Her hearing changed focus. Distantly she registered someone throwing up, sparking a chain reaction. Walked, unaffected, through a morass of gagging, sobbing, screaming people, and heard it all as background. All she could hear clearly was the kid’s voice: the nonsense syllables that spilled from his tongue as his mangled brain struggled to function. She dropped to her knees beside him: the two of them in a pool of quiet, his eyes fixed on hers.
She was wearing an oversized belted cardie that came down to her knees; it was the beginning of the season and the weather had yet to warm up. She gazed into his rapidly darkening eyes as she sat back and stripped it off. Shaved head, puffy arms, grey cheeks as full as a hamster’s. He was wearing a Liverpool strip: she remembers the horrid blue and yellow nylon, the Carlsberg logo, the dark damp patch that grew and grew as cerebrospinal fluid dribbled down his neck.
‘Oh look,’ she said, as kindly as she could, ‘you’ve got cold.’ She draped the cardie over him – she never saw it again once the ambulance had taken him away – and took his hand; felt the weakening pulse, knew that he was dying. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m here. I’m with you.’
‘Ak-haaaaaaaaaa,’ said the boy. He couldn’t have been more than eight. What a way to go. Rides and candyfloss and – death. She wondered, randomly, what he had had for breakfast that morning. A last meal of Coco Pops and milk, eggs and soldiers, half a pack of Hob Nobs?
She tore her eyes away for a moment, looked over her shoulder. A couple of hundred gawpers now: the sort of people who slow down to look at car crashes. Faces wide-eyed and full of speculation as they formed the words to make the anecdotes. Poor little mite. Blood everywhere, people screaming, and there was nothing we could do.
‘Ambulance,’ she cried out hoarsely. ‘Has anyone called an ambulance?’
Vic suddenly bursts out laughing. ‘Oh my God,’ he says, imitating her. She gapes, recoils.
‘You didn’t know,’ he says. ‘All this time you didn’t know. Oh my God, you thought you were keeping a secret from me!’
She can feel a scalpel-edge of panic slice at her skin. They’re not alone. He can’t – he mustn’t – carry on like this. ‘Don’t,’ she pleads. ‘Vic, don’t-’
He’s tickled pink. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Ambel,’ he says, the mispronunciation deliberate and obvious only to her, ‘your secret’s safe with me. It’s just – hah! – all this time I’ve been thinking we didn’t talk about it because we didn’t need to. Because we understood. And those presents I’ve been leaving you…’
‘Presents?’
‘Oh, come on,’ he says. ‘You know.’
And she does. She should have seen it before. Two of those bodies were left where she would find them, and it was only pure chance that prevented her being the first upon the second. And his questions. Those little probing, gloating, prurient enquiries as to how she’d felt, what she’d seen.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No, no, no. No.’
Vic stepped forward, his face a portrait of calm under pressure. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘It’s on its way.’
The kid began to flap his hand in hers, dragging her eyes back. Drool pooling at the corner of his mouth. Some pointless urge to preserve his dignity drove her to dab at it with the sleeve of the cardigan. The syllables had deteriorated, now, to formless gurgles. A woman sobbed hysterically in the crowd. She noticed it; thought, with irritation: If you can’t handle it, just go away. Do something useful, or fuck off. Even in a situation like this, there are people who think that it’s all about them. Who parade their distress for others’ benefit to demonstrate their greater sensitivity.
As if he could read her thoughts, Vic turned and spoke over his shoulder. ‘Can someone take that woman away please? She’s not helping.’
A stir. A ripple of comprehension. Someone led the woman away and a straggle of gawpers, chastened, followed. Vic knelt down beside her. ‘How is he?’ he asked.
Amber shook her head, because words wouldn’t come. Held the child’s hand and felt the pulse flutter, weaken.
He came closer, put his face next to the child’s. ‘Hello, mate,’ he said. ‘You’ve had an accident. Don’t worry. The ambulance is on its way.’
Then he stared into his eyes, as though drinking in the last of his life.
‘You thought I was your hero?’ asks Vic. ‘Oh, Amber. I’d thought better of you than that.’
She feels sick. Sweaty. Afraid.
‘I noticed you noticing me, you know,’ he says. ‘That day. It wasn’t just me recognising you. You recognised me back. I saw it. That was the start of everything, wasn’t it? When you noticed me.’
The smile flicks back on like a searchlight.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That was a good one. I was a bit late to the party, but it was fun.’
Chapter Thirty-four
Despite the fact that they lead down to the seafront, the botanical gardens are almost always empty, mostly because big signs at the gates forbid alcohol, barbecues and ball games. The only people other than Martin himself who ever come here are pensioners with foil-wrapped sandwiches and the odd mother with toddlers, though the formal flowerbeds and lack of swings don’t make it particularly attractive to them. He likes to come here to think – and, after what he’s read in the Tribune, he has a lot of thinking to do today.
He takes his usual seat, on a bench on a hummock of earth that raises him high enough to see over the hedges that surround the garden and watch the comings and goings without being forced to participate.
And the first thing he sees is Kirsty Lindsay, hurrying from the direction of town, her head bowed. He almost jumps out of his skin. The bloody cheek of it. She’s the last person he expected to see. She shouldn’t come here ever again. Not after what she’s done to his town; what she’s done to him. Then he thinks: If I can see her, she can see me, and ducks down on his seat to take himself out of her line of vision. An old couple, toddling along below him, look up at the sudden movement and cross to the other side of the path, as though the extra five feet will act as a barrier against lunacy.
He gives them a big wide smile to assure them that they’re safe. It seems instead to make them more afraid. The woman clutches the man’s wool-wrapped arm and they march purposefully towards the nearest exit.
He waits until they’ve passed, then pops his head up to see where she’s got to. Registers with amazement that she’s covered a couple of hundred yards in the twenty seconds he’s been down, and is very nearly at the fence. She’s not looking around her. Seems to be buried in thought. She crosses Park Road, reaches the fence and swings left towards the entrance. My God, she’s coming in here, he thinks. Stoops down once more and scuttles for the cover of the hydrangea bushes behind him.
Through his screen of heavy foliage, he watches as she turns in through the gate and starts to walk along the path. She slows her pace a little now she’s off the road, but still seems blind to her surroundings. She seems to be having trouble breathing. Certainly, her chest is heaving like a character in a Victorian melodrama. Intrigued, he creeps round as she circles his mound, and watches her progress. She does a full circuit of the park – it doesn’t take long, as it’s barely bigger than one of those London residential squares – then flings herself down on a bench as though she’s simply run out of puff.