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.