“Rod was nice,” sighed Ruby. “When he was there, that is.” She thought a moment. “Well, actually a lot of the time he wasn’t nice at all. He made lots of money. That was nice. But he handed over the cheques while he was telling me about all the affairs he’d been having, and how he really didn’t love me anymore, and he’d be away for the next year.”
“My husband,” said Iris softly, “was just utterly forgettable. I’m not sure I can even be bothered remembering his name.”
Ruby nodded into her wine glass. “Sylvia admitted a couple of things to me yesterday,” she said. “I mean, her first marriage was ages ago, and I never knew her back then, but she’s told me a few things. It was a total failure. Anyway, he obligingly died before the divorce went through, so she ended up with money. The same handy trick my own husband managed. Not that we were ever getting divorced. I just sat alone and put up with everything. He came home when he got sick.”
“You were saying about Sylvia. Isn’t it working with Harry?” Joyce was curled on the small sofa. “If she doesn’t want him, I’d be delighted to take him off her hands.”
“No, no,” Ruby giggled. “It was her first husband that didn’t work. And then he died anyway. But she says she lived alone for years and years getting old, and never realised she was lonely or depressed until she met Harry. She told me he walked in and the lights went on. Then she realised how fed up she’d been for all those years before.”
“Do your policemen listen to our conversations?” wondered Iris.
“They’re welcome,” Joyce said. “Especially if they’re lonely and miserable too. I wasn’t lonely with Lionel. I started hating him after the first two years. He used to punch me and knock me over. He liked to throw buckets of ice cold water over me. He liked whacking me in the stomach and then locking me out of the house in my nightie. Oh, there was lots more. I was so terribly pleased when he stayed away.”
“You said you tried to kill him once?”
“I wish I’d succeeded.”
Iris shivered. “I just kept thinking something good had to happen soon. I was so sad about life, but then I won some money and it was such fun. For the very first time in my life, I felt I was worth something. And I wanted that feeling again. But I never got it quite the same. I just felt smaller and more and more worthless. I just had to prove it to myself that I was important in this world after all. I got that gambling addiction so quickly. One day I was normal. Two weeks later I was lost.”
“I put money in one of those machine things once,” Ruby admitted. “But I never got a penny back, so I never did it again. It was boring.”
“I tried weed once. It made me sick.” Joyce giggled. “I should have studied poison a bit better.”
“Hush. Police in the front room,” Iris reminded her. Her flesh now fitted her skin instead of the skin ganging in pale sacks. She bounced when she walked. She had her own bedroom, snuggled up with a hot water bottle, and saved her social security for the day when she would have to leave the safe house and start paying rent somewhere.
“I’m selling up,” Joyce assured her. “I can’t ever face that house again with all its hideous memories. I’ll get a bit of cash, though it’s a pokey little dump. But then I shall buy something nicer for you and me together, and I can get a titchy mortgage and write a best seller about Lionel and pay off the mortgage and live happily ever after.”
“There’s that lovely big house where they found all the bodies,” Ruby reminded them. “Mock Tudor and a hundred bedrooms, not to mention a secret cellar. Under the circumstances, they’ll have to sell that off cheap. I happen to know who owned it,” she smiled, remembering Stella and Benjamin, and their disgust at the outcome of their generosity regarding the house they bought their son. “Or perhaps they’ll sell it as the house of horrors and double the price.”
Joyce pulled a face. “I wouldn’t want it anyway. No shit, not after being married to Lionel.”
“The police haven’t finished with it yet, have they?” Iris remembered newspaper photos of the house still swathed in blue and white plastic ribbons, with men swarming the place in their white plastic suits.
“They’ll probably knock it down once they’ve finished,” sighed Ruby. “They’ve knocked half of the walls down already.”
“Make it into a museum,” suggested Iris.
“I’ll tell Stella,” said Ruby. “But she’ll just say – Yuk – and sell it off for tuppence.”
Some expressions had changed. Master had changed. Eve thought she knew why.
“You’re unhappy, master,” she told him. Curled on the bed with the alpaca rug around her shoulders and the blanket wrapped beneath her arms, keeping warm while hiding her nakedness, she watched Master as he paced, one leg wobbling, his hands fisted at his side.
“Not happy,” Master agreed.
“It’s because I know who you are and I know who your brothers are,” nodded Eve. “I know I shouldn’t have told you. But I trusted you. You’re not going to – kill me, are you? Because I know too much?”
“Don’t know nuffin’,” said Master suddenly, turning around. “You doesn’t know how Number One does stuff. A great man, he is, I loves him. The best of all. But he don’t like you no more.”
“So you won’t kill me. But your brother will?”
“Number One ain’t me brovver,” Milton insisted. “Twins, we is. So’s Number Two. Me – I’s Number Three.”
Eve was not sure about this. She knew Maurice Howard the teacher, and she had seen the man who resembled him so closely. They were clearly identical twins. This small and crooked man was quite unlike the others. “How nice for you,” she said, lost in contemplation. The elder man, dark-haired, tall, and frozen eyed would no doubt be ruthless in killing her. But she felt unafraid. The torture that Master enjoyed so relentlessly and without the slightest understanding of pain had now reduced her to agonising starvation, and her body not simply sagged fleshless but was burned in long strips, cut in endless patterns, and was punctured with wire and metal spokes. The rape was usually vicious, while Master became more inventive and increasingly demanding. Eve knew herself to be floating on the precipice of death and would invite it, depending on how it was delivered.
Her fleshless body quivered. Pain and terror had constructed her only awareness, and she knew nothing else. Hope had long since been quashed from her thoughts. She had now discovered that fear could be worse even than horrific pain. The nightmare narrowed the walls of her room. The bucket of shit stank, but that stink was one of the few things that attached her to life.
She asked, “Master, how will he do it?”
“What?”
She explained. “Your brother, I mean Number One, he intends killing me, doesn’t he? Will he be quick and clean? Perhaps I should say, will he just shoot me? Or cut my throat? Do you know what he usually does?”
“Dunno.” Master sat on the floor and contemplated with some enthusiasm. “I never watched every time. Number One says he’ll do it all special if I likes. I can watch. Not sure what that’d be. Reckon sommint like pulling off skin. Wiv one o’ my ladies who was naughty, he hanged her upside down and let me fiddle afore he poked the gun up her arse and shot her.”
Heaving, trying not to vomit, Eve whispered, “I haven’t been naughty. Please, please don’t do things like that to me.”
“Wot does you want then?” asked Master with some curiosity.
“A quick shot. In the head. In the mouth.” Eve had never before been asked to choose the manner of her own death, but she had considered it several times while in captivity with Milton.
“Then does you just goes off and play wiv someone else?” Master wondered.
“Life after death?” It was another question she had not expected. “I don’t know. We’ll all find out one day.”
Master shook his head. “Not me, not Number One. Reckon not Number Two neither. Shame ‘bout you but Number One says tis important.” Master sighed, scrambled up, and came to Eve’s s
ide. “So we ain’t got much time. Now, quick. On yer back and open,” he commanded, pointing.
Eve whispered, “I am so dreadfully hungry, Master. Is there any chance of a little food? Anything at all? Just a crust perhaps?”
“I got cake, but Number One says not fer you,” Master explained. “So tis time fer last games.”
“Mr and Mrs Daish, my dear. On the front step. Shall I let them in or will you go out?”
Sylvia smiled at Lavender. “Oh, let them in at once, poor things. And make tea, if you wouldn’t mind. Not cake. Too frivolous. Perhaps some biscuits?”
The ice-cold Cotswold weather was beginning to thaw and a pale flicker of sunlight was squeezing between the clouds. It brought no warmth, but the sprinkled light through the first flush of apple buds was like the year’s first smile. Harry was out in the car, driving the forests and hills. Convinced that both Lionel in some hidden corner, and the Howard twins in some old secret cottage, could be discovered if he drove every lane and highway in three counties, Harry had made friends with his Sat Nav and was exploring the south west of England.
Sometimes Sylvia accompanied him. The shy appearance of sunshine helped her decisions. But usually she preferred the comfort of friends, blazing fires and cheerfully answered calls for tea.
Lavender brought Andy and Belinda Daish into the smaller living-room where Sylvia was waiting, and then bustled off to put the kettle on. “We heard something important,” said Mr Daish. “This morning, on the early news. They said something about another woman being taken.”
Belinda was already in tears. “If the monster wants another girl already, does that mean our Evie must be – already – gone?”
“Oh dear, not in the least,” said Sylvia in a rush and a gulp. “Actually. They don’t even think it’s the same man. They think it’s Lionel Sullivan who tried to grab some other wretched girl. You know, the brute who escaped from prison. They still can’t be sure of anything.”
“So that ghastly creature doesn’t have our Evie?” said Mrs Daish, begging for it not to be true.
“No,” Sylvia assured her. “He was still in prison back then. I honestly think Eve is still probably alive.’ She paused, looking back into the untrusting and desperate faces of Belinda and her husband. “I’m terribly sorry,” she went on at last, “but Harry and I, we’re honestly trying to help. We manage little bits of ideas here and there, but we’re not official. I mean, we don’t even know what the police do half the time. We made friends with the chief inspector or at least one of them, but most of the time we don’t know what he’s doing either. There’s a briefing room and the forensic lab with a pathologist, and there’s the front desk. The only place we’ve been in is that and Darcey’s office. And I promise, if they’d found Eve they’d have told you at once. She’s still – missing.”
Andy Daish had not yet sat down. He stood in front of the fire with his hands clasped behind his back. Sylvia was surprised he hadn’t scorched himself by now. “And no one knows yet why the murderer shoved his women up the chimney?”
“Oh dear.” Sylvia hoped the tea would arrive. “I think that was just to hide the bodies. They were using a cellar in part of an old abandoned house. No one lived there, but they didn’t own it. So they hid what they could in the best place.”
“They?” asked Mr Daish after a suspicious blink.
Sylvia realised that she had said the wrong thing. “There’s a faint suspicion,” she said carefully, “that the killers are two brothers. But no one’s positive. There’s no proof. And the brothers can’t be found.”
“Who are they?” asked Belinda with a quivering hope.
“Umm. I don’t know.”
“So how did the telly know about this new woman,” Andy demanded, ‘if the police don’t know anything at all?”
Luckily, the tea came. Lavender sat down, handed round the biscuits, poured the tea from the pot, and asked sympathetically about the Daish family’s situation.
“I don’t sleep. I may never sleep again,” Belinda said.
“Dear Sylvia and Harry are very good at finding out things,” said Lavender, trotting back to the open door. “They’ll find your daughter, Mrs Daish. Never worry.”
Sylvia ignored this unhelpful remark. She sipped her tea. “A young woman was approached by someone out in the countryside, and she suspected he was a rapist, so she ran away. She phoned the police and Morrison decided it sounded like Lionel Sullivan.” Sylvia took another sip of tea and burned her tongue. “The girl must have contacted the TV journalists too.”
Andy was disappointed. “So there’s no real news.? Just media? Typical.”
“Lionel Sullivan doesn‘t have Eve, Mr Daish. That’s so important and so hopeful.” Sylvia exhaled, desperate for something reassuring to say. Instead, she could only think of nonsense. ‘Your daughter’s alright. I feel it in my bones’. Well – she’s probably thinking of you right now. The police are on to it, Mrs Daish. Patience is a virtue. Life’s a horrible turd of misfortunes, Mr Daish, you just have to trust to luck and the cops.’ No, losing your beloved daughter deserved better than any of that cliched rubbish. Sylvia said, “There have been quite a few clues, but not enough yet to arrest the right man. If they do, then Eve could be home in days.” She paused, then risked saying, Was Eve ever taught at Primary School by Maurice Howard, do you remember? Would she have accepted a lift from him if it was offered late at night?”
What? Really? Mr Howard? Our Evie liked him. Yes, she’d get in his car without any worries. What are you telling us?”
“But these brothers?” Belinda interrupted him. “Do you know their names? Is one of them Maurice Howard? Are they both sick? I mean psychopaths? That’s what murderers are, isn’t it?”
“One is certainly a psychopath,” said Sylvia. “Or at least I guess so. But I’ve never met him, and I’m certainly not a psychiatrist. I’m not sure what murderers suffer from. As for the other, I think he’s normal. But what the hell is normal, anyway? Are any of us normal? I don’t think I’m crazy, but I’m not really sure about anything else.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“You must be crazy, to be in love with me,” Harry told her later.
“It’s you who must be crazed, combing the country for sheds.”
“I found a hundred.”
Amy, who was sitting beside Percival on the old mustard velvet couch, smiled, catching the end of the conversation. “Did you find mine?”
“You once had – a shed?” Harry asked politely.
Any nodded eagerly. “I was born around here, you know. My parents owned a nice house on the Welsh border. Quite grand, it was. We had three sheds. I made one into a playhouse.”
“No. That wasn’t the direction I explored today, I’m afraid,” Harry apologised. “Perhaps tomorrow. But we’re looking for Mark Howard in particular.”
Amy turned the nod into a shake. “Not at all,” she murmured. “The bus driver did it, you know.”
Her husband peered over the top of his glasses and snapped shut the copy of The Lancet which he had been reading. “This is another case, my dear. The crimes committed by the coach driver were all some years ago, and the killer went to prison.”
“Nonsense, Ben, my dear,” said Amy, reverting to the smiling nod. “He escaped. You should read the proper newspapers instead of all that medicine stuff. And he lives in sheds. He may have found mine. I used to play mummies and daddies, and I had three dolls, all baby girls in pink. He’d like that.”
“No doubt, my dear.” And Percival returned to The Lancet.
“I never had a little brother,” Amy continued, though speaking to her cream merino lap. “I kept telling my parents that I wanted one, but they didn’t oblige. So I played mummies without daddies.” Then she looked up and dangled two fingers at Percival over the top of his newspaper. “Until my Percy came along of course.”
Percival wasn’t listening. “Happy families, my dear,” he said and rustled the paper.
“
I had a little boy cousin,” Amy continued, now speaking to the crackle of the flames in the huge fireplace. “Until he started Kindergarten, we used to play together. Once it was so hot, he took all his clothes off. I was only three or four, and I was shocked. What’s that? I demanded, pointing. He was quite surprised. ‘My dingle, of course’, he said. ‘What’s your dingle like?’ I felt quite confused. Had my mother missed out dingles when I was born? I said, shamefaced, ‘I don’t have a dingle?’ This upset him even more. He couldn’t tell which one of us was weird. ‘So how do you do wee wees?’ he asked with a yelp. ‘Easy. I sit on the loo and it just happens,’ I insisted. I asked my mother about dingles afterwards, and she stopped my cousin coming to play, which was a shame. But people were more proper in those days.” She pushed her hand beneath the open pages and patted Percival’s knee. “But my Percy has a nice dingle, and he taught me all about it.”
“Yes, that’s right dear,” murmured Percival without paying the slightest attention.
Ruby was giggling, and said, “It was my father who taught me the truth of dingles.”
Sylvia looked up, mouth snapping open abruptly. “Now that could mean several different things – maybe good – maybe not so good. You certainly never told me that before.”
“You never asked,” Ruby sighed. “I’ll tell you more another day.”
Sylvia’s mouth remained open with several words unsaid, but it was Lavender rushing in who stopped any further discussion. “Sylvia and Harry,” she squeaked, “it’s your gambling lady. Iris isn’t it. She’s terribly worried.”
“She’s seen something,” said Sylvia, hoisting up her skirts, rising with difficulty from the low velvet couch, and hurried out into the hall.
“Or done something,” said Harry, running after.
Iris, wearing a smart new navy trench coat, stood dripping rain onto the carpet, her hair in pale streams over her small head. She had walked all the way to Rochester Manor from the safe house on the other side of Cheltenham and looked both utterly exhausted and utterly distraught. “My lovely new friend,” she quavered, “Joyce, my dearest, dearest new friend Joyce.”
Ashes From Ashes Page 24
