The Wicked Girls (46 page)

‘How is everyone?’ she asks eventually.

‘How do you expect them to be?’ replies Lucinda.

‘I don’t …’ says Bel.

‘Michael almost divorced me,’ says Lucinda. ‘But, thank God, he’s changed his mind. He understands, you see. That I can’t
be blamed for what you’ve done.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Bel, humbly. Looks down at the worn cuffs of her sweater, wonders how much longer this visit will last.

‘Anyway,’ says Lucinda, after a pause. ‘I just came to let you know we’re leaving. Going to Singapore.’

Bel doesn’t answer. It’s already clear to her that it’s all over, on the outside, that the house is locked up and the family
fled. No one has made much effort to hide the press coverage from her; she’s seen the boards over the windows, the steel grille
on the door, like the burnt-out wastes of Broadwater Farm. The Walkers have been rehoused, their names changed, the younger
children taken into care and the eldest scattered to the winds. Her own people – there’s less help from the state if you’ve
got bank accounts. Less interference, too.

‘The bank’s transferred him,’ continues Lucinda. ‘Kind of them, really. But then again, he’s good at what he does. Popular,
too, though I don’t suppose you’ll appreciate that. Anyway, that’s it. I dare say we won’t come back. So that’s us, condemned
to life as international gypsies, thanks to you. I thought I’d tell you. Let you know.’

‘OK,’ says Bel passively. In a way she feels relieved, knowing
more clearly what the future holds. They’re not going to fight for her. She’s on her own.

‘Right, well.’ Lucinda starts to root in her bag. For a moment, Bel has a wild thought that she might have brought a gift.
A keepsake for the years ahead, some small token that will remind her that she did indeed once have a family. Her mother’s
hair, usually immaculate, is unruly, tied back in a ponytail, roots showing among the candystripe blond. She’s developed lines,
she notices, around her mouth, in the six months since Bel last saw her. I did that, thinks Bel. It’s all my fault.

Lucinda finds what she is looking for, brings it out: a handkerchief, embroidered: her initials in one corner. She blows her
nose delicately; brings her oversized sunglasses down from their perch on her head and covers her eyes.

‘At least your sister’ll get some chance of a normal life,’ says Lucinda. ‘Without people knowing. People looking at her.
Wondering.’

‘Yes,’ says Bel.

‘How could you do it, Annabel?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t meant. We didn’t mean to – it just
happened
…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Lucinda dismisses the crime as though it were some petty gossip, some vandalism, some schoolyard scrap.
‘Not
that
. For Christ’s sake. I mean those lies. All those lies about Michael.’

‘They weren’t lies,’ she says defiantly. ‘I told you. I told, but you wouldn’t listen. They weren’t lies.’

Lucinda doesn’t want to hear it. Has never wanted to hear it: not about the cellar, or the stables, or the late-night visits
when her mother is deep in Valium dreams.

‘I tried to tell you, Mummy,’ she says, ‘but you wouldn’t listen.’

And she won’t listen now. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. He
paid for your lawyer
, for God’s sake. How could you do something like that to him?’

‘Mummy—’ she tries one more time.

‘Oh, shut up. I just wanted to tell you, that’s all. What I think of you. That man’s brought you up since you were a toddler.
He took you on out of the goodness of his heart. He’s given us everything. I can’t
believe
you’d repay us like that. How did you get to be like this, Annabel?’

You taught me, she thinks. I learned that lying was the best chance I had. She stares and shakes her head. There is nothing
to say. Nothing that will be heard, anyway.

In the corner, the corrections officer turns a page of
Woman’s Own
pointedly. Lucinda glances at her, then gets briskly to her feet. ‘I’m done,’ she commands. ‘I’m ready to go now.’

The woman slowly puts the magazine down and starts to pull her keychain from the pocket of her navy trousers. Her expression
is inscrutable; the expression of someone who’s storing every detail for later dissection. Lucinda turns back to Bel, gives
her the Look again.

‘Dear God,’ she says. ‘You always were a little liar. From the minute you could talk.’

She wheels on her elegant green heel and marches towards the door. The officer points at Bel’s chair. ‘Stay there,’ she says.

The door bangs to behind them.

A cigarette is at its most delicious in damp sea air. She rests against the station wall and savours every last lungful. Waits
as the lights on the front fade to insignificance and Martin releases a final, surrendered sigh. He’s gone, thinks Amber,
and Jade is safe. No one to tell, no one to see.

She takes her phone from her pocket, dials 999. Looks at the watery sun as it leaps over the horizon, gets out the last of
the cigarettes, crumples the pack and puts it, tidily, in her pocket. ‘Hello,’ she says, calmly, when the operator answers.
‘I need help. I think I’ve killed someone.’

She lights the last of the cigarettes, sits back and waits.

Jim’s mother goes up to bed and they do the washing-up. She’s aged noticeably since their last visit, and seems relieved to
hand over the chores, though she has always been one of those old-fashioned women for whom late rising, public displays of
emotion and leaving the washing-up are all, if not mortal ones, sins nonetheless. She’ll be eighty in a couple of years, thinks
Jim. I wonder how long she can keep this house going for. Maybe we should be talking to her about her plans, before she gets
too frail to make them.

Kirsty washes and he, still knowing his way round the kitchen of his childhood, dries and puts away. Kirsty is quiet. Has
been all day. She must be exhausted, he thinks. Apart from her nap in the car while I drove us over here, she’s barely slept
since the night before last. She stands on one foot as she scrubs; dangles her sandalled other to take the weight off it.

‘How’s the knee?’ he asks.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘A bit hurty.’

‘I’ll get you some ibuprofen,’ he says. ‘I’m sure Mum’s got some in the bathroom.’

‘That would be nice,’ says Kirsty. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’

Jim puts down the dishcloth and makes his way as quietly as he can to the bathroom. It’s all so familiar. Same old Flower
Fairies on the hall wall, same old umbrella stand by the front door. At what point in life do you stop buying things? he
wonders. He loves the stability of his mother’s domain: the memories in every chair, the china picked out with his father
before their wedding and cared for and husbanded so that the service is still intact nearly fifty years later. But he doesn’t
remember them ever doing the acquisitive thing that seems to be expected of you these days. By the time he was aware of his
surroundings, they’d reached a point where they only went to the shops to replace things when they actively wore out. They
never spent their time combing country-house sales looking to upgrade, or threw out curtains simply because they’d tired of
the pattern, the way he and Kirsty do.

He tiptoes past his mother’s room and lets himself into the bathroom. White tiles, cautiously chosen to not reflect the vagaries
of fashion, dark green lino, sink and bath and toilet plain white and still good a hundred years after they were first installed.
The room smells of lavender and talcum; old-lady smells, he would think, except that it’s how his parents’ bathroom always
smelled, one of the earliest scent memories he possesses. He is suddenly filled with nostalgia; a strange nostalgia for something
that still, after all,
is
. What if she has to move out? he thinks. If she has to move down to something smaller, has to choose which belongings to
take with her? I think it would slay me. I think I’d want to cry myself to death.

He opens the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet and shuffles through its contents, feeling, as he always does when he goes
through other people’s stuff, a bit like a burglar, like a snoop. His mother is taking statins, he notices. He must remember
to ask her about them tomorrow. And how her arthritis is. The first night is always such a rush of news and greetings and
suitcases tucked beneath beds. They rarely get on to the family stuff until all the details of his schoolfriends’ parents’
funerals are out of the way. He finds the ibuprofen, tucked in with the Rennies and the Night Nurse and the Sudafed; tips
a couple into his hand and takes them back to the kitchen.

Kirsty has finished the crockery and is on to the casserole dish; scrubs with a level of concentration that he knows from
experience is a sign of tension. We’ve not talked yet, he thinks. Another piece of talking that’s been sidelined by the necessity
of action. I hate parting on a quarrel. The ‘sorry’s need to be said. He comes over and holds the pills out in his hand. Kirsty
takes off the rubber gloves, wipes a strand of hair out of her eyes and takes them.

‘Thanks,’ she says.

‘You didn’t say how you did it.’

There are shadows under her eyes and her expression is faintly haunted. Jesus, she’s tired, he thinks. I must make her stay
in bed tomorrow morning, even though she gets embarrassed about doing it here. ‘Oh, stupid,’ she says. ‘That bloody shingle
beach. I don’t know how anybody gets up it without breaking a leg.’

‘The beach? You were on the beach?’

A touch of colour crosses her complexion. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Jim,’ she says. ‘There were loads of people. I’m not going anywhere
by myself in Whitmouth ever again.’

‘Well, thanks for coming home,’ he says, and touches her shoulder. ‘It means a lot to me.’

For a moment she looks like she’s going to cry. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Jim. I’m a bad wife.’

‘No.’ He gazes into her eyes, wills her to believe him. ‘You’re a wonderful wife. I’m just sorry I shouted.’

‘I’ll be better,’ she promises. ‘I won’t do it again.’

‘Shh,’ says Jim, and puts his arms round her, there at the kitchen sink. ‘Shh, Kirsty, it’s OK. I’ll be better too.’

‘It’s all of you,’ she says. ‘Nothing is more important than all of you. You must know that. I would never hurt you on purpose.
You have to know that.’

He strokes her hair, shushes into her scalp. ‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he says. ‘You make me whole.’

The grandfather clock in the hall whirrs in preparation for a strike. He glances over her shoulder at the clock on the stove,
sees that it is nearly ten o’clock. She always watches the news at ten; it’s part of her emotional make-up, as essential to
her routine as the news wires on the internet in the morning. ‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘I’ll make you a cuppa and we’ll watch the
news.’

She stiffens slightly in his arms. As he breaks away, he sees a strange look on her face, almost an unwillingness. He laughs,
runs his palm down her cheek. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart,’ he assures her. ‘Once a hack, always a hack. I don’t
really
want you to change. It was a—I was cross. I didn’t mean it. You wouldn’t be the woman I married then, would you? Go on. I’ll
be through in a minute.’

She goes off to the living room and he hears the sound of the adverts, blasting loud, at his mother’s volume, for a moment,
before she finds the remote and zaps them down. He puts on the kettle and hunts in the cupboard for a biscuit. He knows his
mother always keeps digestives in the house. There’s usually a cake, too, but even as an adult he still feels bound by the
rules in place in his childhood. Cake is something you eat at teatime. Fruit’s expensive; you have one piece after lunch,
and cherries are counted out in batches of ten. Sweets are things you get after lunch on Sunday, if you’ve been good. If you’re
hungry, have a piece of toast. But don’t eat too much, mind; you don’t want to spoil your dinner. He smiles at the memories,
feels comforted, as he always does, by the everlasting presence of his childhood. I can’t imagine what it must be like to
be Kirsty, he thinks; there’s so very much to be made up for.

He finds the biscuits and puts four on a plate, puts the plate and the tea mugs on a tin tray with the Guinness toucan on
it. His father must’ve half-inched it from a pub at some time, though he still finds it impossible to imagine that his parents
could ever have had moments where scrupulous morals weren’t observed. He makes two mugs of tea, sugars it up, nice and sweet,
the way Kirsty likes it but rarely allows herself to have.
Really, this is what the big stuff of life is made of. It’s not the holidays and the dinners out and the wish for more, it’s
about the cups of tea and the curling up together after a long day. It’s about forgiving and forgetting and making allowances.
It’s about honesty and truth and trust, it’s about making a place of safety and keeping the ones you love warm within it.

He takes the tray through. The room is dark: just the standard lamp in the corner, dust and old-fashioned tassels on the shade,
and the flickering light from the television to light her serious face. She’s on the sofa, knees pulled up and feet tucked
underneath her, her arms wrapped around a cushion in her lap, watching. He puts the tray on the coffee table and hands her
her tea; settles down beside her, thigh touching her toes, companionable. Some people in grey suits are shaking hands outside
a white concrete building with flags.

‘So what’s the news?’ he asks.

‘United Nations. Pakistan. Security Council not doing its stuff. The usual.’

She wraps her hands round the mug as though they are cold; blows on it like a child. ‘D’you want a biscuit?’ he asks.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Go on.’

He smiles as he watches her almost dunk, then remember and stop. Though most New Year’s resolutions fall by the wayside, she’s
stuck with this one, has a theory that you eat more of the things if you don’t have to chew them. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’
he tells her again. ‘This is nice. Just … you know.’

Kirsty unfolds a hand from her mug and puts it in his. Squeezes. They turn their attention back to the television just in
time to see stock shots of Whitmouth seafront, some footage of police cars and jostling crowds, and a picture of that woman
Amber Gordon, the one from last week whose plight made Kirsty so angry, while the voiceover intones. An arrest, this morning.
A murder in the night, the suspect in custody, charges expected tomorrow.