Deep darkness inside; machines hunched and lurking, the floors damp and sticky, awaiting the arrival of the dawn cleaning team. Two huge pillar ashtrays overflow on either side of the double door. As she huddles below the five-inch overhang, the heavens open like someone’s turned a tap on, and rain starts to sluice through the gutters. The sea changes mood; the dull roll and suck becomes a growl of annoyance. She feels the ground tremble beneath her feet.
Kirsty dashes the last fifty feet and hits the central square. It’s empty. No sign of Amber, just full bins and empty benches. She splashes to a halt, looks wildly around. No one. Only herself and the beating rain, and the flashing light on the helter-skelter. The theatre looms, Edwardian-grand, in front of her, box-office windows like black eyes, Marvo the Magnificent sneering, twenty feet tall, from a poster. She half expects to see Amber sheltering beneath the canopy, but the area is empty.
‘Shit,’ says Kirsty out loud, rain running off her face. Knew I should’ve stayed at the car. Knew I shouldn’t have come. She could be bloody anywhere. For all I know the police have taken her in and there’s no need to be here at all…
She opens her mouth and yells at the top of her lungs. Yells to be heard over storm and sea and the flapping canvas of the tarot tents among the flowerbeds, the clatter of something caught by the wind behind the arcade. ‘BEL! BEEEELLLLL!’
Movement, out of the corner of her eye. She whirls, ready to defend herself, sees that the front door of the cruddy little waxworks has come open. Amber’s head appears: frightened, hopeful.
‘Fuck!’ shouts Kirsty and splashes over the boardwalk, into the dry.
Chapter Forty-three
It’s called Dr Wax’s House of Horror, and it is well named. The place has a musty smell of damp cloth and hopelessness, and the sight that greets her as she plunges through the door is a tableau of an execution at the guillotine. It’s dark, lit by emergency lighting, and faceless forms loom from murky niches in the side walls.
The rain drums on the tar-paper roof and the floor shifts with the surge of the sea. Like being on a boat, she thinks, in a harbour, midwinter. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asks, peering through the gloom. ‘It was just drizzling when I got here.’
‘It happens all the time. It’s called the Whitmouth Wilding. Something to do with the Thames Estuary and the North Sea.’
‘We can’t go out in this.’
‘No,’ says Amber. ‘But it’ll die down in a bit. It never lasts long. Come on.’
She leads her between the heavy velvet curtains that divide the lobby from the main hall. The hall is cramped and crowded, lit eerie red; faces familiar-but-not-familiar stare frozenly into a mysterious otherworld, eyes blank and mouths forever frozen on the edge of words. More tableaux, more savage now they’ve passed the entrance halclass="underline" a man stretched on a rack, his face a screaming rictus; a Cambodian peasant holding a plastic bag – the striped kind, the kind you get from corner shops everywhere – over the face of a man in a suit; First World War soldiers wallowing in mud and barbed wire. MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN, reads the banner stretched from wall to wall. And all for an entrance fee of £9.95 inc. VAT, thinks Kirsty. A bargain.
‘Good God,’ she says, ‘it’s a cocktail party in hell. I’d’ve been crapping myself if I’d had to wait in here.’
Amber laughs humourlessly. ‘Strangely enough, I was crapping myself before I got here. To be honest, they’re the best company I’ve had in days.’
She slumps on to a cushioned seating platform in the middle of the room. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what I would have done.’
Kirsty’s anger returns. ‘Well, you didn’t give me much choice, did you?’
Amber looks away, ashamed. ‘I’m sorry.’
Kirsty glares at her. Amber looks back, and meets her eyes. ‘I am,’ she assures her. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. There are people looking for me, everywhere, and no one to help me. I needed you.’
Kirsty remembers the crowds in town, the home-made weaponry and the absent police. Walks to a bench a few feet away and sits down. She knows that what Amber has said is true, but she doesn’t want to be near the woman. Doesn’t want to have to look at her.
‘How was your drive?’ Amber asks suddenly, in a bright social voice, as though Kirsty has simply turned up for brunch.
‘It was fine.’ Kirsty is amazed at the teatime voice she uses in return. ‘The roads are good at this time of night, of course.’
‘Yes,’ says Amber. ‘We – Vic and I – we always left at this time of night, when we went to Wales. Took about half the time, he reckoned.’
‘Right,’ responds Kirsty. It takes a couple of seconds for her to register that the Vic Amber refers to so casually is the same man that she and her colleagues are already automatically referring to by his formal title, the Alleged Seaside Strangler, Victor Cantrell (the ‘Alleged’ to be dropped after conviction, of course). She sees Amber’s face fall as she remembers her reality. She’s behaving like my mother-in-law, thinks Kirsty, after Jim’s father died and it hadn’t sunk in completely yet. She’d talk about things they would do together, opinions he would hold, things he’d said, and then her face would fall in the same way, and awkwardness would grip the room. It was a good couple of years before she, or anyone in her presence, could mention his name without the grief closing over their heads.
This must be how it is for Amber, she thinks. The same bereavement, without the sympathy. A widow’s state is essentially a noble one; there is no such solace for the intimates of the notorious. I was so busy crying for myself, all those years in Exmouth, that it never occurred to me to think about my family. It’s only since I had Soph and Luke that I’ve thought about what it really must have been like for them.
‘What was in Wales?’ she asks.
Amber sighs. ‘Oh, nothing, really,’ she says. ‘We just used to go there, sometimes. In the off-season. The Pembrokeshire coast. He – Vic – went there once with some needy kids’ scheme. He liked it there. Liked to go back.’
‘Yeah, it’s beautiful down there,’ says Kirsty.
‘You’ve been?’
They’re making conversation out of discomfort, the small-talk essential to fill the chasm between them. This is beyond abnormal, thinks Kirsty. We’re talking like strangers on a bus. Come on, rain, stop, God damn you. I don’t want to be here, doing this.
‘Jim’s grandparents retired to Saundersfoot. He’s got a lot of good memories.’
‘Jim…? Oh, yes. Your husband,’ says Amber distractedly. Kirsty remembers again the circumstances that have brought her here. ‘Yes,’ she says pointedly. ‘My husband.’
‘What did you say he does again?’ Kirsty hears echoes of Bel’s silly, social mother in the question. Talking constantly to keep intimacy at bay, training her daughter but never loving her.
‘It doesn’t matter what he does,’ she replies impatiently. ‘It has nothing to do with you. But if you’re going to ask questions, I’m going to ask one back. Did you mean it?’
‘What?’
Amber sees the look in her eyes and understands her meaning. ‘Oh. My threat. Do you want an honest answer?’
‘Yes. If you can give me one.’
‘OK. Then – I don’t know. I’m sorry. Probably not. I don’t think I’d’ve got anything from carrying it through, do you?’
Kirsty isn’t really listening; is more intent on sharing her feelings than on hearing what her blackmailer has to say. ‘Jim doesn’t deserve that. I can’t believe you’d do it. Nor my kids. What have they ever done to you?’