‘I can’t, she…’ Even now she is unwilling, in front of this girl with her cut-glass accent and her Levi’s jeans, to admit the whole truth. She doesn’t have friends, but she knows instinctively that this new, shining person would vanish from her life in an instant if she discovered the full extent of where she comes from. She still hasn’t realised that their brief friendship is already over. ‘She’ll kill me,’ she finishes lamely. ‘Look at me.’
‘Come on,’ says Bel. ‘We’ve got to get clean.’
They pick their way back along the sheep path to the stream. The meadow is splashed bright yellow with islands of dandelion and ragwort. They are silent, now, and don’t dare look at each other. Their hateful task has robbed them of the chatter of the early hours. The only words they can find are practical, brief. They scramble along the bank to the pool. It seemed deeper when they were floundering about, fighting for footholds, but the water is deep enough to reach their thighs, and runs clear, the mud they kicked up all settled. Neither mentions what they’re doing, but each girl looks about her surreptitiously for Chloe’s blood, for any signs of what has happened here.
‘Come on,’ says Bel again. She strips off her top, her jeans, and dumps them into the water. Jade hangs back. ‘Come on, Jade,’ she urges.
‘Then they’ll be wet,’ says Jade doubtfully.
‘We’ll squeeze them out. And it’s still hot. They’ll be dry in no time. And anyway, we can say we fell into the river. No one knows where we’ve been all day. Come on!’
Jade strips off her top and skirt. Her knees are green from kneeling in the woods. She wades reluctantly down into the water and stands there, shivering despite the heat, hugging the clothes to her chest. Bel snatches them away, throws them into the water. ‘Scrub,’ she orders. ‘Come on. Just get on with it.’
Bel drops to her knees, water up to her chest, and rubs vigorously at the dirt on her arms and shoulders, the sweat in her armpits. Dips her head beneath the surface and re-emerges, dripping and swiping the grime from her face. Gestures to Jade to follow suit.
I can’t, thinks Jade. That’s where she… Where her face…
‘I can’t swim,’ she says.
‘Don’t need to. Come on.’
Bel lunges suddenly forward and grabs her by the arm. Stares hard into her eyes. ‘Jade. Don’t go soft on me now. If you don’t do this, if you go home looking like that…’
She avoids completing the sentence. Doesn’t need to. Knows that Jade is filling the words in for her. They’ll know. They’ll realise. Already they’re distancing themselves from what they’ve done. Trying to separate the actions they’re taking now from the reason why they need to take them.
Jade kneels and plunges beneath the water, like a Baptist.
She opens her eyes below the surface, sees that the water is once again thick with kicked-up mud. It’s dark down here. Quiet. This is what she saw, she thinks. This is how it was, her last moments.
Chloe’s face looms at her through the gloom. She kicks back in panic, struggles upward, bursts out into air. She flounders through the water to the bank. Half crawls, half runs to the top. Stands there shuddering in her underpants.
They reach the gate. Each girl is dripping, clammy in her damp clothes.
‘We’ll split up,’ says Bel.
She’s much calmer than me, thinks Jade. She seems to know what to do. If it was just me, I’d have made so many mistakes by now. They’d all know already. That it was me.
‘I’ll go back through the village,’ says Bel. ‘To mine. They can’t know we were together. Do you understand?’
Jade gulps, and nods. ‘Yes.’
‘They can’t know we were together, ever,’ says Bel. ‘You know that, don’t you? We can’t see each other again. If we see each other, we just pretend we don’t know each other. OK?’
‘Yes,’ says Jade.
‘Do you understand?’ asks Bel again. ‘Not ever. Do you understand?’
Jade nods again. ‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Good,’ says Bel.
She turns away and starts across the meadow, towards the west end of the village. The sun is beginning to set, and she casts a long shadow.
Chapter Six
Stan’s already rolled a cigarette while the press conference was wrapping up, and lights it as they step into the car park. ‘Good God,’ he says. ‘What sort of morons put on a lunchtime bloody press conference and don’t even lay on any bloody sandwiches? You’ve got to do sandwiches if you want a good write-up. Everybody knows journalists need sandwiches. I could have been in the pub.’
Stan is old-school. Very old-school. He comes from the days when journalism was largely conducted in bars, and somehow he continues to live his life as though those days still existed. By modern Fleet Street standards he is a dinosaur, still doing his research by telephone and attendance rather than news feeds and a couple of hits on Google. But he sucks you in when you see him and reminds you what attracted you to the job in the first place.
He plonks himself on a wall that holds in a bunch of evergreens and a collection of discarded fag butts and soft-drinks cans. Kirsty grins and settles down next to him.
‘Yeah. That was pretty much a waste of time, wasn’t it?’
A rich Guinness growl emerges from his throat. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘at least it got me away from Sleaford.’
‘You’ve been up in Sleaford?’
‘Yes. Even the name sounds like something you find on your shoe, doesn’t it? I had to volunteer to cover this just to get out of there. What I want to know is why they can’t start murdering people in places you’d actually want to go to. Seriously. How about the seaside, for a change? Just bloody selfish, I call it.’
‘Child F and Child M?’
Stan nods. Another week, another outbreak of schoolchild violence: two twelve-year-olds bullying another till he jumped off a railway platform into the path of an oncoming train. The whole thing recorded on CCTV, so there was no doubt as to the identity of the guilty parties.
‘Of course,’ says Stan, ‘if they hadn’t got rid of the staff on that station, they wouldn’t have needed the CCTV and someone might’ve stopped it. Shit. What a world we live in. Price of everything, value of nothing. There seem to be bottomless funds for wheelie-bin Nazis, but God forbid you’d want to protect someone’s kids from a pair of bullying scumbags.’
Her heart jolts. She’s always thought of Stan as relatively liberal. For a crime reporter.
‘Seriously?’ She says. ‘Bullying scumbags?’
Stan sighs. ‘Yeah, I know. But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Poor little shits didn’t stand much chance of being anything else. The usual shower of useless parents, absent dads, third-generation doleys. I went and doorstepped Child F’s mum. Exactly what you’d expect. Still in bed at one o’clock and a bunch of kids doing wheelies on the pavement outside among the dumped fridges. And do you know what she said?’