The Wicked Girls Read online

  Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of a journalist who has worked extensively across the British press. Alex lives in South London and is working on her next novel.

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-13002-3

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 Alex Marwood

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For William Mackesy

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1986

  There’s a blanket, but from the aroma that rises from its folds, she guesses it’s never been washed. The cells are overheated and, despite the fact that Jade balled it up and pushed it into the corner of the room when they first brought her in here, the stink of stale piss and unwashed skin is hard to ignore. Officer Magill picks it up and holds it out towards her, wadded in her hand. ‘You’re going to have to wear this,’ she says. ‘Over your head. Apparently they’re not allowed to see your face.’

  It’s hardly necessary. Jade’s face was all over the papers months ago, and will be all over them again tomorrow. She looks at the blanket, repelled. Officer Magill’s eyes narrow.

  ‘You know what, Jade?’ she says. ‘You’re welcome to go out there uncovered if you want. They’re all dying to see you, believe me. It’s no skin off my nose.’

  They’ve seen me already, thinks Jade. Over and over. In the papers, on the news. That’s why they make us queue up for those school mugshots every year. It’s not for our families. It’s so there’s always a picture to sell to the papers. So they have something to hang a headline on. THE WORLD PRAYS. FIND OUR ANGEL. Or, in my case, ANGELIC FACE OF EVIL.

  Through the open door, she can hear Bel screaming. Still screaming. She started when the verdict came in, and it’s been hours since then. Jade has been able to hear only silence through the thick cell walls. No sound gets through: not the baying crowd, not the hurried feet passing by in the throes of preparation. Occasionally, the metallic slick of the eyehole cover being pushed back, or the sonic boom of another heavy door slamming shut; otherwise, stone-built silence, the sound of her own breath, the sound of her racing heart. When Officer Magill opened the door, the noise was overwhelming, even here in the basement: the feral, chanting voices of strangers wanting Justice. The crowd wants her. Her and Bel. This much she knows.

  Magill holds the blanket out again. This time, Jade takes it. They’ll make her wear it one way or another, willing or not. Their hands brush, and Magill snatches hers away as though the child’s skin is coated with poison.

  Bel sounds like an animal, shrieking in a snare.

  She’d chew her own arm off if it helped her get away, thinks Jade. It’s worse for her than it is for me. She’s not lived her life in trouble, like I have.

  Officer Magill waits, her mouth downturned. ‘How do you feel, Jade?’

  For a moment Jade thinks that she’s asking out of concern, but a glance at that face shows her otherwise. Jade gazes at her, wide-eyed. I feel small, she thinks. I feel small and alone and scared and confused. I know they’re shouting for me, but I don’t understand why they hate me so much. We didn’t mean it. We never meant it to happen.

  ‘Not good, is it?’ asks Magill eventually, not requiring a reply. ‘Doesn’t feel great, does it?’

  Bel’s voice, the sound of struggle in the hallway: ‘Nonononono! Please! Please! I can’t! I want my mum! Mummeee! I can’t! Don’t take me out there! Nononono dooon’t!’

  Jade looks back at Officer Magill. Her face is like a Halloween mask, all swooping lines in black and red. She glares with all the loathing of the voices of the mob outside. Jade is guilty. No one has to act as though they presume her innocent now.

  That’s it, that’s us: not ‘the suspects’, not ‘the children in custody’. We’re The Girls Who Killed Chloe. We are the Devil now.

  Magill glances over her shoulder to see if any of her superiors are listening, then lowers her voice.

  ‘Serves you bloody well right, you little bitch,’ she hisses. ‘If it was up to me they’d bring back the death penalty.’

  Chapter One

  2011

  Martin checks his watch. It’s nearly ten o’clock. She’ll be going to work soon. The neon lights on the roller coaster at Funnland have been switched off, the halogen arc lights they flood the park with after hours – as much to drive stragglers away as to help the cleaners see the globs of gum and the sticky soft-drink splashes, the careless smears of ketchup – have come blazing on. She’ll be in the changing rooms. Like a lot of punch-card people, she is punctilious about arriving, more leisurely about actually starting work. She’ll be shucking her civilian garb and replacing it with trackies and overalls.

  He feels a swell of familiar rage at the way she has just cut him off. No response, no contact; just empty silence, day after day. Is she even thinking about him? He’s left it three hours, but he can’t stand the waiting any longer. He picks up the silent, baleful telephone and pulls up her number. Types in a text: please answer me. do not ignore me. Watches the screen as it thinks and sends.

  A hen party pauses in the street below. He knows it’s a group of hens because they’re bellowing ‘Going to the Chapel’ at the tops of their voices. It’s always that, or ‘Nice Day for a White Wedding’, just the chorus, over and over, or ‘Here comes the bride, short fat and wide.’ There are millions of songs, but hen parties never stray beyond this narrow selection.

  A shriek in the street, then a chorus of cackling. Someone’s fallen over. Martin pushes himself off the bed and goes to the window. Cracks open the curtain and looks out. Eight young women, in various stages of inebriation. The bride – shortie veil and L-plates
– is on the ground, felled by six-inch heels and a portly backside. She flumps about on the pavement in her tubular mini-skirt, stomach flopping over waistband and tits overspilling her décolletage, while two of her friends haul at a pale and dimpled arm. The other friends are scattered across the pavement, pointing and staggering as they howl with laughter. One of them – hot pants, giant hoop earrings and a horizontal-striped boob tube – is pestering men for a light as they weave their way past the flailing bride.

  Boob Tube strikes gold. A stag group – the town is overrun with them everyweekend, the sort of stags who can’t afford, or who lack the passports or the probationary permission, to spread sangria vomit over warm Spanish concrete – pause, light her up, fall into conversation. Well, mutual shouting. No one communicates under Martin’s window at anything less than a roar, ears destroyed by thumping basslines, sense of other people destroyed by the alcohol and ecstasy and cocaine that seem to cost less than a packet of smokes these days. And you don’t have to go outside to take them.

  The bride finally regains her feet. She is limping, or pretending to, and uses the shoulder of a stag for support. Martin watches as the man’s hand creeps down over the tube skirt, inches its way in from behind. The bride cackles, slaps him off half-heartedly and bats her lashes encouragingly. The hand goes back. They set off up the street, heading towards the nightclub quarter.

  Boob Tube lags back, leaning against a shop window, talking to the man with the lighter. She sways from side to side, doesn’t seem to notice as her friends disappear round the corner. She tugs at her top, pulling the droop from squashed bosoms, and flicks lacquered hair out of her eyes. Smiles at the man coquettishly, pushes lightly at his upper arm. So goes the business of modern mating. You don’t even need to buy a girl a drink any more. Just lend her your lighter and she’s yours for the taking.

  Dropping the curtain, Martin shambles back into the darkened room, depression seeping into his pores. He doesn’t understand the world. Sometimes he feels like they pick the road outside his flat just to taunt him. To remind him of the fun he’s not having; of the fact that these spangled, dancing creatures would scutter over to the other side of the pavement if he tried to join in. Whitmouth is a disappointment to him. He thought, once his mother died and he was able to choose his destiny, that the world would be his oyster, life would roll his way at last, but instead he finds himself observing other people’s fun as though he’s watching it on television.

  I thought it was Fairyland, he thinks, as he switches on the unshaded ceiling light. When I was a kid. When we used to come down here from Bromwich. It was families, then: cream teas, and the helter-skelter on the pier the tallest building for miles. That was why I came back here: all those good times, all those memories, all that hope. Now I hardly dare to look in shop doorways as I pass them, in case I see Linzi-Dawn’s knees hitched up and Keifer’s low-slung jeans humping away between them, and me excluded, never wanted, always looking in.

  She still hasn’t replied. Martin’s skin prickles as he stares at the blank display. Who does she think she is?

  Throwing the phone down on the bed, he turns on the television, watches the bad news scroll out on the BBC. Dammit, Jackie. You have no right to treat me like this. If you were going to turn out like the rest of them, why did you pretend to be something else?

  Another shriek in the street. Martin presses the volume control, turns it up to full. The rage of rejection crawls beneath his skin; invisible, unscratchable. All she needs to do is text him back. He doesn’t want to go out, but if she refuses to respond he’s going to have to. As his mother was always assuring him, persistence is the most important quality in life. And he knows that he is the most persistent of all.

  Chapter Two

  Amber Gordon clears out the lost-property cupboard once a week. It’s her favourite job of all. She likes the neatness of it, the tying up of loose ends, even if the loose end is simply deciding that, if someone’s not come back in nine months, they never will. She enjoys the curiosity, the quiet sense of snooping on other people’s lives as she marvels at the things – dentures, diamond earrings, diaries – that they either didn’t notice were lost or didn’t think worth coming back for. But most of all, she enjoys the gift-giving. For the Funnland cleaners, Sunday night brings the chance of an early Christmas.

  It’s a good haul tonight. Among the forgotten umbrellas, the plastic bags of souvenir rock, the A Present from Whitmouth keyrings, lie moments of pure gold. A gaudy gilt charm bracelet, hearts and cupids jangling among shards of semi-precious stones. An MP3 player: a cheap thing, none of the touch-screen bells and whistles, but working, and already loaded with tunes. A jumbo bag of Haribo. And an international-call card, still in its wrapper and unactivated. Amber smiles when she sees it. She knows who would benefit from a good long call home. Thanks, fun-seeking stranger, whoever you were, she thinks. You may not know it, but you’ll have made one St Lucian very happy tonight.

  She checks her watch, sees that she’s already late for tea break. Locks the cupboard back up, drops the gifts into her shoulder bag and hurries across the floodlit concourse to the café.

  Moses is smoking again. It’s something of a sport with him. He knows that she knows – now that everywhere is non-smoking, a single whiff of tobacco indoors stands out like lipstick on a collar – and that she knows that it’s him who’s doing it. And yet he likes to test it anyway, to bend the rules and see what will happen. They’ve reached an unspoken truce on the matter. Amber feels that there are battles worth fighting and battles that are a waste of breath, and this is one of the latter.

  And anyway, he’s a good worker. By the time the café staff arrive in the morning, their territory will gleam with hygiene and the scent of chemical lemon.

  She sees him jump and drop his butt into the open Coke can in front of him when she pushes the door open, suppresses a smile as he assumes a look of injured innocence and, at the same time, pretends not to have noticed her. Amber pointedly meets his eye, as she always does, and gives him the knowing smile she always gives him. Life is full of small complicities, and she’s found that being boss involves even more than before.

  Amber misses very little that goes on in Funnland. The room is full of people whose small stuff she resolutely doesn’t sweat. Jackie Jacobs, and the fact that all work grinds to a halt when her phone rings, but who keeps up morale with the stream of innuendo that pours from her mouth between times. The fact that Blessed Ongom is first into and last out of the café every night but works half as hard again as any of her colleagues in the hours either side. And Moses, of course, who has the stomach of a robot and can be relied on to clean up customer deposits that reduce weaker colleagues to tears.

  The room is crowded. Their communal tea break is a ritual that none of these night workers would miss for their lives; not even the new ones, not even the ones whose English is so sketchy they have to communicate with smiling and sign language. A night spent scraping off the evidence of other people’s fun is a wearisome thing, Amber knows that. If a sit-down and a handful of sell-by-yesterday doughnuts make the whole thing bearable, she sees no point in token whip-cracking. As long as everything’s done by shift’s-end at six in the morning, she doesn’t question how her staff timetable themselves. It’s not as if Suzanne Oddie or any of the rest of the board are going to be down with stopwatches and clipboards when they could be tucked up under their 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. This is the great advantage of unsocial hours: as long as the job’s done, no one cares who’s doing it or how it gets there.

  Moses’ face falls and his dark eyes fill with doubt as Amber alters her course to approach his table. He thinks I’m going to tell him off at last, she realises. Even though we’ve known each other for years, the fact that I’ve been promoted makes him – makes all of them – look at me now with a touch of suspicion. She smiles, and sees the wariness deepen. Forces herself to laugh, though she feels a tiny bit hurt. ‘It’s OK, Moses,’ she calls re
assuringly. ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  She reaches his table, takes the card from the bag and holds it out. ‘Lost-property night,’ she says. ‘It’s got about twenty quid on it, I think. I thought you might want to call your gran.’

  The suspicion falls away, is replaced by deep, warm pleasure. Moses’ gran, back in Castries, has been ill lately; isn’t expected to last much longer. Amber knows he’ll never find the cash to fly back for the funeral, but at least a final phone call might help ease the loss. ‘Thank you, Amber,’ he says, and beams a wide white smile at her. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’

  Amber tuts, tosses her hair. ‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘No skin off my nose,’ and walks on. She knows, and everyone else does too, that this is not entirely true. Her predecessor in the job treated lost property as a personal bonus. But she couldn’t do that. She’s never earned this much in her life, and she’d feel ugly, keeping these treats from a group of people whose lives are lived on minimum wage. These aren’t just her employees, they’re her neighbours. Her friends. If she kept herself apart at work, they’d soon keep themselves apart on the high street. She gives the bracelet to Julie Kirklees, a skinny eighteen-year-old whose Goth eye-paint, she often suspects, hides black eyes, and walks on to the counter.

  She pours herself a cup of stewed tea from the urn and adds two sugars. Eyes the display fridge and the domed plates on top. There are precious few perks to this job, but an almost limitless supply of leftover junk food is one of them. Amber suspects that some of her staff live on little other than half-stale hamburger buns, lukewarm frankfurters, sausage rolls, cold chips; tinned tomato soup and apple turnovers their only vegetable input.

  She’s not hungry, really. Just wants to stretch out the interval between doing the accounts and starting on the single cleaning duty she reserves for herself because she can’t trust anyone to do it well enough. Her eye skims over the plates of scones, the giant, softening chocolate-chip cookies. Blessed holds forth behind her, her voice filled with refined African distaste.