Cells and locks and corridors; the echo of painted concrete, the long, empty waits before the brief highlights of bland meals. Solitary confinement without the human rights. The crushing memory of guilt, and Vic three rooms down. She jerks, like a dreamer who’s found themselves falling. His ’n’ hers jail cells: partners in everything.
‘Why?’ she asks. ‘There must be some other… somewhere else. It can’t be a choice between here and a cell…’
‘Like I say. It’s up to you. But it might be best,’ he says, and adds again, significantly: ‘Under the circumstances.’
‘The circumstances’. What a lovely way to put it. ‘Can’t I… isn’t there somewhere else? I… you can’t really expect me to… can’t you take me to a hotel or something?’
‘Well, Ms Gordon,’ he says, drawing out the name so it’s no longer a simple address but some insult she doesn’t understand, ‘it’s the only way we can guarantee your safety, under the circumstances. We’ve been calling. You didn’t answer. And anyway, I very much doubt there’s a hotel that’ll be prepared to take you.’
‘You couldn’t guarantee my safety yesterday either,’ she protests. ‘Why are you suddenly so…?’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You don’t know.’
Creeping disquiet. ‘Know what?’
‘They know who you are, Ms Gordon. The papers.’
Her mouth goes dry. ‘Who I am…?’
‘Annabel Oldacre,’ he says. Then adds, spitefully: ‘But of course, you know that already.’
Amber hangs up.
She crawls, hands and knees, across the spare room and cracks a curtain aside. Peers into the darkened road, the glass-strewn front garden. Jumps back, gasping for air. There must be thirty of them out there: standing, hands in pockets, staring at the house like extras in a zombie movie. Oh God. I’m dead. By morning there will be hundreds.
She has to accept the policeman’s offer. The moment the squad car turns up, she’s got to be out of here, and damn what happens next. If they come in, she will never survive.
She creeps downstairs, gets a hooded fleece and pulls it on. Calls, in a whisper, for the dogs. They have to come with her, there’s no way she can leave them. Once the crowd has seen her the house is done for, and its contents with it. She knows they won’t let her keep the dogs in the station, but once she’s brought them in, they will become someone’s responsibility: they can’t just chuck them on to the steps to fend for themselves. They’ll have to find something to do with them. The RSPCA. Something. Anything is better than being left to the tender mercies of the mob.
They don’t respond. No patter of paws, no claws clicking on the kitchen floor. They must be outside. They’ve gone out through the cat-flap for some night-time dog life. She is afraid to follow. Wants to shelter in the safety of locked doors and a boarded-up living room until the police come. But she has to find them, and now. There won’t be time after. Once she’s answered the door, and the crowd is certain they have her, there will be time for nothing other than flight. She’ll need to scoop them up, grab the bag she’s been keeping ready-packed in the hall, and run for the patrol car before outrage turns to action.
She snatches the back-door keys from the hook in the hall and creeps into the kitchen. Dark and still; familiar objects crouched shadowy on countertops as though waiting to pounce. She stops halfway across the room, and scans the garden; wants to be sure there are no unseen visitors before she lets the outside in.
And then she sees them.
They’re only little. Little and defenceless, and never did harm to anyone. Oh, my darlings.
Amber steps into the garden and realises that tears are pouring down her face. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. This is beyond bearing. They’ve come and they’ve taken them and they’ve used their trusting natures, and they’ve punished them to punish me.
She stands helpless and gazes at the tiny corpses. They’ve been strangled; had their souls squeezed out the way Vic did to those girls. And they’ve left them dangling from the washing line by their collars, the breeze catching their feathery coats and turning them, round and round, like gibbeted vermin. Dark saucer-eyes, bulging as they gasped for life.
An animal keening escapes her open mouth. Mary-Kate and Ashley, my friends. My poor friends. Oh, my darlings. They didn’t have to do that to you. You never did a thing.
She drops the keys in her shock, falls to her knees to feel around in the shadows. Gazes up at the strangled faces, and weeps and weeps.
The gate rattles on its hinges. Someone outside has heard her.
Amber freezes. Crouched below the bodies in the moonlight, she watches the gate bounce. They won’t bother to climb over, this time; this time they’re coming straight through.
‘Annabel!’ shouts a voice: male, high, excited. ‘Zat you, Annabel?’
Amber jumps to her feet. No hope of help from the police now. They know she’s here. She’s given herself away.
The gate rattles again, and she hears something crack. Doesn’t wait, doesn’t really think. She runs to the neighbour’s fence on the far side, and scrambles over. Lands hard in a flowerbed, feels the snap of brave perennials beneath her feet. Races across the garden, towards the next fence. There’s no way she’s getting away through Tennyson Way. Her only way out is if she can make it to Coleridge Close.
2.30 p.m.
Bel flops down on the doorstep. She wants to cry, but Jade looks like she might explode and she doesn’t want to rile her any more than she’s riled already. Chloe plays with the toggles on her anorak and sticks out her lower lip. She’s got mud on her face, somehow, and looks like she’s come down a chimney. Bel is soaked in sweat. The hunger has started to translate into faintness. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, she thinks. I just want to lie down and sleep.
‘Well, why didn’t you say there wasn’t nobody here?’ asks Jade.
‘My mum’s gone to Chippy,’ says Chloe, as though this is an answer. ‘To the shops.’
‘Well, fuck’s sake,’ says Jade.
‘I thought Debbie was here,’ says Chloe.
‘Of course she isn’t here,’ says Jade crushingly.
‘Where’s she gone?’ asks Bel. She knows she’s slow on the uptake, but even she had managed to work out that Debbie was getting off with Darren Walker when they came across them on the bench. It seems logical to her that they would have come here to have sex in her bedroom, because everybody knows that that’s where sex is done. ‘She’s not gone to your house, has she?’ she asks doubtfully.
Jade bursts into sardonic laughter. ‘No, she’s gone to Buckingham bleeding Palace for a garden party.’
‘In a leather jacket?’ asks Bel doubtfully.
Jade catches the look on her face and laughs again. She’s beginning to think that Bel is simple. She’s missed three of her jokes now. ‘Joke,’ she says. ‘But I can guarantee you she’s not at ours.’
Chloe starts to whimper again. Both the older girls roll their eyes. ‘Don’t start that again,’ says Jade. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it, is there?’
As fast as Chloe started, she stops again, and sniffs. She’s had an idea. ‘The river,’ she says. Her mum never takes her down the river. She’s only been twice. The river, to Chloe, is as magical and magnetic as Disneyland. If she’s not going to get her lunch, she’s going to get to paddle, at least.
‘The river?’ Jade is suspicious.