by Adam Nevill
They arrived on the first floor of the farmhouse and began searching the rooms again. After they’d completed a search of the second bedroom, including a check of every window lock, Josh spoke without looking at her. ‘I know you think you saw things, unnatural things, in that place, Amber. Saw them and heard them as clearly as you can see and hear me now. And I don’t know how you came to learn certain things about that house that happened years before you were ever there. But none of that helps me.’
He was almost telling her off; she had wrenched him out of Worcester, had screamed at him on the phone, had doubted him.
‘I’m sorry I lost my temper, Josh. I never meant anything by it. I was just so certain that he was here. I was frightened. I don’t doubt you, you know that. It means a great deal to me that you came.’
Josh checked behind the curtains of the second spare room, and nodded in acknowledgement.
Amber worked her fingers into knots, squeezed them tight, and was unaffected by the pain. ‘I once thought that I was seeing things that weren’t there, and also hearing things that weren’t possible. And I am not an irrational person. I was not irrational then. Everyone thinks I was, but I was not. The fact that I rationalized everything and didn’t trust my instincts put me in hell in the first place. My instincts are all I have left, Josh. And I was so sure that I saw him today.’
Josh turned to look at her. ‘He’s not here, Amber. He could not be here. Or even in Devon. I know you are here, and my knowledge of your whereabouts has not been compromised. Your barrister knows you are here, but she would not divulge these details either. Your agent knows you are here, but wouldn’t dare jeopardize her cash cow. Peter St John, does he now know that you are here?’
‘Not yet. But I have to tell him. He’s coming to see me next weekend.’
‘He still chasing a new book?’
Amber nodded. ‘But we’re only catching up on loose ends.’
‘I see. Something I should know about?’
Amber shook her head. ‘I still want the parts of the story that are incomplete. About the first victims.’
‘Which is why you’ve carted all those files into your study.’
Amber nodded, but smarted at Josh’s clear disapproval of her continuing research into the history of 82 Edgehill Road.
Josh sighed and shook his head. ‘What I am alluding to is the improbability of your being discovered. The low risk. It is possible that one of us who knows you live here has been hacked, but I doubt Fergal Donegal would have the wherewithal to do that, or know anyone who might do something like that on his behalf.
‘Remember, he only ever had tenuous links with organized criminals from England, Kosovo and Albania, at a peripheral franchise level. He was small time and only ever on probation for Andrei Makarov. We know he was done a big favour with the loan of the two girls. A favour to be paid back once he’d recruited local talent. Fergal failed as soon as he began. Because he was a psychopath. The kind that ends up in prison, over and over again, who never thinks about the consequences of his violent, impulsive actions. He is not the kind of psycho who ends up in a boardroom running an international company.
‘So Fergal finding you down here, by calling upon investigative criminal resources, is an unlikely scenario. Nor was his arsehole in crime, Knacker, top rank. He was an even smaller potato. If anyone discovered your new identity, and where you are, it would most probably be a journalist. Not Fergal Donegal. And if the press have rumbled this rather tasteful set-up you have down here at the seaside, why have they not gone public?’ Josh stopped talking and came to a standstill outside the study.
Amber nodded. ‘I know. It doesn’t make sense. Not in a logical way. But…’
Josh raised his eyebrows. ‘Can I see the incident room?’
Amber unlocked the door. ‘You’re probably going to need a drink afterwards.’
‘My thoughts exactly. What have you got in?’
SEVENTY-SIX
‘Not bad, this,’ Josh said, swirling the amber liquid around the bottom of his highball glass.
‘As long as you don’t overdo it.’ Amber had switched to black coffee and her elegant cup now steamed on the table.
She and Josh sat at right angles to each other: Josh on the chair, Amber on the sofa with her feet pulled off the floor and a cushion clasped to her stomach. She felt as if the cushion was pinioning her to the seat to prevent her from a frantic pacing about the room.
Josh raised an eyebrow. ‘The same can be said for other things.’
‘I felt it was time to go through it again.’
‘I can see that. You think I will find him?’
‘Who else have I got?’
‘The police were thorough.’
‘For as long as time and resources allowed.’
‘I’ve mostly followed the same leads and lines of inquiry they did. The routes are finite.’
‘I think he is alive.’
Josh pursed his lips and considered his response. ‘I don’t. And neither do the police. Andrei Makarov and his associates have a deep reach inside the British Isles. It’s not unlikely that they rubbed Fergal out. He’d damaged their merchandise. Two of Makarov’s top girls were in that house with you. If Fergal put in a call for assistance to Andrei, which he may have been forced to do after you’d finished with him, Makarov’s cronies would have whacked him as soon as the news of Margaret Tolka’s murder broke. Not to mention the fact that he put Svetlana in hospital for a month. And he’d stolen their money too, which was Andrei Makarov’s money, in Makarov’s mind. Reprisals against Fergal would have been severe. Conclusive. Evidence dissolved with the same concoction you threw in his face. Because that’s where Fergal got the acid from: Andrei Makarov’s gang.
‘But let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that Fergal hid somewhere. An abandoned building, the house of a mentally disabled person, or a pensioner that he used as a hostage for a while. Such things have been known to happen. But it’s now been three years. Do you think a man that unstable and sadistically violent would have managed to maintain his cover? With that temper? If all that you said about him was true, I don’t think he could have contained himself for twenty-four hours.
‘Even with some medical assistance from the nurse he killed, he wouldn’t have gotten far. You probably blinded him in one eye, at least. He must have gone mad from the agony of the burns. And he had nowhere to go to ground. Who could Fergal have called for help in the West Midlands? I am certain he had no connection to the area besides Arthur Bennet, who was a loner, like his father. The Bennets were never connected to any gangs in Birmingham. So how can you be sure that he’s still alive?’
‘You know that I don’t know. But everything I said to the police is true.’
‘I know.’
‘Josh, can I ask you something?’
‘Not if it’s what I think you’re going to ask me.’
‘If … you find him. If he is alive. I don’t want there being any chance of him escaping again.’
‘Hold up.’
‘No chance of him coming here.’
‘If he is found, he’d do life.’
‘That’s not even fifteen years.’
‘In a psychiatric hospital on a very secure wing. I shouldn’t imagine he’d ever get out in your lifetime for three murders.’
‘They could put him in Broadmoor. That’s near here. I don’t want there being any chance of him ever getting to me.’
‘I am not an assassin, Amber.’
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Josh eventually checked his watch. ‘You’ll have to show me to the servants’ quarters soon, kiddo. I’ve got an early start. I need to be in Surrey by noon tomorrow. The children of a man who owns one of the Arab Emirates want to go to Chessington World of Adventures.’
The disappointment on her face was obvious.
Josh sighed. ‘There’s some serious protection strung around this place. Anyone scales a wall and the boys will be on
their way. They’re a good outfit; you can rely on them. It’s why I picked them. Not to mention the arsenal in your bedside cabinet. And you sleep in a locked room. You’re safer than the Duchess of Cambridge, and you don’t do public engagements.’ He smiled, but Amber struggled to acknowledge his attempt to reassure her.
‘But…’
‘What?’
Amber turned her head in the direction of the kitchen.
Josh tried to smother his smile. ‘House dust.’
‘How did it get in here? Those aren’t a few specks. But clumps of dust and black hair. And I know where I saw them last.’
‘Your hair is black.’
‘But not that long. And the dreams. The horrible dreams. Two, that came at the same time as the dust. Nightmares like I used to have. I would have dealt with the dreams and the dust, but what I saw outside … It’s like … It was a sign.’
‘I can’t help you with those kinds of signs, Amber. Other than to make an educated guess that after you cracked the seal on those files yesterday, and got them all out for a thorough going over, while shit-faced, I’d have been very surprised if you’d not had a nightmare. Not to mention seeing people peeping over the garden gate. Baby steps, love. Baby steps.’
‘That’s what I told myself. But here we are.’
Josh looked at his hands. The glimmer of mirth in his eyes had gone. He looked older, his features subtly subsiding, his eyes sadder, less focused. ‘We both know there are things you will never forget, Amber. Ghosts, if you like, that those of us who have been in certain situations have to live with. Stuff we need to lock down.’
He gathered himself and looked around the room, released another weary breath. ‘Look at this bloody place. It’s not half bad, kiddo. So why bring all of that in here? You’re asking for trouble. Let this journo, Peter, take care of things. Meet him on neutral ground when he has something useful to tell you. But until he does, just give yourself a break and enjoy this. Get that crap out of your study. Put a treadmill inside there, a rowing machine. It’ll do you more good.’
He leant forward in his chair. ‘Just how many girls your age have their own farmhouse by the sea, and all to themselves? Especially girls who had nothing not so long ago and who are very lucky to be alive.’
Amber looked around her living room. ‘I refuse to feel guilty about this place.’
‘No one is asking you to. But there are no more warehouses, call centres, or latte promotions in the mall for you, kid. The service industry is here to serve you now. Don’t let old shadows spoil what is a very nice view. Because you’ll cripple yourself with it. You won. They lost. Now enjoy yourself. You’re young, you’re not bad looking, you’re loaded. If you start living a normal life again, you’ll meet someone.’
Amber threw her head back and laughed derisively. ‘Josh, people believed I was a prostitute in that house. And after what I did to those bastards … Men will always think I am a monster. They’re afraid of me. And the men who are too interested in that side of things in my past, I don’t want to meet. I can’t have my history being part of a future relationship. But I would have to tell someone who I was close to. I don’t think it could work. Not yet. Not for a long while.’
She finished by offering Josh a tired smile, hoping it would suffice as a message: believe me, I have my reasons for being a celibate recluse.
The famous picture of her appeared in her mind: the one in which she was wearing a hooded top, her face without make-up, eyes darkened by insomnia. A photograph shown on the enormously popular online Puff Post site every day for a week, accompanied by garish headlines: CATCH A GLIMPSE OF STEPHANIE BOOTH: SAINT OR MONSTER?
The photograph was taken on one of the many occasions that she was taken back to the address to assist the police search of the house. A newspaper had been tipped-off by a police officer and informed of her movements. A photographer disguised himself as a forensic detective to rip a slit in the plastic screens surrounding the crime scene so he could take a picture of her being led into the house; it was the first picture of Stephanie Booth the world saw after she was found.
By the time of the inquest, three other police officers had been suspended for selling information about her to the press. Her mobile phone was bugged twice.
The picture of her with hair tied back and wearing a tailored black suit, complemented by court shoes and flesh-toned tights, as she entered court with her barrister, was the picture that really began the frenzy.
STEPHY, THE BLACK WIDOW, CHARGED £80 TO WALK ON VICTIMS.
That second picture and the fabricated stories began the marriage proposals; they came in thick and fast from all over the world. For months after the second picture appeared, she had even been known in the tabloids, and in social media, as the ‘Castratrix’. Apparently she had performed ‘inhumane acts of sadistic revenge’ against her pimps in a dispute over money, while wearing high heels and provocative clothing.
She became an object of curious fascination to men almost as soon as the original stories broke about the murders in a brothel; for a long while, it seemed male fantasies had refashioned her experience to their own tastes.
Amber doubted Josh would ever be ready for her apocryphal tales of courtship. Like the one about the portly man who repeatedly photographed himself naked save for a rubber pig mask, and sent Amber the images through her agent and lawyers: photographs with an emphasis on his shrivelled genitalia. The man had always addressed Amber as ‘Mistress’ and requested she burn off his ‘sissy prick’ before slaughtering him at her leisure. He wanted to pay her fifty thousand pounds for the honour. His only stipulation was that she wear patent black high heels and paint her toe nails blood-red as she ended his miserable existence. The police discovered he was a hedge fund manager and the correspondence ended.
Besides the more radical feminist activists, and until Kyle Freeman made Closer by Darkness Than Light, the only sympathetic and unnervingly accurate portrait of her experience appeared in the form of an installation, made by a British artist, who recreated a miniature replica of 82 Edgehill Road out of animal bones. He then papered the inside walls with pictures of female murder victims and their killers. He called the sculpture ‘The Edge of Where?’.
Amber had found photographs of the installation too difficult to look at for long, but of everything that was interpreted about her, the installation was the best depiction of the place she had survived. The sculpture sold for two million pounds.
Everybody loves a survivor.
Her experiences were only now kept alive by the success of Nine Days in Hell, and the genital torture films that were emerging in Eastern Europe on small budgets: a sub-genre of torture porn that always featured a kidnapped woman in a haunted house; a young blonde woman resembling her old self, who became possessed and resorted to a torture that involved the genital mutilation of her captors.
She had just been a minimum wage temp, who couldn’t afford to go to university, and only owned three pairs of shoes. There was nothing extraordinary about her, never had been; nor was there anything special about most victims of killers. People were reluctant to accept she was just a girl who had rented a dusty room in a dismal house in North Birmingham. And yet she had spawned an industry of exploitation that she had never fully understood.
She’d felt better for as long as Josh was talking, and for a few moments afterwards, but no longer. ‘I wonder if I should have come back. To this country.’
‘You had your reasons. And what was the alternative? Staying at sea for the rest of your life?’
‘Maybe, if it came to it. I felt I was…’
‘Getting better?’
Amber gave him the evil eye. ‘Recovering. I think I might even have been happy on a ship for the rest of my life.’
‘You had to stop and find a home eventually. And wherever we may go, or find ourselves, I believe we remain the same people. I don’t think we can change, not in any meaningful sense. New places don’t change us. Not really. Because no one
travels light. We just have to learn to take less baggage with us and to pack our cases more carefully, and then make a fist of it. But if you ever need someone to watch your back on the Queen Mary, I’m up for it.’
Amber opened her hands and looked at them; they’d finally stopped trembling. ‘I came back to find them, Josh. Because it’s not finished. I didn’t come back to be found. And that’s how I feel now, found.’
‘It’s in your head, kid.’
‘You wouldn’t understand, mate. But I can sense a connection. Always have done. I think he was there today, outside. Maybe not physically. But there all the same. I think they know…’
‘Know what?’
‘Where I am, and where I was, all this time. They were just waiting.’
‘Like I said, kid, that’s the past. It’s always waiting, always. Simple things, anything at all really, can bring it up. Up inside us. It doesn’t go away. We just have to learn to stop the past in its tracks when first we feel its reach. That’s what I was told.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Sometimes. But you have to try. Or you’re stuck back then. Stuck on a loop that goes round and round in tighter circles until you snap.’
Amber twisted her fingers, eyed the bottle of rum. ‘I’m not the same, Josh. They took something out of me. In that house. Something small, subtle, but significant, that’s hard to pin down, because I don’t know if I can remember what it was that has gone. But I know … I am sure that something is gone. Gone from me. I thought … I want it to be over. For him … For him and her to be found. Then maybe everything can rest. In me. In the others. Because I am not sure anything is at rest.’
