The two men sit up, look at the women with surprise, pull each other upright and barrel away towards the far goal.
‘Don’t you want to play, Ben?’ Amber turns back to Blessed’s fourteen-year-old son, who leans silently against the breakwater, reading a biology textbook. Benedick glances up, shakes his head and goes back to the page. He’s a serious, slightly pudgy child. Amber suspects that the weight of his mother’s hopes for him hang heavy on his shoulders. He’s got the MP3 player plugged into his ears; he shrugs without taking the earphones out to hear what she’s said, and carries on reading. I hope he’ll be OK, thinks Amber. I hope he gets to be happy.
‘How’s he getting on at school?’ she asks his mother, flipping the burgers as she speaks.
‘OK,’ replies Blessed. ‘He’s high in his class,’ she adds proudly.
‘That’s good. He’s clever.’
‘He’ll be a doctor one day,’ says Blessed firmly.
‘I’m sure.’
‘And he’s good with computers.’
‘Is he?’ She’s not surprised. Benedick is just the sort of solitary child you’d expect to spend his free hours indoors. ‘Likes the internet, does he?’
‘Yes,’ says Blessed. ‘I suppose it’s a good thing we don’t have it at home, or I’d never see him.’
‘You don’t have the internet? I thought they all used it for their homework these days.’
‘He goes to the library for that. They have computers there.’
‘You don’t have a computer?’
Blessed shakes her head. ‘He had one, but something called the motherboard died. That’s what they said. Anyway, something that can’t be mended, and only one week after the guarantee ran out.’
‘Oh, Blessed,’ says Amber, ‘that’s a bummer.’
‘I’m saving for a new one,’ says Blessed. ‘Maybe for Christmas. They’re so expensive.’
‘Oh, wow,’ says Amber. ‘I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?’
Blessed shrugs. Takes up her knitting again.
‘Well, it’ll keep him off the porn sites anyway,’ says Maria. ‘My Jordan’s a bugger for those. I can’t go into his room most nights, I’m so scared of what I’ll find.’
Behind her, Jason Murphy punts the ball as it flies towards the goal. It’s a wild shot, and hard. The women watch as it flies high and wide over the beach and bounces on the surface of the water.
‘Aah,’ says Jackie, and opens another can. ‘Showtime.’
Chapter Eight
Kirsty looks up at the rusting network of struts and pillars that supports the walkway from the turnstile on the seafront to the pier’s end. It’s dark here, dank and smelly – not just the brine-and-fish tang of rotting seaweed, but the fug of generations caught short, of picnics half eaten and discarded, of a leaking something pooling beneath the rocks.
It’s not the nicest town she’s ever been in. But in terms of why she’s been sent here, that’s no bad thing. Her job is to find fifteen hundred words of the sort of Sunday feature that makes readers feel better about their own lives. To skim over the rides and the ices and the bright animal-shaped inflatables, the exquisite pleasure of chips hot and salty from the packet in a stiff sea breeze, the joyous shock of Channel water on naked skin, and show instead the mile upon mile of grey post-war prefabs blotched back into the marshland around the estuary, the crumbling plastic fast-food shopfronts, the stressed lives of a largely itinerant population whose employment prospects are seasonal, the Georgian façades peering out between plastic and neon. To make Balham look balmy in comparison. No town where a killer is on the loose is allowed to be a nice town: it’s an unwritten law. If things like this happened in nice towns – the places where people buy Sunday papers and read them – then who would be safe?
And yet, she can’t help liking it. Despite the run-down, ill-stocked shops. Despite the pallor of skins that should be brown from seaside living, the fact that there’s not a colour that occurs in nature to be seen on the Corniche. Despite the tears on the faces of Hannah Hardy’s hungover friends when they discovered why she’d never made her way back to their static caravan last night, despite the fact that everyone here who is over fifteen looks closer to forty, there’s a gaudy, gutsy bravery to Whitmouth that she finds surprisingly charming. Part of her, despite the grim nature of the work that brought her here, feels like it’s on holiday. She likes Whitmouth and she thinks she likes its people.
Like the big group fifty feet from where she stands: one of those working-class parties where the women sit together while the men play a rough, elbowing game of football with frequent breaks to drink fizzy lager from the can and pass a fat, rough-rolled joint between them. The sort of gathering, she reflects, that I would have been grateful to be included in, once upon a time. Maybe that’s the reason I like it here. In another life, I would have thought it was heaven.
And yet here she stands at the spot where Nicole Ponsonby, this summer season’s first victim, was found. Nicole was lying, quite peacefully, face-up, with one arm thrown back behind her head. She would have looked for all the world like another teenage sun worshipper, were it not for the fact that she was lying on a heap of rags and bottles in the deep shade of the breakwater, and that her face was blue.
That was 13 June. Nicole had been in Whitmouth for four days at the time she met her death. She’d last been seen stumbling off from the Sticky Wicket pub, a skinful of snakebite and a lovebite on her neck, in search of chips. She was from Lancashire. She was nineteen years old and had left school the previous year with A levels in catering sciences and business studies. She had wanted to go into the hotel trade, and had been working as a receptionist at the Jurys Inn in Manchester for the previous three months. The trip to Whitmouth had partly been a scouting expedition to see if she couldn’t move a bit further up the food chain in one of the hotels along the Kent coast. She didn’t have a boyfriend, hadn’t had one since the sixth form.
She had come here as a child two or three times, with her parents, Susan and Grahame, and her two brothers, Jake and Mark. A nice, clean, respectable girl the vast majority of the time – not out of control habitually, but cutting loose with her mates the way teenagers do. No one had noticed her between her leaving the pub and turning up strangled twelve hours later. Of course they hadn’t: she was unremarkable, and the streets were crowded.
As Kirsty stands thinking about the girl and the circumstances of her death, a man in an anorak – he’s got the look of a stoat or a ferret, she thinks, all pointy teeth and beady little eyes – pauses as he passes her.
‘Can I help you?’ he asks. His voice is flat, nasal, toneless.
‘No. Thank you,’ she says, trying to sound kind and friendly, but clear. Then, ‘Well, yes, actually, as you ask. Are you from around here?’
‘Yes,’ he replies with an edge of annoyance, as though the answer is so obvious a child could see it.
‘Oh, good. I’ve been having trouble finding anyone who isn’t a tourist.’ This is a minor lie. Truth is, the locals she’s found have shown admirable loyalty to their home patch and she’s alarmingly short of attributable scared-to-go-out, quaking-in-bed quotations that will make the people of Cheltenham grateful for their property prices. If she can’t get some soon, she’s going to have to make them up. ‘Do you mind if I ask you how you feel about all this? These murders? As a local resident?’
The suspicion dials up. ‘Why do you want to know?’
Kirsty adjusts. Turns the transparent charm up a notch. ‘Yes. Sorry. I should have introduced myself.’ She offers him a hand to shake, though the thought of touching his greyish skin makes her feel uncomfortable. ‘Kirsty Lindsay. The Sunday Tribune. I’m writing an article about-’