She’s never known him so cruel. What would they think now, all those people who tell her what a gentleman he is, how lucky she is, what a catch she’s got? Would Jackie be so keen to brace herself against the mirrors and hitch her skirt up if she could see him now, reclining against the cooker, smiling as she cries, as though he’s won a victory?
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she shouts. ‘Are you some kind of fucking psycho?’
Vic shrugs. The smile hasn’t wavered.
‘Why?’ she asks again. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Dunno, really,’ he says. ‘Because she was there? No, I’ll tell you what it was. Because she wasn’t you. That’s why. It was because she wasn’t you.’
She hears her own weeping as though it is coming from the far end of a tunnel. As though she’s hearing it from underwater. The dogs jitter in the doorway, unsure whether to offer comfort or run away. ‘But you don’t even like her,’ she says again.
‘You don’t have to like a woman to fuck ’er,’ he says crudely. ‘Surely you know that, by your age?’
‘Vic!’ she protests.
He shrugs again. ‘I told you I didn’t want her staying here,’ he says.
‘But you didn’t shag her here.’
Silence. She looks up. He doesn’t even have the grace to look discomfited.
‘Oh shit,’ she says. ‘Not in my bed. Tell me you didn’t… in my bed.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Not in your bed. Even she thought that was beyond the pale.’
Why am I crying? Why am I fucking crying? I should be roaring, I should be yelling and throwing things. Not behaving like some broken reed.
She heaves a breath into her lungs, feels it shudder through her body.
‘So,’ he says. ‘Now you know. I told you I didn’t want her here.’
‘How long?’ she asks.
He shakes his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does to me.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Amber.’
‘Fuck,’ she says. Snatches up his tea mug and lobs it at his head.
The tears stop the moment the door closes. She’s astonished at the speed at which they dry. She watches him walk down the path, then pulls the curtains. She doesn’t want the world seeing in.
Amber collapses into the sofa. Lies full out and puts her feet, still in shoes, up on the arm. He hates that. Hates it. Well, who gives a fuck? She drags the blue fleece throw down from the backrest and pulls it over her. She lies there, dry-eyed and weary, and stares at the ceiling.
She’s got an image in her head now, and it won’t go away. Jackie Jacobs in the hall of mirrors, impaled against the wall by her common-law husband. For some reason her mind has dressed her in a red polka-dot halterneck dress, the sort of thing Marilyn Monroe would wear. She’s got scarlet nails, and they’re clutching on to the back of his strong, familiar neck. Her face is screwed up into a snarl as she bucks against him; a million howls of orgasm, a million pumping buttocks.
Fuck.
She closes her eyes, presses her palm and fingers across them.
Come on. It didn’t look like that. She’s rarely seen Jackie in anything other than trackies and a T-shirt. The night they all went out for Vic’s birthday, she wore a short, tight denim skirt; meant to be white, but more like grey. She’s not got a double life as a glamourpuss, a secret identity that seduced him with surprise.
Shit. Her mind’s eye sees her now, with that skirt hitched up over her hips. She’s not even bothered to take her knickers off properly; just kicked her pink stiletto heel through one leg for ease of access. And she’s going unh-unh-unh-unh as he hammers away between her thighs.
Stop it. Stop torturing yourself. What are women like? Why do we have to dwell, when the facts are sufficient without the detail? She doesn’t need these images, conjured up from the interior of her brain, getting in the way when she needs to think, needs to make decisions.
What am I going to do? Do I even care that much? When I strip away the humiliation, the outrage, the disgust that my good nature should have been abused this way, do I honestly, really care?
She’s stunned by how indifferent she feels, in her core. Part of her simply watches herself, fascinated like a scientist watching a bug. Six years lost, and a part of her knows only too well that her tears earlier were as much to do with doing what would be expected as with actual pain.
Shit.
Mary-Kate comes in and stands by the sofa. Sniffs. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Hey, honey.’
The dog stands up on her hind legs and scrabbles to get up beside her. Amber reaches out and puts a hand round her tiny, surprisingly round belly, and pulls her on to her chest. She stands there wagging, smiling her doggy grin; Amber moves her after a couple of seconds, because her paw is digging in to one of the bruises Vic left the other day, during his quickie.
I hate him.
Do you? Or are you just thinking that because you think you ought to? Seriously, do you care enough to hate him? Have you just been hanging on here for the sake of getting to stay in one place for a while? God. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s not just saying it to justify himself. Maybe I have brought this on myself.
A voice from the past – her mother’s: What do you expect, Annabel? All the things he’s done for you, and this is how you repay us. You’re such an ungrateful, nasty child…
Amber closes her eyes and scratches behind the dog’s ears. ‘At least,’ she says, ‘now I can sack her without feeling shitty about it, eh, Mary-Kate?’
Mary-Kate wriggles forward and covers Amber’s cheeks with wet doggy kisses.
‘Fucking bitch,’ says Amber, though she’s not sure, really, who she’s talking about.
Chapter Twenty-five
Although he thinks he might have a talent for it, Martin decides against a career as a private detective, because he quickly discovers that following people is seriously expensive.The bottom’s dropped out of the private detective market anyway, since the Milly Dowler scandal.
Kirsty Lindsay is a very busy woman. Since he located her outside the daily police briefing, he has followed her all over town, and laid out what would usually be a week’s living money on entrance fees and related expenses. He has followed her into the amusement park, ridden the train on the pier three carriages behind her, bought five cups of tea, two glasses of cola, a bacon sandwich, a chicken burger, three pounds’ worth of tokens for the machines in the arcade, two newspapers and four bus tickets and now, after a trip to the cash dispenser, has spent fifteen pounds on the entrance fee to DanceAttack. But he still hasn’t worked up the courage to talk to her and, to his astonishment, she’s acted like she’s not noticed him at all.
He waits by the dance floor and watches as she works the room.
She stands out like a nun in a brewery in a crowd whose average age barely brushes the legal drinking limit. He nods with approval as she buys fizzy water at the bar. Anyone weaker than her, or himself, would have to get slammed to bear the relentless thump-thump-thump, the sweat-haze hanging beneath the too-low ceiling, the flashing dance floor, the jangling earrings, the blue alcopops, the pinprick irises, the jerking pelvises and faint sense of menace that characterise Dance-Attack or any of its clones around the country. The noise and the crowded isolation would normally fill him with despair, but tonight he is not alone.
Though she, it would seem, is. Her colleagues have left her to it. It’s been four days since the last murder, and now that Vic Cantrell – Vic Cantrell, who’d’ve thought it? – has been released, the nation is drifting back to Britney and Katie and how-dare-they spending cuts and inner-city looting. Now it’s a quarter to midnight and she’s standing on the edge of the dance floor, opposite him, and glancing at her watch. It looks like she’ll be joining the other journalists any minute now. He needs to act, or lose her.