The House of Ashes

by Stuart Neville

  “Maybe try and stay out of the spark’s way today,” he said, not looking at her.

  “You mean the electrician?” she asked, retrieving her phone.

  “You’ve no call to be talking to him,” he said. “Just let him get on with his work.”

  “Maybe I could get out of the house for a while,” Sara said, lifting the two cups and the plate, bringing them to the sink. “If you left me the car, I could—”

  “I need the car,” Damien said. He gathered his jacket and laptop case. “Look, just stay out of his way. There’s nothing you need to talk to him about.”

  “I’ll go for a walk,” she said as he passed her on the way to the hall. “Actually, I thought I could go to the care home, see how that woman’s doing.”

  He stopped in the doorway and turned to look at her, his eyes narrow and searching.

  “You what?”

  “I keep thinking about her. I don’t think she has anybody. Maybe it’d be good for her to have a visitor. It’s a couple of miles walk, I think, but I could do with the exercise.”

  He became still and quiet for a moment, staring at a distant point, his mind working. Then he came back to himself, nodded, a decision made.

  “No,” he said. “I need you here while the work’s going on.”

  “You said I’ve to leave the electrician alone. But you want me here. Which is it?”

  She held his stare, would not drop her gaze, even as a deeper part of her mind said, danger, beware. Don’t push him. But she needed to talk to the woman. Needed to. She let her arms stretch, let the cardigan’s sleeves creep up past her wrists, letting the red, angry tracks on one forearm into the light.

  “Just do what I’ve asked you,” he said, his voice sharp and flat like a blade. “Please.”

  Sara swallowed and said, “I think I’ll do what I want.”

  Damien stepped out of the doorway, came close to her. As he opened his mouth to speak, there came a knock on the door.

  “That’ll be Tony,” Sara said.

  Damien glared at her for a moment, reached for her right sleeve, pulled it back down to her wrist, then went back to the doorway and the hall beyond. He opened the front door, revealing Tony on the step, his toolbox in one hand, a backpack in the other.

  “Morning,” Tony said. “Here, the supplier didn’t have those switch plates in yet. He told me he’ll have them by lunchtime. I’ll go and get them then, all right?”

  Damien didn’t answer. He brushed past Tony and went to his car. Tony entered the house and closed the front door behind him. He leaned into the kitchen.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  Sara forced a smile, snugged her hands into the cardigan’s pockets. “Yes. Can I get you anything?”

  “Maybe later,” he said, setting his toolbox on the floor. “I need to get on, but I brought you these.”

  He carried the backpack over to the island and placed it on the worktop. Sara watched as he unzipped it and pulled out a bundle of yellowed newspapers.

  “There wasn’t much,” he said. “A few Belfast Telegraphs, a couple of News Letters, and an Ulster Gazette.”

  She stood confused for a moment before she remembered he’d promised to look in his mother’s attic for old newspapers with stories about the house. A sickly chill appeared in her stomach as she realised she wasn’t sure how much she really wanted to know.

  Tony spread them out in front of her, eight newspapers in all.

  “That’s them in order of date,” he said.

  She read the headlines. Black letters screamed over yellow.

  Police Seek Identity of Mystery Child.

  Massacre on Family Farm.

  Five Dead in Farmhouse Shooting.

  Son Suspected of Killing Family, Then Self.

  “My God,” Sara whispered, placing a hand on her stomach.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t read them,” Tony said. “I can take them away.”

  “No,” Sara said. “I should read them. I should know.”

  As Tony left to go about his work, she opened the first newspaper, feeling it dry and decayed against her skin, the words spidering across the pages, spelling out the horror.

  She sat on the stool and read.

  Sara spent more than two hours reading through the articles, following the events as best she could. Not only what had happened in this house, but outside, in the streets and towns of this place. A history of which she was only vaguely aware. The turn of the decade, the fifties turning to the sixties, and like the rest of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland was recovering from the ruination of the Second World War. Austerity was the norm, except for the most wealthy, and even the rich found some luxuries hard to come by. The IRA were active along the border, moving from the Republic into the North, targeting police and military outposts. Headlines spoke of attacks and assassinations, and men interned without trial by both governments.

  In the midst of it all, little Mary Jackson, believed to be at most twelve years old, though no one could be entirely sure. A girl who didn’t exist until she wandered into a grocer’s shop one early morning, dripping in blood.

  Sara worked her way through the pieces, stitching together a picture of what had happened. At first, they knew nothing about this child, where she had come from, what she had endured. As Buchanan the grocer had told Sara, it was a few days before the girl spoke, and even then, she gave the doctors and the police nothing coherent. A week passed before she spoke a name, and then an explosion of headlines, each more frantic than the last.

  The first piece focused on the child, as if she were some bloodied angel who had appeared from nowhere. Then the bodies were found, and the glee between the lines of the stories was almost tangible.

  The men were identified straightaway: Ivan Jackson, sixty-two, and his sons, Thomas, forty-one, and George, thirty-nine. The identity of the two dead women remained a mystery for several more days. Ivan Jackson had been widowed years ago, left to rear his sons on his own. Word around the village was that there’d been a daughter, but no one could say for sure. Neither of the younger Jacksons had ever married, not even courted any of the local girls, as far as anyone knew. The police continued to work with Mary, trying to build a picture of what went on at the farmhouse. Eventually, she gave them two names: Joy and Noreen. Finally, the women were identified.

  Joy Turkington, missing for almost thirteen years, since she was fourteen. She had left her parents’ Armagh home one evening after a heated argument. Her parents had wanted her to remain in school, but she wanted to leave and get a job. She was last seen talking with a man in a pub in the town centre. She was buried in the graveyard at St. Mark’s Parish Church. The article had a photograph of her parents in the funeral procession, walking behind her coffin as if to their own graves.

  Noreen Weaver, born in the Lisburn Road Workhouse in Belfast. A known thief and a prostitute, already a record of arrests and convictions for minor offences before she disappeared at the age of fifteen. Not being from respectable stock, no one much cared about her absence from the street corners she had frequented. Fifteen years she’d been missing before an aunt identified her corpse in the mortuary at the Royal Victoria Hospital. The aunt refused to take the body, and Noreen was given a pauper’s funeral.

  A public inquiry was called by the Stormont government. Many people testified, but Mary Jackson did not, as a doctor had deemed her unfit. Instead, the inquiry relied on transcripts of interviews between her and the investigating police officers, along with statements from the medical professionals who had cared for her.

  Sara continued to read, the story clarifying.

  As far as the police could ascertain, the two women and the child had been living in the dug-out cellar of the farmhouse. The women had been in reasonable health, given the circumstances. Mary was small for her age, indicating a lack of good-qual
ity nutrition. There were medicines in the home, intended for the farm’s livestock, but probably used for the women. Their dental health was poor; they had been given toothbrushes and toothpaste, but a lack of proper care meant cavities and decay had gone untreated.

  Investigators speculated that the women and the girl had been used as house slaves, cleaning, tidying and cooking for the men. Post-mortem examinations indicated that both adult women had given birth to at least one child, possibly more, and it was assumed they had also been used for sexual gratification. Whether they were shared among the men or each took a wife, of sorts, was unclear.

  Sara looked to the door across the kitchen, the one that led to the basement. She remembered the feeling of walking on graves and could not suppress a shiver. It took some effort to read on.

  Mary Jackson had stated that she had always lived in the basement and had no memory of anywhere else. It was logical, therefore, to assume that she was the daughter of one of the captive women, sired by one of the men. There had been other children, but evidently none had survived. One of the inquiry judges asked if Mary had been violated similarly to the adult women; the doctor on the stand stated that he did not know and had felt a physical examination to determine such would be unnecessarily cruel and invasive without being conclusive.

  Sara turned to a photograph of the girl and recalled the grocer’s words: like a doll. And she was. Small next to the nurse she was pictured with, her face dark with fear and mistrust. Sara wondered, what did she see? What did she know that could never ever be said aloud?

  Mary had appeared at the grocer’s door at around 6:30 a.m. on the morning of the 17th May. As far as the inquiry could determine, at some point on the evening of the 16th May, an altercation had broken out in the kitchen. Joy Turkington had been severely beaten, her nose, left orbital socket, and jaw all broken, along with two ribs. Her left lung had collapsed, and she would eventually have died without medical treatment. Before that could happen, she was shot once, the bullet passing through her skull. The weapon was a Lee-Enfield rifle, presumed to belong to Thomas Jackson; he had served in World War Two and had most likely brought the weapon home as a souvenir.

  The exact sequence of events was never ascertained, only that Thomas Jackson had been shot a total of four times, and Ivan Jackson had been bludgeoned to death with the butt of the rifle, its magazine having been emptied of its five-round capacity.

  Noreen Weaver died from a single bullet that entered her back and exited through her chest. The coroner believed that she had been fleeing the kitchen when her murderer, believed to be George Jackson, fired on her with a Webley revolver, killing her almost instantly. George Jackson then went upstairs, where he sat on his bed, pressed the Webley’s muzzle to his forehead, and pulled the trigger.

  Sara pictured the bed she shared with her husband, upstairs. She pictured the depression of a man’s weight on the mattress. The lurch as his body fell.

  “Stop it,” she said aloud, and resumed reading.

  From beginning to end, the coroner estimated the entire episode lasted no more than a few minutes. Five lives ended in hardly any time at all. Amidst the horror, one detail struck Sara as odd: the Webley revolver had been identified as being issued to an officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Sergeant Ronald Jennings, aged thirty-one. He had gone missing some weeks before and was presumed to have been the victim of an abduction by the IRA. The Ulster Gazette seemed to be local to the small city of Armagh, where Sergeant Jennings had lived, and the last article she read outlined how the hopes raised of finding the policeman had been dashed when searches at the farm revealed no trace of him or the car he’d been driving the evening of his disappearance. No explanation was ever offered for how the weapon came into the possession of George Jackson. As far as Sara could tell, the official line remained that Jennings had been taken by the IRA.

  And what about little Mary Jackson? According to the police officers who interviewed her, as soon as the gunfire started, she fled the house and hid in the cowshed at the rear of the yard. She did not emerge until morning when she walked into the nearby village.

  Walking at dawn, alone on these country roads. Sara imagined the child, terrified in the early light. And as an ageing woman, making the same walk in reverse, coming back here, more than sixty years later. Still terrified. Still alone.

  Terrified. Alone.

  Sara knew that feeling. And more, she was terrified of being alone. Perhaps she had always known that about herself but could never admit it.

  She closed the newspaper and sat still for a time, aware of the cool around her, the spaces between the walls, the empty basement below. She was glad of the occasional noise from Tony’s work, the clatter and rattle of tools picked up and put down.

  If she turned her head and leaned to the side, she would be able to see the red stains on the floor. But she would not look. She had seen too much, and now she wanted to be gone from here.

  She found Tony upstairs in her bedroom, kneeling at a mains socket, the plate suspended from the wall by coloured wires. He looked up at her, eyes questioning. She became aware of the bed between them, the strange indecency of it. He dropped the wire cutters he’d been using and got to his feet.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Can you take me somewhere?” she asked.

  20: Esther

  In the morning, Esther washed and dressed, putting on a pair of old boots she’d found in the bottom of the doorless wardrobe. They were too big, her feet slipping around in them, and the leather was hard and cracked. But they would have to do. When she went upstairs with the others, she found Ivan sitting at the table in the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”

  Ivan didn’t look at her. “Make sure you don’t. Get some tea on the brew, we’re dying of thirst here.”

  Mary fetched the kettle for her, showed her how to pump water at the sink. Esther had never seen a pump like this, let alone used one. Water in her world came from taps. She filled the kettle and brought it to the wood stove.

  “We need to clean it out first,” Mary said. “Then we need to light it.”

  Esther lifted the brush and shovel, got to her knees, opened the stove door and set about cleaning out the ashes. That done, she and Mary went out through the back door to fetch wood from the tarpaulin-covered pile. Thomas was there, waiting, no work to hand. He watched as she and Mary gathered wood in their arms.

  As they went to return to the kitchen, Thomas said, “Here.”

  They both stopped and turned back to him.

  He spoke to Mary. “Away you go.”

  Mary hesitated, looked to Esther, then left them alone together in the yard.

  They both stood there for a time, Esther’s gaze fixed on the concrete-covered ground, Thomas’s wandering over her body, from her feet to the top of her head. She suppressed a shiver of revulsion.

  Esther cleared her throat and said, “I’m sorry about what happened yesterday.”

  He didn’t acknowledge her apology. Instead, he said, “See this evening? When the tea things are redd up, get some water heated and give yourself a bath.”

  Now Esther lifted her gaze from the ground and looked at him. “Why?”

  “Just do what I tell you,” he said, before walking back into the house.

  Now she found herself alone in the yard, her arms filled with wood. She looked around. The same outbuildings as yesterday, the same cowshed and stable blocks. The same gate, the same lane and fields beyond it. The same chickens wandering, seeking out morsels in need of pecking.

  All the same except she knew that this morning, neither Thomas nor Ivan were working in those fields. No one to stop her, no one to block her way, no one to knock her to the ground and hold a blade to her throat.

  But she thought of the others, of wee Mary, and what might befall them if she went.
What might befall her if she was caught.

  Esther took the wood and went inside, kicking the back door closed behind her.

  They ate scraps for lunch, sitting in the kitchen, soaked in the light from the back window. Crusts of bread, the scrapings from a pot of porridge, a small portion of cheese between them. Like dogs, Esther thought, eating the leavings of the table. George and Tam—they all called him Tam—were out in the fields. Ivan wandered the yard, tossing feed to the chickens.

  “Where do we have baths?” Esther asked.

  The others stopped eating and looked at her. All except Mary.

  “That thing,” Noreen said, pointing to the tin tub in the back hall. “You don’t get a bath unless they tell you to, though.”

  Esther could feel the grime coating her body, under her arms, in the small of her back. And the grease in her hair. She imagined soaking in hot water, breathing in the steam, soap slick between her fingers. The decadence of it.

  “Tam told me to have one this evening,” she said. “After tea.”

  Noreen and Joy looked at each other, then down at the table, and the last few crumbs of food. Mary chewed on a piece of crust.

  “What?” Esther said.

  No one answered. Noreen picked at the material that bound her injured fingers together.

  “Tell me,” Esther said, even though she knew the answer. Had known since she first saw these women in the dim cellar. A cold weight settled in her gut as she remembered what they’d told her before. Pleasing them, they called it. But she had ignored it, turned her higher mind away, as if that would make it untrue.

  Noreen closed her eyes, leaned her head to one side, as if she heard music from some far-off place. A crease appeared in her brow, and Esther knew something pained her. Noreen opened her eyes and spoke.

  “It’s always the same. Have a bath so you’re clean. Then you go upstairs and do what needs doing.”

  “Have they done it to you?” Esther asked.