“You’d make money out of them,” Harry told her. “The telly pays huge amounts for interesting interviews.” He shook his head, scratched one ear lobe, and plodded over to the bar.
“Like Oh yes, my darling dad raped me two hundred times before I got away.”
“Wouldn’t that be better than slogging around wet streets for sweaty men who might beat you up?” Sylvia scribbled a phone number and passed over the corner of the napkin. “This is someone who does less sleazy interviews. I used to know him, though I’m not sure if he’s still around. Try it and see if you ever want to. He’d pay well.”
“Well, I could.” Tracy thought about it. “But I couldn’t tell him I’d been on the game ever since. I’d just say I was always broke. Poor little me.”
“Well it is poor little her,” Harry said after they’d left the pub with Tracy plodding upstairs to her room. “Being born to a family like that would be a curse. Indeed. What a vile childhood. And escape – only ending up on the streets. Not much choice, I imagine.”
“We’ve helped a little.” Sylvia frowned. ‘When it’s all you know – yes, I understand. Sort-of. But anybody can ask for a job in a pub, or cleaning, or learn to drive and join Uber. Even night classes. “
“I suppose we could just give her money,” Harry said. “But not for the rest of her life.”
“It’s funny having to think about making money after all this time,” Sylvia said later in the car, driving the five minutes back to the manor. What they had once always walked, was no longer comfortable on one leg and a crutch. “Life hasn’t been lovely, but at least money was never a trial. Buying a place here helped. But meeting you was the big thing that changed my life.” She blew him a kiss from the passenger seat. “Much more precious than money, my love.”
He grinned. “Nice to be a blown up life jacket.”
“That’s what Tracy needs,” sighed Sylvia. “A really loving husband. But it might be hard to find a saint after being a prostitute for years.”
Lionel washed the parts of Joyce’s body where the deterioration of decay had made vivisection somewhat messy. He carried in a bucket of water from the stream, so heavy it hurt his back, used the only large piece of cloth he had, which he also used on rare occasions to wash himself, and began to remove the reeking rot from the corpse. The smell didn’t bother him. Lionel found it quite sexily alluring. Yet the soft slush simply leaked into the floor and was less desirable for that. He finally took the bucket, now full of filth, back to the stream, emptied and washed it out, and took clean water from further upstream back to the cottage. He was naturally disinterested in what anyone else might now collect unknowingly downstream.
Not much remained of the body he had stolen. The skeleton was now distinct, but plenty of flesh remained and all the hair he had not already wrenched from her at the time of death. The internal organs were largely in place. He found her flat discoloured heart fascinating. Lionel had good dreams that night.
The skull, which still retained flesh in parts, he took to bed with him. He told Joyce she had now grown more ugly than ever, but was actually finding her gaping bones and rotting skin quite cuddly. “Stupid bitch,” he told her. “Shut your gaping mouth, shut your big yellow teeth, and be thankful for a warm blanket.”
Iris sat with her knees together on the end of the bench. In the middle sat Kate, legs stretched out, fingers twitching. Milton sat at the other end, leaning back against the wooden slats of the garden seating, the shade of the weeping willow fluttering over his face. Before them stretched the long flat lawn, sprigged white with daisies. In the distance, the huge hospital stood high beneath the sunshine.
“Operations,” Milton said, “ain’t pretty, is they? I knows I’s not pretty. I knows right well I’s a monster. But I’s a master monster. So if them doctors go cutting, is I gonna be pretty? Not bloody likely, is it? I done cut my ladies. They didn’t get no prettier.”
Kate gulped. “You were never a trained doctor, Milton. Cutting is only good when a very special doctor does it. These doctors are called surgeons. I’ve met the surgeon who is going to start making you pretty. His name is Geoffrey Swan, and he’s going to come and meet you in about half an hour. He’s going to explain the surgery. And I promise you’ll be asleep when he does the special cutting.”
“I ain’t never gonna sleep through that,” Milton objected.
“The doctors have special drinks and needles to make sure you sleep and have lovely dreams.”
“I doesn’t have nice dreams neither. Not never. I doesn’t like sleeping,” Milton muttered. “I reckon these people is bloody silly. I wanna see Mark. Number One will know wot I ortta do.”
“Umm,” Kate said, looking to the sky for answers.
Iris peeped across her to where Milton slouched. “Your eldest brother,” she said warily, “has gone on a very long journey. He didn’t want to go and would much have preferred staying close to you. Indeed,” she paused a moment, crossed her fingers as though asking forgiveness for the lie, “he sent you money and all his love. But he cannot come back for a long, long time. Maurice hopes to visit you soon, but he is also abroad. But he approves of your operations and has decided that the surgeon Geoffrey Swan is the perfect doctor for you. He is paying for the operation.”
Almost true in parts.
Milton slouched further back into the leafy shade. “If Number Two says so. But I’d sooner have Number One. Number One knows everyfing in the whole world.”
Iris mumbled, clenched her fingers together, ignored Kate’s astonished expression, and said, “I expect a letter from him for you soon. He told me he wanted to keep in touch.”
The smile reappeared on one side of Milton’s face. The other side, partially paralysed, had never yet managed a smile. “Right proper. I’s happy ter wait fer that. Then being rotten cut ain’t so bad.”
Nodding vigorously, Kate stood up and shook out her skirt. “Time to walk back to your room, or they’ll be looking for us,” she said. Milton’s problems walking would mean a half hour trip just across the lawn. “The operation is already paid for. Money from Maurice – and Mark.”
“’Tis alright then,” Milton decided. “If’n they says so. And ‘sides, if I dies then it don’t really matter. I likes the idea. T’will be fun, and I’s gonna come back and tell wot ‘tis like being in the dead place.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you did,” sighed Kate. “If anyone’s going to haunt me, it would certainly be a Howard.”
The bath was full, and the water steamed. She bathed every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes three times. It cost quite a lot on water and heating, but Eve didn’t think of that since she knew little about paying bills, and her parents would never have dreamed of mentioning such a thing.
The new house had two bathrooms, one attached to the master bedroom. Eve occupied the master bedroom by insistence of her mother. “One day, my dearest,” Mrs Daish told her, “when you’re off with boyfriends and having fun again, then your father and I might pinch this lovely big room back off you. But in the meantime, my sweet, it’s all yours. Our bedroom is fine. Quite enough for us. After all, we only sleep in it.”
So Eve had her own private bathroom and spent a great deal of time there. She even adored the flush toilet, the comfy seat, the privacy, and the fluffy turquoise mat beneath her feet. The bed was nearly as glorious as the bathroom, with a variety of soft clean sheets to choose from and a quilt as feather filled as any gosling. Yet, somehow, she never felt clean. Even when her skin sparkled, she could not feel clean. Once, as she saw her mother cleaning out the second toilet, she saw a bucket of water on the floor. Immediately she burst into hopeless tears.
Her mother talked of boyfriends, and she never argued. But Eve knew she could never let any boy near her again. Even her brother Niles sometimes bothered her. He hugged her every morning. “You look marvellous, little sister. Pretty as a picture.”
He was a darling and so she resisted the urge to push him aw
ay. But once, when she saw from the window that a past boyfriend had come to visit, she rushed to the bathroom and vomited in the washbasin.
Refusing to read newspapers or watch the television was no great sacrifice. But lying in bed all day or constantly jumping back into the bath could get stunningly boring. Eve read a lot. She learned to sew and made herself a long nightdress in black linen, long sleeved and high necked, which was unfortunately uncomfortable in bed but made her feel safe. She had begun to put a little weight back on, but she was surprised to find that virtually none of her appetite returned. Her stomach had, she supposed, shrunk to the size of a button.
But she liked to drink. Drinking seemed ever more desirable. Cold, clean water was her favourite, but a good hot cup of tea was a close second. Then, before bed and the risk of horrible dreams, she swallowed any sort of booze she could find around the house. Her mother was sometimes worried that Eve would become an alcoholic, or perhaps was simply losing her strength in alcoholic escape, but Eve also knew that both her brother and father bought gin and vodka for her and smuggled it into the cupboard.
Now the steam from her bath rose up into her nostrils and calmed her, whispering of peace, rest and forgetfulness. She had a glass of Scotch and ice, but the ice was beginning to melt, sending up tiny bubbles to the surface. Slowly, her toes turning bright pink, she dipped one foot into the scalding water and breathed it in again. Heat was a new world. After months of freezing in Master’s cell, clean water and steaming heat came as dreams come true. They were what she had missed so dreadfully.
She knew of stories where girls had been kidnapped as she had, and taken by strangers, or even by their own fathers. They had then been raped, beaten and starved just as she had. But instead of escaping after three months like herself, they had been held prisoner for years. Years – and years – and more endless years of misery and torture. She told herself to feel lucky. She cried for those who had suffered more and for longer than she had, but she could not, however hard she tried, feel lucky.
Sitting on the edge of the bath, both feet becoming accustomed to the boiling water, she sipped the Scotch and looked down at her own body. Some of the scarring and lash marks had faded. A few had now finally disappeared altogether. The sunken pit of her stomach now swelled in a small sweet convex curve and her breasts were also filling out, even though the bite and knife marks still persisted, faint but obvious. Some of her injuries were still clear against the pale flush of her skin. But marked or otherwise, her flesh was returning.
There had also been books she had read, and more graphic explanations on her tablet, describing the easy suicide of bleeding to death in a hot bath. To drink yourself into a delightful oblivion and allow your life’s blood to float from your wrists into the painless drift of soaking heat. It seemed such an attractive idea, and it called to her. It sang to her. The song was rich and melodic and called most specifically promising the immediate end of memories. Those vile and bitter memories kept her permanently cold – unless up to her neck in bath water as scalding as her new soft flesh could bear.
Slipping down, she was quickly immersed. Steam made her eyes water. She ducked down her head and came up only to breathe. On one ledge beside her sat her glass of Scotch, half finished. On the opposite ledge lay a Stanley knife, snapped shut in red metal. But inside the blade was sharp.
Lying back, Eve closed her eyes and sighed, breathing deeply. She wanted the end. The absolute end. But she knew the utter terror and misery her abduction had caused not only herself, but almost equally to her mother and father, and even to Niles. Could she be so selfish as to cause that dreadful sadness to those she loved all over again?
No child was truly responsible for their parents. It was only her own life she needed to save. Or finish. The heat soothed her but brought her only temporary relief. Instead, she wondered what sort of creature would knowingly bring excruciating sadness to the people she loved most.
Almost without noticing at first, she found that she was singing. The music hummed through her head, and her voice obediently followed. She was singing Olde Lang Syne and heard the soft melancholy of the bagpipes at the back of her mind. She had never before thought about what the words meant. One last sleepy sip finished her Scotch, and she let the empty glass slip from her fingers, falling to the soft safety of the bath mat. Her other hand groped for the knife.
It had been some time since she had forced herself to make a decision.
Chapter Twelve
The cottage was small, more shed than home. The roof was almost flat, old tin, bent and hidden beneath the trees. Branches hid the entire building. Age had hidden even more, for one wall was little more than a broken panel. The roof was caved in but still provided shelter.
On a thickly treed slope of the Wilton Forest, the cottage had never housed a family, but may once have housed farm implements or a woodcutter’s work and rest. Leaves probably fifty or more years old now carpeted the old hard earth floor. There was a bed of sorts, being only of straw, piled and weighted down by the past exhaustion of whoever had stayed there. Mice, rats and insects had nested there but now seemed to have deserted the remaining rubbish. An abandoned bird’s nest stayed balanced within the cavity of the roof.
The animals had left. The original builders and workers had left long, long ago. Yet there were signs that the cottage had recently been occupied.
Gertrude Sullivan’s phone number had changed. ‘This number is no longer available.’
“But that annoying idiot who thinks he knows my whole family history and certainly makes more money out of it than I can, he must have talked to Mum. No one else except Dad of course, would have known any of that stuff about Karyn, my sister.”
“The DNA from her underwear,” suggested Harry.
“OK, but that wouldn’t have given her name or how she died or anything.” Tracy tried the same phone number over again. “Well, it was about eight years ago. Phones were different back then. Big things that wouldn’t fit in your pocket.”
“We need to trace your mother’s address,” Sylvia decided. “A lot will have changed in eight years. She might be – gone.”
Tracy shrugged. “I wouldn’t miss her. But unless Dad bumped her off like he did Karyn and his second wife, well, I reckon she’s alive somewhere walking the streets.”
“Didn’t you ever love her?” asked Harry quietly.
“When I was little. Not after I turned seven and Dad started fucking me and she did nothing to stop it. But she knew. Of course she knew. Then she turned nearly as bad as him. I was thirteen when I managed to get away. She didn’t even try and find me. Once gone, easily forgotten. I hated her by then.” But Tracy smiled. “But I suppose looking back she did sort of try and protect me from Dad. Maybe, as long as she was sober.” Suddenly Tracy laughed. “Boozy whore! I’ve taken after her, haven’t I?”
“Well, stop both,” Harry suggested.
Sylvia shrugged. “Your life, just like it was your mothers to do as she wanted. But with the disadvantage of a father like that, you get disadvantages and advantages too.” She gazed serenely as Tracy looked astonished.
“Advantages. And what exactly are they?”
“First. Knowing just how disgusting it feels to be raped,” Sylvia said, counting off on her fingers. “Second. Knowing how getting pissed all the time doesn’t help one bit except give you more headaches and less brain. Thirdly, bringing the possibility of instant fame and celebrity if you try and fix a goal.”
“Fame as the bitch daughter of a sadist and serial killer? Nice!”
“In a way, yes, I’m afraid so,” said Sylvia. “But the one made good. Writing a good book about your father and early life – much better than the Paul Stoker stuff. Do TV interviews. Try designing something. I don’t know, but there’s plenty of variety out there. Practise hockey. Open a bar.”
“With what exactly to use as capital?”
“Get a backer, explaining who you are and how you can use that as a marketing tool.�
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“No one would trust the daughter of that pig murderer.”
“I might.” Sylvia sat straight and didn’t smile.
The following silence lasted some moments. “Oh, bugger,” said Tracy eventually. “That’s – well, too kind to even think about. Shit. I’d fail you. Honestly I would Let’s find my mother first. Then at least I’ll feel I achieved something.”
“I’ll ask Morrison,” said Harry. “He may have done it already. Who knows?” With a crunch of chair legs on the wooden floor, he stood, stretched, and nodded to Sylvia. “We’ll drive south tomorrow and look for cottages,” he said. “And we really must stop meeting in pubs. No good saying not to get pissed when we pass our lives at the bar.”
Tracy laughed. “So come and pick me up tomorrow – at the bar.”
“Early,” said Sylvia, standing with a good deal more difficulty as she leaned on the one crutch and the back of the chair with her other hand, “about eight thirty?”
“Evening?”
“You fancy meeting up with your father again at midnight? A sweet thought, no doubt.”
“He’s sick any time, day or night. But I’ll see you in the morning,” said Tracy. “I’ll be at the bar, but I might even be drinking cocoa.”
Tracy stumbled from the back of the car, and did up the zip on her jeans, which she had undone while lounging unseen behind Sylvia. Sylvia took somewhat longer to extricate herself, and as Harry helped, she leaned back against the bonnet and breathed deep.
“I’ll come a little way,” she said. “It’s interesting. Anyway, we never find much, but it’s still more interesting than sitting in the car staring at the same three trees. Besides, a little exercise will do me good. I’m becoming root-bound.”
Tracy was now bouncing. “It’s sunny. Hardly any mud. And look – there’s bluebells. I always loved bluebells.”
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