Amber breathes deep. ‘Nothing,’ she says.
‘So, what? It was revenge against me? Because of what your husband’s done, you’d destroy mine?’
‘I’m sorry,’ says Bel again. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. I’m sorry I did that to you, but I was-’
‘Oh, I don’t care about me,’ Kirsty interrupts.
Amber looks sceptical. ‘Sure.’
Kirsty subsides. They eye each other suspiciously and listen to the wind. ‘Well, I’m here now,’ says Kirsty eventually. ‘What do you want me to do with you?’
Save my life? thinks Amber. It’s just a small thing, but-
Somewhere in the back, a door bangs; keeps banging. Kirsty jumps, stares at Amber, eyes wide in the gloom. Amber looks calm. This is weird, thinks Kirsty. This isn’t how I’d be, if I were her. It’s as though the fight’s gone; as though she can’t be bothered any more.
Amber shakes her head, as though she’s forcing thought back into it. ‘It’s OK. I sort of – had to break in. I thought it was better to do it round the back. The latch is probably a bit kaput now. That’s all it is.’
Kirsty raises her eyebrows.
‘What?’ Amber looks irritated. ‘Kirsty, I was cold. What did you want me to do?’
‘It’s OK,’ says Kirsty hastily. ‘It’s all right. Sorry.’
‘I guess we should shut it.’ Amber gets to her feet.
‘Yes. We should.’
Beyond the main hall, where Hitler jostles Stalin and Kim Jong Il jostles Mao, the museum splits into a series of rooms off a narrow, red-painted corridor, the signage above their doors denoting themes like MASS MURDERERS, PLAGUES and TORTURE. Amber leads the way with surprising confidence, Kirsty following timidly behind, glancing as she goes into the dark spaces beyond the doorways. Anyone could be in here. Anything.
The corridor ends with a fire door. Through it, the drumming of the rain and the roar of the sea comes louder, like a distant crowd. On the floor to their side of the door, a small puddle of water. The open exterior door bangs monotonously behind.
‘Wow,’ says Amber, clocking the water at her feet, ‘serious rain.’
She pushes the fire door open and wet wind bursts through, buffets their faces. Beyond, a storeroom-cum-rec-room: a shabby modular settee, a coffee table, discarded mannequin body parts piled in corners like the aftermath of battle, a coffee machine (switched off), polystyrene cups flying through restless air. On the far wall, the door flaps uselessly back and forth, knocks against a Formica-topped table pushed against the wall. Amber strides forward, catching a faceful of salt spray, and forces it shut.
The sudden quiet is almost deafening. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Nothing wrong with the lock, anyway. Phew. I was worried I might have damaged it.’
Kirsty laughs nervously. ‘We’ve already broken in, Amber.’
Amber gives her a look. ‘There’s a big difference between breaking and entering and trespass, Jade. How did you get to be so wet behind the ears?’
She leads the way back into the corridor. The water seems to have spread. There’s a trail of it leading all the way back up to the main hall. I must still be dripping, thinks Kirsty. Jesus, it’s wet out there.
‘Oh, by the way,’ says Amber, suddenly, ‘we’re in here. Did you know?’
Kirsty quails. ‘Really?’
‘Yuh.’
‘Where?’
‘We’ve got a category all of our own.’ She gestures at a doorway to her left. It’s labelled TOO YOUNG TO KILL.
‘No,’ says Kirsty.
‘Yes. Fortunately they’ve not actually put us in with the kiddie-murderers. Though I’m surprised they didn’t.’
Kirsty doesn’t really want to look, but she is drawn inescapably to the doorway, hovers in it with sinking heart. Amber flips on the light. It’s a poky little room, and contains few figures, which somehow makes it worse. Despite the fact that there are over a dozen murders by children each year, only five are represented here among the deliberately emotive trappings of youth – rocking horses and record players and party dresses on the backs of chairs – none of which she ever had. The same old five: John Venables, Robert Thompson, Mary Bell and, huddled conspiratorially by a five-bar gate, herself and Bel.
Kirsty walks over and studies her mannequin, feels her skin crawl as she sees herself again through the eyes of national condemnation. Five feet tall, it’s been based on her school photo – the only photo anyone ever got hold of other than her police mugshot, mostly because there weren’t really any others – but they’ve replaced the school uniform with a shapeless, childish dress designed to make the figure look even younger than her real years. The face is puffy, the hair cut in a pudding-basin bob, the lips turned down at the corners like an old woman’s; an old woman who’s lived a life of ill-humour and small-time cruelty. It’s a crude facsimile, like those medieval lion sculptures you see in museums, made by someone who had never seen a lion, had just heard them described by sailors. And yet it’s undoubtedly herself, most easily recognised by her proximity to the haughty, imperious blonde who stands beside her with a rock in her hand.
Jade Walker and Annabel Oldacre, reads the label. It is faded, the edges worn shiny by fingers over the years it has stood there.
Both aged 11, Walker and Oldacre shocked the world with the brutal murder of Chloe Francis, aged 4, in fields near the village of Long Barrow, Oxfordshire, on 17 July 1986. The girls had abducted the child by the village sweet shop and taken her to a number of locations, eventually bludgeoning and drowning her in a stream in the late afternoon. Chloe’s body was covered in cuts, grazes and bruises, and three broken ribs and a dislocated elbow showed that they had subjected her to a day of brutal torture. Her head wounds alone were so ferocious she would have been unlikely to have survived them. To cover up their crime, the girls then callously buried little Chloe’s body in woodland, where it was mutilated by wildlife – her family were forced to bury her in a closed casket – and feigned ignorance of their crime for days. Walker came from a deprived background, but Oldacre, seen by many as the dominant one of the pair, was the daughter of a prominent businessman and attended one of Britain’s top boarding schools, leading the detective in charge of the investigation to describe her as ‘the coldest creature he had ever encountered in all his years of police work’.
‘Is that how we looked?’ Kirsty asks, in a small voice. She still has difficulty associating herself with this long-ago child, the one who killed Chloe. ‘Did I really look like that?’
‘Christ,’ says Amber, disgust in her voice. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Well, yes, I – no. It’s just I… do you recognise yourself? From the things they say about us?’
‘Every fucking day,’ says Amber bitterly, and steps back out into the corridor. ‘Don’t you?’
‘I…’ Kirsty turns away from the statues, finds them too painful to look at. Switches off the lights as though doing so will make the image leave her mind. ‘We’re never going to get away from this, are we?’ she asks miserably. Hears a gasp that sounds like outrage from halfway down the hall.
‘This?’ cries Amber. ‘This? What do you mean, “this”?’
She steps out and sees anger and despair in her old conspirator’s eyes.
‘How come they ever let you out, Jade?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re in denial. That’s what they always said to me. If I kept on denying it, if I didn’t face up to my crime, they’d never let me out.’
‘Well, yes,’ protests Kirsty. ‘Of course! God, I don’t pretend for a minute that-’
Amber storms up the remainder of the hall, stamps back to her red velvet seat. ‘Oh yes you do. Every day you pretend. Same as I do. Go on, then. Tell me who you don’t pretend to? Tell me one person, apart from whatever trainee’s been assigned to supervise your licence compliance this month? Go on.’