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.