The Girl at My Door: An utterly gripping mystery thriller based on a true crime

by Rebecca Griffiths

  It was stiflingly warm and wafts of unwashed parts drifted over from his travelling companion. He closed his eyes against the sharp sunshine flooding the carriage, felt the way it settled in warm bands across his body. Too edgy to sleep and unable to concentrate on the book he’d brought with him, he passed the time by scanning the colourless topography beyond the train windows. Searching it for freshness. For anything green. But there wasn’t so much as a window box.

  He was concerned about Joy and felt desperately sad for her, but he couldn’t imagine her travelling to Dorset. Surely the memories would be too painful. He had agreed to this trip to help Queenie out; seeing how agitated she was at not being well enough to make the journey herself, it was the least he could do. What a mess everything was. Queenie had no idea that what she had done to Joy had impacted on him too. Terrence longed to confide about Christie blackmailing him but it wouldn’t solve anything. But what Queenie had done to Joy – despite what he had been saying to her face to salve her conscience – it was unforgivable. She had spoilt Joy. Spoilt her like a flower growing wild that she had crushed with her hand for no other reason than she could.

  68

  Joy was almost there. Weaving through the usual trampoline of youngsters who today were fastened into thick winter woollies and breakfasting on chips out of newspaper parcels. The morning air was thick with the smell of them, of the hot fat and vinegar, rising from their fingers. Avoiding eyes, she kept her head low and left the curve of abandoned guesthouses, the shuttered fronts of souvenir shops fringing the strip of shore.

  A rumpus of clouds slid across the headland. Wonky clusters gathering momentum out along the weather-beaten land. This walk had become as familiar as her handwriting over these past months and, pausing to button her old green coat as far as it would go against the bitter January weather, she noticed a cluster of snowdrops sheltering under a wedge of gorse. She stooped to touch the drooping white heads and tears pricked her eyes. Why the tender things in life were harder to bear than injury, she didn’t know. No hat today and her hair, the colour of autumn bonfires – amber, red, gold – blew obliquely across her face. She looked different. Instead of her usual bouncing gait, now and again stopping to take in the view, she looked depleted; as if she’d run the longest race and now that race was over.

  Her feet, in their stout leather shoes, took her higher, under a canopy of spinning terns she could almost touch. Then higher, to a steep flight of brick steps, which eventually opened on to a grassy clifftop pathway. Head bowed – a little boat navigating a rough sea – she followed the path away from Smuggler’s Cove and out to the desolate and windswept bluff. Of no interest, the tiny granite seafarer’s chapel with its jumble of gravestones and seal gargoyles, usually so fascinating to her. Pausing only briefly, she adjusted the bag she wore over her shoulder before continuing her climb to the top.

  The dramatic arches of chalk cliff, when she reached them, were as vast as cathedrals. Carved out by storms and sea, the guidebooks said they were breathtaking whatever the season. But they were of no significance either. She was somewhere far away today. Remembering something Charles had told her the first time he’d brought her here: how Thomas Hardy had compared the cliff she stood on to an elephant dipping its trunk into water. Finding his voice, she tottered forward, wanting to grab it, but elusive, it was lost to her again. Dispersing like smoke, it stung her eyes and made the bruise of horizon, where sea met sky, swim before her.

  Backing away from the edge, she dropped to her knees to listen to the crashing waves on the beach below. She pulled out the note Terrence had left for her the previous evening and, taking a minute on this mossy plateau with views of the sea, she reread his words. Kind of him to come all this way to find her but she didn’t want to be found; she wanted to be alone. With the salty taste of the wind in her mouth, she tilted her face to the milky-diffused light where the sun should be and opened her fingers to let the note go. Watched it float like a bird, up to heaven. Terrence couldn’t help her, no one could – whoever Joy once was, she had lost her, and there was no way to bring her back.

  She waited. Not long now. Her mind crowding with disparate memories… a pink iced birthday cake with five candles… the snip-snip of her mother’s kitchen scissors cutting her fringe… the feel of her father’s bristles when she scrubbed her face against his… running barefoot along the sand at Goldchurch with her best friend… her lover’s fingers winding her hair. His blue eyes beneath the brim of his black fedora. The eyes that said she could trust him.

  She rose to her feet and stepped up to the lip of the precipice. Fragments of the cliff edge crumbled to the shore below. She looked down at the scuffed toes of her clumpy shoes and thought of the beautiful deep-red leather ones Heloise had given her. The hand-stitched soles, the bow, the pearl button fastening. Such pretty things until she’d managed to scratch one. Not that she had any idea how she had done it. She had expected Heloise to be angry, in the way she had been with herself for spoiling them when they were so precious. But none of that mattered now.

  She lifted her gaze and, staring into the distance, trembled a little under her coat. The wind tugged her glorious hair off her face to reveal a neck that was as white and exposed as the chalky cliff beneath. Then, deciding it was time, Joy stretched out her arms as she’d done as a child playing the aeroplane game with her father among his fruit trees, and fell forward into the plaintive cries of seabirds, down to the unforgiving rocks below.

  69

  It was evening and a chilly Terrence, surprisingly rejuvenated after his overnight trip to Dorset, was back in London. Despite the awful circumstances that had taken him there, he supposed he had been looking for an excuse to return to that little town for years. Secret and sheltered between two hulking ridges of chalk downland, Smuggler’s Cove had always held a special place in his heart and it was a relief to find it unchanged. Stepping off the train at Swanage, he had felt the same surge of excitement he had as a boy. From the bold heights of Ballard Down, the jagged chalk stacks of Old Harry, the distinctive vertical swell of Durlston Castle set against the steel-blue backdrop of sea: it was a jewel of a place and he could see why Charles had wanted to take Joy there.

  Zigzagging through the multitude clogging the platform, he took off his hat and tipped his head to the filigreed ironwork and glass panelled roof of Waterloo Station. He was already missing the squall of shearwaters; seeing their wings cut against the sweep of the English Channel had lifted his heart. It certainly beat London. He could think straight there, away from the smog and the creeping Christie. Sitting on the seafront, watching the fishing boats coming in, was when he had made up his mind about Joy. Deciding he couldn’t do much, that she was a grown woman, and if she didn’t want to see him – and why should she? – then it was her prerogative, he couldn’t force her. If she had wanted to talk, she would have come to him at the Bluebell that morning. The poor girl had probably just wanted to be left alone to lick her wounds. Bruised by a man who didn’t love her properly, it would take time to recover from that if she ever could. He didn’t want to push things by going back to her boarding house and pestering her. He’d given her plenty of time and then he’d had a train to catch. As much as he would have liked to duck out of society for a week or two, he couldn’t. He had to come back to London, if only for his mother’s sake. He couldn’t abandon her, fearful of what Christie would do if he wasn’t around. London needn’t be forever, though. He lay awake half the night thinking about the Bluebell with its guestrooms, its dark-beamed bar and row of beer pumps he could envisage working behind, how well the back room would lend itself to musical evenings. Thanks to Christie, Terrence might have run out of money, but Lambert’s would sort him a mortgage – they weren’t asking much for the place – and he knew his mother would go with him. She’d always loved that stretch of coast. It could be the new start he craved because things couldn’t carry on the way they were; it was a seedy existence.

  But what about Christie? Tha
t dark spectre who was draining his very life’s blood. Escaping to a new life in Dorset where he would be out of the man’s grasp and free of his blackmail seemed the ideal solution. The more he thought about it, the more he believed that this was something he could do. Short of that, Terrence knew the only other option he had to get his life back and be finally free of that man was to take far more drastic measures than merely relocating. The only other way was to kill him.

  * * *

  Terrence chose a small bunch of flowers for Queenie from a stall on the way out of the station and hurried out into the London smog. Buttoning his coat to keep out the freezing air, he felt the slide of pavement beneath his shoes as ambiguous shapes emerged then faded around him. He joined a queue at a bus stop. Part of him wished he was just heading home, but he’d promised Queenie he would let her know, and although there wasn’t much to tell, at least he could impart the news that Joy was safe. Tell her he had spoken with the landlady at the boarding house where she was staying and make her understand Joy had gone there because she wanted to be left alone. The city’s damp had seeped through the seams of his shoes and he stamped his feet to get warm. The bus arrived, pulled into the kerb.

  ‘Royal Brompton, please.’ He handed his coins over.

  ‘Take your ticket, sir,’ the conductor reminded him.

  The lower deck was full, so he clambered up the metal stairwell hoping for a seat at the top. Not that there would be much of a view tonight; the world beyond the steamed-up windows evaporated into the fog.

  It was the top of his head he saw first. Without the trilby for once, the bald crown shone under the aqueous light.

  Bloody hell, it’s him.

  The unexpected sight of his puny shoulders made Terrence’s heart beat faster as he pulled his homburg further down over his eyebrows.

  Don’t let him see you… don’t let him see you.

  He swept past, breathing in the man’s unpleasant disinfectant smell. A frightening moment when the buckles of his khaki kitbag skimmed the sleeve of his raincoat.

  Safe.

  He didn’t move.

  Terrence made a beeline for a seat at the rear, sat down beside an elderly woman with a bundle of knitting in her lap. Amid wet umbrellas and the smell of damp shoe leather, he kept Christie in his eyeline.

  Beyond the windows, the Thames’s rippling reflection under a thousand city lights and the perpendicular rise of Big Ben. The bus wheezed and juddered like an old-age pensioner, emptying and refilling itself with each stop. Unfamiliar with this route, he had no idea how long the journey would take, but at least there was no need to change buses. He stared at the back of Christie’s neck and shuddered. Whoever this man was, there was something frightening about him. Christie put on his hat and lunged forward in his seat to pull the rope. The grind of the engine vibrated through the floor as the bus slowed to a stop. When he got up, Terrence did the same. Curiosity, like a fishhook through his gut.

  Follow him. Follow him.

  And finding himself out on an unknown street with a voice in his head telling him to see where Christie went – what he was up to – it was a relief to find he wasn’t alone. That others were spilling off the bus too. Except these others were taking too long. Christie had skulked off by the time they had opened their umbrellas and put on gloves in readiness for their walks home. Reluctant to lose him, Terrence broke away from the crowd. The cold gnawed through his clothes. It was a filthy night. He followed Christie around one corner, then another, fearful the sound of his shoes against the pavement would alert him, but not once did he turn around. Breathing hard, he shadowed him over a road and through the thickening fog. Off around another corner, close enough to see the puff of Christie’s breath, he tracked him down dark cobbled passageways and along empty streets. On high alert, not daring to drop his guard, he squinted through the cloying gloom. Visibility was poor: the only illumination was the sickly blush of gas lamps, and Christie’s dark shape was reduced to a smudge in the murkiness.

  What the hell did he think he was doing? This was madness. He wanted his bumps felt. He should have stayed on the bus and gone to see Queenie as planned.

  The dystopian setting unnerved him. It was the same kind of feeling he’d had reading Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that Joy had lent him. The idea of a totalitarian state may only be fiction to other readers, but to him and his kind, this was London life. As he walked, he scanned the deserted streets, swapped the flowers to the other hand. He knew the Thames was out there somewhere, he could sense the steady pulse of the tide. It seemed as if he and Christie were the only two people in the world. There was something sharp in his shoe. He stopped to shake it free. When he looked up again, Christie was nowhere.

  Where has he gone?

  There.

  A silhouette lit by the headlamps of a passing taxicab. It had to be him; it was the only other human shape around. When Christie turned in his direction, Terrence’s brain shrank in fear. For one heart-stopping moment, he feared the man was on to him. But he wasn’t. Repulsive little bastard… repulsive little slimeball. Terrence’s major fear was that he couldn’t afford to keep paying him off, that he was going to lose his job, his home, and then Christie would end up reporting him to the police anyway. His fears loomed larger than ever tonight. His visit to Smuggler’s Cove had changed him: it had given him hope for a better future. But back here with the threat of this man, danger pinched at him again.

  The way ahead suddenly opened out onto a busy thoroughfare. Pimlico? Chelsea? There wasn’t time to worry about his bearings. Close on Christie’s tail, Terrence couldn’t believe he didn’t look round, and followed him down into the mouth of the Tube, onto the underground staircase, eyes glued to the back of the brown trilby. Part of the creaking, jostling crowd of commuters, he let himself be pulled along on the tide of grey suits and hats. A mechanical swarm, like tin soldiers, their noses turned to home. He bumped against a young man with oiled hair and mumbled an apology.

  The air was dry and dusty. Terrence had grit in his eye but no time to stop and rid himself of it – he needed to work hard to keep up. The warm, simulated wind of the Underground tugged at his coat and blew more grit into his eyes. Rubbing them to clear the way, he trailed Christie down tunnels and tunnels of gleaming glazed bricks, barely lit by the glowing lamps. He stepped behind him into a crowded lift and tried not to look into the hollow lift shaft as it surged downwards. The giant rolling steel ropes over the deeply grooved pulley, the blackness above and below, made him feel queasy. They pushed out, onto the platform. Passed a sign on the wall with its yellow loop of Circle Line and the notches of stations heading westbound.

  A sudden rush of hot air from an approaching train. The scream of metal on metal. Terrence knew what he needed to do. It was the answer to everything. It was the only way he would ever be free.

  Close at Christie’s back, measuring where best to push. All it would take was a little shove against the shoulder blades.

  This was it. This was his chance. Who would miss him? Terrence felt sure that the world would be a better place without John Reginald Christie.

  And mindful of the crowd, swelling forward as one in anticipation of the oncoming train, crushing the flowers he was still holding, Terrence allowed himself a small smile as he lifted a hand, spread his fingers and touched the slightly greasy material of Christie’s coat.

  Then, bang.

  Terrence was shunted sideways and nearly lost his footing. A man, big and burly inside his suit, barged forward to claim his space on the platform, wanting to be first on the train as it screeched to a halt.

  The space between train and track was gone. Terrence had missed his chance. And little did Terrence know then that by missing the chance to end Christie’s life, it would cost the lives of four more women: Christie’s wife Ethel, Rita Nelson, Kathleen Maloney and Hectorina Maclennan.

  Three Years Later

  It was the maid, Dorothy, who escorted Michael to the door of the smart Regen
cy-style house. Queenie was not permitted to enter the porch, never mind go inside. Michael toddled down the garden path to where she waited for him by the gate. As well as the wicker basket, she now had a smart set of beach toys to carry home: presents to Michael from his grandmother. The kinds of playthings she would love to be able to buy him but couldn’t afford on her nurse’s salary.

  She scooped her young son in her arms, but before moving out into the hubbub of the Bayswater Road, she paused and turned back to the house.

  ‘Say bye-bye to Heloise… say bye-bye to Grandma.’ Queenie encouraged him to wave to the blonde lady at the window. Manoeuvring his arm up and down.

  ‘Grandma,’ Michael copied her, laughing.

  ‘Your grandma loves you very much, doesn’t she, sweetheart?’ Queenie talked to him, then added, under her breath, ‘But she hates me… She’ll never forgive me any more than I will ever forgive myself. What I did to Joy, what I caused her to do… it is unforgivable.’