Kirsty steps back out on to the path and stands for a moment staring after her bloodhound colleagues, her mouth taut, her face unreadable. Then she wheels on her heel and starts to walk, quickly, in the direction of the town gate. She’s up to something, thinks Martin. Anybody would think she’s trying to keep away from Amber. That she’s scared of something.
He waits till he’s sure she’s not going to look back, then comes out from behind the rhododendrons to follow her.
Chapter Thirty-five
Home. Sanctuary. Walls that enfold and protect. A barrier against the world outside, the place you long for in the storm. Kirsty sits in her quiet dining room, the Sun spread out on the table before her and sunlight falling through the window to her right. Wonders about Amber. Wonders if she’s home too, or if she’s been driven out to some anonymous motel room, some friend’s spare bedroom, some safe-house for the relatives of the loathed.
The Sun’s gone front-page with Whitmouth. A huge, grainy colour photo – in the absence of a court appearance by the man himself – of Amber in the park, dark glasses covering the upper half of her face, a cream mac tightly belted. A phone clamped to her ear and her teeth bared in the age-old primate expression of distress. But that’s not how the paper interprets it. Or chooses to, anyway. There’s not an editor in the world too green to tell the difference, but that doesn’t mean they’ll go with the truth when there’s righteous outrage to be drummed up. NOT A CARE IN THE WORLD, says the headline.
Kirsty scans on. Heartless Amber Gordon takes a seaside stroll, chatting and laughing on her mobile phone, mindless of the pain of victims’ families.
Shit, she thinks. They’ve turned her into Sonia Sutcliffe.
She reads on.
The cleaner, wife of Seaside Strangler suspect Victor Cantrell, dropped off a bag of treats for her husband at Whitmouth Police Station yesterday morning and spent some time closeted away with him before emerging. Amazingly, she then walked on through the town to spend the day at the Funnland theme park on the beach. Families riding the famous rollercoaster unawares would have been shocked to know that they had such a notorious figure in their midst.
Works there, thinks Kirsty. She works there, for God’s sake. And you know it. You all know it. You were all making up quotes from her ten days ago when she found that body.
Cantrell is awaiting charges over a series of murders in the town. For Gordon, though, it’s business as usual. See page 5.
Kirsty opens the paper, finds the rest of the story, accompanied by a smaller, older picture of Amber and Victor together on the beach. ‘Said a neighbour, Shaunagh Betts, 21,’ it continues:
‘It’s amazing. You’d have thought she’d have some shame. She’s always been weird – a snob, always interfering in other people’s business as though she was better than the rest of us – but the way she goes on, you would have thought she was completely innocent.’ Holding her daughter, Tiffany, 2, tightly, she continued: ‘If it was me, I’d be on my knees apologising to the people round here, but she behaves like she’s done nothing wrong. I can’t believe I’ve been bringing my kids up next door to people like that all this time. What if something had happened? I would never have forgiven myself.’
Another neighbour, Janelle Boxer, 67, said: ‘She always treated him really badly. They kept themselves to themselves most of the time, but sometimes you’d hear her having a go at him, really belittling him. I heard her doing it only the other day, right out in the garden where anyone could hear. It’s hard to believe she didn’t know anything. She must have noticed something. Some of those girls fought back, and there must have been marks on him. I know no one wants to believe they’re living with a monster, but there must have been more to it than that.’
Cantrell is expected in front of Whitmouth magistrates tomorrow, charged with the murders of Nicole Ponsonby, Keisha Brown, Hannah Hardy and Stacey Plummer, and the attempted murder of a young woman, whose identity we are protecting out of concern for her recovery, on Friday night. The women’s bodies were found dumped heartlessly in spots around the south-coast resort after being attacked and violated. More charges, related to unsolved murders in the town in previous seasons, are expected later in the week.
Gordon (pictured with Cantrell, above, at a seaside barbecue earlier this year), meanwhile, is unrepentant. ‘I’ve not done anything,’ she told our reporter yesterday. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone?’
In bold type beneath the story, a puff for another: My nights in strangler’s lair: centre pages.
Kirsty stares at the picture and recognises Victor Cantrell as the man who rescued, then abused, her that night in DanceAttack. God, she thinks. Was it him all along? Did I finger Rat Man in the Trib when I really was being followed by the genuine article?
She feels sick: ashamed of her colleagues and their ability to use words to throw any light they choose to on a situation. Innuendo, allusion and false connection: the staples of a media that’s still awaiting facts. She feels ashamed of herself for having indulged the same faults in her own piece on Sunday. It’s hardly the first time she’s done it – you can’t avoid it when an editor’s had an idea and is paying you to establish it as fact – but she doesn’t think she’s done it by mistake before.
God, we’re all such liars, she thinks. Is that what made me decide to do this for a living, because I’m the biggest liar of all? I lie to my husband, lie to my children, every single day, and it’s only going to get worse. Even after a quarter of a century, Bel and I are linked by an unbreakable thread, and I can no more forget about it than I can tell the truth.
She looks down at the paper. Wonders what other delights it has in store.
Blessed turns up with food and a copy of the paper, her face solemn with sympathy. Amber almost doesn’t let her in, but she knocks and shouts for so long that eventually she peeps through the curtains and sees her there among the crowd. She opens the door and a photographer immediately slips a foot into the gap, hoping to prise it open long enough to get an interior shot. Maybe a picture of Amber looking dishevelled: the woman who spent so much time in her dressing gown she drove her man to murder.
There’s a scuffle, and Blessed starts haranguing the man in ringing evangelical tones. And then she’s inside, and stabbing at the foot with an umbrella, shouting, ‘You will not pass! You will not pass!’ Mary-Kate and Ashley yap furiously by her ankles as she slams the door and turns to Amber, brushing herself off as though she’s just emerged from a sandstorm. ‘There,’ she says. ‘That was easy.’
Amber bursts into tears.
Blessed puts down her shopping bags and gives her a hug. The first hug Amber can remember receiving in years. Vic was never a hugger: too keen, she understands now, on carrying his embraces through to death. It makes her cry harder.
‘I’m sorry,’ says Blessed. ‘I would have come before, but you weren’t answering your telephone and I thought maybe you’d gone away. Until I heard you’d been at Funnland.’
‘No,’ says Amber. ‘No, I’ve been here all the time.’
‘I brought you some food,’ says Blessed. ‘I didn’t know what you liked, so I got a bit of everything. You must tell me what you need, and I’ll bring it.’
Amber sniffs and wipes her eyes. ‘Maybe some… I’ve run out of dog food. They’re living on tuna and toast.’ She’d really like a bottle of whisky, but knows it’s too much to ask of a woman who thinks that drinkers go to hell.