The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood Page B

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 upthe 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—’
    ‘I know what you’re writing about,’ he says, and he puffs withpride 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