Authors: Ann Troup
The room had grown gloomy since she had begun her reverie, it was time to put the lights on and chase the ghosts back to their corners. They had lived there a long while now, a bit more time would do them no harm – they would have their voice soon enough. With a heavy sigh she leaned across and switched on the lamp, then drew the curtains. There was a drama starting on the TV in a minute, if she looked lively she could get a cuppa on the go and be settled in her chair and ready by the time the credits had started to roll. Lena liked a good drama – they made her feel at home.
Sam was pacing, it wasn’t helping but he had to do something. With his third glass of vodka in hand he swept past the picture window once again – the fact that he might wear a groove in his high gloss wooden flooring was the last thing on his mind. Things were going to come undone if he wasn’t careful, and he really hadn’t been that careful. He’d assumed that Edie Byrne would be a pushover and – being the desperate divorcee that she appeared to be – that she would have fallen for his charms without faltering. Sam had hoped to have her fully cooperative by now and to have worked his way into her affections enough for her to let him have free rein on that house. There were things in there that he needed to get his hands on before anyone else did. Things that Edie wouldn’t understand, things that could bring trouble. He knew that he’d been an idiot to leave it so long, what he wanted might have been as safe as houses so far, but that house was far from safe now with two women poking around in it.
It would be easy enough to persuade someone to break in and retrieve the goods – but his power and control rested on him being the only one who knew. He might have to break in himself, but with the guttersnipe in residence that might not be so easy. He’d have to up his powers of persuasion with Edie, turn on the charm, get into her good books – if it meant getting her into his bed, he was OK with that – he’d had worse and you didn’t have to look at the mantelpiece when you were stoking the fire. Besides, enough booze on board and he wouldn’t have to think about her at all. The thought brought a spiteful smile to his face, until the thought of Pascoe crept back in and wiped it away.
Something would have to be done, and soon. Pascoe was not a man with a reputation for patience, but he was a man with a reputation – and it wasn’t one that Sam relished tangling with.
Edie had finally managed to persuade Sophie to take a bath, and had coaxed enough hot water out of the ancient and terrifying boiler to make it a decent one. While Sophie soaked, Edie washed the girl’s paltry collection of clothes and pondered on the child’s circumstances. Not that she was a child – 23 according to her – but she felt like a child to Edie, who still had far too much mothering instinct left over from Will to want to let it go completely. It was hard to know whether Sophie needed her, or whether she needed Sophie. Or whether it even mattered if it was benefitting them both. Sophie’s previous existence – the neglectful mother, the running away, the tangling with people of dubious motivation – bothered Edie greatly. No one should be forced to live like that because there wasn’t an alternative. Had the mother sounded like a more stable sort, Edie might have contacted her and tried to restore Sophie to her home and her family. However, from what Sophie had imparted, Karen Hedley was not the nurturing sort, much preferring a line of coke and a good party to the idea of a quiet night in with a DVD and the company of her daughter. It was a tragic waste, and if Edie chose to dwell on the scenario, it might just break her heart. Edie could empathise to a degree; her own mother, Shirley, hadn’t been easy and it had been like growing up with a chameleon. Shirley had changed her colours and her attitude with alarming and destabilising regularity. Edie often wondered what it was that broke such women so irredeemably.
With Sophie’s clothes draped and dripping over Dolly’s rickety clothes horse Edie turned her attention to the jewellery that Sophie had so patiently sorted out. A pile of junk more than likely, but what did Edie know? She wrapped it carefully in some kitchen roll and stowed it in her bag with the intention of taking it to be valued the following day. She hoped the jeweller wouldn’t laugh at her; she would have laughed at herself if the whole thing didn’t feel so depressing. She had tried to maintain an indifference to the task of clearing the house, but it was hard. Trawling through other people’s possessions gave you a sense of the person. A feeling of their intrinsic presence crept up on you whether you liked it or not. By handling Dolly’s belongings, Edie had started to form a more complete picture of the woman, a more intact vision than she’d ever held when her aunt had been alive. In Edie’s memory Dolly had been a vapid sort of woman, someone who had existed but in a peripheral way – someone there, yet insubstantial; real, but not recognised as significant. Edie had never considered her to be a person with thoughts, feelings, wants and needs. Dolly had seemed to exist purely to serve others – Beattie and Dickie, then Rose and Edie and their mother, the emotionally unstable Shirley. All except Rose were long gone, and Edie wondered why they loomed so large in her mind now that it was too late for her to say or do anything that might have led to a different outcome. You could only validate the dead with a gravestone and flowers, which felt to Edie like much too little, much too late. It was a shame that sadness and sorrow could not transcend the veil between life and death. Dolly would never know that Edie was sorry (and desperately curious to know where all the money had gone, and why her aunt had lived such a squalid, cluttered life).
Sophie lay in the bath, her thoughts meandering along a similar path to Edie’s, but reaching a fork in the road and taking an entirely different direction. She was thinking about the guy she’d bumped into and why he’d been stealing Edie’s rubbish. She’d checked the bags earlier, and sure enough the tin and the notebook were gone and the incident hadn’t been the weird coincidence she’d been hoping for. What kind of freak stole other people’s rubbish? Sophie could smell a rat, and she wasn’t kidding – this house stank, literally, like something had died in here and was festering in a corner. It must be the rot Edie had mentioned, but bloody hell it got up your nose and lingered – even the smell of the soap couldn’t mask it. Anyway, that bloke and what he was up to was niggling. She knew where he lived and had seen him about a few times. When you were surviving on your wits you tended to notice things that other people didn’t, and clean-cut blokes moving into bedsit land were one of them. The man was out of place and up to no good, and it was a different kind of no good to the usual whoring, boozing and drug dealing that defined the square. Sophie considered herself nobody’s fool and was determined to find out what he was up to at the soonest opportunity. But for now she was bloody enjoying this bath – if she were to die and could have her choice of heavens, one with a huge luxurious bath would be the one she’d choose.
Matt sat on the edge of his bed, carefully stitching the handle back onto his satchel. It had annoyed him no end that the girl had wrecked it, the bag was an old and faithful friend, one of the few things that Matt had hung onto throughout his life. The bag and his obsession were his lifelong companions, familiar and comforting when nothing else was. The girl had got to him in more ways than one; there had been a flash of recognition, something familiar in her features that had rattled his psyche. He was sure he’d seen her before, and not just from around the square. There were few people who frequented the square that he didn’t know of, but he flagged them by their movements and habits, not by their faces. It didn’t do to get too up close and personal with people’s faces. He’d learned that in the forces, to watch what people did and use all resources to avoid relating to them. If you studied a face, you studied a person. It was harder to shoot a person than it was to assess a set of circumstances, make a decision and take action. For Matt it was important to keep things separate and maintain dispassion. He wasn’t feeling particularly dispassionate about Edie though, she was occupying his thoughts far more than she ought to. He’d tried to categorise her as a means to an end, a conduit to the information he wanted, but he couldn’t escape that stupid memory of her as a child when she’d stuck her neck out against the bullies and offered him a sweet. Of all the things to remember – a throwaway incident, which should mean nothing yet it was wriggling around in his mind like a parasite feeding on his concentration. Edie had to be a means to an end, and nothing more. He finished his stitching and bit the end of the thread then put away his sewing kit, wishing that he could stow his thoughts of Edie so simply. She had got under his skin and he didn’t know why.
Sophie hadn’t realised how hungry she’d really been until she had started eating properly again. Edie’s nurturing was waking up an appetite for food that she’d forgotten she had. That, combined with the freshly laundered smell of her clothes, a decent night’s sleep and clean skin for a change were all amalgamating to make her feel almost happy. If that was the appropriate name for the benign feeling that started in her belly and spread out from there. She figured it must be, because when it hit her on the outside it triggered a smile, which made her face ache – the necessary muscles being wholly unfamiliar with the movement.
Edie took her dirty plate and matched her smile. ‘You look happy this morning, what’s occurred?’
‘Nothing, just thinking, that’s all.’
Edie placed the plate into the sink and turned towards Sophie. ‘Yeah? What are you thinking about, I’ll give you a penny for them?’
Personally Sophie would have preferred a tenner, but her thoughts weren’t worth that. ‘I was thinking about how much I like bacon and eggs and how nice it is to be clean and sleep in a bed.’
Edie laughed. ‘Maybe we should all think about the little things from time to time.’
‘They might be little to you missus, but believe me, they’re not little to me.’
Edie paused and looked a little crestfallen, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that such simple things might be big. ‘That’s a fair point. Sorry. Anyhow, what are your plans today? I’m going out for a bit as I have a few things to do, then I thought we could tackle the rest of Dolly’s room – if you’re up to it?’
Sophie sipped her now tepid coffee. ‘What, clean up Miss Havisham’s lair? Sure, why not?’ she grimaced to show her relish for the prospect. ‘I’m going to go out first though, but I’ll help when I get back.’
‘Yeah, where are you off to, anywhere nice?’
Sophie tried be nonchalant and hoped it would transfer to her voice. ‘Not really, just got a few things to do that’s all.’ Fortunately Edie had her back to her, and couldn’t see the lie that was written all over her face.
‘OK, meet you back here then? Take a key won’t you, I need to start locking this place up.’
‘What for, to keep people out, or to keep things in?’ Sophie quipped. She wasn’t quite sure where the flippant comment had come from, but the slight stiffening of Edie’s spine told her she must have a hit a nerve. ‘Sorry, I’m just being a dick, it’s just that this place is a bit creepy eh?’
Edie turned and sighed, bubbles from the washing up bowl dripping from her fingers. ‘Well, it certainly isn’t the cosiest place on earth. But there aren’t any ghosts here, and even if there were, they wouldn’t do us any harm. My family might have been a bit odd, but I don’t think they were dangerous.’
Sophie nearly snorted her coffee and narrowly stopped herself from choking. Edie had no idea, no idea at all. ‘Sorry,’ she spluttered, ‘went down the wrong way.’
Sophie was sure that the slats of the bench she was sitting on had made permanent indentations in her skinny backside, she’d been perched there so long waiting for the guy to go out that she was convinced she would have disfiguring ridges in her ass for life. Finally, after an hour and a half of waiting, she spied him coming out of his front door and walking off out of the square. Thank bloody God for that!
Rising stiffly, and still acutely aware of the ache in her ribs, she scuttled across the grass of the central garden and made her way across the street and around to the back of the building where the guy lived. These houses backed straight onto a rear alley; there were no fences or gates, just dustbins, flat roofs and easy access. Sophie had spent too many years being the latchkey kid without a key not to have mastered the rudimentary basics of housebreaking. By the time she was sixteen she could have written the idiot’s guide to getting in without getting caught. People were so unaware of how vulnerable their properties were, they thought if you shut the windows and locked the door, you were safe. You were only as safe as the next opportunistic housebreaker wanted you to be. To Sophie, whoever this bloke might think he was, his domestic security was ‘open season’. It took the simple moving of a wheeled bin, a quick clamber onto the flat roof and the use of one of Dolly’s bone handled knives as a jemmy to get her into the building. Once she was on the first floor landing, it was an even simpler task to find which bedsit was his – he was no dope smoker, so his room wasn’t going to be the one which emanated a fug of marijuana, neither was it going to be the one with the empty Special Brew cans piled outside the door.
The only good thing about slum landlords from Sophie’s point of view was that they used cheap materials and cheap locks. With a bit of fiddling, pretty much any old bent bit of wire would open a basic three lever mortise lock, you just had to get a feel for it, stroke the levers and listen for the sweet point where they would give. She had tumbled the lock in less than thirty seconds and was in the room with the door quietly closed behind her in forty-five. She knew she had the right room when she spied the leather bag on the floor by his neatly made bed, and was even more sure when she spotted Beattie’s old tin and the notebook sitting on the desk. However, it wasn’t those items that surprised her – or made her take a step back before curiosity got the better of her and she ventured to take a closer look.
The whole place had been set up like an incident room, not that Sophie had ever been in an incident room, but she’d seen enough of them on the telly to know what one looked like. A huge map of Winfield took up most of the wall above the desk, surrounding it were old newspaper pictures of the women who had been killed in the square. It seemed bizarre to Sophie that anyone would still be interested – it had all happened so many years ago that God’s dog must have been a puppy at the time. Piles of folders were heaped on the desk and she was tempted to take a peek but knew that she wouldn’t be able to put them back properly and that he would guess someone had been inside rummaging. Red strings spanned the map connecting various locations to the pictures of the women and he had Post-it notes scattered everywhere – this guy was some kind of obsessive weirdo! Peering intently at the map and staring at the pin that pierced the red marked heart of Number 17 she heard a click behind her and froze.