by Adam Nevill
There had been treatment for her injuries, and her clothes bearing three blood types were taken away and put inside evidence bags. Within hours of her arrest for Knacker’s murder, she had told the solicitor appointed to her and the detectives that first interviewed her that she believed Ryan Martin and a prostitute from Albania, known as Margaret, were buried in the garden, and probably inside polythene and probably behind the oak tree.
She had been correct on both accounts.
Two of the house’s last three fatalities had suffered massive head traumas. Ryan Martin had been kicked unconscious and then finished off with a house brick. He had to be identified by a distinctive birthmark on his left ankle.
The girl she had known as Margaret had also suffered a massive head trauma, but had been killed by strangulation with ligature; her killer had left the garden twine in place and within her plastic shroud. The spool of twine the garrotte had been cut from was discovered in the kitchen of the disused ground floor flat.
What the press never knew at the time was that, unlike all of the other victims, whose spindly and disarticulated remains would soon be discovered and brought back into the world from various unconsecrated tombs scattered about the property, only Margaret and Ryan were buried fully dressed. The only other distinguishing feature of their murders was missing hair and teeth.
Once her week-old remains were recovered from a shallow grave, a large section of Margaret’s hair was found to have been removed post-mortem. Ryan had lost six teeth, two from his upper jaw, four from the bottom. Only four of these teeth were ever recovered by forensic detectives.
For most of the life of the investigation, this was not seen as significant when considering everything else that would soon, literally, be unearthed at the address. The inquest only served to record the known facts of the case and the details of her own gruelling experience. What few were able to accept was the greater and older mystery that she alluded to, and that remained unsolved. The role of the stolen teeth and hair in the story would never be understood until Fergal Donegal was apprehended; or, as Amber hoped, his own tatty remains were uncovered in a place as lonely and miserable as the one where he had interred his victims.
Amber closed her eyes and clenched her hands until her fingernails hurt her palms. Reliving this was going to be the hardest part of being alone in the house. The pain in her hands returned her to the present. She opened her moist eyes and stared at the next headline.
SIXTY-EIGHT
GARDEN OF EVIL: TWO MORE BODIES.
Amber rose from her chair to touch the pictures of Simona Doubrava and Olena Kovalik, pinned side by side beneath the tabloid headline that took the investigation and media interest to a whole new level: the game-changers.
One week after the discovery of Ryan and Margaret, the rear grounds of the entire property were excavated on her insistence that there were more bodies. And five feet from the poorly interred bodies of Margaret Tolka and Ryan Martin, two other sets of human remains were discovered on the first day of the excavation.
She had never subsequently considered one girl without thinking of the other; they were even found buried in the garden like occupants of a family plot. The horrible and painful way in which they were extinguished at the hands of Arthur Bennet, and embraced by the arms of death, was something the two girls also shared.
Halfway through her third or fourth glass of rum, Amber felt a surge of bitterness that became a cinnamon-tinged reflux. This point in the investigation signalled the first indication of police unease. And the distrust in her statements lingered until she was finally released without charge, one year after being stretchered out of the house covered in Svetlana and Knacker McGuire’s blood.
Six feet from the oak tree, Olena Kovalik had been found in the overgrown garden; she was lying face down beneath three foot of black, stony soil and refuse-strewn weeds. Naked and wrapped in an opaque polythene sheet, Kovalik’s remains had been reduced over time to a foul soup of hair, decomposed tissue and bodily organs, through which mottled bones had protruded like dead tree branches from a marsh.
Forensic analysis of the position of Kovalik’s leg bones, and the position of the ligature, created a belief that her ankles had once been tied to her throat by garden twine. This had been the cause of death: the twine had slowly and fatally strangled the twenty-four-year-old woman, but only after she had been buried alive beneath the cold earth.
Olena Kovalik’s grave had been dug into the uneven ground ten feet before the garden shed, itself situated close to the rear fence and a row of fir trees screening 82 Edgehill Road from the adjoining properties in the next street.
Simona’s remains were found three feet away from Olena’s in much the same condition, face down again. But it was believed that although Doubrava’s wrists and ankles had been tied, and she had been strangled, the girl had additionally been buried with her pelvis and buttocks raised over a crude cairn of broken house bricks, as if in provocation. In death as in life she had been denied dignity.
Olena Kovalik was Ukrainian; Simona Doubrava was Czech. They were known to have worked as prostitutes at 82 Edgehill Road between 1999 and 2001. They were identified by their dental records and gold fillings. Their teeth were intact. Determining missing hair was not possible, but each girl had a toe missing. Murdered by strangulation and then mutilated. Murders attributed to the life-long sex offender Arthur Bennet, deceased; the last owner of what would soon become the most notorious house in Britain.
Amber sniffed and wiped the tears from her cheeks.
Only one of the girls had ever been reported missing: Simona Doubrava.
Olena Kovalik’s family had not notified the authorities of her disappearance, a fact that Amber realized was still capable of making her cry whenever she saw the girl’s photograph. The same fate of contemptuous neglect would probably have been her own had she died with her face wrapped inside Knacker’s cheap plastic bag.
When Amber first saw pictures of Olena, photographs mostly from various European police departments who had arrested the girl for soliciting and minor drugs offences in Belgium and Germany, Stephanie immediately knew where she had seen the girl before: standing in the garden beside an abandoned and soiled mattress, smoking a cigarette.
Olena Kovalik had turned tricks to feed a drug habit that an old boyfriend and petty criminal had introduced her to in 1996. How she came to Britain was not known, but she had probably begun working for Bennet voluntarily, though the full facts of their arrangement were not known and probably never would be; few records were kept in the criminal underworld.
More was known about Simona Doubrava. She had left home and crossed the borders of her country without realizing her visa was fraudulent; she had thought she was going to work as a PA to a managing director of a software company in Munich, but soon discovered she had been duped by an organized criminal gang and was put to work in various brothels across Europe, initially in Odessa where she was forced to pleasure long-distance freight drivers.
By the time Simona Doubrava was shipped to England, prostitution was all she had known. Effectively, she had been a sex slave from the age of seventeen. She was acquired by Bennet through someone he’d met in prison, while serving time for attempted rape in 1997.
Several customers of 82 Edgehill Road around the time of Simona Doubrava’s death were traced; two had even come forward to assist the police investigation. Both men recognized the petite, raven-haired girl who bore a distinct resemblance to a young Jane Seymour. They said she had spoken good but heavily accented English.
To widespread horror, it was believed that Simona had probably never actually been outside 82 Edgehill Road once she’d first entered the building; two witnesses admitted she had been secured to the bed while ‘entertaining’ them. One was certain he had met Simona Doubrava on many occasions in a first floor room – the very room, Amber realized, that was next to her own at the address.
When the same witness, who’d been a regular customer at the ho
use, was told by Arthur Bennet that Simona was no longer working from number 82, and that the girl had returned home to Poland, the witness had become suspicious but had felt unable to share his concerns. At the time he had been married with three children, but the witness had known Simona was Czech and not Polish because they had often spoken about Prague.
The witness, or her ‘boyfriend’ as he referred to himself, had been upset by the girl’s sudden departure and admitted to having fallen in love with her. He’d always wondered what had become of her, and even claimed that he and Simona Doubrava had discussed her escape from Bennet, whom she loathed. It is possible that such a scheme for Simona Doubrava’s liberation had hastened her death. As Amber knew, the house had an uncanny way of learning everything about a person.
Against the advice of her solicitor, Amber had insisted on telling the detectives that she had never been sure, at the start of her residency, whether the other girls that she had seen or heard inside the house were even alive. She assured the police that she had seen Olena Kovalik in the garden on two occasions; and possibly once more too, ascending the stairs and then entering a room on the second floor.
Enough evidence of Olena Kovalik’s hair was discovered to attest to the fact that she had indeed once occupied the improperly cleaned second floor room.
Amber also speculated that it had been the Ukrainian, Simona Doubrava, who had wept nightly in the room next to her own on the first floor. An exhaustive forensic sweep of that room also confirmed Amber’s hunch, with the discovery of just enough DNA belonging to Doubrava.
Neither the police, nor the judiciary, nor the press believed in ghosts, which disinclined them to believe Amber, despite the uncanny accuracy of her testimony. The investigators surmised that Amber had been told by her captors, ‘the McGuires’, which rooms had once belonged to the murdered women, and that they must have received the same information from the girls’ killer, Arthur Bennet, before he died of pneumonia caused by exposure in the bedroom of the ground floor flat. Which was exactly what her solicitor advised Amber would happen if she ever claimed to have seen or heard Doubrava and Kovalik at the address, because the girls had been murdered over a decade before she ever set foot in Birmingham. And, as everyone knows, the dead don’t speak, or move.
Amber insisted she had experienced their apparitions, and the supernatural direction of her testimony contributed to the success of her book, the popularity of the Kyle Freeman documentary, and the record-breaking success of the Hollywood film. But the paranormal angle that Amber championed accounted for officialdom’s distaste for both her and her testimony, as well as the total condemnation by the other victims’ surviving families. And that had been the hardest thing of all to endure.
You saying that my daughter is not at peace? That she is still in hell? That he is still raping them … You are wicked, wicked … as wicked as he was. How could you? My Kelly. My girl. My little girl …
Amber would never forget the day of the inquest when the elderly mother of Kelly Hughes, whose remains were found beneath the first floor bathroom, broke down and had to be removed from the room. And as Amber thought of the scene again, her eyes thickened afresh with tears.
‘I am not a liar’. Amber had stated that simple fact over and over again to police officers and lawyers and psychiatrists and counsellors and horrified parents for one entire year.
Her own father had never lied and she had followed the example of the kindest man she had ever known. And in the darkest places only kindness matters.
SIXTY-NINE
HELL HOUSE: GIRL BURIED UNDER BATH.
There she was, young and blue-eyed and blonde and happy. Kelly Hughes. A musician, a devout Christian, unquestionably a virgin, who had taken a place at the Birmingham Conservatoire to study violin but disappeared one week before term started, presumably abducted from a bus stop in West Bromwich in 1979. Never to be seen again until her bones and their parchment flesh, the colour of age-spotted papyrus, were brought lipless and grimacing from beneath a cheap bath on the first floor of 82 Edgehill Road.
Strangled and wrapped in polythene. But not murdered and hidden by Fergal or Knacker, because Hughes had died twenty-seven years before the McGuires’ reign as the kings of ruin and depravity at number 82; nor had Kelly Hughes died in the grubby clutches of the convicted sex offender Arthur Bennet.
It was soon determined by the age of Kelly’s remains that Arthur Bennet had been a mere apprentice to a master. And the master was Harold Bennet, his own father; a man who had murdered seven women inside the building.
Amber closed her eyes. The darkness juddered behind her eyelids. She stood up before the judder became a swoop, went for a window to gulp fresh air. Then paused and decided against opening the study window. She closed the blinds instead.
Too much. Too much rum. Too many memories, too much horror. Too much all at once.
Amber left the study and closed the door on it all.
Number 82 had pulled her back inside itself; yanked her out of comfort and back between the dim brownish walls, close to the relics the house had reluctantly given up after her escape.
The house had been demolished; every trace of the building to its black foundations had been removed and covered with cement, poured deep and wide. There was no number 82 any more. Between numbers 80 and 84 there was a smooth concrete surface that Birmingham City Council swept twice a week. And in the middle of the concrete plane stood a simple memorial, upon which fresh flowers were still thrown over floral tributes that had withered and blackened.
But the house had maintained a second life inside her mind for three years; in a quiet back street of her memories, 82 Edgehill Road had been rebuilt, brick by brick. And Amber had just called again upon a house that was still full of voices and footsteps and the cries of women and fierce white faces contorted into snarls that spat and shouted …
… and they rose inside their plastic shrouds …
… and round the table in the black room they still peered at the ceiling in ecstasy …
… around their hidden feet she uncoiled heavily and …
… opened white eyes.
‘No!’
Amber wanted to slip her fingers inside her mind and pluck out, from the moist black roots, the returned images of the slim female bones, browned by age and carelessly abandoned inside silty polythene wrappers. And she wanted to scrape out the photographed faces with their freckles and smiles and braces and mousy hair faded by time and the sunlight’s bleach. Because they were all inside her mind again and jostling for attention. Pleading for release and for salvation. Like they had when she’d lain shivering in the old beds of those strange rooms.
But Amber had told them they must stay on the walls and outside of her heart; that was the deal. And not pour through her mind like screaming children released from the iron doors of some terrible school, every time she looked at their faces.
As she moved away from the study on unsteady legs, the spiteful words and hurtful looks of those who’d investigated and interviewed her also flickered alive, and loudly broadcast their voices from her mind’s memory tracks, all on repeat with no fade. They were interspersed with looped flashes of interview rooms, courtrooms, ante chambers, and so many other municipal rooms that she had lost count of; plain rooms she had sat inside, on plastic chairs, to repeat her story, and repeat her story, and repeat her story …
You mutilated him. You burned the genitals off his body with acid.
You cut his tongue in half with your dirty fingernails.
You cut his throat with broken glass.
You stamped on his face while he was in agony.
You threw acid in a man’s face.
Disproportionate response … disproportionate response … what were you thinking?… You expect us to believe that you saw ghosts?
‘No! No! Piss off! I am not a liar!’
Inside her own mind she could return to that house at any time, just like she had done every day for the first year
in custody.
The police had tried to grind the truth out of her with their raised voices in their plain rooms; the very same truth that she had uttered within three hours of being carried out of that place on a stretcher.
Too much. Too hasty.
One thing at a time. She had been careless. Was drunk. Hadn’t paid attention to how many of those spicy rums had been slipping down her throat so easily, unlocking inner doors like gatecrashing oafs at a house party; doors that should only be opened one by one, day by day, week by week, and not too many at once. Time could rewind quicker than she could think.
In the corridor outside her study, Amber stopped moving until her vision and balance were partially, but not wholly, restored. Applying more effort than dignity was ever comfortable with, she carefully moved to her bedroom.
She turned on all of the first floor lights as she made uneasy progress through the farmhouse, including all of the lights in her room, before she undressed and climbed into her bed.
SEVENTY
They were patting their hands against the walls of the house.
Outside the building in the total darkness of a rural night, the thumps of poorly coordinated arms, that sought and eventually found the windows and doors, carried up to where she lay in bed.
Amidst the bumps and scrapings there came whispers from voices either dreary and muffled with sleep, or sharpened at the foothills of a private panic.
‘What is my name?… before here … that time … nowhere … to where the other … the cold … is my name?…’
Amber shivered in the cold and tried to remember where she was. She could not understand why the room around her was so dark. Instinctively, she knew it should not be like this.
Someone below the window was talking. Maybe not to her, though she could not be sure. ‘And then you said … I said … I wouldn’t … unreasonable … but who was I … you, you told me … you swore … it was … meant something … a sign … frightened, the more I … and now I know…’
