Weird, she thinks. She looks familiar. Like I know her from somewhere. Not like I’ve seen her picture, though God knows it’s been smeared across the papers enough in the past couple of days, but like I’ve seen her in real life. There’s something about the way she’s holding herself, something about the nose and the jawline, and that bloody great mole on her face. I wonder if I’ve met her? It feels like it. Where was it? Certainly not Whitmouth. Absent-mindedly, she takes another biscuit from the pack and dunks it in her tea.
I know what it is, she thinks. It’s that bloody mole. I can’t help it. I see a mole like that on a woman and I just immediately dislike them. Because of Annabel Oldacre, I think of everyone with a mole like that as a killer in disguise. I remember staring at that mole for hours on end during the trial, watching that little bitch who killed my baby sister get her punishment. It’s obviously stuck. All the feelings I had are concentrated on that one facial flaw.
But it is very like, she thinks, sucking tea through the softened biscuit. It’s even in the same place as hers was.
Martin turns back to the front page. Gordon is all over that one as well. He chews his lip as he looks at her, grinning away as she walks down the street like she’s going to a party; he’s edited from his interpretation the fact that he was watching when the pictures were taken. I suppose she likes the attention, he thinks. She’s got her fifteen minutes and she’s making the most of it. But she’s not like Kirsty. At least she’s not dedicated her life to making sure her lies make their way into everyone’s homes.
Jim calls in to divert himself from his nerves before his meeting with Lionel Baker. He’s been reading the papers on the train and Kirsty can practically hear him shaking his head as he tuts over the Whitmouth coverage. ‘That poor woman,’ he says. ‘They’re crucifying her.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’
‘You’re the only person who seems to have been even remotely fair.’
‘Yeah. God knows how that got past Back Bench.’
She hears the sound of folding paper. Jim always takes revenge on publications that have annoyed him by screwing them up and dropping them in the bin. She stares out of the window, notices that that damned Russian vine that next door planted three years ago is sprouting from a hole in the foundations of their shed. Dammit, she thinks. Life’s one long treadmill of fighting against nature, one way or another.
‘I think I’m going to give up reading the papers,’ he announces. ‘It just seems so… unnecessary. They’re just making things up as they go along. They don’t know anything, so they’ve just decided to turn this woman into a pantomime villain, to fill the space till they do. You see them doing it all the time. They just can’t bear to admit they don’t know any more than the rest of us.’
‘Steady on,’ says Kirsty. ‘And if everyone stops reading them, what am I going to do for a living?’
No one has been able to find out much about the Alleged Strangler himself. There’s maybe a page about him, but in the silly season a page is not enough. The Mirror’s photographer has followed Amber Gordon all the way to Funnland and then to the unremarkable ex-council house she lives in. There’s a picture of her walking a pair of those yappy, snappy little dogs you usually see tucked under the arms of the likes of Liza Minnelli. The house is clearly neglected, a wooden board nailed over a window, the flowerbeds trampled and muddy. Deborah reads the screed below the pictures, and wonders.
Seaside Strangler’s girlfriend, Amber Gordon, walks her dogs as though it’s an ordinary day. Gordon, a cleaning supervisor, refused to speak to the Mirror’s journalist when he confronted her after dropping off a bag of goodies for her lover, currently undergoing questioning at Whitmouth Police Station. Back at their scruffy house on the outskirts of the town, she swore at photographers. ‘Leave me alone!’ she said, when we attempted to ask her about her partner’s crimes. ‘I’ve not done anything!’
The making of a murderer, page 13.
In the doorstep picture, the woman is clearly shouting. About my age, thinks Deborah. Maybe a bit younger. I wonder what it’s like to be her? Did she know? She must have known. You can’t live with someone and not know something like that, surely?
She turns to the ‘making of a murderer’ feature and starts to read.
Martin looks up the road as he scans through the radio channels in search of Radio 2. Some classic pop, that’s what I need. Classic pop for the classic suburbs.
He’s surprised by the road she chooses to live on. He’d imagined something more modernist, more minimalist, the sort of thing favoured by Channel 4. A warehouse conversion, all naked brickwork and stark white plaster, or something whose walls are made of glass. What he hadn’t expected was an ordinary four-up-four-down in a medium-sized garden full of clematis and concrete dolphins. A series of near-identical 1930s semis, brave little flourishes – a garage, a brickwork turning-circle, a pergola, a porch – attesting to their owners’ individuality. If she lives somewhere like this, he thinks, she’s probably got a family. Two girls called something like Jacintha and Phoebe. A Weimaraner.
A dignified Burmese cat stalks out of a drive, sits on the pavement to survey his territory. Yeah, thinks Martin. Too normal. She’ll have one of those hairless sphinxes, or a Dalmatian. Something stupid and useless, designed to impress fashion victims.
He glances in the rear-view, sees the front door a couple of doors back open and Kirsty Lindsay emerge. She goes over to the dusty little Renault that sits on the drive and unlocks the door. She looks unguarded, innocent, filled with thought. Martin slides down in his seat, though there’s not a chance that she will recognise him like this, from behind, and watches as she scrabbles around in the glove compartment and comes back out brandishing a satnav and its lead. Of course she’s got a satnav, he thinks. Nice work if you can get it.
Funny, though. It’s the dullest house on the street, covered in wisteria, and that Renault’s eight years old if it’s a day. He would have bet his weekly budget that she lived in the one with the Jag.
There are more photos of Amber Gordon in the ‘making of a murderer’ feature: the implication clear that her contribution has been bigger than any other, even though she’s only known him for six of his forty-two years. It seems that there are very few photos of Victor Cantrell before he met her, just a couple taken in a caravan park in Cornwall where he worked before he came to Whitmouth. Deborah feels another twinge of visceral dislike as she eyes the woman. It’s that bloody mole, she thinks. It really is identicaclass="underline" same place, same shape, same colour. What are the odds? How many people can have that same blemish, in just the same place…
She feels a jerk of realisation… And be the same age?
Deborah hears the breath hiss from her body. She grips the sides of the paper in fisted hands, presses her face close to the image on the page. Oh. My. God. Under the bleach, the twenty-five years, the tense defiance, the celebrity sunglasses. She still has the same jawline, that same upper lip half the width of its lower twin, the eyebrows heavy and dark and at odds with the shade of the skin.
It can’t be.
She feels freezing cold. She went to the trial every day, with her mother: the bereaved, the living victims. She stared at Annabel Oldacre and Jade Walker as she sat on the witness stand on the first day and gave her testimony. They stole my little sister. I only asked them to take her to the shops, and they kidnapped her. Bitches. Those little bloody bitches. And later, when she was done, she stared at the backs of their necks, at their profiles as they looked up at their lawyers (they never looked at each other, not once through the whole four days); glaring into their faces, willing them to look at her as they passed in and out of the courtroom, willing them to see what they’d done. She memorised everything about Annabel Oldacre, but she never expected to see her again, with or without the changes of a quarter-century disguising the child within.