‘OK,’ says Blessed. They carry the bags through to the kitchen. Baked beans. A cauliflower. Some plantains. A bacon joint. Chocolate mousse. Wonderloaf. Peanut butter. Cheddar. Some tomatoes. Some chicken nuggets, which Blessed makes haste to put in the freezer compartment. Full-fat milk.
‘This is… you’re so generous,’ says Amber. ‘Can I give you some money?’
Blessed shakes her head vehemently. ‘Absolutely no. It is my duty. I cannot take money from someone who is in trouble. You must tell me what you need, and I will bring it for you, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. Can I make you a cup of tea?’
‘No,’ says Amber, ‘I’ll make it.’
Blessed lowers herself into a chair as Amber fills the kettle. ‘How’s work? What are they all saying?’
She tuts. ‘The things you would expect, Amber.’
‘Who’s supervising?’
Blessed looks slightly uncomfortable. ‘They have asked me to do it, in the hiatus. I hope that this is all right with you.’
The kettle clicks off. ‘Yes. Of course. I should think you’d be good at it. You’ve always had an organised mind.’
A flash of teeth. ‘Thank you,’ says Blessed. ‘Your confidence means a great deal to me.’
‘Milk and sugar?’
‘Yes please. Two, please. Amber?’
‘Yes?’
‘I have something I must show you. I was unwilling to do so, but then I thought, Perhaps she should know.’
Amber feels weak. Steadies herself against the kitchen counter. ‘OK. What is it?’
Kirsty comes back to the table with another cup of coffee, and turns to the centre pages. A young-middle-aged blonde, plastered in make-up – thick blusher, scarlet lips – and sporting an obviously new haircut sits on a studio floor on a sheet of white background paper, weight thrown back on one hand, in high heels and a wrap dress. Her legs are crossed at the ankles.
THE LUCKIEST WOMAN ALIVE, says the headline. Blonde tells of bizarre life inside Strangler’s home, says the strap.
A woman told of her incredible escape from the clutches of alleged Seaside Strangler Victor Cantrell yesterday. Attractive blonde Jackie Jacobs, 38, was ensnared by the womaniser’s charm and spent four months secretly dating him earlier this year.
If that woman’s thirty-eight, thinks Kirsty, I’m Kate Moss. And, wow: if they’re only describing her as ‘attractive’, that stylist must be one skilled worker. There’s only one step down from ‘attractive’ on the tabloid beauty scale, and it’s the simple description of hair colour. Under the slap, Jackie Jacobs must look like a bulldog.
‘I’m in shock,’ said Jackie yesterday. ‘I never thought, when I got involved with him, that Vic would turn out to be a cold-blooded killer. He was the most charming man I’ve ever met. And good-looking too. I couldn’t help fancying him. He really knew how to look after himself!’
Jackie met Vic when they both worked together at the Funnland theme park on Whitmouth’s seafront – Jackie as a hygiene consultant and Vic as a jack-of-all-trades working the rides. ‘He was a bit rougher than what I’m used to,’ says Jackie. ‘I usually date men in the professions – my last partner was an IT consultant – but there was something about him that just drew me like a moth to a flame.’
Jackie knew that Vic was living with a woman who at the time she thought of as a friend – Myra Hindley lookalike Amber Gordon, a cleaner at the same park – but she was unable to stop herself from getting involved. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of,’ she says, ‘but I couldn’t stop myself. Vic was so charismatic I was helpless around him. And besides, later on I realised that there was a lot more to the situation than I had thought.
‘I keep thinking,’ she says, ‘that I should have realised at the time. It wasn’t like I didn’t notice that things were weird in that house. No one could fail to notice it. They hardly ever talked, and he was always out in Whitmouth’s famous bars while she worked the night shift. And Vic wasn’t exactly a gentle lover. You wouldn’t call it romantic. Sometimes he’d just come and find me at the park and get me to perform a sex act on him in one of the rides that was closed for maintenance, or in an area that was closed to the public. He liked that: the sex acts. He’d put his hands round my neck, sometimes, and it makes me shake to think about what he must have been thinking about.’
Things took a turn for the weirder, though, when Cantrell’s common-law wife began to take an interest in Jackie herself. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time,’ says Jackie. ‘I just thought she was being friendly. I didn’t think she knew that anything was going on between me and Vic. But now I look back on it, I think there must have been more to it. But she was weird anyway. Always sticking her nose into other people’s business. Controlling. Always coming up to other people at work and asking them how they were, like she had something on them.
‘I felt uncomfortable around her, of course, because I thought I was sleeping with her man behind her back, but now I wonder if she didn’t know all along. And not just about us, either.’
The piece is illustrated with more photographs. Amber and Vic at a pub table, and Jackie – a far less glamorous Jackie, she notes – standing at the entrance to the helter-skelter on the pier. The captions are gems of innuendo and twisted information. Weird: Cantrell and Gordon enjoy a drink at the seafront; Innocent: Jackie in happier times with lover Cantrell. She had no idea of the secret he was hiding.
Kirsty doesn’t really understand why the paper seems to have cast Amber in the role of villain’s sidekick. Probably the fact that she’s given no interviews, that she’s not made a PR company her first stop en route to Cantrell’s holding cell. The reasoning of the papers, in their invention of villains and innocents, has always been a mystery to her. It’s often, she suspects, something as simple as the baddie involved reminding an editor of their school bully or an unpopular politician: the ‘lookalike’ tag they often earn gives the game away a bit. Or there’s another agenda, like the Sun’s fawning attempts to get the city of Liverpool to drop its fatwa twenty years after the Hillsborough disaster. Or something as basic as a story happening on a slow news day when no one wealthy has poked a prostitute. But she knows all too well what it’s like to be a Celebrity of Evil.
A few months into her secret relationship with Cantrell, Jackie started having relationship problems with a man she had also been dating publicly. Gordon, however, took it upon herself to make the situation untenable. ‘It wasn’t anything, really. Silly stuff. I’m sure I could’ve handled it, but she insisted on getting involved. She took over completely.’
Gordon even insisted that Jackie move into their twobedroomed ex-council house so she could ‘keep an eye on her’. Jackie’s suitor was keen to patch things up, but Gordon was having none of it. ‘It was as though she didn’t want me to have a boyfriend,’ says Jackie. ‘Now I look back on it, the whole thing was bizarre. She used to follow me everywhere.’
Jackie soon found that she wasn’t allowed a moment to herself, in the house or out of it. Gordon escorted her to and from work, and even insisted on going along when she went out in the evening. ‘I guess she didn’t want me bumping into him,’ she says. ‘She wanted me all to herself. Or maybe she’d guessed about me and Vic, and wanted to keep an eye on me.’
Cantrell, meanwhile, had withdrawn and become distant. He seemed as keen to get Jackie out of his house as Gordon appeared to be to make her stay. ‘I don’t know what was going on between them. Maybe he was getting jealous,’ says Jackie. ‘There was something not right about Amber’s behaviour. I think she thought I’d see it as protective, but it felt like there was more to it than that. I think she wanted control over me. I think maybe she fancied me. She certainly didn’t fancy her boyfriend, from what I saw.’