‘I know what you’re writing about,’ he says, and he puffs with pride as he says it. You get this sometimes. Though most people are nervous around journalists, afraid of letting out too much information about themselves, unsure of where a question will lead, there’s always the odd one who sees an approach as evidence that they are important, and that the journalist has seen it where their neighbours have not.
‘Sure. OK, yes, of course you do,’ she says. ‘So I was wondering-’
‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he says. ‘I think the lot of you should go away. No one wants you around here.’
‘Oh, look,’ protests Kirsty. ‘We’ve got to report the news.’
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘if you call it reporting. I know what you’ll do. You won’t ask anyone who actually knows. That’s not what you want, is it? You just want to bring your London sneering down to the provinces. We’d be fine if you’d all just go away and leave us alone.’
‘I-’ She looks at the tufty hairs on his carelessly shaved cheeks, the tight lips set in stubbornness, the unreasoning knee-jerk dislike in the eyes, and knows her answer. She’s not going to get anything useful out of this guy. Just the sort of formless disapproval that blames the media rather than the man who’s actually killing people. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘thanks anyway.’
‘You can’t quote me,’ he says. ‘I didn’t give you permission to quote me.’
‘I don’t have your name anyway,’ she says. Walks away up the beach before he can prolong the encounter. Feels, nonetheless, his eyes bore into her back as she skirts between the barbecue and the perimeter fence of Funnland, a festoon of yellow police tape marking out the hole in the short run of wire fence behind a bucket-and-spade stall. From this side, the amusement park’s concrete fortifications make it look a bit like a prison camp. The front wall, on the blowy road everyone jokingly calls ‘the Corniche’, is bright with hoardings and coloured lights.
Besides the big party, a few knots of young people talk and doze away their hangovers, and play Frisbee in T-shirts and long shorts. A camera team wanders among them, recording vox pops. Kirsty wonders how the lure of appearing on television can overcome the horror of doing so without make-up or preparation.
‘Yeah, of course I’m scared,’ says a young woman as she passes, ‘but what am I supposed to do? I only get a week’s holiday. I’ve got to have fun, innit?’
‘So are you going to come to Whitmouth again?’ asks the reporter.
‘Probably not,’ she replies. ‘It’s a bit pants, really. The booze is dead expensive and, did you know?, that amusement park’ – she gestures at the hulking wall of Funnland, where the police are spending their second day sweeping every inch between the fence and the death site with camelhair brushes – ‘has been closed ever since we got here. And in high season too!’
She visits the Antalya Kebab House, where the second victim, Keisha Brown, was last seen. The owner is Turkish, voluble and unfriendly. ‘So why are you suddenly interested?’ he asks. ‘You know what? This happened twice last year as well. There were two girls last year, and they were just as dead then, and you didn’t give a toss. Not one reporter, not one newspaper, apart from the Whitmouth Guardian, nobody from the telly then. They were invisible then. Might as well never have existed. But now… you’ve got some glamour now. You’re all looking for your Hannibal Lecter and now it matters, isn’t it?’
‘Fair point,’ she says. There are two murders every day in the UK. Only a third of them make much more than a downpage NiB in the papers. You’ve got to have a stand-out quality, or a determined family, for your death to get past the news editors. ‘But I’m here now. At least it’s a chance to put that right now, eh?’
‘You gonna buy something?’ he asks gruffly, glaring with deep dark eyes.
‘What’s good?’
‘Everything’s good.’
‘I’ll have a doner and a Coke, please.’
‘Chips?’ he barks.
‘No,’ she begins, then hurriedly assents. No point in blowing her chances for the price of a bag of chips. ‘And a receipt, please.’
She waits a couple of beats as he turns to the fryer and plunges the basket into the oil. ‘So do you remember her?’
He has his back turned. She can see his reflection in the mirrored wall behind the grill, napkin-scrawled, sellotaped-on specials framing his black hair. He’s fifty-something, and looks older. Everyone looks older around here.
Stop it, she thinks. You’ve turned into the worst sort of bourgeois snob while you weren’t looking. Just because you write for an audience doesn’t mean you have to share their views.
He shrugs. ‘Not really. Yes, sort of. But only because of what happened. I wouldn’t have remembered anything about her except for the fact that I found her body in among my dustbins. Then I remember her. Sort of.’
‘Was she with people? Alone?’
‘I don’t know. A lot of the time it’s hard to tell, especially on a Saturday. Sometimes they’re alone when they come in and not when they leave. They’re like animals on Saturday night. You’d think, what with them being on holiday, Saturday wouldn’t be such a big deal, but you’d be surprised. They still get dressed up, get drunker, stay out later. Don’t know how to queue, don’t know how to wait. Must’ve been twenty, thirty, hanging around, inside, dropping stuff on the pavement. Chips, chips, chips. Twenty alcopops and then they think chips will put them right. I’ve got CCTV. Something kicks off every Saturday. CCTV saves me hours giving statements.’
‘So she’s on it?’
He nods. ‘Yeah. Like I say, nothing remarkable. She comes in, she gets her chips, she talks to some boys while she waits. She liked vinegar. Must’ve used up half a bottle. Fanta. She drank Fanta.’
‘And the boys?’
‘I don’t know. Ask the police. They must’ve told you anyway. It wasn’t them. They were too drunk to stand up, most of them, let alone strangle someone. Except by accident maybe. So she gets her chips, she leaves, I carry on serving. We’re open till four on Saturday. I can turn two hundred kilos of chips on a good night, high season. We’re the only shop that’s open when the clubs let out, and most of them would sell their aunties for a bag of chips.’
‘So then?’ she prompts.
‘Half-four I’m taking out the trash, waiting for the oil to cool down enough to drain the fryer, and…’ He shrugs again. As an obituary, it’s not much.
‘It must have been awful,’ she says sympathetically.
‘Yeah…’ He starts to wrap her kebab in paper. ‘It’s not something you see every day. You want chilli sauce?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Thanks no or thanks yes?’
‘Thanks yes. Thanks.’
‘Open or closed?’
‘Closed, please.’ It’s only going to go into the first bin she passes when she gets out of sight.
He slaps the bundle down on the counter.
‘Twelve pound fifty.’
‘Twelve fifty?’ she squeaks.
‘Twelve fifty,’ he says firmly. ‘And a receipt.’
Kirsty suppresses an eye-roll and hands over the money. The press aren’t the only people for whom serial murder represents a business opportunity.
She can’t get into Funnland. A notice on the staff gate, where a handful of cold-looking hacks and snappers huddles among piles of cellophane-wrapped carnations, says that it will reopen tomorrow. She’s worked with one of the photographers a few times before, and wanders over. ‘Anything much?’ she asks. ‘Seen Stan Marshall?’
He shakes his head. ‘I should think he’s in the pub. Nothing much here. Managing director, that Suzanne Oddie, and some other suits.’
‘Anything to say?’