Chloe just stands there. Presses her face into the anorak and inhales, deeply, for comfort. Stares at Jade like she’s visiting the zoo.
Eventually Bel puts her hands under Chloe’s bum and heaves. Unwillingly, the leg on the bar straightens up. The other just hangs in the air. The kid wobbles. Looks scared. Says nothing. She’s been silent since they waded through the dock leaves on the edge of the Hundred-Acre.
‘It’s OK. Go on. Put the other one on the next bar. You can do it.’
Bel stands up and leans her body against Chloe’s, takes the weight against herself. Wow, she thinks again. I thought she was heavy before, but now she feels like a bag of sand. She unpeels Chloe’s anorak hand and puts it on the top of the gate. It’s a weak grip, for the child is pressing her elbow into her side so as not to lose the sacred garment. ‘There you go,’ says Bel. ‘Almost there.’
It takes for ever to manoeuvre Chloe to the top. But eventually her crotch is on a level with the bar and she’s wibble-wobbling at the hips. ‘Lift your leg up,’ says Jade. ‘Go on. Just swing it over.’
Chloe looks down, as though she’s noticed the ground for the first time, then she bends at the waist and lies the length of her body along the top bar. The anorak slips between her torso and the gate; a sheer, slippery base to take her weight.
‘Come on,’ says Jade. Chloe stares at her, frozen. Grips her perch with chunky thighs.
‘Oh, come on, Chloe!’
Bel has a rush of rage. Doesn’t know where it comes from, just knows that she wants this afternoon over. She’s sick of being patient, sick of the way her day’s turned out, sick of thistles and cowpats and nobbles of hardened earth that get into shoes, and can’t bear the sight of the kid any more. She wants her off the gate. She jumps forward and shoves, with all the strength she has left.
Chloe slithers round the bar and pitches forward, head-first, through the air.
It seems like a very long time until she lands.
Chapter Forty-two
He guesses almost as soon as they set off that she is heading for Whitmouth and, with the radio rolling news out constantly as he drives, he’s got a pretty good guess as to what is bringing her there. By the time they arrive, at half-past three, he almost feels cheated. Every journalist in the country must be converging on the town right now; there’s not a hope of getting her alone, and it’s clear to him that, whatever it is he plans to do – and he’s not entirely clear in his mind what he does plan, just that she won’t enjoy a moment of it – he needs to be alone with her to do it. He’s tempted to throw the towel in for the night, to go and get some sleep, because after all she’ll still be here in the morning, but then she does something that surprises him. Instead of leaving her car in her usual slot at the station, or checking herself in at the Voyagers Rest, she continues straight on down Brighton Road and into the town centre. Intrigued, he follows her.
It’s slow going. A fine drizzle hangs in the air and the bars are closed, but the town is full of people. And not the usual young crowd, but middle-aged men and women with determined faces and cricket bats. Even through tightly closed windows, he can feel that the atmosphere is as thick as soup. He smiles as he understands that the whole town has heard the news about Amber Gordon. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person, he thinks.
They seem to be concentrated around the police station, though someone stands on virtually every street corner they pass. T-shirted, muscle-bound men with necks like tree trunks and arms that bulge their seams; women whose default expression, from early youth, has been disapproval. They stand, still and watchful, glaring into the dark as though expecting a squadron of Daleks to materialise from thin air. Outside the police station there’s a gloomy, angry party going on beneath the blank gaze of shuttered doors. Press, of course, in search of the morning scoop – but more, far more, ordinary people. His neighbours, roused from their dens by the scent of the hunt.
He expects Kirsty to pull up somewhere near by, but she carries on driving, crawling past the massing bodies, winding her window up as she goes, as though she expects to be robbed. Martin frowns and drops back a few yards. They’re the only vehicles on the road, and he doesn’t want to have come this far for her to spot him now.
Kirsty drives slowly, wonders if she has something – a scarf, a stole, a hood – in her overnight bag with which she can hide Amber’s face, if she finds her. There’s no way they’ll make it back through town without it, with all these eyes staring suspiciously through her windows as she passes. As she approaches the sea, the crowds thin out. A few stragglers from the bars lurch through the escalating rain, but down here they’re not looking at anything other than their own feet. The Corniche itself is an empty sea of fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts. Even the death-burger van has moved up to Brighton Road to make the most of the unexpected glut of customers. Maybe, she thinks. Maybe we just might get away with it. If I put her in the boot, or lying down on the back seat.
She pulls in to the loading bay at the foot of the pier and kills the engine. Cracks her door and realises that, for the first time since she came to Whitmouth, she can actually hear the sea more than she can hear anything else. It sounds huge as it thunders on to the beach, dragging great cobblestones one over the other with its suck. To disguise the sound of a sea as wild as this, the daily cacophony must be more deafening than she had realised. She scans the road as she feels for her bag. A couple snog against the window of WHSmith, but otherwise the Corniche is empty. As she pulls on her jacket, a white van cruises slowly past and pulls in to the space vacated by the burger van. She peers through the distortion of rain on windscreen, but sees no one get out.
She grabs the phone off the passenger seat, slides it open and hits redial. It thinks for a moment, flashes up the number, goes blank.
‘Shit,’ says Kirsty, out loud. Presses the Call key again. Nothing. She’s made the most basic of schoolgirl errors: forgot to plug it in to charge before she got into bed, despite the fact that she’s been melting the battery all day.
‘Shit,’ she says again, and slams her hand down on the steering wheel. Fights back tears. Closes the window and allows herself a moment of release by screaming at the top of her lungs. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’ She can’t call, can’t tell Amber she’s here, can’t verify her whereabouts, can’t organise a rendezvous. The pier gates are closed, high, forbidding, the rain beginning to step up, and Amber, if they’ve not found her yet, is counting down to Kirsty’s destruction.
I don’t want to go out there, she thinks. I’m afraid.
Then she opens the door and steps out into the night.
Martin watches in his rear-view as she gets out of the Renault. She stands beside it and stares up towards town. And then, as if she’s satisfied that she’s unobserved, she wheels on her heel and hurries past the foot of the pier on to the beach.
He’s caught off-guard. He’d been expecting her to go up to where the people are. Can’t believe she’s cut him an easy break like this. He rushes to get out of the van, closes the door as quietly as he can behind him. If she’s really down on the beach, the noise of the sea and her feet sliding on weedy pebbles will drown out most sounds, but there’s no sense in being careless. He jogs up the road, stays in the shadow of the Funnland fence and, pressing himself against the corner strut, peeps round the corner.