Excerpt of Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth

"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 woolen 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 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.

This excerpt is taken from Weirdo, copyright © 2013 by Cathi Unsworth. Reproduced with permission from House of Anansi Press, Toronto. www.houseofanansi.com.