Page 40 of The Tapes

We had definitely done that.

I always thought a part of that was payback because she was such a quiet child.

She wasn’t crying when I gave birth. Instead, there was a sniffle, a wrinkled nose, and a baffled expression at why everything was so bright and loud.

By four months, she was more or less sleeping through the night – and, even before that, she was so quiet when she’d awaken in the early hours.

My mother used to tell me how it wasn’t fair. I didn’t sleep through the night until I was five years old, a fact she never let me forget. ‘You owe me five years’ of sleep,’ she would remind me, well into my thirties.

I was the devil and my daughter was the saint.

But perhaps that’s why we argued.

There was the fight about her bedtime when she was five; her refusal to wear anything that wasn’t pink at six; then the refusal to wear anything that was pink by seven. She wouldn’t wear a coat to school at eight, and kept leaving lights on when she was nine.

It’s hard to know why I cared about any of those things.

My dad would always tell me off for leaving on lights and, somehow, I morphed into him over the same issue.

Now I know that if Pamela didn’t want to wear a coat to school, the worst that would happen is she would get wet.

She’d learn a lesson, and even if she didn’t, all it meant was that her young mind was working out the boundaries of the world for herself.

By the age of ten, Pamela was pushing back over why her friends’ parents could afford to go to Disney World but we couldn’t.

At eleven, she wanted to play football with the boys and was angry that the school wouldn’t let her.

By twelve, she didn’t like her school uniform because she wanted to wear trousers but girls had to wear skirts.

I agreed with her, yet we still argued because I wanted her to see that there are battles that are worth fighting, and the key is picking them wisely.

I was wrong.

If a twelve-year-old girl wants to go to war with her school over a clearly sexist uniform policy, the least she should expect is her mother to back her.

I didn’t and I was wrong.

But because we argued about that, we kept on going.

She had her ears pierced without asking.

Two months later and it was her nose. Because she objected to the school uniform policy, she went out of her way to break it.

She would be suspended, or sent home for the day – and then she would skip school entirely.

It turned into a three-way battle of wills between Pamela, the school, and myself.

I would lie in bed at night, thinking of my perfectly silent little baby, wondering why she couldn’t just fit in.

I was wrong about that, too.

It would have meant an easier life for me – but Pamela wasn’t the sort to simply ‘fit in’. She saw things differently. While the vast majority of girls would wear a skirt, happily or not, Pamela was brave enough to question it.

Now, I can’t remember why I was so keen for her to stop asking those questions.

I’m on the main street of Sedingham again, where a yawning man in dark trousers and a white shirt is opening the shutters of Tails.

A couple of months have passed since Kelsey and Adele shared memories of the HAVE FUN education scheme with me at the bus stop.

It’s a part of town I have to force myself to visit, because Tails used to be known as Phoenix, which replaced Eclipse, that was once Jewel, and before that Enigma.

Provincial towns and their idiosyncratic nightclub names are quite the combination.

Pamela was fifteen when she first got herself into Eclipse on a Friday night.

She’d told me she was staying at a friend’s house.

It was a few minutes after two in the morning that the doorbell sounded.

I flew out of bed, confused and half-asleep, finding my way downstairs to the front door, where a uniformed police officer with a fluorescent jacket was waiting for me.

Pamela had thrown up on one of his colleagues’ shoes, before being taken to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.

She was fine, of course, more embarrassed than anything.

On the back of that, Eclipse almost lost its licence, and ended up rebranding as Phoenix.

I walk past Tails now and then, picturing the scene of my fifteen-year-old daughter somehow getting past security.

I imagine her delight at passing from the chill of outside into the sticky, humid hall beyond.

Obviously, she wouldn’t have been wearing a coat.

Tails is not Eclipse. The ridiculous patch of sodden red carpet that used to be at the door is no longer used, nor the clippable rope across the door supposedly to signify VIP status.

The dank lighting has been replaced by bright bulbs and chandeliers across the ceiling.

The pound-a-drink promos switched for ten-quid cocktails, or mocktails.

It’s different, yet this will always be the place at which my daughter was sick on a policeman’s shoes.

Pamela and I argued about those shoes, the stomach pumping, and the sneaking into a club while severely underage. I tried to ground her but that didn’t go well. I had a job and places to be – so Pamela would leave the house anyway.

But then a miracle happened less than a year later – or that’s what I thought.

Pamela got straight-As in her GCSEs, one of only four people in her year to get perfect results.

I considered it a miracle because of what had gone before, completely disregarding everything else in front of me.

The truth was, she found the level of education beneath her, because she understood it so naturally and easily.

She picked fights over uniform policy because there was little else in the curriculum to push the boundaries of her intelligence.

Somehow, I’d never seen that. I’d been to the parents’ evening and, instead of focusing on the ‘She’s so clever and understands everything put in front of her’ part of a teacher’s comments, I’d hone in on the ‘but…’

We didn’t fight over my daughter’s GCSE results – but it was the worst I ever let her down. She showed me her paper, with that perfect row of As and I looked at the marks, then I looked at her, then I looked at the marks again.

‘This is unexpected,’ I said.

They are three words that have haunted me ever since, because I should have only needed one.

‘Congratulations,’ is what I added afterwards, but it was too late by then. I saw it in Pamela’s face, a subtle shift in the way she sucked her lips into her mouth and bit down on the bottom one. No argument, no fight, nothing thrown, no threats, just a soft bite of the lip.

I hadn’t believed in my daughter, hadn’t seen her for who she was, and then I’d told her that outright.

Things were different after that. We probably argued less, although a part of that was because we didn’t see as much of each other.

Pamela continued on to college for her A-levels and she also got her first proper boyfriend.

We argued about him, of course. I didn’t like his tattoos, or the short Mohican along the centre of his otherwise shaved head.

I wasn’t a fan of his nose ring, or the disc that expanded his earlobe.

But that was me missing the point again.

He was a good young man, who treated my daughter well.

There was no longer a desire to sneak into clubs, or skip classes.

In many ways, that rebellious part of her life was over – except I missed it because she now had a pair of nose piercings and another through her lip.

I saw the surface, never what was underneath.

So we fought about that and about her boyfriend – and it’s impossible to remember why I felt like that.

Things that were big then are insignificant now.

Pamela loved that boy, and, really, that was all that should have mattered.

Except I remembered my father telling me how tattoos on a person meant they’d never get a real job, never contribute to society.

That others would always look down on them.

His opinions had somehow become mine, even though I’m not sure I ever really believed it.

And we argued.

It was about Pamela’s boyfriend but, really, it was about me. I always regretted not getting the university education I wished I had, and I was so desperate for Pamela to have that. I wanted her to live my life, not hers.

And that’s why, at three minutes past nine in the morning, Pamela said I was being over-dramatic. She left the house – and I never saw her again.

Back on Sedingham’s main street, I head past Tails towards the corner, then follow the pavement up a slight hill, past a bus stop and a church. There’s a small play park, where a boy is attempting to walk up the slide, and then a row of shops.

Pamela was last seen on the grainy CCTV outside the chip shop that has been offering the same large sausage and chips lunchtime special for as long as I can remember.

She would have probably been heading for the bus stop, where she would have caught the number eight that would have taken her to the record shop where her boyfriend worked.

She would hang around while he was on shift.

Despite not being an employee, there were plenty of customers who later remembered her helping them find items, or who asked for her recommendations.

She was known in a way I’d never realised.

The owner himself joked that he had two employees for the price of one, saying she helped reorganise the entire stock, unprompted and unpaid.

Except, on that day, nobody saw her get on the bus, the driver didn’t remember her, and she never made it to the record shop.

The last person she spoke to was in the mini supermarket, next to the chip shop. Pamela bought a packet of cigarettes – something else over which we argued – and she told the girl behind the counter that she liked her Metallica T-shirt. Pamela paid, then left.

The shop is a Londis now, with an A-frame sign outside advertising ice lollies, and a bin that has scorch marks across the top, plus a graffitied ‘AJ’ on the side.

I’m on the spot where my daughter was last seen.

Three days later, the body of Pamela Mallory was found in a gully near a sewer outlet around six miles from this spot.

The next time I saw my daughter was for the official identification in the mortuary, ahead of the autopsy.

There was a single jet-black plastic stud in one of her earlobes, while the other was bare.

Pamela was a victim of the Earring Killer – the first in six years since Sarah Graham; the eighth in sixteen years.

And then, precisely as Harry Bailey said, Pamela became a number.

His wife, Janine, was number two; Pamela was number eight.

Articles would be written in which the name ‘Pamela’ was barely used, yet the number ‘eight’ appeared multiple times.

There was a clamour, a rush. Would the Earring Killer reach double figures? How long would it take?

People looked at me differently, and they talked about Pamela differently. That’s how people like Harry Bailey at the cricket club, and Alan Ilverston, who lives on the canal, came into my life. Others, too. So many others. We’re all connected by a single person – the Earring Killer.

Pamela Mallory became number eight – but she wasn’t the last.