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  Cathi Unsworth is a novelist, writer and editor who lives and works in London. She began writing for the music paper Sounds at nineteen and has worked as a writer and editor for many other music, film and arts magazines since, including Bizarre, Melody Maker, Mojo, Uncut, Volume and Deadline. Her first novel, The Not Knowing, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2005, followed the next year with the short story compendium London Noir, which she edited, and in 2007 with the punk noir novel The Singer. Bad Penny Blues, her third novel, came out in 2009.

  More at www.cathiunsworth.co.uk

  Praise for Bad Penny Blues

  “In Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth fashions a magnificent tapestry of period and place, confirming her status as one of Britain’s most potent writers of noir. The exciting, dangerous, experimental mood of Notting Hill is conveyed with realistic harshness and a tinge of nostalgia” Marcel Berlins, The Times

  “The author has been compared to cult noirist Derek Raymond, but here she enters a pantheon of writers exploring London lowlife that extends from Patrick Hamilton and Colin MacInnes” Christopher Fowler, Financial Times

  “Cements her reputation for eerie plots, evocative settings and deeply drawn characters … should propel her into a new league” Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror

  “There’s something about the textured layers of Cathi Unsworth’s third novel that effortlessly draw the reader into the dark and disturbing environment she creates … Unsworth lives up to her growing reputation as one of the UK’s stars of noir crime fiction, combining hardboiled prose with vivid characters and a lucid sense of place” Yasmin Sulaiman, The List

  Praise for The Singer

  “A cracking page-turner that feels authentic, authoritative and evocative. And it’s beautifully written. This is a bloody good book” Val McDermid

  “Brilliantly paced, plotted and stylish crime novel from the hugely talented and highly original Cathi Unsworth” Daily Mirror

  “If Cathi Unsworth’s searing debut novel, The Not Knowing, was the perfect sound check, The Singer is the incredible show that everyone should be talking about … Gritty, raw with an authenticity that proves the author knows her stuff. Quite simply, Cathi Unsworth rocks” Daily Record

  “[An] excellent slice of muso-noir … gripping” Metro

  Praise for The Not Knowing

  “Brilliantly executed with haunting religious imagery, interesting minor characters, great rock ’n’ roll references and a spectacular ending. The Not Knowing is a cool and clever debut. Sleep on it at your peril” Diva

  “Hugely entertaining debut from a future star of gritty urban crime literature” Mirror

  WEIRDO

  CATHI UNSWORTH

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Cathi Unsworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2012 Cathi Unsworth

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published in 2012 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  website: www.serpentstail.com

  ISBN 978 1 84668 792 1

  eISBN 978 1 84765 849 4

  Designed and typeset by Crow Books

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Matthew, Yvette, Thomas, William and Sophie Rose

  Death to come

  to those we husband,

  frightened crowds

  running circles –

  on the path and down the hill.

  I’m not the man

  here to murder

  but in his time

  he will come.

  Benedict Newbery,

  ‘Some Man’s Business’

  Normal is for shit

  Harry Crews

  Part 1

  SMALLTOWN ENGLAND

  1

  You’re Already Dead

  March 2003

  They had hidden her far from the rest of the world, deep within a forest. Nearly twenty years she’d been there now, still not long enough to stop the murmurs of hate, nor keep them from turning into a clamour each time her name was recalled. Whenever another case hit the headlines of teenagers killing each other.

  Wicked Witch of the East, the tabloids called her. Killer Corrine, High Priestess of a Satanic cult that had gripped the teenage population of a Norfolk seaside town in the summer of 1984, bringing death in its claws. Social transgressor, female aggressor. Bloody weirdo, the locals said. They’d always known Corrine Woodrow was a wrong ’un. Never any doubt in their minds about her guilt and the need for her punishment to be both severe and eternal.

  Keep her away.

  Sean Ward had read all the files and all the news reports he could lay his hands on from the bloody summer of 1984. Had a teenage face in his mind, a girl with spiked and shaved black hair, thick lines of kohl around what were routinely described as ‘the eyes of evil’. The picture of her at her arrest, rather than the smoothed-down, smartened-up teenager that had finally arrived at court, was the one they went on repeating. Usually next to the shot of a bleached-blonde Myra Hindley.

  The forest was dense with pine, branches swaying under the force of the wind and slanting rain. The only other traffic Sean had seen on this B-road through the Cambridgeshire countryside was an ancient Massey Ferguson tractor, driven by a hunched figure in a woollen cap, that had lurched past at the last crossroads and disappeared down a cart track. Sean couldn’t help thinking that he had taken a detour from the real world somewhere between here and the M11, got lost in a folk tale instead – travelling through the wild wood to the fortress where they kept the Witch bricked up.

  The windscreen wipers swooshed as the rain pattered down on the roof of his dark blue Peugeot 207. He had long since turned off the radio, preferring the solitude and the drizzle to the darker clouds of war in Iraq that dominated today’s headlines: George Bush and Tony Blair demanding Saddam stand down and knowing he wouldn’t, pushing towards conflict at any cost.

  Sean had had enough of conflict. He had been a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan police when his job had nearly killed him, in a spray of semi-automatic gunfire that the teenage drug dealer had fortunately not been capable of aiming with deadly accuracy. Had spent the best part of a year in hospitals and recuperation after that, his nights haunted by visions of the look in that young man’s eyes.

  He had a new line of work now, not so different from the old. Pensioned out of the Met, Sean had ended up doing the only thing ex-coppers really knew how to do – private detective work. He hadn’t liked the idea of it, imagining a dull, endless line of cheating spouses and petty fraudsters. But it was preferable to life as a social worker or a prison guard, or worse still, slipping into the inertia of sofa and daytime TV, a life devoid of purpose.

  To his surprise, he had found there was a new area of detection providing the sort of work that would allow his brain to go on doing what it had been designed for. A field opened up by the advancement of chemistry and physics, DNA technology; a boom area for lawyers with good money to pay.

  Cold cases.

  Which was why, having almost been felled by one child villain, Sean was now driving towards another – or w
hatever Corrine Woodrow had become in the years since her incarceration.

  Janice Mathers, the QC who was behind this, the second attempt to appeal against indefinite sentence, was the type of lawyer that induced fury within his former profession – a trendy lefty who had made her name taking on unpopular cases in a quest to expose the miscarriages she felt were at the heart of the justice system. She’d had a fresh forensic test done on clothing recovered from the murder scene and, thanks to a new technique called Cluster DNA, had found evidence that cast doubt on Corrine’s sole culpability.

  Someone else’s genetic imprint was smeared across it, a person unknown to the police, an anonymous entity who must have stayed clean ever since, never been caught for another offence or put on a file anywhere. She had engaged Sean to try and find this phantom accomplice who could be anywhere else on earth, including underneath, it by now.

  He had taken Mathers’ coin despite the disapproving faces of friends from his old squad, first amongst them Charlie Higgins, Sean’s old chief super, the guiding light of his ten years on the Force. Not that he didn’t have misgivings. Even if an injustice had occurred, what hope would the Wicked Witch of the East have for rehabilitation now? She would have to live the rest of her life under a false identity, permanently looking behind her back, never able to rest. Sean had seen what could happen at the first whisper of suspicion, seen the shit through the letterbox, the windows smashed, the graffiti scrawled and the fires lit. Seen it happen to innocent people, let alone those who really were tainted by past deeds.

  But the real reason he had taken the case was becoming clearer to Sean with every mile he drove: after long months of inactivity, his brain was crawling. He needed a case, needed a purpose. He could do with a new identity himself–if this really was a folk tale, he would be the white knight on his charger – but he had never been comfortable with the ‘hero cop’ handle the press had bestowed on him while reporting his misfortune. Welcomed instead the anonymity of criminal archaeology.

  Sean had been eleven years old when Corrine had committed her crime. He had no memory of it happening. Nor had he ever been to this part of the world before. After his stop here, he was headed further east, to the coastal resort of Ernemouth in Norfolk, where it had all begun, to meet with the man who had headed the original case, the now retired Detective Chief Inspector Leonard Rivett. But first, he wanted to meet Corrine. Wanted to look into her eyes and see what they revealed.

  On the passenger seat beside him, the map showed that beyond the next bend would be the entrance to the perimeter fence of the high-security facility. It was a Victorian institution, as so many of them still were, forbidding brick pillars and arched iron gates guarding a grim stately home for the criminally insane.

  The sentry waved him through with a bored expression and Sean found himself on a pale grey ribbon of road that stretched on through a clearing of heathland, the heather and gorse bushes dripping with rain. He saw no signs of life; not even the murder of crows you might expect to find circling such a desolate location. When the secure unit finally came into view, he understood why.

  It really did look like a fortress with its turrets and towers, its slits of windows reflecting nothing but the iron hue of the sky. Sean felt a shudder of revulsion so deep that it was all he could do not to put on the brakes, swing round and head right back. Hospital had been bad enough, but this …

  How long would it take in a place like this before you became infected too?

  Taking a deep breath, he swallowed his fear and drove on.

  2

  In The Flat Field

  August 1983

  Edna Hoyle sat for a while at the kitchen table after her husband had gone. The skin on her cheek smarted from the hasty kiss he’d deposited there as he was leaving, one arm already in his jacket, cigarette still smouldering in the ashtray. It wasn’t like Eric not to shave clean, nor to rush his tea as if he couldn’t bear to linger in his own home one second longer. But then, these were not normal days.

  Edna reached over and stubbed out the Silk Cut. The lowtar brand were Eric’s most recent concession to doctor’s orders to take better care of himself; they were supposed to be better for you than the Rothmans full-strength he’d been on since his teens. Trouble was, he seemed to smoke twice as many of these, smoked them with an ill-concealed rage that he was denying himself his pleasure. God knows, Edna thought, how many he’ll be on this time next week, when everything will change…

  She stopped that thought the only way she knew how, by applying herself to the chores at hand. She filled up the sink with hot water and Fairy Liquid, cleaned the glasses, the plates and the pans so that everything sparkled.

  They were doing it for Samantha, she had to keep reminding him. Their granddaughter. It wasn’t her fault that her mother behaved the way she did …

  Edna winced, pulled the plug and dried her hands briskly. Ran a cloth over the surfaces, put the tea towel over the radiator, made sure everything in her domain was orderly.

  From his basket in the corner, Edna’s toy spitz, Noodles, lifted his head and yawned, revealing a pink mouth fringed with sharp white teeth. He got to his feet, shook himself and hopped out, tail curled over his hindquarters, tiny ears pricked.

  “Tha’s a good boy,” Edna leant down to pet him, feeling a twinge of arthritis in her knee as she did. Noodles yelped, as if he was talking back to her, brushing his face against the side of her hand. With his shaggy gold coat and bustling walk, Noodles was an amusing canine mirror of Edna. But he was a sensitive one, too.

  The pair of them climbed the thickly carpeted stairs up to the room Edna had spent the past few weeks renovating into a bedroom for Sammy.

  Her eyes trailed over the wallpaper and matching bedspread she’d picked from Laura Ashley in Norwich. Edna had asked her best friend, Shirley Reece, who had granddaughters of a similar age to Sammy, for advice.

  Shirl had been sure that the bright, simple, poppy pattern would go down well. Edna was no longer certain. The room was so small that the wickerwork dressing table and stool were blocking the view of the sea from the window. And the wardrobe that stood against the opposite wall really didn’t look big enough to contain all of Sammy’s clothes.

  “Oh, Noodles,” she whispered, “what if she don’t like it?”

  Noodles stared up at his mistress, his brown eyes offering sympathy.

  Edna reached up to the shelves she’d had Eric put up. Here she had arranged the collection of knick-knacks won by her granddaughter at The Leisure Beach, along with the books Sammy left behind each time. A china Mickey Mouse and a series of Nancy Drew mysteries, the things she usually picked up first when she arrived for a summer stay. Edna was keenly aware that this time her granddaughter might not be so eager to go back to her childhood things, not now that she was coming here to live. She might take one look around her and throw all of Edna’s carefully chosen home improvements in the bin.

  But it wasn’t Sammy’s fault that her mother behaved the way she did.

  As her fingers closed around the little figurine, the memories she had been trying to suppress all day, all month, all summer long, since her daughter Amanda had made the phone call that had turned their lives upside down, welled up in Edna’s brain.

  Amanda, the cause of Eric’s first heart attack. Amanda with her too ripe figure and her platform boots, running off with an artist from London the moment she was eighteen – eighteen and eight weeks’ pregnant. Edna’s eyes closed as she tried to shut out the recollection of all that screaming, all that shouting, china hurled and furniture broken, fists raised and blood vessels bursting … Eric lying in hospital attached to a ventilator, unable to speak but his eyes still raging while Edna wept by his side. Amanda not daring to contact them again until the baby had been born, using her from the very start as a weapon against their affections, against their better judgement.

  No, it wasn’t Sammy’s fault, Edna repeated to herself, fingers tightening their grip …

 
* * *

  All along the seafront, the streetlights fizzled on. From the North Denes, where Edna stood in her architect-designed villa, Marine Parade stretched for another mile between the rolling humps of the sand dunes, until it reached the first of Ernemouth’s piers.

  The mid-Victorian Britannic was a testament to the town’s dedication to commerce. Five fires and two schooners sailing off-course and into its 700ft-long rear end had done nothing to deter a succession of entrepreneurs rebuilding the pier and embellishing its theatre to accommodate still more patrons for the summer shows. Its current frontage looked out upon an amusement park, where giant snails trundled laughing children around. Above, this season’s stars emblazoned in lights: Cannon and Ball, The Grumbleweeds and Jim Davidson’s Late Nite Nick-Nick.

  From here on, the second mile of Marine Parade was called “Golden”, and not in reference to the sands that constituted this stretch of the beach, but to the entertainments across the promenade. Amusement arcades, every one named after a Las Vegas casino – The Mint, The Sands, The Flamingo, Caesar’s Palace, The Golden Nugget and Circus Circus – all recreated in glittering lights on the façades of one-storey breezeblock caverns. Between the beachfront bars, Kiss-Me-Kwik sun hat vendors, candy floss and donut stands, they squatted like a blowzy row of ageing drag queens, demanding attention and making the most infernal noise about it.

  Inside The Mint, Debbie Carver stood leaning against a pinball machine, trying to work out what was irritating her most – the shrieking, whistling cacophony of the machines, or the sound of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” blaring through the speakers above her head. Maybe it was the company she was keeping. The penultimate Friday night of the summer holidays and here she still was, stuck in the boring ’musies while her companion went on banging pennies into the slots, oblivious to her discomfort.

  Not for the first time, Debbie wondered if she had been more foolish than kind to make friends with the girl who had moved into her road, in the terrace underneath the gasworks, nine months ago. Not that, when she looked back on it, she could even work out whether she’d had any choice about it.