by Adam Nevill
When she was ready, she took a long look at the faces tacked on the wall above her desk. Faces she had refused herself more than a glance at through the day, and only to establish their placement on the walls, as if she had merely been hanging framed watercolours to enliven the room. Now she looked right into their eyes.
‘I came back. I said I would.’
During the long investigation, the inquest and the writing of her account that had absorbed the first year after her escape, the strangers in the photographs had begun to feel like a group of friends. A strange sense of kinship had occurred between the dead and living victims of the house. By the time she was released into the world and began work on the first of two films she executive-produced, she knew she would never be able to leave the dead people behind; they were not to be ignored or forgotten in the way they had been for so many years.
Besides the only two people she had known – the sole male victim, Ryan Martin, who had once been a boyfriend in her other life, and the girl who had briefly been a housemate, Margaret Tolka, whom she’d only known in passing – Amber had learned all that she could about the murdered strangers, the other victims: the fifteen.
* * *
Amber arranged fifteen tea lights in the long, horizontal pewter holder at the rear of her desk. Carefully, using one of the cook’s matches that she kept inside her study, she lit a single candle for each of the victims, including the two who had yet to be identified because they were found without any teeth in their skulls.
Thirteen victims were matched by photographs. For each of the two unidentified women an inclusion on the wall was signified by the picture of a white and pink rose respectively. She called them ‘Top Girl Walker’ and ‘Bedfellow’.
If the first four victims of the house – Lottie Reddie, Virginia Anley, Eudora Fry and Florence Stockton – all murdered ninety years before Amber set foot inside 82 Edgehill Road, had ever been photographed individually, their pictures had not survived or been discovered. An investigative reporter, Peter St John, had found the only photograph that included images of the four: a formal group portrait of a spiritualist society called The Friends of Light. The picture was taken in 1919 on a Bank Holiday weekend, with the members of the society arranged before the bandstand of Handsworth Park in Birmingham.
This was also the biggest of the photographs attached to the wall because Amber had enlarged her copy so that the relevant faces could be seen more clearly. The faces of the four victims were neatly circled in black ink.
Virginia Anley had a face Amber would never forget, a face she had once dreamed of: the eyes open, the body hanged beneath a tree branch.
Two of the first four victims, Lottie Reddie and Virginia Anley, were found buried in the foundations of the house. Post-mortem, it was determined that their bodies had been cemented into a pair of bespoke soil cavities, dug into the foundations, and laid side by side.
The other two victims from the early twentieth century, Eudora Fry and Florence Stockton, were entombed within fireplaces in the building. Eudora was bricked inside the original fireplace of the second floor bedroom that Amber initially occupied; Eudora had been the first presence to speak at the address, during Amber’s first night inside the house.
The fourth woman, Florence Stockton, was the oldest of the four: a widow, who was found behind a walled-up fireplace in the first floor room that Amber had been imprisoned inside for one night, before Fergal had introduced her to the rooms of the ground floor. And it had been Florence Stockton that Amber must have heard on the ceiling of the room, reciting scripture. Verse, she’d since discovered, to be from chapter three of Titus in the King James Bible.
The rope used in the executions of all of the first four victims was once popular for hanging washing in turn-of-the-century Birmingham yards.
The four women had been murdered around 1920 and then buried with the ligature still knotted about their necks. It was proven by the damage to the bones in their spinal columns, and through the way the twine had been cut while suspending a heavy weight, that all of the victims had been hanged first.
Any evidence of what had been presumed to be a sexual motive in the first murders had long been erased by decomposition. But each set of remains was found missing a finger.
This was the second significant connection between each murder at 82 Edgehill Road: the evidence of a missing body part – ears, fingers or teeth, and missing hair in Margaret Tolka’s case. The first connection across every era of murder at 82 Edgehill Road was the cause of death: strangulation by ligature.
Peter St John, who became Amber’s researcher and coauthor in the year after her escape, did discover some information about The Friends of Light, and their spiritual leader, Clarence Putnam, though it was scant. At its peak, the organization had boasted a treasurer, chairman, secretary, and established international links with several churches and spiritualist colleges. Clarence Putnam had been the first owner of 82 Edgehill Road when it was a new build, and also the founder of The Friends of Light. With key members of his congregation, he’d moved from the country to the city before the Great War. He was originally a pastor from Monmouthshire, and a respected authority on pre-Roman British history, who’d become a zealous devotee of spiritualism. Many believed he was gifted with second sight. Any remaining records of his time on earth suggested he had lived an honourable life and he was now buried in St Mary’s Church in Handsworth, amongst the fathers of the industrial revolution.
Peter had also connected women reported missing in the Midlands at the time, to the first four victims who were featured in the photograph of The Friends of Light, all of whom possessed a connection to 82 Edgehill Road, which had been used by the group as a spiritualist meeting house. Peter had even beaten the police to the information and broken the Friends of Light story, and it had been Peter St John’s feature in The Sunday Times that had compelled Amber to make contact with him through her barrister.
All four victims had been declared missing by their families between 1920 and 1924. Although initially treated as suspicious by local police, no one had ever been suspected of their murder, nor held responsible for their disappearances.
The membership of the group was unremarkable: a collection of grieving Christian souls, many of whom had lost sons and husbands and fathers at the front in the Great War.
Peter and Amber hadn’t provided much information about the first four murders in their co-authored book, No One Gets Out Alive, because they’d discovered little evidence, material or anecdotal, about the disappearances. Someone known to all four of the women, and probably a member of The Friends of Light, perhaps Clarence Putnam himself as it was his house, had murdered them and hidden their bodies at 82 Edgehill Road. And as Peter had said to Amber on numerous occasions: ‘This part will go all Jack the Ripper, but no one will ever really know who killed the first four, or why.’
Following the demise of The Friends of Light sometime around 1926, the house was left mostly vacant for twenty-five years until it was bought at auction by plasterer Harold Bennet in 1952. The house had remained the property of the local church to whom Clarence Putnam bequeathed it, and was subsequently occupied and quickly vacated at least five times between 1926 and 1952. No explanation was ever discovered for why the building could not keep its tenants.
Only one other interesting fact about the earlier life of the address had been uncovered by Peter St John: during the Second World War, a local council report claimed that gypsy émigrés had occupied the building: an elderly woman and her blind grandson. They had been evicted, judged insane, and rehoused in a Somerset asylum during the Blitz.
Amber finished her drink. She’d known for a long time that the nine days she’d spent at 82 Edgehill Road, three wearying years ago, needed to take a backseat; there was little more she could ever learn about that period of time. Her time. Despite Peter St John’s dead ends, the new search must concern the preceding one hundred years; a story that occurred long before she crossed the threshol
d of that place.
The last time they’d spoken on the phone, Peter had claimed he had something for her. Not much, but it was the something that was now burning a hole through her mind.
SIXTY-SIX
PIMP MURDERED AT BIRMINGHAM BROTHEL.
That had been the first headline. And it was the first cutting Amber considered the evening she resumed the search.
Memory swiftly brought nausea.
The opening story broke the afternoon that she and Svetlana were found at the house by two police officers and a paramedic, who had been first on the scene. Amber had heard a news report on a radio at the police station. For a few moments she had not realized the story was about her and Svetlana. No names were mentioned at that stage; she wished it had stayed that way.
The news of the ‘murder’ initially only made headlines in Midlands’ newspapers and media. But further revelations from 82 Edgehill Road were blaring from national news broadcasters by ten p.m. Within weeks, hundreds of hours of coverage about the case were screened in Great Britain, following the gruesome reports of what had been found in a scrappy back yard in North Birmingham. Once it had been widely established that the case was unique, most major European news services and broadcasters were also following the minutiae of the criminal investigation too. From Europe the story quickly found a global audience.
* * *
POLICE SEARCH GARDEN AT 82 EDGEHILL ROAD.
One entire wall, from desk top to eye level, contained only the highlights: the triggers to help Amber organize her memories. Her recollections would inform the wider research she now needed to embark upon. Because this story was a long way from finished.
SEX WORKER TURNED KILLER.
The cuttings had a pertinent subtext. A second, more personal story was being told on the wall, about the world’s endlessly changing perception of her former self, Stephanie Booth: victim, perpetrator, collaborator, martyr, victim.
Amber guessed she could paper the entire first floor interior of the farmhouse with stories about her old identity, and with stories solely from the British media.
PIMP CASTRATED AND BURNED WITH ACID: WHAT A SEX WORKER DID TO SURVIVE.
Only now, sat in her study, and looking at the patchwork mosaic of newsprint, photocopied pages from online sites, and photographs secured during the research for her book, could she better comprehend what the world’s perspective of Stephanie Booth had been, and also of the victims and their killers. And she remembered very quickly that she’d never cared for much of it, and still didn’t.
SECOND KILLER STILL AT LARGE.
Even with the horrors of the house still fresh in her mind, the media had shown no quarter. They had made her absorb a peculiar brand of vindictive persecution to accompany the black horror she had literally crawled through, stained by blood and urine.
POLICE TEAR DOWN WALLS.
It was the media that had driven her into what two doctors had called ‘emotional breakdowns’, not the house. The house had left scars, had stolen things from her she could not replace, but she had beaten the house and escaped whatever occupied it. The world, however, could not be defeated, and its media was incalculably different. Her best defence had been the screaming of her own story straight into the maelstrom of competing voices; the opinionated and ill-informed voices that always knew better. So she’d screamed and then disappeared.
My name is Amber Hare.
But she would never forgive the world for what it had done, nor trust it again. Because of how it had interpreted her without restraint or remorse, for the purposes of its own entertainment.
CASTRATRIX GETS DOZENS OF MARRIAGE PROPOSALS EVERY WEEK.
The words and images on the wall jerked awake a flurry of dormant feelings that simultaneously made her panic, want to laugh hysterically, and also made her feel as though her heart was bursting. After one year at sea, gazing into a distance so old and dark, an immensity she’d hoped would scour her mind in the way salt water cleaned all traces of former occupation from shells upon the shore, Amber had feared these very cuttings. It had taken a long time to rediscover the courage, and the will, to return to this time in her life. She had never underestimated the past, but had also never anticipated the force with which memory could return. Memory might even be insanity.
In a clinch of terror, accompanied by what she sensed was a plummet in her blood’s temperature, she was briefly convinced that she must never leave her sanctuary.
Just in case.
Stop!
Only three people in the world – a solicitor, her agent, and a private security consultant – knew she was here, why she was here, and who she was.
STEPHANIE GOES INTO HIDING.
* * *
Amber was under no illusion as to why she now sat in the largest room upstairs in her new home, why she had made herself sit inside a space dedicated to one of the worst cases of serial murder, abduction, torture and sexual depravity that Great Britain had known. She was sitting here, as she had known she would during those months at sea, for the same reason she had stopped the course of anti-depressants during the first year following her release from the house. And even though she had observed the recommended course of counselling for victims of violence and sufferers of post-traumatic shock, and gracefully submitted to numerous psychological and physical tests, she had resisted most opportunities to forget, to forgive, or to ameliorate her experience.
She wanted to remember. And even when she took her mother’s maiden name, Hare, and transformed herself into Amber Hare, anonymous lottery winner, her need for the truth endured as her mind endured.
She may have survived, but she would not fool herself that she was free, or ever would be free. What happened inside 82 Edgehill Road would, and should, distinguish the rest of her life, and define her, and no one could persuade her otherwise. It would take a long time to put back that which had been taken from her.
But more than anything else, what had occurred at 82 Edgehill Road had not finished, not even when she was stretchered out of the building, because he was still missing.
Fergal.
And what he took from the bowels of the abomination that had masqueraded as an ordinary rundown residential address in North Birmingham, had never been recovered either.
It.
Black Maggie.
The details of the coroner’s long inquest and the theories of criminologists, the Serious Crimes Analysis, Behavioural Profiling, Geographical Profiling and Physical Evidence teams, the essays by forensic psychiatrists, the arguments of lawyers and journalists – all of these records, filed inside the steel cabinets that surrounded her desk, were only part of the story: the acceptable surface and the last known chapter, but not much more.
Now was the time to go back in. It was an acknowledgement that brought her no joy, but a recognition of a duty; a duty supported by a desire for resolution. Nor was the plunge she was about to take into that place a descent to be taken solely for herself. This was for her friends up there on the wall.
Amber swallowed the last of her drink. Then went and retrieved the bottle of Sailor Jerry rum from the kitchen.
She returned to the study and refilled her glass. The measure was larger and she didn’t add Coke.
SIXTY-SEVEN
MAN KILLED WITH BRICK. WOMAN STRANGLED.
Until the police took her back to the house to move the investigation into the second stage, Amber had never been in the garden of 82 Edgehill Road; she had only ever seen the rear of the property from the kitchen and stairwell windows, and she had only ever known that part of the address as a patch of neglected, unpleasant, and yet incongruously fecund land that encroached upon the refuse-strewn patio. The patio appeared in her mind now as a polluted shoreline, between the house and the explosion of wild vines, hanging fruit and weeds that reached near head height to the rear fence of the garden.
But for a long time, the police did not believe her encounters with the garden had been so slight. The press certainly didn’t
believe this was the case, and as a consequence the general public were also convinced of her deeper involvement in the murders.
Only a self-prescribed treatment of work had sufficed as an effective escape: telling her own story, the true story, that most had refused to believe, with the help of Peter St John. And then telling the story again with a documentary film-maker, Kyle Freeman, in the film Closer by Darkness than Light. Before she added weight to the feature film adaptation of her book, Nine Days in Hell, by taking the role of executive-producer. Nine Days in Hell was still being seen by a great many people around the world, and the movie was already three months into a theatrical run in the UK. Nine Days was only an interpretation of her story, but Amber acknowledged that the feature film had achieved a greater rehabilitation of her image than her release from police custody and the verdict of the coroner’s inquest.
The film recast her as an innocent victim, a role that had finally begun to stick, to the disappointment of so many for whom fifteen murders and an incalculable number of rapes was not sufficient sensation. They wanted a living scapegoat into which to pour their bile, and in some cases, their desire. But Amber’s newly returned status of victim-survivor would never be universally shared or observed; she only had to look online to understand this.
Revisiting the exacting detail of her experiences, and all that was discovered about 82 Edgehill Road, may have been painful and exhausting enough to leave her close to collapse twice, but the process was just and ultimately rewarding. For Amber, the book and films were not entertainment; they were testimony. And the truth had subsequently made her very rich.
Amber closed her eyes and recalled her first breathless, jumbled accounts at Perry Barr Police Station; how she had wept with relief, horror, sorrow and despair, when trying to speak, to communicate so much, and all at once.
She clenched her eyes shut and moved on.
