Something Wicked Read online

  “Hello, young lady! What are you doing in here?”

  I recognised the voice. It was Mr Singh. I froze in terror. My mind raced – how was I going to get out of this? I prayed for inspiration and it came.

  “I wasn’t feeling too good,” I lied.

  “What’s wrong?” He sounded concerned.

  “I’ve got a migraine. I suffer from them. I just thought if I could sit in a dark room for a few minutes, while my pills take effect …”

  “Can I do anything for you? Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water? Shall I let someone know you’re not feeling well?

  “No – it’s all right.” I forced a smile. “I want to last out the evening. I need the money.”

  “Oh, no! Don’t let that stop you going home. I’ll square it with the caterers and make sure you get full wages. You’ve worked hard enough already.”

  “No – I want to stay. I will feel better, when the pills take effect. I’m used to this, honestly.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Well, have a word with my wife later. She’s a medical lady.”

  He left me then. I had to sit down because my legs couldn’t carry me a moment longer. I had never been so near being discovered. But it was OK. I was safe. I knew I couldn’t possibly break open the trophy cabinet now, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I would ring Ritchie and tell him to come anyway. The second part of our plan would still work.

  My fear was now affecting my stomach and I had to go to the ladies for real. The room was empty, apart from the whiff of mingled perfumes from the female guests. I went into the same end cubicle I was in before. Sitting there, something caught my eye. An earring. A gold drop earring. When I had finished, I picked it up. That would be worth a bob or two. I cheered up instantly. I would have something to give Ritchie. I’d had a close shave. Luck was still with us. I rang Ritchie’s mobile.

  Within a few moments the buzzer was ringing at the front door that led into the lobby. I was there so I opened it. There was Ritchie. As soon as I saw his face, I felt better. I was about to explain what had happened when I heard the sound of people behind me. But that wasn’t a problem. We had this all worked out. I turned, and it was Kelly and another girl.

  “Oh, hi. This is my brother, Craig.”

  “Hi, Craig,” Kelly said. I didn’t like that flirty edge to her voice. But I could hardly challenge it, now I’d said he was my brother.

  “Yeah,” Ritchie drawled. “I need the house keys. I called in, in case you’ve got them. I’ll take your bag back if you like, as I’ve got the car.”

  “Do you drive?” asked Kelly. “What do you drive?”

  “An Audi TT.”

  “Ooh!” she replied.

  “Craig – I need to speak to you,” I said. He heard the urgency in my voice and followed me into the trophy room. I explained very quickly what had happened, then passed him the earring. He said it was probably nine-carat gold and I was pleased. He said never mind about the trophy. I could tell he was edgy, not his usual self, but I guess it was the pressure of the job. I didn’t feel too great myself. Both of us knew that at this moment in time Woodsy or Tanner was going through the coats.

  We emerged back into the lobby and – guess what? – Kelly was still there. She spoke directly to Ritchie.

  “Are you older than Anna, then, to be able to drive?”

  “Yeah, I’m eighteen.”

  “Cool. Do you work or what?”

  “I’m a cocktail waiter,” Ritchie said, slick as anything. I was a bit annoyed at Kelly, but enjoying Ritchie’s lies, too.

  “Where? In town?”

  I knew what she was up to. She wanted to find out where he worked, and then she’d be round there, chatting him up. So I waited with amusement to hear what Ritchie would say. That was when Julia materialised.

  “Anna darling! You’ve been working so hard – I shall tell your mother what a treasure you are. Hello – who’s this?”

  Oh my God. I couldn’t pretend that Ritchie was my brother any longer. Panic gripped me.

  “My boyfriend,” I said in a small voice. Julia’s eyes lit with interest.

  “Now I remember your mother saying something about a new man in your life. Aha! So you can’t keep away, can you?” she said to Ritchie, giving him a good once-over. Then she disappeared into the ladies.

  “What?” Kelly said. “You said he was your brother? Which are you?”

  Ritchie looked at me quizzically. I shot him a look as if to say, leave me to handle this.

  “He’s my boyfriend. We were just kidding.”

  She wasn’t too pleased. “You’re weird, you,” she said, and went into the ladies too. That gave Ritchie and me another moment alone together. He said he reckoned Woodsy should have been in and out by now. The cloakroom door had been closed throughout. I’d made sure of that. I realised I hadn’t given Ritchie my bag, but now I didn’t need to, and I couldn’t have anyway, as it was in the cloakroom. Everything was getting awkward and complicated and I could hardly keep everything in my mind at the same time. It flashed across my mind that more than anything I wanted to be out of here and somewhere with Ritchie – back in the country again, anywhere. He kissed me briefly on the lips and went. He said he’d stay in close touch.

  After he’d gone, first Julia and then Kelly and her friend had emerged from the ladies and gone back to the dinner. I was on my own again. Curiosity overpowered me. I opened the cloakroom door to see what damage Woodsy had done. He had been very clever. The room and coats looked untouched. The window had been replaced exactly as I’d left it. In fact it looked as if no one had been in. I paused. Had he been in? Had something else gone wrong?

  I knew I couldn’t loiter, so I closed the door again and went back to the kitchen to help serve dessert. There was a choice – fruit salad or chocolate bombes. I made my way to Table Seven carrying two bombes.

  “Ah! Our waitress!” said Mr Singh. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yes – much,” I lied.

  “Allow me to introduce my wife. She’s a doctor. Our waitress suffers from migraines. What would you suggest?”

  His wife laughed. “I’m not a GP,” she explained to me. “I specialise in pain relief.”

  “She works at the hospice,” said Mr Singh proudly, digging into his bombe.

  “Mmm. Delicious. I hope they save one for you,” he grinned at me. “Although chocolate can trigger migraines. I was going to ask you – can you ask the other waiters if anyone has seen a gold earring. Mrs Hartley –” he gestured to a lady across the table “– has lost one. It was a gift from her mother. She’ll be so glad if it turns up.”

  “OK, I will,” I said, returning to the kitchen.

  Well. It was too late, I thought. Ritchie already has the earring. It won’t appear now. I told myself there was no point being upset about it. But – I’ll admit this now – I was upset. It was different, knowing who you’ve taxed. I felt mean. And, Mr Singh was being so nice to me. I began to wonder if maybe Woodsy’s dad had deserved the sack for some reason. There are two sides to every story. I was more confused than ever, and the headache I’d lied about earlier was becoming a reality. Then I remembered that it was OK. Apart from the earring, we’d taken nothing. By all appearances Woodsy had not been in the cloakroom, and we could write the whole evening off as a bad experience, no harm done. And I could even suggest to Ritchie that we could post the earring back to the golf club – it couldn’t possibly be worth that much by itself. Then we could just go back to taxing shopkeepers.

  All this was going through my mind as I was pouring coffee. Table Seven had relaxed now and they were asking me about myself. They’d learned I was still at school and what GCSEs I was taking, and that I knew Julia. Mrs Singh offered me a petit four, and I declined, but liked the way they were drawing me in to their world. Now I was positively grateful that Woodsy had failed.

  We cleared away the coffee things, and as we were doi
ng that some people began to move the tables to one side for the dancing. I knew that I’d be free to go then. I thought I’d text Ritchie before I rang my mum. I hoped we could snatch some time together. It might even be possible for him to run me home instead – it would save Mum a journey. The idea of having some time alone with him blotted out all the mishaps of the evening.

  So I wasn’t one of the first to leave. I stayed in the kitchen to send that text to Ritchie. Other waiters and waitresses got their coats and went out the door that led directly to the car park. I started to press the letters on my phone. Then one of the waiters came back in.

  “Some idiot’s broken into my car!” he was shouting. Everyone looked over at him. Then another woman came back. “I can’t get into my car,” she said. “The lock’s been ruined.”

  I don’t remember the sequence of what happened next, sorry. But other people went to check the car park, and nearly every car had been interfered with. Radios were gone, locks damaged, stuff taken. Someone was ringing for the police. The news filtered through to the guests who were dancing, and the festivities stopped. Everyone was outside checking their cars. Then Mr Singh came back in, and announced, his face creased in puzzlement, “My car’s gone.”

  I read in the newspapers they found it the next day, smashed up, abandoned in a ditch, with Paki bastard spray-painted across the windscreen.

  The problem with baths is that you can never be sure you’re really getting clean. Because the old water circulates, it doesn’t go anywhere. You scrub yourself with soap but all the bits that come off with the soap stay in the water. The water goes murky with them. And if the bath is too hot, and you begin to sweat, where does the sweat go? It stays in the water and might come back and cling to you. But on the other hand, you can be certain in a bath that the water is reaching every bit of you. But now you understand why I shower both before and after a bath. I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it?

  I was in the bath on the Sunday night after the event at the golf club. It was a good place to think. I’d had one brief text message from Ritchie. Sorry, it read. That was early Sunday morning, about three o’clock. When I read it, I knew immediately what must have happened. Raiding the cars and trashing Mr Singh’s Merc was the gang’s idea. Ritchie was powerless to stop them.

  In which case, why hadn’t he replied to any of my texts? Maybe he was lying low, until the heat was off. Perhaps his phone was switched off, or he lent it to his mum or something. I hated having to wait around like this. It was horrible, bottling up everything I felt.

  I’d decided I wasn’t going to think about any of what happened on Saturday night until I was with Ritchie. Replaying it in my mind would drive me mad. There was no point. Analysing your feelings is the kind of pathetic thing my mum would do.

  But I couldn’t stop the pictures in my head. White, distraught faces. Donna, the head waitress, sobbing, because she didn’t know how she was going to be able to get her car fixed. Mr Singh striding back into the hall, saying his car had gone. And the question he asked: “What have I done wrong?” The policewoman who came into the kitchen looking so concerned, saying we were free to go.

  My mum had wanted to know all about it on the way home. Then in the morning Julia had rung with the news about the Merc. She said they were treating it as a race-hate crime. Mum said people who do that sort of thing are the scum of the earth, lower than animals. To attack someone because they are a different race or religion was stupid and ugly. She got quite worked up.

  I just concentrated on acting like normal. I had to protect Ritchie, which you’ll agree was reasonable, because I was pretty certain he wouldn’t have done such a thing. I did notice that Mum’s anger made her come out of herself a bit. In the past few weeks she’d been getting back to normal. And Julia had persuaded her to part with some of her hard-earned cash to go away for a weekend for a massage course. It gave me a jolt to realise how quickly that weekend had come around – it was next Saturday, in fact. I had insisted to Mum I didn’t mind her going away, and it was true. I quite like having the house to myself. But for some reason, right now, I wished she wasn’t going. I just wanted her to be around. Just around.

  Whenever I did think about Saturday night, I controlled my thoughts by saying:

  1) I didn’t do anything;

  2) Ritchie probably didn’t do anything;

  3) The gang was after Mr Singh anyway and there was probably little I could have done to prevent it.

  Then I would think about something else. I made myself. I had to.

  I was glad to go to school on Monday because I could concentrate on my lessons. There was a big debate in the formroom about whether Janette had lost her virginity. I smiled but didn’t join in. She’d been going out with a twenty-year-old bloke, so everyone thought they were sleeping together. There was a science test later so some people were testing each other, or cramming as much in as possible alone at their desks.

  It was English next, Macbeth again. Everyone was moaning because they all hate Shakespeare. So the teacher was really trying hard, trying to make it exciting. She was going on about how Macbeth ordered the killing of Macduff’s wife and children, and how brutally it was carried out. She read out the scene with Macduff hearing the news, and how he couldn’t take it all in. Her voice was breaking. Then she said it showed how evil Macbeth was, to arrange the killings of innocents.

  I said how did she know Macbeth ordered it? She said because he was after Macduff. But I said, it doesn’t say anywhere in the play that Macbeth wanted the wife and children killed. Maybe the murderers took it on themselves to do the killings without permission, because they were the evil ones. Maybe Macbeth would be shocked when he found out what happened.

  The teacher said, “Technically you could be right, Anna. But I think it’s unlikely, don’t you? Macbeth had got used to killing, used to blood. By that stage in the play he was only thinking of himself.”

  “No, Miss,” I said. “What about Lady Macbeth – he was thinking of her too.”

  “You have a point. But what Shakespeare is trying to say is that evil breeds evil.”

  “But it was an accident,” I said.

  The teacher looked puzzled. I noticed my hands were dirty and made a note to go and wash them at the end of the lesson.

  In Maths I felt my phone vibrate in my blazer pocket. When the teacher was writing on the board I checked it. Ritchie. He wanted to meet me in the afternoon. Four thirty. At Moor Park gates. At last.

  I’d had time to go home first and get changed into my jeans and a fleece. Ritchie was waiting for me. I saw him before he saw me. He was just stubbing out a cig. When he looked up, there I was.

  “You all right?” he asked me, smiling.

  I smiled back. It was just so good to be back with him again, and I realised how much I’d missed him.

  “Yeah,” I said. It just bowled me over, how good-looking he was. I know it sounds silly, that I’d known him so long and didn’t see that in the beginning. But there’s a kind of beauty about him. His eyes are greyish-brown. When he smiles, it’s as if he’s trying not to smile, but can’t help it. His hair had grown quickly and it covered his scalp like dark fur. I wanted to reach out and stroke it. Instead I linked arms with him and we walked into the park. We were unremarkable, just any boy and girl.

  “Let me tell you what happened on Saturday night,” he said.

  “OK.”

  “After I saw you, I went back out to where we’d parked the Micra and there was Tanner throwing up in the bushes. I don’t know whether the drink had disagreed with him, or what. But I reckoned he was the only one small enough to get in through the window. Loz got really irate then, cursing and that. It was Woodsy’s idea to get the Merc, cos he said he’d be able to recognise it.”

  “Mr Singh was all right, Ritch. He was nice to me.”

  Ritchie threw me a sidelong glance, then carried on with his narrative. “There was some gear in the back of the Micra, spanners, cans of paint. Loz knows how
to spray the CCTVs so they can’t operate. Anyway, he and Woodsy were at the cars then. Loz knows what to do because of his brother. So when they’d got a couple of radios and some bits and pieces, Woodsy found the Merc. There was no alarm or anything, so it was easy. Woodsy and Loz drove away in it, and I got Tanner up from behind the bushes and took him back in the Micra.”

  Even though we’d begun to walk uphill, my legs were light with relief.

  “So you weren’t involved, Ritch?”

  “Only a bit – otherwise, well – you know.”

  “Yeah, I understand. It was good of you to look after Tanner.”

  “Yeah, well. He’s a mate.”

  “I like Tanner,” I said.

  Moor Park is huge. I heard it said once it was the second-largest park in England. There’s a bowling green, a golf course, a boating lake, a children’s zoo, and even then, in the middle, there’s a vast expanse of grass. From the top you can get an amazing view of our town. That was where we seemed to be heading. It’s funny how the higher you get, the smaller your problems seem. Perhaps because people look tinier, and their concerns are tinier.

  We sat down on a bench at the highest point.

  “Look, Ritchie, I don’t think we ought to have any more to do with Loz and Woodsy.”

  “Why not?”

  I was surprised he had to ask. “Well, they didn’t stick to the plan. And if we’re a gang, then you’ve got to obey orders.”

  “But the plan collapsed when Tanner was ill.”

  “Yeah, but we made it clear at the meeting that we’re doing what we do without hurting people if we can help it, and targeting people who deserve to be hit, and helping the needy!”

  “Sure, but sometimes someone’s going to get hurt. That’s the world we live in.”

  “Ritchie, no. Someone vandalised Donna’s car – it was an old Mini and she can’t afford to get it fixed.”

  “That’s tough,” he said.