The Silent Girls Read online

  Sophie wandered up behind her. ‘Last farewell?’ she asked.

  ‘Something like that. I almost wish the fire had taken it all.’

  Sophie didn’t say anything, just pushed her hands into her pockets and let out a long sigh.

  ‘So are you all packed and ready?’ Edie said, turning away from the house. ‘I thought we might have a few days down in Cornwall or something before I find somewhere more permanent.’

  She looked down at Sophie’s foot scuffing the ground and knew what was coming, Edie was 100% fluent in body language. ‘You’re not coming are you?’

  ‘Umm… no, not for a bit, but I will visit when you’re settled. I got offered a job, in the café. It’s not much, but it’s the first time I’ve ever had a chance to do something proper for myself. I want to give it a go. You’ve been great Edie, and I can’t tell you what it means to me, but I need to do this. I need to prove I can stand on my own two feet.’

  Edie nodded, she did understand but it was going to break her heart. Sophie had been the one purposeful focus in the whole debacle, and the only thing that had kept her sane in the aftermath. ‘But where will you live?’

  ‘Matt said I could have the bedsit. He’s moving on too.’

  Edie nodded. She had become quite fond of Matt, even though he had been the catalyst for terrible things. It felt like the only two people who had the vaguest notion what it looked like when your world had been tilted on its axis were abandoning her. It hurt, like a hunger pang in her heart. ‘That’s kind of him.’ she said.

  ‘He’s a kind man.’

  ‘He is.’

  Sophie was kicking the ground again, she had worn away the residue of grime from the fire and had found fresh earth. ‘You should give him a chance you know. He really likes you.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. He just feels bad about everything that came out. Like you said, he’s a nice man.’ she said it, but wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince, herself or Sophie.

  Sophie cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows. ‘Yeah. OK. If you say so.’

  They stood in silence for a few more minutes, just staring at the house. ‘I hate this place.’ Edie said. ‘I don’t know how you can want to stay here.’

  ‘I’m not too keen on this particular house I must admit, but the square itself – it has potential. Sam and Johnno are gone, it’ll get better now.’

  ‘I doubt that, other vile people will pop up and take their place.’ Edie said, knowing that though her words might be true, she was bargaining. Sophie knew it and smiled.

  ‘I’ll be OK you know, and I will visit. You don’t get to shake me off that easily, missus.’

  Edie felt the threat of tears begin to sting her eyelids and turned away. ‘Glad to hear it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’ Her voice was beginning to crack with emotion.

  Sophie took her hands from her pockets, reached out and enfolded Edie in a brief but intense embrace. ‘I love you missus, don’t forget it because I’ll only say it once.’

  The words were mumbled into Edie’s hair where they lingered like a halo of wishes and wants. She hugged the girl back, ‘You only need to say it once, and ditto.’

  Sophie pulled away, ‘That’s enough of the mush. Now bugger off before one of us starts crying. I’ll phone you, all right?’

  ‘You better had.’ Edie said, forcing a smile.

  ‘I will, now bugger off will you – I’ve got to go and learn how to make bloody cappuccinos!’

  Edie laughed, wiped her hand across her face and blew Sophie a kiss before turning her back on Number 17 for good.

  At the tube station she hovered in front of the destination board trying to pick where to go – a ticket to anywhere would do. She had been invited to go and stay with Rose, but it was too soon. They might talk about the past one day, but Edie needed it straight in her own head before she allowed Rose to soften it and mould it and make it into something more palatable than it was to suit herself. Cornwall had been appealing when she’d thought it would be her and Sophie, she’d had a vision of them staying at that big hotel in Newquay and having a ball, but it would be too lonely a trip on her own. She would rather be a sad middle-aged woman in a city where she could be relatively invisible. But not London, she was tired of it, and – as the saying went – she was tired of life too. York had always held an appeal; maybe she would go there…

  ‘Edie’

  Her thoughts were entirely disrupted by the sound of his voice. She turned to see Matt standing a few feet away and staring at her with a pained look on his face.

  ‘Weren’t you even going to say goodbye?’ he asked.

  She blushed, because trying to slip away quietly had been an abject act of cowardice.

  ‘Am I going to make a complete dick of myself if I say don’t go?’ he said peering at her through those knowing grey eyes of his.

  She looked away from his face and through the station entrance to the busy road outside. ‘I have to, I can’t stay here. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye – it felt… awkward. Anyway, you’ve still got Sophie, she’ll keep you out of mischief.’ she said, with a laugh that sounded hollow even to her.

  ‘Sophie might be staying, but it doesn’t mean that I am.’

  ‘Oh, where will you go?’ Somehow she couldn’t picture him anywhere else but in the square.

  ‘I suppose I ought to try living in the house that I own, be normal for once.’

  ‘What’s normal for people like us?’

  He spread his hands and raised his shoulders in a gesture of bewilderment. ‘Search me, I’ll let you know if I ever find out.’

  Edie looked down at the bag that rested by her feet. ‘So, I’d better say goodbye then.’

  For the briefest of moments she thought he was about to do what Sophie had done and hug her, but he hesitated and the moment passed. Instead he reached out and took her hand, squeezed it and let go. Then he was gone.

  Edie bent down to pick up her bag, it felt so much heavier now. It was as if she had forgotten that she’d packed all her sorrows too.

  King’s Cross was heaving with people. As Edie stood in the queue to buy her ticket to York she heard a little girl ask her mother where the Harry Potter train was. The mother was clearly harassed and had no time for such things. ‘It’s not real love, it’s all made up. There is no Harry Potter train.’

  The child’s face fell, ‘But there’s a shop and everything!’

  The mother laughed and gave the kid a hug. ‘You can’t buy magic, love.’

  Edie watched the child’s shoulders visibly sag as this news sank in and felt her own heart shrink with them. Not because she was under any illusions that a magical train would somehow whisk her away to a better life, but because…

  She pulled away from the queue, causing the man behind to mutter rudely. Given that she had just done him a favour she glared at him and mouthed a profanity. Life was too bloody short to put up with rubbish, or miss out on opportunities.

  Outside the station she waited for a taxi in the rapidly moving queue. When her turn arrived she leaned through the window ‘Coronation Square, Winfield.’

  The taxi driver raised his eyebrows and set the meter. Once underway Edie took out her phone and tapped out a text to Sophie. ‘Tell Matt not to move a muscle. I’m coming back.’ She pressed send and smiled. You might not be able to buy magic, but when there was a hint of it in the air, it would be stupid not to take advantage.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Lionel looked out of his window, his view of the square softened and diluted by the long lace curtain. He liked a net; you could catch many things with a net, even when you were just looking through it. He could see his bread and butter now; the evening tour had just commenced with plenty of eager people waiting in the twilight to hear the gory tale of the Winfield murders. He liked to wander the garden sometimes and stop and listen to their reactions as his employee regaled them with the grisly story of Elizabeth Rees who had been found dead on the benc
h. Lionel had thought that was a fitting place for her – after all, it was where she had plied her trade all those years ago, spreading her filth as well as her legs. They had all done that for him, he’d made them. The thought made him shudder.

  Anne Townsend he’d left in the street, lying in the gutter, which was exactly where she belonged. Jean Lockwood he’d left in the garden shed where he’d first spied on her, cavorting and spoiling herself with any man who would have her. Mary McGowan he’d left by the bins at the back of the pub with the rubbish. Sally he would have liked to lay claim to, but sadly the job had been done for him. He still found it irksome that he had been robbed of the opportunity to demonstrate to Sally the error of her ways. More irksome still that her killers had prevented him from carrying on. In testifying against John Bastin, those two women – Dolly Morris and Lena Campion – had made it impossible for him to continue. He’d tried, but she’d got away and somehow he’d lost heart for it after that.

  He’d moved away from the square for a long time after, unable to sit back and watch it all decay in front of his eyes. He should have stayed, he knew that now – in his absence the filth had spawned and spread like a fungus, whatever it fruited that could be seen was nothing to the network it had spread underneath. It was like a hydra, you cut one head off and two sprang up in its place.

  Filth and scum had become inherent here and it sickened him. The murder tours had been intended to serve as a moral alarm that would remind people of the true wages of sin. He’d intended them to be a salutary lesson to the people of Winfield – a warning even. If he were honest he’d also seen them as a celebration of his achievements, lest the part that he’d played in the history of the place be forgotten. It was a shame he couldn’t name himself and bask in the glory, but he considered himself a modest man at heart and was satisfied with his vicarious observations – for now.

  There hadn’t been much satisfaction in disposing of Dickie, but he daren’t have taken the risk of the man recovering and stumbling into Matthew Bastin. That boy was like a terrier with a bone. He’d long worried that Dickie had suspected him – ever since the incident with the scarf five years before. Lionel liked to carry a little something with him sometimes, just a token – he had kept one from each of the girls. He’d had the scarf in his pocket and had called on his old friend for a cup of tea. He’d been shocked at the state of the house and the decline of standards, not that it had been terribly surprising given what the mother had been. But the dust had made him sneeze and stupidly he’d pulled out the scarf and not his handkerchief. Dickie had recognised it immediately because he’d been the one who had bought it for Jean – not that she’d ever repaid him with her favours. She’d taken Dickie’s gifts but treated him with disdain. On the day Lionel had visited there had been a scuffle and he’d tried to deal with Dickie then, but Dolly had come home and, like a fool, Lionel had done the first thing he could think of and had stuffed the scarf in an old china ornament while Dolly called the ambulance. Like a fool he’d believed the story of Dickie’s demise too. He’d missed his trophy all these years, and had been most pleased to find it in Matthew’s abode. Most pleased indeed. It had been the matter of a moment to slip it into his pocket while the boy had been busy making tea. Lionel had always found that it paid to be friendly, much easier to lull people into a false sense of trust.

  The dress had been a grave mistake and a foolish, foolish error. Lionel was still angry at himself for it. The day he had finally disposed of his mother’s belongings had been traumatic, as if he was throwing the woman herself away. A sad and tumultuous time that had made the loss of her all too real again. The dress had hung in her wardrobe for years following her death, a splash of gaudy colour sandwiched between the uniform blacks and blues of the righteous. Somehow, when he had bagged up his mother’s clothes he’d included the dress and like a fool had handed it over to Dolly with a smile on his face, expecting her to be grateful for his kind donation to the local jumble sale. He should have known really, she had treated him differently since Dickie had supposedly died. The discovery of the dress was the last nail in her coffin.

  Lionel knew that he had lost his touch the day he went to retrieve it and had scuffled with her on the stairs and pushed her to her death. A vague recollection of a moment of panic when the postman had knocked on the door explained it. With Dolly lying at the bottom of the stairs, clearly broken, he had rushed out of the house, allowing the door to slam behind him. Lionel loathed sloppiness and hated making mistakes. Precision in all things was what he had been taught.

  Some consolation had come from the sight of young Edie wearing it. When she had emerged from the house that night wearing the dress he had felt a frisson of excitement and a reactive yearning in parts of his anatomy that he preferred not to think about. The chance meeting in the garden later that evening had been serendipitous indeed, especially when they had shared the very bench where he had first removed the dress. It thrilled him even now to think of it.

  Sadly only a small piece of charred fabric remained. It had taken him a while to find it, he’d had to rake through the sooty remains of the burned-out kitchen for some time. It would be too fragile a thing to carry around in his pocket, but it completed his collection and he found it satisfying that his trophy cabinet could be considered complete.

  It amused him no end that Edie and Matthew had taken up with each other. He’d taken great pleasure in inviting them round for tea and watching their coy, tentative interactions. Such sweet irony that the sins of their fathers had brought them together. They were gone now, both had wiped the mud of the square off their feet and had moved away. A house in Winchester, so he had been told. He hoped they would marry; all this living in sin still didn’t sit comfortably with him. Had they stayed he might have felt the need to intervene.

  The day they’d gone Edie had brought him a gift, a box of Earl Grey from Fortnum & Mason and a photograph for his collection. She’d found it in the house she said, amongst Dolly and Dickie’s old things. A picture of them all as children. Lionel looked at it often, remembering the day it had been taken. He looked at it and considered that he’d been a handsome boy. When he looked long enough he was sure he could see a halo of light surrounding his own handsome head. In moments of self-doubt he thought it might just be a trick of the sun, but on other days it was clear to see that he had been a saint. How proud his mother would have been to see her son so rightly shown.

  Chapter Thirty

  Alice Hale couldn’t settle. She’d had to accept that Sam Campion wasn’t coming back. Hard as it was, she’d had to let go. Despite that, the name Campion continued to make her lose sleep at night.

  Along with some smarmy looking old guy who smelled of mothballs and dressed like a throwback from the twenties with his dapper cravat and silver topped cane, she’d been one of only two witnesses at Lena Campion’s funeral. It would have been disingenuous to call herself a mourner. Besides, it would be hard to mourn at a state-funded cremation, they were always rather perfunctory affairs. It was hard to know the reason she had bothered going at all, but something about Lena Campion’s confession had been niggling at her. Despite her superior’s reluctance to re-open a solved case, the whole thing had piqued Alice’s curiosity. Since Lena’s death she’d been poking around and had requested the old case notes from the archives. There had been nothing new to find, John Bastin had been hanged on the evidence of his affair with Sally Pollet, his reputation as a lothario and the testimony of Lena and her friend Dolly Morris. Despite this apparent fait accompli, and the fact that it couldn’t realistically be re-investigated due to the fact that everyone involved was now dead, Alice was still curious. It had become the latest bee in her bonnet. As it buzzed, nudging at her consciousness, she moved across the office to make herself a cup of coffee. She would need the caffeine to focus, a great big fat file had just been delivered that would hopefully contain something which would help them move against Pascoe.

  On top of the bigger file lay a
small one, old, thin and intriguing. The name on the folder was Beryl Jackson. Pushing the Pascoe file aside she opened the thin folder and began to read, eager to see if her hunch had been right.

  This latest line of personal enquiry had been to find out if any other crimes had been committed that could be linked to the Winfield murders. Her search had only come up with one interesting item, the report of an assault on a young woman, Beryl Jackson, who had been walking home after an assignation with her boyfriend. A man had hit her over the head with an unknown object and had raped and attempted to strangle her, but the attack had been interrupted by a witness. The attacker had fled the scene, disappearing into the night never to be identified.

  The witness had been more concerned with the state of the girl than the escape of the felon, so hadn’t pursued him. Several elements of this report were rattling about in Alice’s mind. The location was bang on, the features of the victim fitted – a young girl with apparently loose morals – and the timing was right. In Alice’s opinion Beryl Jackson might have been the one that got away.

  What was most interesting, and the thing that was mutating into a clear thought in her mind, was that the witness had reported that the attacker walked with a pronounced limp – he had loped rather than fled from the scene. Frank Morris had not walked with a limp, neither had John Bastin. What was most odd about Beryl’s statement was the observation that her attacker had an unusual smell about him, an odour reminiscent of bergamot. In fact, what Beryl had actually told the police was that the man who had tried to kill her had reeked of Earl Grey tea. Alice closed the file with a sigh, the contents meant nothing. There must be thousands of old men with gammy legs and a penchant for fancy tea, besides, the killings had stopped after the hanging. Perhaps her colleagues were right and she needed to learn how to let go and move on. She placed the file into her desk tray and picked up the brick of manila and paper that constituted the dubious life and times of Alan Pascoe and began to read, wondering what motivated such a man to be so relentlessly evil. In the back of the file was a copy of his birth certificate holding the bland statement ‘Father, unknown’. Alice thought it was quite the shame that Beattie Morris had been in prison at the time of his conception, she might have done Winfield a significant service otherwise. It was a terrible thought really; two wrongs didn’t form a right and two Beryls didn’t necessarily form a connection. Alice convinced herself that the name of Pascoe’s mother was completely irrelevant and totally coincidental – even if she was the same Beryl Jackson who had been attacked all those years before, and even if she did give birth to Alan nine months later, and even though she did marry Thomas Pascoe when Alan was three. Beryl Pascoe was long dead, and like everyone else from that time had retained the right to remain as silent as her own grave. Whatever questions Alice might have they would never get answered.