The Silent Girls Read online

  Despite her conscious refusal Sophie couldn’t help her mind constructing a picture of the woman who dressed in black crepe and who thought that a hat with cherries on the band was the height of haute couture. Sophie wasn’t entirely sure about haute couture, it seemed to be something for posh people with more money than sense. Beattie had not been posh; she had resoled her battered leather shoes, and kept mothballs in the pockets of her coat. Even now the faint tang of camphor hung in the air like a waft of bad breath.

  Beattie seemed to have lived a life of frugality and austerity in a room so free of fripperies that it resembled a nun’s cell. The only nod to vanity was a tiny glass dish on the tallboy, containing a few hairpins. It was situated directly under a pock marked mirror, which distorted even Sophie’s fresh young face with its cuts and bruises. The room felt sad, lonely and almost punitive to Sophie – it was hard to imagine the demeanour of a woman who would choose to live like this. Even through the barrier of the loose rubber gloves she could feel the essence of the old woman’s despair penetrate her skin and seep into her bones, where it sat like a winter chill, brooding, ready to pounce and make her heartsick. It wouldn’t take much, she was heartsick already.

  With the wardrobe clear and another bag already half full of hideous old knickers and vests retrieved from the drawers of the tallboy, there seemed little else to do. Sophie’s ribs were getting sore again, the ibuprofen had worn off so she necked two more, swallowing them without water as she contemplated stripping the bed. The feelings and ghosts that she had manifested since starting on the room made the prospect of sleeping in a shop doorway and grappling with the elements (and the drunks) suddenly more appealing. She tried to snap out of it, a bed was a bed and anywhere had to be better than the street.

  The bed had last been made with absolute precision, the sheets and blankets were stretched tight as a drum with hospital corners so spare they would have made even the hardest matron weep tears of joy. As she wrestled with the stiff fabrics she thanked God for the invention of duvets – life should be about ten second flings, not faffing about with sheets and standing by your beds. No matter how hard she pulled, she couldn’t release the bottom sheet from the corner of the bed where it was wedged against the wall. Not that she could pull very hard, well, not without risking a punctured lung the way her ribs felt. With a sigh of abject frustration she shuffled round the end of the bed and attempted to use her foot to move the divan out and away from the wall. It wouldn’t give, despite an immense amount of effort and some serious grunting. She had no choice but to get down on her hands and knees amongst the insect corpses and inspect the problem. With a grunt of effort she got down, gritting her teeth at the pain of the movement, and felt around the castor to see what was preventing it from moving. Sure enough it had sunk into the rotten wood of the floorboard and was firmly wedged into a neat, soggy hole.

  There was a small fireplace in the room, unused for years, and plastered in a fall of dusty soot, but next to it was a set of fire irons, equally dusty and unused, but complete with a hefty looking poker ideal for use as a lever. Sophie reached out and grabbed it, shoved it under the edge of the bed near to the castor, got to her knees and heaved. As she levered – with a searing pain shooting through her thorax – she shoved the poker to one side, moving the now raised bed a little away from the hole. For a frightening moment she thought that the sickening crack that shuddered through her had come from her ribs, because it sounded like bone rending from bone. She froze and took a breath, expecting it to make her chest scream with pain. To her surprise it was no more sore than usual. When she unscrewed her eyes and took a look, she realised that in removing the castor from the floor, she had also managed to pull free a large wedge of rotten floorboard. Dropping the poker she pushed the bed away and surveyed the damage. ‘Shit!’ Edie was not going to be happy. She was expecting a cleared out room, not a wrecked one.

  Sophie picked up the shard of wood and wondered if she could just wedge it back in, in the hope that no one would notice. Plausible deniability and all… Unfortunately parts of the wood were so soft with rot that they just crumbled in her fingers, and the more she tried to force it, the worse it became. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’ She gave up; all she’d done was make the problem worse. Sore, frustrated and fed up, she stared at the now huge hole in the floor, and the small piles of splintered, crumbled wood that surrounded it. Down under the floorboards, resting across the lathe and plaster ceiling below, lay a tin. She reached her still gloved hand inside the gap and pulled it out. A biscuit tin, with a grimy, semi rusted scene on the lid. Brittle yellowed sticky tape held the lid in place, and it took some effort to remove it, and even then the lid wouldn’t budge. Ever resourceful, Sophie reached for the poker again and managed to work it under the rim and bend the lid enough with the end of it to be able to prise the lid off in one grinding, graunching, metal-popping move. The contents of the tin were singularly unexciting to her, an ancient sponge, so dry it crumbled like honeycomb when she poked it, a bar of carbolic soap, shrunken and cracked, a nail brush, a length of perished rubber tube with a bulb at the end and two or three long metal hooks that looked like something that might be used to crochet fishing nets. It meant nothing, so she threw it in the bag along with the other detritus from the room.

  With the bed stripped and the wardrobe and tallboy empty there was very little left to do. Only the bedside table remained untouched, and all that contained was an old Gideon bible and a pair of glasses. Sophie threw those into the bag too and only paused to pick up a sliver of newspaper that had fluttered from the pages of the bible and floated to the floor. She was about to screw it up and toss it after the rest of the rubbish, but a name caught her eye – the name of the woman whose belongings she had been systematically disregarding. According to the yellowed and fragile cutting, in 1959 Beatrice Morris had been sentenced to seven years in prison for acts of feticide and actual bodily harm. Sophie paused, frowned and looked around the clinical little room and its ordered frugality. It hardly seemed like the lair of a criminal, and what the heck was feticide when it was at home? It sounded chemical, like pesticide, or insecticide or even cyanide. Had Beattie poisoned someone? Though the thought was entirely irrational, and she knew it, Sophie was extremely thankful for the rubber gloves. She had read something once about how poison could enter the body through the skin and how, in the sixteenth century, the Italians had been the past masters of the art of steeping leather gloves in toxins that could kill a person in minutes by poisoning them through their skin. She looked down at her gloved hands and for a second wondered if the same technique could be applied to rubber? Nah, she was being ridiculous. It occurred to her that Edie might not know that her dear old nan had been a criminal and had served time. Or if she did know, she might not want anyone else to.

  Stiff and sore, but with her curiosity burgeoning, she lowered herself onto the bed, the bare mattress groaning and squeaking beneath her. This family was weird. Dolly had definitely been weird. Edie wasn’t exactly the full ticket either, not that Sophie was complaining – the woman had fed and watered her and given her a bed for the night – but it was odd. People you didn’t know didn’t do that kind of stuff. They might give you a few quid, buy you a sandwich even, but clothe you, feed you and give you shelter? Not unless they wanted something. OK, Edie had said she wanted help clearing the house, which had sounded fair enough before Sophie had clocked on that Nana Morris was a crim. Perhaps the whole family was terminally bonkers, and Sophie was being lined up as the next victim… Sophie wasn’t entirely sure what she might become a victim of, but she was damned if she was going to fall for any shenanigans. Before she took another thing from Edie, she was going to find out exactly what this family was all about.

  With renewed determination and a sense of intrigue, Sophie felt energised. She grabbed up the black bags and towed them down to the back yard, where she bundled them on top of the mountain of others that writhed and crawled with God knew what. Her task complete, she wen
t back into the house to retrieve her backpack. A mission had been set – she wanted to know all about the Morris family. The public library was only a few streets away, and that was the place she would start, they were used to her in there as it was free and warm and a source of endless entertainment. It was only as she went to zip up her bag that she remembered the notebook she had thrown in there the night before. She flicked through the pages once again, looking at the dates, initials and numbers – all those unnamed entries. It all meant bugger all and was no more meaningful now than it had been in the middle of the night. On her way out of the house via the back yard she threw it on top of the bags. She was on to something much more interesting and she didn’t have time to worry about old rubbish.

  Chapter Seven

  One girl’s rubbish is another man’s treasure. At least that’s the way Matt Bastin saw it. He’d been watching the house for most of the morning, aware that Edie had gone out, but equally aware that the girl was still in there. He couldn’t go poking around while she remained in situ, so it was with some relief that he observed her leave. His room was well positioned, giving him a vantage point that gave him an almost panoramic view of the square, always a bonus when you spent your time spying on other people. It had been a stroke of luck that he’d spotted her at all. She’d obviously left via the back alley, and it was only by chance that he’d caught a glimpse of her through his binoculars – she’d been crossing the road that abutted the square on the left side and looking somewhat determined, like someone who had somewhere to be and who was in a hurry to get there.

  The woman, Edie, had been gone for some time, and he had no idea when she would be back, but he had to seize this opportunity. Things were coming out of that house left right and centre, and he needed to see as much as he could before it was all gone, and any chance he had of discovering the truth had gone with it.

  It took him less than two minutes to leave the flat, cross the square and find his way to the back of the houses. He knew exactly which one he was aiming for, he’d been staking it out for weeks and had even contemplated breaking in. But Lena Campion was better than a guard dog, and with her security lights, her eagle eyes and the ears of the old bat she was, he’d have had no chance. By a stroke of luck all his prayers had been answered that morning, and Lena had gone out too.

  Years in the army had made him quick, agile and light on his feet, but even he couldn’t search through rubbish quietly. All he needed was a few uninterrupted minutes, just a quick chance to poke around and see what was new. What was new on this day were two pristine looking black bags and a book. Matt’s heart surged with hope as he reached for the book and quickly put it into the leather bag that he wore across his body. Next he poked and prodded at the bags, his eyes on the loot but his ears trained to seek out any source of movement in the alley.

  He’d barely managed to stow the tin and the bible into his bag when he heard footfall on the tarmac beyond the gate. A woman, by the sound of the footsteps – they were too quick and light for a man. She was carrying something awkward if the sound of her breathing and the rustling of bags indicated anything. Matt knew he was going to get caught, but if he mustered himself it needn’t be red-handed.

  As she came through the gate he was at the door, one arm raised as if he was about to knock. He turned at the sound of her intake of breath and smiled. ‘Oh, there you are, I was just about to knock.’

  She was red in the face, and heaving two bulky bags, she looked harassed, hot and in no mood for niceties. ‘Can I help you? Matt isn’t it?’ She didn’t look remotely pleased to see him, not that he expected her to be, and he was surprised that she knew who he was – though it probably explained her reaction. In fact she looked positively alarmed by the sight of him. Matt had found that few people in the square were pleased to see him – he brought back bad memories.

  ‘Yes, how did you know?’ He watched as she set down her bags and fumbled in her pocket, she kept glancing over her shoulder as if the cavalry might be bringing up the rear in order to rescue her.

  ‘I remember you, and you were at the funeral.’ she said.

  He remembered her too, but there wasn’t much left of the shy kid. He’d wanted to speak to her outside the fish and chip shop, but she’d looked so fearful at the time he’d backed off. She’d grown into a nice looking woman, but her face was threaded with strain and her eyes were dull, as if they’d seen too much and had dimmed from the seeing. ‘Yes I was, that’s why I came. I didn’t get an opportunity to speak to you there so I wanted to call and express my condolences in person. I wanted to speak to you in the square the other night, but I wasn’t sure how to approach you.’ It was lame, he knew, but the best he could come up with on the spot.

  ‘Thank you, but we weren’t a close family. Umm…’ she hesitated and glanced past him towards the door. She looked nervous, and was glancing at him as if he was something unpleasant that had just crawled out from under a piece of rotting wood. ‘It’s very nice of you to call, and under normal circumstances I’d invite you in for a cup of tea, but the house really isn’t in much of a fit state, and I have so much to do…’ she trailed off, her words as strained and unwelcoming as the look on her face.

  Matt wasn’t one to miss a hint, subtle or otherwise. ‘Oh, no, that’s fine. I understand.’ He’d have liked to get a look inside but if he pushed his luck now he might miss a better opportunity along the line. ‘Let me give you a hand with those bags and I’ll get going and leave you to get on. I just wanted to apologise for not speaking the other day – you know, outside the fish and chip shop. I wasn’t sure if you’d know who I was and I didn’t want you to think, well, that I was some kind of weirdo.’

  She was looking at him as if that was exactly what he was, and given that he’d just been manhandling and stealing her rubbish, he concluded that she might have a fair point. He toyed with the idea of fronting up and telling her why he was really there, but given the indifference she was showing towards the contents of the house he wasn’t sure she would care, let alone want to know more. ‘So, ummm, sorry about that.’ he added.

  She seemed distracted. ‘Oh no, it’s fine. It took me a while to work out who you were, that’s all.’ Her words hung in the air, underlining the awkward impasse.

  ‘I’ll be off then, unless there’s anything I can help you with inside?’ he said it as an afterthought, an opportune bid that might pay off and get him through the door.

  A look that he couldn’t quite fathom flickered across her face. He was about to speak again when she cut across him.

  ‘What is it with everyone wanting to help all of a sudden? No one wanted to help when Dolly needed it, no one wanted to help when she was lying dead on the floor because no one gave a shit! And no, before you say it, I didn’t want to help her either, I never gave her a second thought in all these years. I suppose I ought to be grateful or something, but sorry, I’m not – now if you don’t mind, I need to get on!’

  It felt like it had come out of nowhere, Matt certainly hadn’t seen it coming, and – by the look on her face, now that the words were out – neither had Edie. She gaped at him, a look of shock, horror and what seemed to be fear mixing and mingling on her face. Both of them made to speak at the same time, Matt to apologise, Edie too by the evidence of her dismay, but they were interrupted by Lena who sallied through the gate like a galleon in full sail.

  ‘What’s all the bleedin’ shouting about eh? Is he bothering you?’ She turned to Edie, who shook her head and looked as if she wished that a hole would open up beneath her feet and consume her whole.

  ‘I think she’s a bit upset.’ Matt said as Lena glowered at him.

  ‘Upset? Upset? I’m not surprised she’s upset with the likes of you harassing her, now get out, you heard her – you’re not wanted here, you never were. If you don’t leave I’ll get my Sam to make you leave. It took me while to place you, but I’ve got your number now Matthew Bastin.’

  If he hadn’t already been on delicate
ground Matt might have laughed, it had been many years since he’d been afraid of anyone like Sam Campion, bully-boys with their bluff and bluster held no fear for him. Neither did vicious old ladies, and Lena was certainly one of those. He treated her to a benign smile. ‘I was just leaving Mrs Campion.’ He turned to Edie, ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you. My apologies.’ He gave her a curt nod, skirted around Lena and slipped through the gate, aware that the glare from the older woman would have scathed his skin if she could have given it the power that she clearly wanted to.

  ***

  Sophie left the library a few hours older but a hell of a lot wiser than she had been when she’d first walked through the doors looking to dish the dirt on the Morris family. She had found some dirt all right but it hadn’t been what she was expecting, and somehow she doubted that Edie had a clue. If she had, there was no way that Sophie would have been left to poke around the house unsupervised.

  Bearing knowledge that others did not have gave Sophie a little thrill, as if the information might be some kind of surprise she could spring, or perhaps some sort of gift that she could bestow. The truth about Beattie Morris didn’t feel like a gift or even a bit of salacious tittle-tattle. It wasn’t like the knowledge that your best mate’s boyfriend had snogged someone else behind her back, or a snippet of gossip that might tear your worst enemy’s world asunder. The truth about Beattie Morris was a shocker and there was no glee to be had from it. In fact Sophie was beginning to wish that she’d left well alone, because the last thing she wanted to do was dump this little nugget on Edie’s plate. As she trudged back to the square, her backpack hanging from one shoulder, her hands in her pockets and her head hunched down, she contemplated the wisdom of telling Edie about it at all. The evidence had been thrown away; there was no reason that Edie had to know if Sophie chose not to tell her. She was so absorbed in these thoughts that her mind didn’t register the figure that loomed up in front of her as she began to turn the corner onto the square. As a consequence she ran smack bang into the man, the dangling straps and buckles of her backpack becoming entangled in the handle of the bag that he was carrying. As Sophie pulled away, mumbling a grudging apology, the man’s bag came with her. Her instinct was to yank the backpack away from whatever was restricting it. She hauled on it, promptly ripping the strap from the man’s leather bag and causing it to fall from his shoulder and disgorge its contents all over the pavement.