going, after all. He crouches below the wall and sees her head, silhouetted above the railings at the top of the steps,
turn left and walk out to sea. Then she’s gone, all sound buried by the crash of the waves.

He takes a chance and scuttles, crabwise, into the shelter of the pier. Now there’s no way she’ll glimpse him. He’s safe and
hidden and she has no idea he is behind her. He has a sudden urge to laugh out loud. Slips and slides to the gate and gives
it a push. She’s left it on the latch and slipped a torn-off piece of the cardboard backing of a spiral-bound notebook between
latch and frame. He hasn’t expected it to give, and fails to stop the gate from swinging back against the fence behind. Grabs
it just as it hits, but not in time to prevent the clank of metal ringing out into the air.

Martin stoops down and waits, statue-still, at the bottom of the steps.

Kirsty ducks in behind the building. Waits, breathing shallow, and watches. Nothing. No one emerges from the staircase. Just
the flutter of a poster advertising the magician whose matinées are the council’s contribution to calling the shack at the
end of
the structure a theatre. You’re jumping at shadows, she tells herself. Because you know what you’re doing is stupid. Because
you got yourself scared out of your wits the other night in Tailor’s Lane, and now you’re expecting to be followed.

She crosses over the railway line and carries on along the other side of the tracks, as though doing so will somehow cover
her progress.

I hate you, Amber Gordon. When I see you, it will be hard to be civil, however frightened you are, however much you need my
help. Because of you, I too am afraid. Because of you, the corrosive, acid terror of discovery is eating away at my mind,
eating away at my marriage. I love him. Oh, God, I love him, and you don’t care. It wasn’t me who killed her, Amber, it was
you.

A blustery gust snatches at her scarf, leaving her gasping at the sudden bitterness of the sea-wind. How this town ever managed
to be somewhere people came for pleasure is beyond her imagination. The boards are slippery, and there are tools and materials
lying around where the walkway is being mended. Bloody great hammers and crowbars, lying about for anyone to find.

Over halfway now. She can’t shake the feeling that she is being watched. CCTV? She hasn’t noticed any cameras, but it’s practically
compulsory to have them these days. But Amber’s been up here for a couple of hours now, though; if she’s still here, then
no one’s turned out to turf her off. Either there aren’t any cameras, they’re not working or not manned.

Of course you think you’re being watched, she thinks. Because being watched would mean the end of the world. Stop it, Kirsty.
It’s a situational fear, not a real one.

But she stops and looks behind her again anyway. An empty walkway, the steps to the gate barely visible in the distance. Stupid,
she thinks. I’ve never been any good at telling the difference between imagined dangers and real ones. Perhaps if I had, we
wouldn’t be in this situation.

*

He crawls on hands and knees to the top of the steps and looks out on to the boardwalk. She’s not come back. Stupid woman’s
walking on, has crossed to the other side of the railway track to make his own progress easier. All he has to do now is duck-run
ten feet to the cover of the station, and he can follow her as closely as he likes.

The moon breaks through the cloud for a second and makes a river across the sea. For a brief moment, Whitmouth looks beautiful,
bathed in mournful light, the starkness of the Sixties blocks behind the seafront softened by the encroaching haar. Then,
as quickly, another gust of wind slaps pinprick raindrops into her face, sends her scuttling for the shelter of the penny
arcade’s stingy awning.

Deep darkness inside; machines hunched and lurking, the floors damp and sticky, awaiting the arrival of the dawn cleaning
team. Two huge pillar ashtrays overflow on either side of the double door. As she huddles below the five-inch overhang, the
heavens open like someone’s turned a tap on, and rain starts to sluice through the gutters. The sea changes mood; the dull
roll and suck becomes a growl of annoyance. She feels the ground tremble beneath her feet.

Kirsty dashes the last fifty feet and hits the central square. It’s empty. No sign of Amber, just full bins and empty benches.
She splashes to a halt, looks wildly around. No one. Only herself and the beating rain, and the flashing light on the helter-skelter.
The theatre looms, Edwardian-grand, in front of her, box-office windows like black eyes, Marvo the Magnificent sneering, twenty
feet tall, from a poster. She half expects to see Amber sheltering beneath the canopy, but the area is empty.

‘Shit,’ says Kirsty out loud, rain running off her face. Knew I should’ve stayed at the car. Knew I shouldn’t have come. She
could be bloody anywhere. For all I know the police have taken her in and there’s no need to be here at all …

She opens her mouth and yells at the top of her lungs. Yells to
be heard over storm and sea and the flapping canvas of the tarot tents among the flowerbeds, the clatter of something caught
by the wind behind the arcade. ‘BEL! BEEEELLLLL!’

Movement, out of the corner of her eye. She whirls, ready to defend herself, sees that the front door of the cruddy little
waxworks has come open. Amber’s head appears: frightened, hopeful.

‘Fuck!’ shouts Kirsty and splashes over the boardwalk, into the dry.

It’s called Dr Wax’s House of Horror, and it is well named. The place has a musty smell of damp cloth and hopelessness, and
the sight that greets her as she plunges through the door is a tableau of an execution at the guillotine. It’s dark, lit by
emergency lighting, and faceless forms loom from murky niches in the side walls.

The rain drums on the tar-paper roof and the floor shifts with the surge of the sea. Like being on a boat, she thinks, in
a harbour, midwinter. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asks, peering through the gloom. ‘It was just drizzling when I got here.’

‘It happens all the time. It’s called the Whitmouth Wilding. Something to do with the Thames Estuary and the North Sea.’

‘We can’t go out in this.’

‘No,’ says Amber. ‘But it’ll die down in a bit. It never lasts long. Come on.’

She leads her between the heavy velvet curtains that divide the lobby from the main hall. The hall is cramped and crowded,
lit eerie red; faces familiar-but-not-familiar stare frozenly into a mysterious otherworld, eyes blank and mouths forever
frozen on the edge of words. More tableaux, more savage now they’ve passed the entrance hall: a man stretched on a rack, his
face a screaming rictus; a Cambodian peasant holding a plastic bag – the striped kind, the kind you get from corner shops
everywhere – over the face of a man in a suit; First World War soldiers
wallowing in mud and barbed wire.
MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN
, reads the banner stretched from wall to wall. And all for an entrance fee of £9.95 inc.
VAT
, thinks Kirsty. A bargain.

‘Good God,’ she says, ‘it’s a cocktail party in hell. I’d’ve been crapping myself if I’d had to wait in here.’

Amber laughs humourlessly. ‘Strangely enough, I was crapping myself
before
I got here. To be honest, they’re the best company I’ve had in days.’

She slumps on to a cushioned seating platform in the middle of the room. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what
I would have done.’

Kirsty’s anger returns. ‘Well, you didn’t give me much choice, did you?’

Amber looks away, ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’

Kirsty glares at her. Amber looks back, and meets her eyes. ‘I
am
,’ she assures her. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. There are people looking for me, everywhere, and no one to help
me. I
needed
you.’

Kirsty remembers the crowds in town, the home-made weaponry and the absent police. Walks to a bench a few feet away and sits
down. She knows that what Amber has said is true, but she doesn’t want to be near the woman. Doesn’t want to have to look
at her.

‘How was your drive?’ Amber asks suddenly, in a bright social voice, as though Kirsty has simply turned up for brunch.

‘It was fine.’ Kirsty is amazed at the teatime voice she uses in return. ‘The roads are good at this time of night, of course.’