Authors: Ann Troup
She needed something to try and guide the key, something thin and long. All she had were the keys for Number 17, too thick and too short for what she wanted. The tiny handle of the nail clippers was too short, too thick and too clumsy. Her mind cast about for something that she could use, and remembered the cable ties. Why the hell had she thrown them across the room? Her temper, disgust and downright fury at the situation had got in the way and now she was angry at herself. ‘Sophie, we have to find the cable ties, help me look.’
She heard Sophie begin to shuffle around below her. ‘I’ll come down, but we have to find them.’
The prospect of feeling around the filthy floor amongst the unidentifiable lumps and debris that could be God knows what was more than revolting. As she slid her hands through the filth she could hear Sophie’s stifled grunts of revulsion and the odd panicked retch.
‘Good one!’ Sophie croaked triumphantly.
Edie scooted over to where the voice had come from, she could barely see Sophie’s outline in the fading light, night was approaching fast and if they lost the last of the light she wouldn’t be able to see the key. Sophie groped for her hand and pressed the cable tie into it. As quickly as she could Edie found the step again and climbed. Once kneeling in front of the door, her back bent so that her eye was aligned with the keyhole, she slipped the thin end of the tie into the lock and tried to feed it behind the tilted key. It was a delicate and awkward process, made more difficult by her shaking hand and the decreasing light. There were several times when she was convinced that she’d got it, only to realise that the flimsy plastic had just caught on one of the wards. She pulled it out, sat back on her haunches and put it in her mouth, trying not to think about the fact that it had been in contact with the filthy floor. Once she had coated it in saliva (something that her panicked body had seen fit to produce in short supply) she took a breath and tried again. Hoping that the spit would lubricate its passage she slid the sliver of plastic in with the precision of a neurosurgeon. The intense focus seemed to have calmed her nerves and this time the cable tie slid behind and the key dropped back to its home position. She checked that the jacket was still under the door and that her shuffling and shifting hadn’t pulled it out, then she used one of the house keys to quickly push the cellar key out the other side. To her immense relief she heard it thud down, its fall broken by the fabric. Sam Campion was an arsehole – she had foiled him and she allowed herself a little smile of satisfaction before attempting to manoeuvre the fabric with its precious load. The light had almost completely gone and she was relying more on instinct and what she could see in her mind’s eye than reality. She almost willed the fabric to move and carry the key towards the gap. Finally, and hoping against hope that her gut was right she began to tug the fabric as gently as she could, the nerves were back and she felt like her heart had leapt into her throat when she sensed the key snag on the bottom of the door. She eased the jacket a quarter of an inch further but it had started to bunch against the doorframe and wouldn’t move any more, she had no choice but to pull and hope that the gap under the door was wide enough. To her inordinate relief it was and she seized the key with a gratitude that made her wish that she was religious, so that she could thank the deity responsible. ‘I’ve got it Soph!’ she called.
‘Dank gob for dat, cad we geb da fuck ouda here den?’ Sophie rasped through her dry mouth, unable to give clarity to her words, hampered as she was by a broken nose and swollen face.
Edie fumbled the key into the lock and turned, her heart leaping with relief at the sound of the tumblers releasing. Something terrifying was prodding at her senses, she had thought she could smell it before, the odd whiff clinging to the stale air of the cellar in thin ribbons. The smell of petrol became a stench when she pushed the door open. A wall of fumes that hit her in the face like a balled up fist.
Sophie was behind her on the steps, holding on to the waistband of Edie’s jeans for guidance in the dark. Somewhere in the bowels of the house Edie could hear someone moving, their footsteps causing the old boards to creak and moan. Not only that, she could hear the glugging sound of a large vessel being emptied. A petrol can. Logic dictated that they make a bid for the back door, but the gigantic man-shaped shadow that fell across the window made that means of escape more frightening than the prospect of coming face to face with whoever was in the house. She turned to Sophie and put her fingers to her lips then pointed up, whispering ‘We have to go up, be quiet, take your shoes off and stick to the edges.’
Like a couple of naughty children they slipped through the door and made for the kitchen staircase, a narrow affair, which led up to the first landing. They paused there, hardly daring to breathe as the intruder made his presence known in the room below. The back door was wrenched open and voices floated up.
‘All done boss.’
‘Good. Torch it.’
The click of a lighter, the leap of flames, the smell of dirt and heat and the acrid taste of burning – and Sophie’s whisper as she clutched Edie’s arm. ‘Johddo, oh fuck…’
Sam knew the law as well as anyone, but since when had it applied to him? Besides, who gave a shit if someone used their mobile phone in a car – Sam knew what he was doing, even if Johnno was gritting his shit by being his usual idiot self.
‘Don’t fucking argue with me, and don’t ask questions – just fucking do it!’ he yelled. The traffic was intense, everyone seemed to be milling around all over the place, it seemed that there wasn’t much left that wouldn’t boil his piss today. With the phone wedged under his chin he swung the car into the right-hand lane, swiftly pulling past a battered van and ignoring the indignant sound of its horn. Johnno’s voice babbled at him over the airwaves. ‘Tell Stefan to go fuck himself, Pascoe will have his goods by midnight. Now go and do what I’ve told you to do, or it won’t be Pascoe you’re worried about, it will be me!’ Satisfied that he’d made himself clear, he threw the phone onto the passenger seat and put his foot down, blithely ignoring the battered van that had undertaken him on the left and was now attempting to pull out, its feeble indicator obscured by the duct tape that held it together. The graunch and grind of collapsing metal reached his ears just as the airbag exploded into his face.
Matt didn’t make it to the residential care home. Instead he spent the remainder of his day sitting in a chair by a hospital bed that contained the pale, shocked form of Lena Campion.
She hadn’t spoken to him since he’d found her in a crumpled heap on one of the quiet side streets that led to the square, hadn’t even glanced at him when the paramedics invited him to go with her in the ambulance and hadn’t met his eyes since they’d been confined to a cubicle at the hospital. The only thing she had done was grasp his arm and refuse to let him leave when he had protested to the hospital staff that he was just a neighbour. Lord knows why she wanted him there, but he had stayed.
A machine that variously beeped, bleeped and dinged to indicate the alterations in her body’s function was connected to Lena via a series of clips, wires and stickers. For each ten beeps, Matt tried to ring Sam from Edie’s mobile phone. He got the answering service every time. ‘He’s still not picking up. I’m going to have to give up, the battery is dying.’
Her first words to him since he had found her were, ‘I know how it feels.’
Her voice shocked him, he’d become used to her silence, and was all too familiar with the thinly veiled hostility that had been coming off her in lazy waves all his life. He turned to her, his mouth open in surprise.
‘Don’t look so shocked, boy.’
‘Hard not to Mrs Campion, no disrespect but you’ve treated me like a pariah all my life, so I’m finding it hard to grasp why you want me here.’
‘I’ve things to say, and not much time.’
‘I don’t think the doctors are too worried, a bit of rest and you’ll be right as rain.’
The woman pursed her lips and gave him a grim, determined look. ‘That’s not what I meant. Though who knows what time any of us have left? I have things to say to you that should have been said a long time ago. I’ve done you wrong, and before I start I don’t want your forgiveness or anything like that. I just want peace for myself. I imagine the police will be here soon, so don’t interrupt me when I tell you what I have to say.’
The police? Matt had no idea what the old woman was talking about, but given her predicament he assumed that her ramblings were the result of clinical shock combined with the medication that the drip connected to her hand was infusing. He figured it was best to just let her talk and keep her calm. ‘OK.’
She closed her eyes, and it seemed as though she was replaying some scene behind her eyelids. Matt waited. After a moment of this internal reverie she spoke again, recounting the story that she had told the bemused police officer earlier. She ended her tale with a simple ‘So there you have it, just as you always thought, and your mother always thought. Your father was an innocent man.’
The news had filtered through to Matt’s consciousness in a series of assaults, challenging not just everything that he had thought, but everything that he believed. In a few simple sentences Lena had blown all his theories and made a mockery of his life’s obsession, and there was no doubt that it had been an obsession. Matt could not have stepped away from it if he’d tried. The dispassionate part of him liked the fact that his idea regarding Beattie’s connection had been proved right. The abortions were significant. Sally Pollett had met her death in search of a solution to the thing that she had believed would ruin her life. It made perfect sense and proved his point… but also raised more questions than it answered. ‘So,’ he said cautiously ‘if you and Dolly were responsible for Sally Pollet, who killed the others?’
‘No idea boy, never did. We just copy catted him to cover it up.’ she stated baldly, but didn’t look him in the eyes.
Matt sat back in his chair and looked at the woman who could confess to manslaughter with such detachment. ‘Didn’t you care about what you’d done? Did you not regret her death and sending an innocent man to his?’
Lena laughed but there was no humour in it; the sound was a hollow, cynical thing. ‘Regret? What do you want me to do, boy, give you me Edith Piaf impression? You have no idea what I’ve learned to live with, so don’t you go giving me your regret. It was what it was, we did what we did.’
Matt leaned forward, both fascinated and repelled by the woman. ‘So why tell me, why tell anyone?’
Lena tapped the side of her head. ‘This. Does funny things to you, conjures up your worst nightmares and makes ‘em real. It don’t matter whether you buried the bodies or not boy, they still come back to haunt you.’
Much as he hated to admit it, Matt was glad that she was haunted – he hoped all the ghosts of all the dead would hound her to hell. This woman, for all her frailty now, had robbed him of not just his father, but his mother too – Sheila Bastin had been reduced to a hollowed out shell of a woman by what Lena and the Morrises had done. Lena Campion had stolen Matt’s life by maintaining her lies. ‘I figure you owe me Mrs Campion, you owe me a lot. But I’ll settle for a few more answers.’
Lena shrugged and looked away from him, as if she was familiar with her own ghosts yet apparently unwilling to meet Matt’s eyes and confront his.
‘I found this today, in Edie’s place.’ He pulled out the invoice from the care home and offered it to her, she didn’t take it, or even acknowledge it. ‘It’s an invoice, from a care home. It strongly suggests that Dickie Morris is still alive. Did you know?’
This seemed to catch her attention and she turned her head towards him, eyes narrowed. ‘Dickie is alive?’
‘It looks that way. Did you know?’ He knew that his dislike of her was leaking out in his tone, but had gone past caring how he came across. He had spent years sitting on his feelings for the sake of gathering evidence.
‘No I bloody didn’t! You’re the one who likes to go to all the funerals, didn’t
you
know?’
‘I was in Afghanistan, Mrs Campion, so I missed that one.’ he said, teeth gritted, jaw twitching.
‘Well so did I. I was laid up, all I knew was that Dickie got carted off in an ambulance. When I was on me feet again and went to Dolly to ask what was wrong, she told me he’d gone and that I was too late. Shut the door in my face and never spoke to me from that day on.’
‘And you never questioned that he’d died?’
‘Why would I, did you?’
Matt had to concede that he hadn’t and had just accepted the general consensus that the man had passed on. He’d been more concerned with his own discharge from the army back then, and the fact that his mother had been ill at the time. Attentions had been diverted to his mother’s rapidly spreading cancer, and the whole thing regarding the Morrises’ involvement with his father’s execution had taken a back seat.
‘People die, boy. People die all the time.’
Matt looked at the monitor that showed that Lena was still very much alive. ‘Yes they do. My mother died that year too. Did you know that? She had cancer, it ate her from the inside out. It was a terrible death, agonising for her, and agonising to watch.’
Lena nodded. ‘I heard. I’m sorry for your loss.’
Matt leaned forward and stared at her. ‘Are you?’
She had the good grace not to answer.
They sat like that for a few minutes, Lena staring at the blank wall to her right, Matt sitting in the chair staring at the monitor and hating himself for wanting the numbers to dip and the green blip to flatline.
‘I’m tired.’ Lena said, breaking the moment. ‘I’d like you to go now. I’ve said what I had to say.’
Matt stood up, happy to be released from his unpleasant vigil. ‘You haven’t said that you’re sorry.’
Lena peered at him. ‘Would it make a difference to a damned thing if I did?’
Matt didn’t need to say anything else; she was right, it wouldn’t, but it would have been gratifying to hear her say it all the same. As he walked away, down the corridor, past the nurses’ station and out into the cool evening air, he wondered at his own lack of reaction to what he’d been told. Surely he should be railing against the injustice, running to the police station to spill the beans and point the finger, or at least quietly raging. He was surprised to find that he felt nothing; he was numb. The energy to even care any more seemed to have ebbed away as the strangeness of the day turned into twilight and slipped into a bleak and empty night.