Kiss Her Goodbye: The most addictive thriller you'll read this year Page 8

  After Mike’s gone, I pick up the wine and finish the rest of the bottle. It numbs my insides and I wonder how much I’d have to drink to feel nothing at all. When I go upstairs, I leave the empty bottle where it is. They won’t notice it. It’s always the same. There’s no point hiding it, because nobody sees anything. People are blind.

  10

  Hayley Reynolds

  Stockport town centre smells of sausage rolls and exhaust fumes. A flock of pigeons circles above as we walk out of the bus depot towards the concrete towers of the precinct. The 192 goes past up the A6 towards Manchester. The bright orange paint shines in the sunlight brighter than any kingfisher breast and I think of the first time I saw Kirsten. As the bus pulls away an advert on the back states that, ‘Life’s Brighter with Johnstone’s Paints’ and a grinning woman with a Princess Diana haircut smiles back from the picture as the bus disappears over the hill.

  It’s Saturday morning and already busy. The car park on top of Debenhams is filling up and, through the hard-faced shoppers, some girls from college are sitting on the benches in denim jackets and ripped jeans. Leila waves at them and they wave back with fingerless-gloved hands. She’s been grumpy since we got the bus, but she smiles when she sees them. I’m not angry though. There’ve been no more visits from the police and I’m in a good mood. As we cross the road the sequins on the dresses in the department store windows glint in the morning sun and I’m hoping that the police will have forgotten all about Kirsten Green by Christmas.

  ‘Let’s get the make-up first,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve got money,’ Leila replies.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  There’s a carousel on the edge of the precinct and a man and woman hold hands as they watch it turn. The coloured horses and candy-cane poles look as if they don’t belong here and as the organ blasts out tinny music one little girl goes round and around on a golden horse. Her long hair moves behind her as she grins and waves to her mum and dad. The horses with teeth bared and flashing lights are a blur of colour as she goes around and around. The father smiles at me.

  ‘Shall we go on it?’ I ask Leila as we walk away.

  ‘Funny,’ she says, as though I’m joking.

  She glances down at the basque I’m wearing under my jacket. ‘That bloke was ogling you.’

  I run my finger over the plastic beads around my neck.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  She’s obsessed with men looking at her. I just don’t get it. We walk around the lower town, with the copper dome of St Peter’s Church above us, past pubs with elaborate stonework and old timber-fronted buildings, before we’re back inside the oppressive grey concrete walls of the precinct.

  Superdrug is quiet. The shelves are piled high with nappies and an instrumental version of ‘Say You Say Me’ plays over the speakers. When we find the make-up, I pick up an eyeliner and slip it into the pocket of my black trousers.

  ‘Don’t, Hayley,’ Leila says as she looks around, making it obvious.

  ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘OK, I’ll put it back if it makes you feel better.’

  I pretend to put it back, but I pick up a lipstick instead, and as we walk out I drop both of them into the pocket of her trench coat.

  Next to the exit, a security guard with a blonde mullet glances down the checkout girl’s top as she changes the till roll. I turn towards the doors, but Leila walks straight up to him and taps him on the arm, with the eyeliner sticking out of her pocket.

  ‘Do you sell ladies’ incontinence pads?’ she asks.

  ‘Aimee?’ he asks the cashier.

  The checkout girl chews her gum open-mouthed and looks at Leila as if she’s unclean.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No,’ he repeats, and turns away while the girl on the till sneers.

  After we’ve left the shop, I burst out laughing. ‘You’re mad! I told you we’d have a laugh.’

  She frowns. ‘What? Mum asked me to get her some.’

  I look her up and down. She’s so different from me – not just her band tee shirts and blazers, but everything about her. We’re wearing the same black hoop earrings, but apart from that we couldn’t be more different.

  I link arms with her as we walk towards the empty bench, where the girls from college were sitting before.

  ‘Barbara’s at the market if you fancy it? She’s entered herself in the pool competition at the Nelson later. Should be a right laugh.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ I laugh, but Leila doesn’t. Her arm goes slack inside mine as we walk along the precinct and look in Freeman Hardy Willis at all the shoes we can’t afford to buy. We go over the bridge, where the river flows under the town centre, and I wonder which pieces of Kirsten are floating underneath the cracked pavement: an empty Opal Fruits wrapper from her pocket? A badge from her top? One of her golden hairs? I imagine them stuck in the cracked foundations of the shopping centre while the water rushes on to better places. I feel as though everyone must know what I’m thinking about, but they stream out of C&A with bags of shopping, as though they’re oblivious, and as usual I’m the only one that cares.

  As we walk back, a group of kids in Kappa tracksuits are standing in a circle around a piece of lino while a Chaka Khan song blasts from the stereo. They take it in turns to practise their backspins to the steady beat of the music. We get a couple of pasties from the baker’s and walk up to the first floor of the precinct as their music fades into a dull and distant thud.

  Everywhere around us are shades of grey: dark and light, pebbledash and smooth, grey after sprawling grey concrete building around us. I lean over the balcony and spit over the edge. It falls through the people and onto the pavement without anyone noticing. I scan over the crowds for the policewoman, but if she were there, I wouldn’t know. There are people everywhere.

  ‘Five points for blokes, three for a woman and one for an old fucker.’

  ‘I can’t spit.’

  ‘Course you can.’ I shake my head. ‘Oh, yeah, and nothing for kids.’

  ‘Hayley, don’t.’

  I lean over the balcony as the perfect family from the carousel walks past under the archway towards us. I spit out a fat globule, seconds before they’re underneath. It turns in the air, before the mother slaps her palm to her forehead.

  ‘Three points! Come on!’ I shout as I jump back from the balcony. Leila doesn’t smile and I don’t know why, because we always used to do this when we came here. We used to have a laugh once.

  ‘Don’t be so immature.’

  I wait for her to apologise, but she looks hopefully at the steps instead. ‘We could go to the market for a bit?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dunno, just to go somewhere different. It’s boring here.’

  She wants to go and see Barbara. She’s saying that Barbara is more interesting than me. I shake up the unopened can of Cherry Coke that she’s bought, while she looks at me thin-lipped, before I step back and throw it as far as I can over the balcony. As I let it go, she stands up and puts her hands up to her mouth. It spins in the air, red and shiny, before it disappears over the edge and lands with a crack on the floor. There are shouts from below and a screech. Leila starts to go towards the balcony and I grab hold of her arm.

  ‘No,’ I say as I pull her back down onto the bench.

  Seconds later, a man with a swollen face in a blue tracksuit runs up the stairs and Leila goes so pale that I can see every last freckle on her face.

  ‘Who the fuck threw that?’ he shouts, and looks around.

  ‘Some lads.’

  I point down towards the stairs, before taking a bite into my pasty. He looks at the long empty space in front of him and decides not to bother. The meat paste is too hot and I lick the corner of my mouth with my tongue while he looks back at me.

  ‘Little shits,’ he says, going back down the stairs and shaking his head to someone waiting underneath.

  I wipe the past
y juice from my lips and we sit in silence, until Leila walks over to the edge of the balcony. I go over to her as the can fizzes and spits on the wet concrete below.

  ‘You could have killed someone, Hayley,’ she says, and looks at me as if she doesn’t know who I am.

  ‘What? With Cherry Coke?’

  ‘I’m going home.’

  She puts her hands in her pockets, before she walks away.

  ‘Come on, it’s just a laugh!’

  She pulls out the eyeliner from her coat and turns to look at me, as if she can’t believe it. She holds it up in the air, with the multi-storey car park behind her and an old Smith’s crisp packet blowing around her feet. As the wind takes the crisp packet over the balcony, she snaps the eyeliner in two and throws it on the floor.

  ‘It’s not a laugh,’ she shouts as she walks towards the steps at the end of the balcony. ‘Why can’t you just be like everyone else for a change? Just come with us to the pub or go into town like we used to?’

  ‘Because I’m not like everyone else,’ I shout.

  I sit back down on the bench, next to her discarded pasty. The melted cheese looks like cat sick as it drips over the edge of the paper bag. It used to be just the two of us, but she’d rather be getting drunk with her new college friends now. She’s swopped her Twilight Teaser lipstick for red and today she’s even wearing Poison perfume, like everyone else. It gives me a headache. She’s nothing like she used to be. The rectangular face of the clock tower looks down on me from above and as the minutes tick by I wonder how long I’ve got left before Leila leaves me too.

  Later, I walk through the blank-faced crowds and up the cobbled hill past the fish shop to the market. I kick a stone that sends a pigeon hopping sideways, before it flies past me, wings clapping, and lands on a ledge below the rooftops. As it sits above me, I think how nice it must be to fly away and be free, but when I get to the top of the hill, it’s back down on the cobbles where it started. If I had another stone, I’d throw it at it, but I keep walking to the top and try not to let it annoy me.

  The market is busy and the smell of oranges reminds me that I’m thirsty as I walk towards the café. Outside an old black and white striped building is a poster stall. I walk over and see what they’ve got. Next to the ‘Jobs Not Bombs’ poster, hung up on the tarpaulin, is the perfect New Order picture. There’s a photo of Gillian Gilbert sitting on a wooden jetty by the water. Her eyes are a blur of dark make-up and her hair is ebony black. She’s breathtakingly beautiful. Around her neck is a chain that could be Kirsten’s and the black ripples in the water hide shapes that curve and bend beneath the surface. It’s black and white and I love it. It was made for me.

  After I’ve bought it, I walk past the Victorian market hall and round the corner to the café, with the rolled-up poster in my hand. The girls from earlier are sitting around a table outside and as I look from one face to the next, I can’t believe it. Leila is sipping lemonade from a straw and sitting next to her is Barbara. She looks down at the table, as though she hasn’t seen me.

  I stand and stare, while Barbara picks at a Danish pastry. As she pulls out a wet cherry and puts it in her mouth, Leila looks as if she’s going to say something, but changes her mind. I wonder if she can see the anger inside me, because I feel it in my face, my hands and my body. As people brush past me I feel nothing. I only see Leila. People are everywhere and there’s no room to get through. I push past a toddler, whose mum is reaching up to get a handbag from a stall, and he falls backwards onto the pavement. I hear the sound of his cry behind me as I reach the top of the cobbled hill by The Bakers Vaults, but I don’t look back. Leila has betrayed me and in those few seconds her name goes into the black book in my head, right underneath Barbara. She doesn’t want her name in there. Once you’re in that’s it. You’d better watch your back.

  11

  DS Beverley Samuels

  As I drive towards work, I make a right turn towards Kirsten Green’s college. I park up on the yellow lines as the students pass by in ones and twos. On the opposite side of the road, the cemetery gates hang open as they wait to swallow up the next procession of black cars.

  The coroner’s report came back yesterday and I had to hide my disappointment when they told me it was an open verdict. It means that there are no clear answers and I don’t have any reason to take things further. When I told Mrs Green, she stared forwards as though she was void of emotion.

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she told me, and I didn’t disagree.

  Mrs Green has taken it as proof that her daughter didn’t take her own life, but as far as Nick is concerned it means that we should draw a line under it and move on. He might be right, but I just can’t do it. There are still too many questions on my mind.

  As I look over at the rusty gates of the cemetery, I think about Moira Timperley’s swollen face as she clung to the last bit of life she had left. Moira Timperley had almost gone into care the year before, because of her mother’s neglect. It felt as though she’d turned things around, but her stepdad had everyone fooled. Her mother even refused to give evidence against him. She chose him over her own daughter to the very end. Thought of the pair of them sickens me and it makes me worry about Hayley Reynolds. There’s something not right about Hayley’s mum’s boyfriend either. I just hope I’m wrong. I couldn’t face a repeat of Moira’s case.

  Kirsten Green will not be ignored because of a coroner’s report and Mrs Green’s dismissal at the idea of a boyfriend comes to mind again. A girl of that age can’t have had no one at all. Someone must know something. The doubts won’t go. They’re like a constant itch.

  I lean my head against the cold glass window and listen to the radio. I’m tired. Kirsten drifted through this town as unnoticed as the shadows on the paving slabs and I close my eyes, as I remember the day we found her. The sight of the wet leaves in her hair as she lay in that river and the empty feeling in my stomach are still vivid in my mind.

  The sound of a car horn on the road behind startles me. It’s been long enough for the street to empty again and the pupils have gone back inside. As I open the car door and walk down the long driveway towards the reception, a grey cloud hangs over the college in an otherwise ice-blue sky.

  The receptionist is about to pick up the phone, when Dr Tibbs comes out of her office with a stack of folders in her hands and when she sees me her mouth puckers.

  ‘Back again?’

  ‘I just need another chat to a few of Kirsten’s teachers?’

  She looks over at a man in a suit waiting at reception.

  ‘Didn’t we already do that?’ she replies, in a quiet voice.

  ‘Just tying up loose ends. Nothing like last time.’

  Dr Tibbs takes a step towards me. ‘Just help yourself to whoever is around. I’ve got to give a talk in the hall this morning.’

  As she walks away I raise my voice. ‘I might need to talk to a few of the pupils too?’

  Dr Tibbs looks back at the man and gives me a fixed smile, before she tells me to: ‘Just sort out what you need with reception, but don’t disturb their studies for too long.’

  As her red high heels click along the corridor I get the impression that she’s more interested in how things look, than in finding out the truth.

  *

  On Saturday, I sit on the bench near the shopping centre as the near-distant river curves towards the place where Kirsten Green was found. A group of lads in tracksuits stand by the steps as a weasel-faced woman shouts at her kid. The art-deco-style theatre stands to my left advertising this year’s pantomime, while another bus goes into the bus station, spitting exhaust fumes.

  Kirsten would have changed buses here, but no one remembers seeing her. She simply blended into one of the many girls who passed through that day. A line of overlapping posters for ‘Coal Not Dole’ is stuck fast to the brickwork on the wall by the river, as I walk over to stare into the blackness of the water below. I understand loneliness, but the thought of Kirsten Green step
ping into that river makes me cold.

  The rough stone wall is splashed in white muck from the pigeons and I take a step back with thoughts returning to Michael Lancaster. There was something unspoken between him and Hayley Reynolds. She’s without a father and I don’t want her taken advantage of. I know what it’s like and it’s important that she feels she can come forward if she knows something.

  As I look towards the grey concrete ridges of the shopping centre a girl walks towards me, and as she reaches the newsagent’s I see that it’s Hayley. There’s a focused look in her eyes as she reaches the road and I smile, but her attention is fixed on the river. She has a haunted look on her face and I turn to look over my shoulder, almost expecting Kirsten Green to be standing on the far bank looking back at me.

  Two girls in matching red slip-on shoes and white jackets go past her and the blank expression on her face is so different from their carefree laughter as they pass by. She has a look of detached intensity that seems out of place on a girl her age. Underneath her many beads, the faint glint of silver on the nape of her neck reminds me that Kirsten’s pendant is still out there somewhere — in the twisted bracken or half sunk on the muddy bank — and I know we must find it. I’m certain that wherever it is will hold a clue to what happened.

  Hayley crosses the road and I wonder if she’s going to hoist herself up on the wall, as I imagined Kirsten might have done. I take a step closer, but she stands and stares at the water with a rolled-up poster in hand.

  ‘Rough day?’ I ask.

  When she turns around, she gives me a knowing look, as though she isn’t surprised to see me.