The Wicked Girls (12 page)

The woman looks at her as though she’s crawled out from under something. She’s familiar, thinks Kirsty. Why’s she familiar?
She gives her a nice open smile. Wonders if she’s got another twenty in her wallet. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Just for a minute.’

A frown. The woman shouts, down the alleyway, at the guard’s hurrying back. ‘Jason! We’ve got a stray here!’

Kirsty sees Jason turn reluctantly back towards them. She has seconds to make her final pitch.

‘Come on,’ she says, ‘be a darling. I’m not going to do any harm.’

‘Jesus,’ says the woman. ‘You people disgust me. Seriously. Don’t you realise? There was a girl
dead
in here. Not some – dummy in a movie. A girl. A sweet, breathing, laughing teenage girl. She was alive, and now she’s dead,
and people’s lives are
devastated—
’

Her voice cuts off halfway through the sentence and Kirsty hears a gasp, as though someone’s punched her in the solar plexus.
She looks up at the woman’s face and sees that it has gone white, the eyes bulging, the jaw dropped back to show snaggled
teeth.

‘What?’ she asks.

‘No,’ says the woman. ‘No, no, no. Shit, no. No. You can’t be here. You can’t. Shit. You’ve got to go.’ She clutches on to
the top of the railing as though the strength has gone from her legs. ‘Oh Christ,’ she says, and she’s almost weeping. ‘Oh
my God, Christ, please no. Jade, go. You’ve got to go,
now
.’

Amber understands now what they mean when they talk of a rush of blood to the head. She feels a pressure inside her skull
that makes her fear that it will crack, like an eggshell. She feels her heart, thump-thump-thump, feels the strength leave
her limbs, sees darkness creep in around the edge of her vision. This can’t be happening. It can’t. Sixty million people in
the country; what are the odds she’d just … be here.

Jade, now that she’s heard Amber speak her name, looks as though the same physical phenomena are afflicting her. She sways,
shroud-white, on the bottom step. Stares up at Amber as though she’s seen a ghost. In a way, she has. They’ve both been dead
and buried for decades now. Annabel Oldacre and Jade Walker, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist when they vanished
into the system. It wasn’t safe for them to keep their names in detention, even when they were still theoretically presumed
innocent. They might never have had visitors themselves, but their fellow hoodlums did, and even back then there was good
money to be made from the News of the Screws for tales from the inside. Especially tales of Wicked Girls and their Wicked
Ways.

Jason Murphy, Maria’s little jackal of a husband, is approaching, slowly and unwillingly.

‘Bel,’ says Jade.

Amber shivers. She hasn’t heard the name as a form of address in decades. She is no longer that girl. Everything about
her is changed. Only continuity can keep you the same, and she has been Amber Gordon for almost as long as she can remember.

‘Please,’ Amber says again. ‘You’ve got to go.’

Jesus, she thinks. She looks ten years younger than me. She feels a surge of resentment towards this woman. Hair well cut
– not showy, but fall-into-place neat, subtly highlighted, shiny; skin unlined; clothes not flashy-expensive but clearly not
from market stalls either. Her black leather boots are classy, though. You don’t get that sort of firm-yet-yielding leather
in Primark. Incarceration’s treated you well, then, she thinks.

She glances up. Jason Murphy is a few feet away now, lurking in that vulpine way of his. Has he seen that something’s going
on? Something more than he’d expect? She has always suspected that Jason’s studied indifference to the world hides a sharp
eye for a situation – as long as that situation provides an opportunity for himself.

She pulls herself together. ‘This area’s off limits,’ she says sternly. ‘Even if – even if the situation was different, you’d
still not be allowed back here. Staff only.’

Jade’s still not found her voice. Amber looks up the alleyway, nods at Jason. ‘I don’t know how she got back here,’ she says
to him, ‘and I’m not going to ask. Just get her out of here.’

Jason steps forward and takes hold of Jade’s arm. She jumps, as though she’s been ambushed, whirls her arm from his grip as
though it burns.

‘Come on,’ says Jason. ‘No point arguing.’

She turns back, looks at Amber, wide-eyed. ‘Bel,’ she says again.

Amber pretends to ignore her. The name, each time she hears it, makes her jolt inside. Stop it.
Stop it
. Do you want them to find out? Do you? Do you want the crowds on your doorstep, the shit through your letterbox?

She turns away and goes back through the door.

*

Once she’s safely inside, Amber allows her legs to buckle. She slumps against the mirrored wall, slides down it to the floor,
stares at her grey-white reflection. Her hands and feet are cold.

‘Ah, well,’ says Jason, letting go of Kirsty’s arm the moment he knows they’re not overlooked. ‘Tough luck.’

He’s preparing to put up a fight if she asks for her money back, but she seems strangely distracted, following him like a
zombie. He doesn’t really understand what he’s just seen, but knows that this was something more than her simply getting caught.
He could swear he saw something pass between the two women; even that they recognised each other. Maybe he’s wrong. This woman’s
small and slight, and would be no match for Amber Gordon: maybe she just got scared at the sight of her.

Most people would, he thinks, and chuckles inwardly. The woman had a face so grim on her just now that you could have cast
her in
Lord of the Rings
without make-up, even if she didn’t have that great knobble on her upper lip. God knows what Vic Cantrell sees in her. It
must be some sort of mother thing, because it sure as shit isn’t sex. Not after the nights he and Vic have had, prowling the
nightclubs on the strip, fucking and fingering the slags on holiday. I must ask him one day, he thinks, if she knows what
he gets up to when she’s at work. Maybe she lets him. Maybe she thinks it’s the only way she’ll get to keep him.

The journalist’s silence is disconcerting. She’s gone a strange shade of grey, and clutches the strap of her bag like a security
blanket.

‘It’s OK,’ he reassures her as they emerge into the park. ‘She’s not going to tell. She won’t even remember which one you
were.’

She gulps. Looks at him with huge eyes, as though she’s only just noticed that he’s there. Stumbles away towards the café.

He notices that Vic is watching them as he rides on the back of a bumper car, holding on casually with one hand. He’s seen
them emerge from the alleyway, and looks amused. Jason grins at him and flashes the universal hip-spaced-hands and crotch-thrust
gesture at her retreating back. Vic laughs, gives him the thumbs-up. Jumps acrobatically on to the back of a new car to give
the girls a thrill.

She wants strong coffee. Her hands are shaking and, despite what the health bores say, she finds that caffeine calms her.
But of course the coffee in Funnland hasn’t seen a bean in eighteen factory processes. She fills the cup up with creamer,
empties three sachets of sugar on top and carries it out to a bench. Checking her watch, she is surprised to see that only
fifteen minutes have passed since she spoke to Jim.

The park has filled up. The kiddie rides are up and running now, and the first nappy change is taking place on the wooden
table next to her. She realises that she’s still shaking. She takes the lid off the coffee, sips, scalds her mouth. She’d
forgotten how much hotter instant is than the real thing. Wonders at the changes in her life since she last saw Bel Oldacre:
that she has become an espresso-drinking, pesto-eating member of the balsamic classes. Back home – back in the time she thinks
of as ‘
before
’ – a meal was Budgen tea and white toast with jam; potatoes and spaghetti hoops; and, occasionally, a glut of pig meat when
her dad took the shotgun down to the corrugated-iron Nissen huts that functioned as sties. A place like this would have seemed
like an unattainable heaven to her, somewhere to see on the telly and dream of visiting.

Was that really Bel? Was it? How can this have happened? Under the weatherbeaten skin, the brassy cropped hair, the stained
polyester overall? My God. She looks the way I was meant to look.

Kirsty doesn’t think she would have recognised her had she not been recognised herself. Though she’s surprised no one thought
to remove that blemish – so recognisable, so discussed – from Bel’s face when they were setting up her new identity. She supposes
that more of the child she once was must still be recognisable in her own face, mole or no mole, than she realises; and the
thought frightens her. Bel, up till now, has remained eleven in her mind. She barely remembers her, if truth be told; is more
familiar with her features from those bloody school photos, the ones that get pulled from the archive whenever there’s an
anniversary, whenever another child earns the sobriquet ‘unspeak able’. They only knew each other for the inside of a day.
And afterwards, standing silently side by side in the dock, barely glancing at each other except for when one or the other
of them was testifying. It wasn’t like they were best friends. Or even habitual ones.

But here they are, their names inextricably linked in the minds of the world. And banned by law from ever seeing each other
again, as long as they live. Venables and Thompson; Mary Bell; Walker and Oldacre – back in the days before Child Protection
took them out of public circulation, child murderers’ names were as well known – better, often – as the names of their victims.
If she quoted their names at a dinner party, the majority of the guests would nod knowingly. Chloe Francis? They’d probably
need prompting.

Her mouth is as dry as the desert. She screws her eyes up and forces more scalding liquid between her lips, holding it on
her tongue and breathing in, hard, to cool it.

It’s a condition of your licence, Kirsty, she says to herself. No one around you even knows there’s such a thing as a probation
order in your name, but it’s there nonetheless. For the rest of your life. You are not to see, or speak to, or have contact
with each other ever again. Like you’d ever want to.

Oh, but I do, shrieks a small, angry voice inside. I do. More than anything. More than anything on earth. She’s the only one
who knows. The only one who knows how it feels. The only other
me
in the world. Twenty-five years I’ve been holding this in, living with my guilt, mastering the art of dissimulation. Twenty-five
years with no family, lying to the friends I’ve made, lying to Jim, lying to my children. How would they look at me,
if they knew? He’s a forgiving man. But could he still love me, if he knew he’d married The Most Hated Child in Britain?

Bel Oldacre. Kirsty doesn’t even know her new name.

It’s raining by the time Amber works up the guts to leave. She’s hidden away for hours: first in the empty mirror maze, then
in her office, among the files and the boxes of J Cloths, until the afternoon shift is over; scared to come out, scared to
show her face in the park. Outside, the rumble of the rollercoaster, the screams of its passengers; inside, the silent scream
in her ears. Then, as an English summer storm sets in, the sounds die down and the music, ride by ride, is switched off. It’s
not worth wasting the power, as the crowds drop as the rain gets up. Any punters who want to stay are given a refund, or offered
free entry another day. Most of them don’t even think to ask; just rush their wailing kids off to the weather-proofed arcades
on the Corniche.

Still, she is afraid. She scuttles from her office towards the staff gate as though she expects Jade to be lurking in the
shadows; pulls her fleece tight round her breasts and wraps her scarf – everyone who lives in Whitmouth carries a scarf with
them wherever they go, even at the height of summer – round her head to hide her face. Crazy, she knows: even if Jade had
been hanging around, she would have been cleared out with the rest of the stragglers an hour ago. But still, she is afraid.

Jason Murphy is sheltering in the hut, eating a cheese-and-onion pasty with his feet up on the desk. He looks at her, all
insolence in his navy sweater, peaked cap shoved to the back of his head, as she swipes her card across the reader, clocking
out.

‘All right?’ he says.

She feels a surge of annoyance. She knows perfectly well how Jade Walker found her way to the mirror maze. And the fact that
he knows that something else has happened has given him some edge, some stupid sense of power. He smirks as he watches her.

‘No,’ she says, turning to him, ‘I’m not all right, actually, Jason.’

That look, that ugly sense of entitlement, the refusal to accept that ‘respect’ is a two-way street. Jason wants respect all
the time: she’s seen him squaring up to neighbours, to kids, to random men in the street, demanding it. She’s never seen him
do anything to earn it.

‘If you ever do anything like that again,’ she says, ‘I’m going to put you on report.’ She’s not his direct boss, but she’s
management, and has authority of sorts over everyone who isn’t. And she’s damned if she’s going to let him forget it.

‘Do what?’ he says – whines – though he knows what she’s talking about.

‘You know what,’ she says. ‘You’re here to provide security, not take beer money off anyone who wants to give it you. There’s
computers here, Jason, and cash, and it’s your job to see they don’t get stolen.’

‘She got past me,’ he says sulkily.

She waits two beats, giving him the gimlet eye. ‘Don’t give me that,’ she says. ‘If I ever find out you’ve been up to that
sort of trick again, I’ll be reporting you, do you get me?’

He tries to give her the eye back. Fails. Amber perfected the art of outstaring the enemy at the Blackdown Hills detention
centre. It was necessary for survival then, and it’s a skill she has never allowed to fade.

‘And get your feet off that desk,’ she says.