By the bed, he puts a foot behind her ankle and pushes her so that she tumbles backwards beneath him. Hoicks down her pants and grips her pubis proprietorially. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’s it. You know you want it.’ With the other hand he unbuttons his jeans and pulls his cock out. It’s thick, engorged, purple.
He climbs on top and begins to thrust.
Chapter Twenty
Her name is Stacey Plummer, and she is a veterinary nurse. Was. At twenty-five she is older than the other victims, and the postmortem shows that she was stone-cold sober, to boot. At midnight on Saturday she tired of the company of her friends, who were intent on drinking the bar at the Hope and Anchor dry before hitting a nightclub, and set out to walk home to their B &B. Her body was found six hours later, in a beach-café car park, by yet another cleaner from Funnland on her way home from her night shift. Those women must be really starting to hate their jobs.
It takes almost two days to identify her, mostly because her friends were so hungover that they didn’t leave their room other than to eat their full English, and assumed that she’d gone home in protest. And partly because the killer has stepped up his game. Stacey’s face has been beaten so badly that her gamine features have been almost obliterated.
The other victim is a different type of person altogether, though the occurrence of two murders so close together has kicked off a frenzy of fear and speculation. Tina Bentham, a forty-five-year-old grandmother of four, an alcoholic and occasional prostitute. Found by council bin men on Monday afternoon in a gore-soaked alleyway off Fore Street, her body undamaged apart from a couple of old, probably unrelated, bruises, and a ragged double-puncture wound to the neck that has ruptured her carotid artery, causing her to bleed to death. The victims, and the manner of their deaths, are so different that the police – and, even more, the press – are beginning to speculate as to whether there’s a single killer at all.
Kirsty arrives on Tuesday afternoon, before Stacey’s name is released to the press. She doesn’t want to be within a hundred miles of Bel, but Dave Park has gone up to Sleaford, where Child F and Child M are due at the magistrates’ court, and work is work is work. I’ll keep my head down, she thinks. It’s not that small a town; I’ll probably never bump into her, especially if I stay away from the theme park. She wishes fiercely that she’d never handed over her number. Doesn’t know what temporary madness possessed her.
The town is buzzing, despite the images on the news-stands. The cash registers in the pubs and cafés ring red-hot as the press corps huddle behind their windows, getting news off each other between the ritual announcements. The sea thunders up the pebbles, washing evidence and bathers in its wake. Police tape turns quickly to streamers which whiplash over the promenade, catching the unwary with paper-cut edges.The streets are crowded with health-and-safety officers handing out Keep Yourself Safe leaflets, with feminist groups and opportunist politicians and churches and police liaisons and council tourism officers reassuring holidaymakers. Travelling burger vans park up on the double yellows on the seafront on the safety-in-numbers assumption. Hotel rooms are full and cafés are running out of bacon butties. Through the steamy atmosphere of the penny arcade, frustrated sunbathers huddle over slot machines, watching their what-the-hell money drain away at a pound a minute. Funnland, with its high walls and patches of shelter, is doing a roaring trade. There’s nothing, it seems, like a serial killer to foster a tourist boom.
Kirsty can’t find parking anywhere near the front and ends up leaving the car at the Voyagers Rest (no apostrophe; she wishes she were less sensitive to these things). With a scarf wrapped across her face she trudges a mile through the pedestrian maze of shopping streets to the sea.
There’s a queue outside Funnland, just as though it were another normal day. She looks at the people shuffling up the line and wonders if Bel is inside.
Amber studies Suzanne Oddie’s skin. It’s shiny and brown and taut, and holds no clue as to her age. And yet somehow she looks every year of it. That’s the thing with plastic surgery and all the rest of the stuff rich women spend so much on, thinks Amber. It’s not really about making you look younger. It’s to make you look more expensive.
Suzanne is looking at the books, frowning over a pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed designer spectacles. She wears a suit that Amber recognises as Chanel. Beneath the desk, a pink-soled stiletto heel drums back and forth. She has three rings on her left hand – one engagement, one wedding, one eternity, the stones the size of corn kernels – and a tourmaline knuckleduster on the right. Amber feels dowdy and poor in front of her. Of course, she is meant to, today. Today, Suzanne is power-dressing to make the pecking order clear.
‘Eighteen tampon-disposal units? Seriously?’
‘You need one in every cubicle,’ says Amber.
‘Why can’t we just have them out in the washroom? And leave bags on the cisterns?’
Amber shrugs. ‘Up to you. I’d’ve said it was a false economy. What with the plumbing, and the cleaners resigning. I think you’re overestimating the average punter’s sense of communal responsibility.’
‘Mmm,’ says Suzanne; looks suspicious that a cleaner should be using such long words. Drums her nails again on the desk. Then she looks up, sharply. ‘Well, we need to make economies somewhere, Amber.’
Why? She wants to shout. Why? Thanks to the murder, and its I’d-forgotten-about-Whitmouth effect, we’re having the best season in living memory. There’s queues thirty minutes long just to get in through the front gate. ‘Really?’ she asks, faintly.
‘Yes. We’re in a recession, you know.’
Ah, she thinks, yes. The recession. ‘But we’re doing well here,’ she argues, aware that she’s wasting her breath. ‘Just judging by the amount of rubbish we’re carting out, numbers must be well up.’
Suzanne doesn’t look at her. Has she always avoided my eye like this? wonders Amber. Was I just so keen to please that I didn’t notice? Suzanne flips the page as she speaks. ‘Yes, well, but these murders are upward blips in a general downward trend. We can’t rely on them for ever.’
Amber’s eye pop. She’s not seen the murders from the business perspective. ‘No, I suppose we can’t,’ she says.
‘Especially with Innfinnityland out of action,’ continues Suzanne. ‘A total waste of an asset. We’re going to have to invest capital in finding another use for the space.’
Yes, thinks Amber. That Strangler’s one selfish bastard. She waits while Suzanne rattles her fingernails a bit more, wonders what’s coming next.
‘Twenty-six cleaners,’ she says eventually. ‘It’s a lot.’
‘Most of them on minimum wage,’ Amber points out.
‘That’s still…’ she turns to the calculator, taps away, ‘twenty-three-grand-odd a month. That’s a lot to be paying for cleaning.’
‘It’s a lot of cleaning,’ Amber replies. ‘Coke and ice-cream aren’t the easiest things to get off.’
‘Still,’ says Suzanne. ‘We’re not made of money.’ She fingers the strand of pearls around her neck, looks at Amber patronisingly. ‘You’re discovering the down side of management, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Sometimes you have to make the tough calls. That’s what we pay you for.’
Not enough, Amber thinks. ‘Can I just… get it straight what it is you’re after here, Suzanne?’
She smiles, tight-lipped. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’d say twenty per cent?’
Amber feels like she’s going to have a heart attack. ‘Twenty per cent? Off the wage bill?’