by Adam Nevill
She still had a sense of her old self, though the older she became the more distant that girl seemed to be. But she still struggled to discover any enthusiasm for anything. Only her work on the book and film had engaged her. But her concentration was in tatters again. She was too quick to rage.
‘It’s hard to explain. It’s … The food on the ships, it was wonderful, but I couldn’t get excited by it. The new countries I saw. Same thing. I know things are good but I can’t … unclench. My mind is like a closed hand. I can’t open myself.’ She waved her hand in the air and growled to swallow the lump that had blocked her throat. ‘Clothes, a car, all of the beautiful shit in this house, everything I ever dreamed of having, I have it now. But I can’t appreciate it. I can’t. I try. I was doing OK this week. But I’m blocked. Again. It seems irrelevant, superficial, this…’ Amber looked around the room. ‘These things can’t touch me, inside. Not this part of me that is talking to you now. That’s the same. It’s what was underneath that.’
Josh looked sad and couldn’t meet her eye. In silence he recognized what she had said, Amber could tell. He knew what she had lost. Because he too had lost things, lost important things to the darkness.
‘But this place. In here. My first week. I was feeling … content, at least. Even safe. I thought it was because I knew that I had finally found a home. That I was where I was happiest as a child. It was like I was called back here for some reason. Something important, from my childhood, made me come here. But now, after today, I don’t know … Maybe I only feel like I’ve been welcomed here. That something was pleased that I came here, so I wasn’t happy at all for myself. Not really. I’ve felt relief. But maybe not my own relief.’
‘Then why don’t you go back to sea. Take another three months, or six, a year.’
‘I can’t. I can’t run any more. I want to be who I was again. Something has to be buried or burned so that I can be who I was again. I need what they call closure. That’s what it feels like. If I hadn’t come back now, then I would have done later. Why later and not now?’
Time doesn’t matter to her.
Amber eschewed the coffee and poured herself a generous measure of rum. They sat in silence for a while and sipped their drinks.
Eventually Josh stood up and yawned.
Amber climbed off the sofa. She reached out, nervously, and touched his arm. The contact nearly made her cry. ‘Thanks, mate.’
Josh made a growling sound and gave her a quick, tight hug. ‘You’re going to be all right, kid,’ he whispered into the side of her head, then broke from the bear hug and made his way to the stairs.
‘Shout if you need anything. Extra pillow, you know, stuff like that.’
‘I’ve stayed in good hotels, Amber. But I already prefer your place. I’ll be fine. And you make sure you shout if you hear anything, OK? If I can isolate one loose floorboard and put your mind at rest, I won’t be annoyed if you wake me up. Agreed?’
Amber nodded, and then followed Josh up the stairs. Despite all of his reassurance and explanations and wisdom and logic, she didn’t want to be downstairs on her own.
Josh looked over his shoulder from the top of the stairs. ‘And if you hear a chainsaw, it won’t be you-know-who coming through the front door. It’ll be me snoring over in the east wing.’
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Once the light beneath Josh’s door was out, Amber pulled the door of her study closed, as quietly as she was able. For a while she sat at her desk with her face in her hands. Number 82 was no more. The building had been erased from the earth it once contaminated. The remains of the victims had been laid to rest. So how could all of that come back? And here too, where almost no one knew where she was?
They had not been on board the ships, or in the hotels, or in the secure accommodation the police and her legal team had found for her, for the two years after she was carried from Knacker and Fergal’s appropriated domain. But she had definitely seen a shadow outside the living room, that very afternoon, and what had cast the shadow had walked through her home: she had heard the intruder’s footsteps. Fergal had stood in the lane outside her property, and he had wanted Amber to see him.
The dust on the stairs was not ordinary household dust, but a variety of dust she’d seen before, gathering under the beds and in the corners of rooms in another place. But a place that now seemed intent on reforming inside her dreaming mind; what had been buried within its walls and under its floors was exhuming itself inside her nightmares. And such things might not stay within sleep.
How?
She thought about what she could remember of the two recent dreams. An excavation of the garden to exhume human remains had been underway when she dozed that afternoon. And though the farmhouse was very much transformed in her nightmare last night, the dead had entered her home. Each episode had been populated by the ghastly victims of Edgehill Road. The overwhelming advice from her instincts suggested the episodes had been shown to her, in effect transmitted to her.
But how?
She had learned that hauntings in Britain were mostly regarded as having an attachment to places and past events, not to specific individuals in a variety of locations. The farmhouse had no earthly connection to the house in North Birmingham.
So how could they have found you here?
Maybe through the deep, ephemeral and instinctive connection she had always been aware of at the back and sides of her mind. Fergal – if he was truly in Devon, in some form – then had he carried this desolate host to her? If such horror still clung to him and orbited her, then he had to be found, and destroyed.
She would sleep with her gun beneath her pillow.
Amber took down her ‘Bennet’ files from the second steel cabinet, now more intent than ever to resume her familiarization of the case history, and the next part of the story; the part responsible for the majority of the human remains found in the Birmingham house and garden.
As she moved the files onto her desk, she wondered again if she had restarted something by engaging with this material so intensely. And by looking hard again she might make it worse. If that was the case then she carried a connection to the past like a taint in the blood or an anomaly in her genes. If she were a conduit for the Maggie, and the congregation of victims from Birmingham, then reacquaintance might occur anytime, anywhere.
She reopened the Bennet files and began spreading the documents and cuttings about her desk top. Whatever tied a former occupant, or occupants, who had murdered four women around 1919, to the Bennet family, and then connected the Bennets to Fergal Donegal, was at the very root of what occupied the house. And the answer to the question of what cast such a baleful and sinister influence over the various households, from the very beginnings of the building’s life, would require a great leap of imagination; a leap that no one was willing to take on her behalf. So here she was, again.
The Bennets were Peter St John’s almost exclusive obsession, but to her they were the least palatable part of the story.
With the exception of the vast store of Arthur Bennet’s pornographic paraphernalia, and what Fergal had once referred to as ‘Bennet’s pervy tat’, the Bennets had kept no records. They were both dead. Their motivations went to the grave. Others had been assigned the unpleasant task of sifting through the grotesque relics and vulgar artefacts surviving the Bennets’ respective careers as abusers, rapists and murderers.
Harold Bennet had died of a massive stroke in Winson Green Prison in 1985. The house had passed to his son after Arthur was released from his first stint in prison for attempted rape in a local park. Little was known about their relationship when the men shared the house. But Amber was sure the father had not tutored the son; that had been the role of something else that cohabited with them. An idea Peter St John, and near anyone else she had spoken to, refused to even entertain.
Arthur Bennet’s various attempts to create brothels at 82 Edgehill Road were all non-starters too, which is why he’d killed fewer women than his father
; he’d always traded on the local reputation of Bennet senior’s more successful former operations. Arthur’s most lucrative and arrest-free period ended when he killed both of his girls, Olena Kovalik and Simona Doubrava, sometime in 2001 and 2002 respectively. His criminal entrepreneurialism was also repeatedly disturbed by the amount of time he’d spent behind bars: imprisoned four times for attempted rape, indecent assault, common assault and theft, and cautioned for public exposure on Perry Common Playing Fields, as well as for stealing washing in Handsworth.
Numerous other fines were levied against him for nonpayment of bills and handling stolen goods, but nothing that shed any meaningful light on why he and his father emulated, in an increasingly degenerate form, the ritualistic murders of the first four women at the same address when George V sat on the throne of England.
Harold Bennet had left nothing behind in an attic cache to incriminate himself. Nothing personal of the father had survived his son’s long infestation of the house. It was also deemed unlikely that Bennet senior would have kept a diary; the only books found at the address were Haines Manuals for a Ford Sierra, Ford Cortina and Austin Metro, and two old editions of The Guinness Book of Records.
To Amber, what was most significant about Harold’s legacy was that at the time of her own residence, all of the furniture, the fixtures and fittings, had belonged to Harold Bennet and his wife, Mary. Arthur Bennet had made no alterations or additions to the property he’d inherited. He’d either lived alone amongst his parents’ relics or shared the property with others to whom he’d sporadically rented rooms, mostly from 1989 to 2003.
To Amber, the preservation of the parental home did not appear to be a testament to one man’s laziness and poverty, as it had seemed to the investigation; she saw the conservation of the father’s sick realm as a deliberate enshrining of the past, and a testament to what had been served there.
Everything else she flicked through about the Bennets seemed innocuous. Harold Bennet had been a plasterer, a working-class man with a history of drunkenness and violence towards his wife, Mary; a wife beater who eventually murdered his spouse.
Mary had been Harold’s first victim, killed sometime in the mid-1960s. After throttling Mary, he’d wrapped her body in polythene and concealed her remains inside a ground floor fireplace; the fireplace in the same room in which Amber had stumbled across Arthur Bennet’s corpse. Arthur Bennet had died mere feet and one layer of bricks away from his own mother. He may never have known. His father had told Arthur that his mother had ‘run away with a tinker’.
Freed of a marital incumbent, Harold had gone on to kill another six women at the address, while his young son, Arthur, who became his teenage son, lived in the same house. Did young Arthur Bennet know of the murders? Had he ever witnessed one? No one would ever truly know, but it was widely assumed Arthur not only knew, but probably assisted during some form of apprenticeship to his father, before embarking on his own less prolific career as a killer after his father died.
When the police identified the remains of the woman they had disinterred from the ground floor fireplace as belonging to Mary Bennet, Amber also realized that Mary had been the presence that repeatedly asked her for the time. And given the evidence of her recent dreams, it seemed that Mary Bennet’s yearning for the time may not have abated, despite an official burial.
Harold Bennet’s other victims were procured from various sources. He had always provided rooms for known prostitutes, a category to which the victim Angie Hay belonged, who was found under the floor of the street-facing second floor bedroom that Amber had never seen inside.
Harold had also taken in vulnerable women as lodgers and then coerced them into prostitution, as in the case of Ginny MacPherson, who was discovered under the flooring directly beneath the bed that Amber had slept in during her first night in the house.
Both sets of remains had been bound inside polythene.
A factory worker missing since 1967, Susan Hopwood was found with her head mummified in parcel tape beneath the ground floor bedroom, only feet away from Mary Bennet in the fireplace. Hopwood had been on the run from domestic violence. Though it was never established whether Hopwood was buried alive, Amber had cultivated her own thoughts on that subject.
Harold Bennet abducted at least one girl too, Kelly Hughes, whose remains had been discovered beneath floorboards on the first floor, on top of which a bath tub had been mounted when Harold turned a box room into a bathroom, presumably during the year of her death.
All of Harold’s known victims had been reported missing between the years of 1965 and 1981.
Besides those whose identities had been established, the toothless bodies of two nineteen-year-old girls were also discovered within a second floor wall cavity that had once contained an airing cupboard; it was believed that they had been killed by Harold Bennet within days of each other. They were also assumed to have been foreign nationals – perhaps exchange students, tourists, or even hitchhikers.
Amber had referred, in her old notebook, to a presence as ‘the woman who moves’. At the time of the discovery of these two unidentified corpses, she began to believe that the mobile presence she had encountered may have been two separate entities: the presence that climbed into her bed, and the presence that rummaged inside her bags. Though the presence that became a chilling bedfellow had spoken English and had not been foreign.
There was still much to learn, and Peter St John’s obsession with the father and son act also moved attention away from the victims. This seemed grossly unfair, because at 82 Edgehill Road the killing had always been easier than the dying.
Neither Bennet had been religious. They had no connection to anything of a spiritual or an occult nature, or none Peter St John or the police had ever established. As far as the police and media were concerned, the sins of a violent, abusive, alcoholic father were passed on to a son with learning difficulties, who developed his dad’s predatory and aggressive sexuality. But this was an inadequate explanation of why the house’s next generation of violent pimps and killers had adopted the house’s repellent traditions. Amber had always considered the Bennets and Fergal as mere tools, homicidal tools, susceptible vessels for something that found them useful, a presence that compelled others to kill on its behalf: ‘for company’, as Fergal Donegal had once told Knacker in Amber’s presence. But was company the whole story? Perhaps death increased the power and reach of what had been served in that building. Death became her. If so, was Amber to become a tool or a victim? The enormity of that thought made her breath catch. ‘Jesus Christ.’
Every woman killed at the house was murdered by strangulation, suggesting a ritualistic aspect to the murders. Official conclusions at the inquest had settled for ‘copycat behaviour’ in the matter of the close connection between Harold Bennet’s modus operandi and that of whoever had killed the first four women in the 1920s, who were all strangled with a washing line.
Harold Bennet had used garden twine to strangle his victims, before burying their remains in fireplaces, wall cavities and under floorboards. Arthur Bennet had merely deposited his two victims in the garden, in shallow graves, but had strangled each of them with the same garden twine his father had used on all of his known victims. Fergal had used the same twine as Harold and Arthur Bennet to kill his sole female victim, Margaret Tolka. Several spools of the twine were discovered by police in the ground floor flat.
The significant links between the murder of each woman across one hundred years, the use of a ligature and the taking of a trophy, demonstrated to Amber that an entire facet of the bloody history still remained unexplained. The killers changed; the methods and intent remained the same.
So she must have directed them: Black Maggie.
But how can she be here?
* * *
Amber left the study and went to her room. Undressed and sat in bed, propped up by goose-feather pillows, her body warmed by the finest cotton sheets and a duvet covered in Mulberry silk. Trinkets of a lifes
tyle designed to entirely relocate and redesign her away from poverty, its dust and dross, the cheap sub-lets and slum lords, the criminal lowlife, the indignity, the hopelessness of being at the bottom and having less than nothing. And yet here she was, inside her very own palace, feeling that she was still within the grip of history’s dirty hand.
The clock said two forty-five a.m. She had hardly slept the night before and the day had been full of driving and shopping and panic and strange men in her home, searching the rooms for what she had escaped from three years before. Thinking about the Bennets had reduced her to a headachy and nervy state. She was also frightened, but her fear was tinged by the beginnings of a loose and hot anger; a volatile and vengeful anger she could feel inside her teeth.
Amber slid her body under the covers. She was not far from a coma of exhaustion, the kind of marrow-deep fatigue that follows the turning of a tide of terror.
She chose to end her inner debate by revisiting Josh’s logic: Fergal cannot know that you are here … it is virtually impossible … he is probably dead … no trace for three years … he disappeared because he was disappeared by other criminals … they’re all sociopaths and they don’t trust each other … rats and weasels … you opened the case files when you were drunk and had a relapse … that’s all … too much of a coincidence to be anything else … the files, the dreams … just dust … an old house … that’s all …
She was not abandoning her new home. Not to the past. Not to them. Never.
Just try and get through the night.
Don’t go inside the study, not for a while. Pace yourself.
Take a few days off. Go to Cornwall. Look at the sea. Read some books. Eat, drink, walk. Spend time outdoors …
Stay away until the weekend. Peter’s coming. He’ll stay for the weekend … you won’t be alone …
Either feeling marginally more secure, or just too tired to think any more, Amber fell asleep in her brightly lit bedroom.
