The Girl at My Door: An utterly gripping mystery thriller based on a true crime

by Rebecca Griffiths

  A hand on his shoulder. He swivelled to receive it. Malcolm. His smile cutting a hole through the sleaze.

  ‘Man, you jumpy, Terry.’ The smile faded and the two of them kissed.

  ‘Now then, my dears, what can I get you?’ It was Albert who pushed between them.

  ‘Scotch and a splash for me and whatever Malcolm’s having, thank you.’

  Albert reached to the optic. A hiss of soda. Only half-listening to Malcolm’s reply, Terrence had refocused his attention on the man in the trilby and noticed he was wearing plimsolls. Odd. Who wore plimsolls with a suit, coat and hat? The man was as loathsome as he was fascinating, and Terrence was still watching him when he unexpectedly returned his interest. The look was one of self-righteous disgust as he eyed Terrence and Malcolm with obvious contempt. Ashamed to have been caught staring, Terrence turned away, but not before noticing the man knock back his drink and creep downstairs with the prostitute.

  ‘Who was dat?’ Malcolm put a protective arm around him.

  ‘I don’t know, but I didn’t like the look of him.’ Terrence threw his gaze to the ceiling to fling off the sense of unease the stranger gave him. It was then he identified the smell.

  Jeyes Fluid.

  And his sense of foreboding intensified.

  4

  The house at the top end of Rillington Place was quiet and mostly dark. The lower end of the passageway, bathed in the cloudy light of the fading day, disturbed him. Disturbed him because he knew he was running out of time. All afternoon, he’d been keeping watch for her through the peephole he’d fashioned in the door of his ground-floor flat and had just about reached the point of giving up when, to his absolute delight, there she was.

  Beryl Evans.

  With her pretty face and tumble of hair. Appearing, as if by magic, at the foot of the stairs with her baby in her arms. Transfixed, he trained his eye behind its horn-rimmed lens on the young mother as she laid the baby in the pram and arranged its blankets, bending and stretching to check the things she needed were in the basket between its wheels. It wasn’t long before he became aware of the budding erection going on in his underpants.

  ‘One day, lass… I’ll have you one day,’ he muttered, wiping his wet mouth on the back of his hand.

  Fixed on Beryl, he admired her slender elegance afresh and replayed the contents of their agreeable little chat earlier in the week. The way she made him feel when she touched his arm. It took his breath away. How many more signs did he need? It was as plain as day she was as attracted to him as he was to her. It was why he’d invited her to call him Reg – the name he went by with friends and family – the moment she and her husband, Timothy, had moved into the top-floor flat, and why he didn’t mind in the least about her flouting his house rules by leaving the baby’s pram in the hall.

  ‘I’ll be finding a way to bend you to my will before long.’ He breathed his menacing intent. ‘Aye, you mark my words, lass. I’ll be partaking in a little something of you, one way or another.’

  Then, pushing down on the handle, he opened the door and tiptoed into the darkened hall, where he stood, still as a post and cloaked in shadow, watching Beryl from his hiding place below the stairs. He could often be found here, spying on those he shared this house with, but since the arrival of Mr Evans and his alluring young wife, his surveillance routine had ratcheted up a notch.

  He was about to step forward, to place a hand on Beryl’s shoulder, when the scratch of a key in the lock and the front door opening stopped him dead.

  ‘Hello, dear. Lovely evening. You off out with Geraldine?’ It was his wife, and swallowing his disappointment and anger, he saw Ethel sidestep the pram to allow Beryl the space to manoeuvre her baby out into the street.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Christie. Tim’s mum’s doing our tea tonight.’

  ‘Well, you have fun.’

  Sensing their conversation was coming to a close, he shuffled backwards, soundless in his canvas shoes.

  ‘Is that you, Reg?’ Ethel threw her voice along the dingy passageway. ‘I weren’t expecting you home. Why aren’t you in work? Reg? Don’t walk off.’ She trotted after him, spoiling his mood with her questions. ‘I asked you why you aren’t in work.’

  ‘Dr Odess signed me off sick.’

  ‘Again? What’s wrong with you now? You want to watch it; you’ll be getting yourself a reputation.’

  ‘Give over, woman. Get in here, we don’t want all and sundry knowing our business.’ Seizing her roughly, he manhandled her into their kitchen with its squalor, its damp-stained walls and dripping tap.

  ‘What’s that funny smell?’ She sniffed the air and dumped her bag of groceries on the draining board. ‘You had a woman in here?’

  Refusing to answer, he closed the door behind them with a decisive snap.

  ‘And what’ve you been doing with this?’ His wife, keeping on with her questions. ‘You know how tight we are for space. It needs to be shoved right up against the window.’

  He watched in silence while she fussed with the rope chair, shifting it this way and that until she was happy it had been returned to its usual position.

  ‘She’s very pretty, don’t you think?’

  ‘Who is?’ His wife turned to him, wide-eyed.

  ‘Beryl.’

  ‘Oh no, Reg.’ She pressed a nervous hand to her mouth. ‘You’d better not be getting ideas. You’re to stay away from her, d’you hear?’

  He gave her one of his crooked smiles.

  ‘I mean it.’ She wagged a finger. ‘You stay away from that girl.’

  ‘Or what?’ he challenged, an evil gleam in his eye. ‘There’s nowt you can do to stop me. I do what I want, with whoever I want. And you’d do well to remember that fact, Ethel Christie.’

  5

  Carrying a bag of groceries and wearing an outfit copied from Vogue, Queenie was on her way home from her dance class. She knew all the shortcuts, and swinging along on her heels, down the lanes that led off Wimbledon Broadway, she reached Pelham Road in no time. A movement caught in the tail of her vision made her look back to a row of terrace houses that dropped away to a valley of rubble. These were the carcasses of homes, what was left after the Blitz. The sight of timbers poking through the bricks like broken ribs was as distressing as the evidence of wallpaper and fireplaces: the relics of people’s lives. There were signs of workmen and machines today. The growl of an engine and a sudden crash as a wall was flattened. Now they had made a start, it wouldn’t be long before new houses went up; she’d seen it happening in other parts of the borough. It meant that South Wimbledon was becoming little more than a route between one place and another. The ancient outpost of Mitcham eaten away by the slow expansion of London that, creeping ever nearer, was eroding the lavender fields of her childhood.

  A weak April sun glinted on the pavement. Up ahead was another leftover from childhood: the curve of her old school railings and a crumple in the asphalt where the walls used to be. Her brother, Harry, had stayed on at school until he’d left to join the navy. Queenie, pulled out at thirteen to go to her grandparents’ farm, never went back. Her father saw little point in educating girls. Girls would get married and another man would benefit from their education. It didn’t matter that Queenie had won a place at the grammar school; they couldn’t afford the uniform, never mind the textbooks.

  The wind gathered along this route, trapped by the tunnels of grey-brick houses that competed for sunshine and air. In a rush of activity, the Chapman twins raced by showing teeth too white to be real. Lugging sticks the lengths of men, they dragged them over the slats of Mrs Clark’s fence. Naughty boys – she should tell them to stop, but she wouldn’t. Mrs Clark was no friend of hers.

  She took out her keys ready. Mrs Wilson, opposite, was down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the front step of her house with a brush and a galvanised bucket. She lifted her gaze as Queenie strode past.

  ‘Good day to you.’ Mrs Wilson spoke in an overly controlled way and eyed her with suspi
cion.

  Always the object of curiosity, Queenie – called the Duchess and accused of believing herself special by those who gathered to gossip, but never with her – supposed she invited it with her fabulous figure and fashionable clothes. She turned the corner into Balfour Road and saw the usual knot of women up ahead. It was obvious they were talking about her. Their resentment swelled and flapped like the washing on their clothes lines. If she were a horse – a memory of the childhood game she’d played with Joy – she would clatter her hooves against the ground to scare them away. But Queenie wasn’t a horse. Any more than she was a child. So, she did all she could to brace herself for what was to come.

  ‘Good morning, ladies. Lovely day.’

  Smiling into the stream of insults this triggered, she swerved between the gap in the privet and up to her green front door. Pleased to see the rosebush planted in memory of her mother was covered in buds that would soon flourish into milky-white flowers. Weaving through the shadows and dustbins kept down the side of the house, an unexpected image of Tommy came to her as she slipped the bolt on the garden gate. Kissing her. His hands exploring her body as she resisted, then yielded. Then resisted again.

  ‘Be a sport, Queenie.’ His breath on her ear. ‘Let me up to your room.’

  A shaft of sunlight broke through the cloud to illuminate the green of springtime leaves and she looked up in time to see a blue tit, a beakful of dry grasses, dip between a gap in the eaves.

  She exchanged the remembered face of her first love for one of her eighteen-year-old self, home from Goldchurch after the war with no idea what to do with her life. Until her ailing mother heard her singing along with the wireless. ‘Queenie, love. With your looks and talent, you could go anywhere.’ And with the seed firmly planted, it began to sprout. Spikes of green, like shards of snowdrops after a hard winter, pushed through the wreckage left behind after the war. It was her mother, alerted to an advert in the Evening Standard, who encouraged her to take singing and dancing lessons with Dulcie Fricker. A woman who saw there was money to be made by representing her and so pushed her in front of Uncle Fish.

  Inside the kitchen, she dumped the groceries on the draining board and hung up her dance shoes beside the gas masks no one had bothered to put away. She looked over at the framed black-and-white photograph of Harry dressed in his naval uniform and searched his smile for any sign he knew what was marching towards him on life’s horizon. Was thankful to find nothing. The photograph was taken three months before his battlecruiser, HMS Repulse, was bombed.

  She put the ration books away in the Oxo tin and listened to her father moving around in the room above. The sound of his cough forking through the floorboards. Her fear his emphysema was worsening reared its head again, but she refused to dwell on it. She’d lost too many family members; her father was all she had left.

  The scuff of his slippers on the hall rug and her father was there. ‘Ta for fetching this,’ he wheezed, taking his paper from the bag.

  ‘They’re finally getting around to clearing that bomb site at the top of Pelham Road.’

  ‘’Bout time.’ He coughed again. ‘Ruddy eyesore.’

  ‘I hope they don’t go finding poor Violet Tanner.’ A shiver as she unwrapped a block of margarine. Added it to what remained of last week’s butter – there weren’t enough points to have butter again this week.

  When the kettle came to the boil, she made them both a cup of tea. Her father checked the shallow boxes of seedlings on the windowsill, then sat down at the table and shook out his paper. Decently muscled for a man his age, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled back to the elbows, she could tell he’d been working in the garden. She’d spotted the tin bucket and the crop of new potatoes by the door.

  ‘We could have these for tea. Go nice with spuds.’ He pushed a bowl containing three brown hens’ eggs towards her. ‘The girls are laying well.’

  The clunk of potatoes as she tipped them into the sink. The crash of saucepan lids. She turned on the tap and snapped on her orange Marigolds. Unlike her mother, Queenie looked after her hands and was glad to find rubber gloves in the shops last year. She groped the muddy water, the bank of grit that had formed at the bottom of the Belfast sink, and stared out at the garden. At her father’s vegetable beds that, like the tittle-tattling tongues of neighbours, were just as industrious.

  ‘You know I’ve been offered a part in South Pacific, on Broadway?’ Potatoes scrubbed, she set them to boil.

  ‘Wimbledon Broadway?’ He coughed his cough. A sound that had featured throughout her childhood.

  ‘No, Broadway. New York.’

  ‘America?’ Her father licked a finger and turned the pages of his newspaper. ‘You want to be settling down.’

  Thoughts of London’s old, cold, bombed-out streets butted up against the pictures she’d seen of New York with its glamour and modernity. Her mother would have been right behind her if she was here, but she wasn’t. Dying five months after the end of the war with something that could probably have been treated had the NHS been around.

  ‘They’re building skyscrapers.’ She lifted the saucepan lid, steam hot on her hand as she tested the potatoes with the tip of a knife. ‘There’s no rationing, people have got money.’ She put one in her mouth. Hot, hot… Her teeth snapping through its skin.

  ‘If that’s what you want.’ He dropped his head; he’d found the sports pages.

  She set the frying pan on the flames and, with the smell of sizzling margarine in her nostrils, cracked one egg, then another, against the lip of the pan. Stood back to watch the whites harden. Fat stung her wrists and the whiff of burning margarine fired off a memory of when the factory down the road was hit, splattering the nation’s supply of Stork against the blackened pan of the night sky. Thought about the camaraderie that came with the blackout. When sirens squealed like slaughtered pigs and people scrabbled to the Tube and lay side by side like oiled sardines.

  It had been on such a night Queenie hooked up with a group of older boys who taught her to play rummy and poker for money; that because she didn’t have money, they required a flash of her knickers as a forfeit. Not that it was much of a forfeit; she loved the attention until her father put his foot down and sent her to stay with his in-laws. Claiming London wasn’t safe. But neither was the Essex coast. What about that time a German plane crash-landed in her grandad’s fields? Not that the excitement compensated for being ripped away from Tommy, whose skin smelled of toffee apples on Bonfire Night. It nearly broke her heart. In the same way it nearly broke her when she came back five years later to discover he’d married that prissy Flora Miller from around the corner.

  ‘I’ve something to tell you.’ Her father burst in on her deliberations. ‘I’ve met a woman.’

  ‘A woman?’ Queenie dropped the spatula with a clatter. ‘W-when did that happen?’ She gawped at the back of his head.

  ‘We just got talking. She’s an usherette down the Odeon.’

  ‘That’s nice for you, Dad.’

  ‘And the thing is, we’re to get married in the autumn. We’ve plans to move to the country. Norma—’

  ‘Norma.’ Queenie repeated the name of her soon-to-be stepmother. ‘Married? Bloody hell, Dad, isn’t that a bit sudden?’ Tears stung her eyes.

  ‘Her family own a smallholding in Norfolk. It’ll be better for my chest.’ He coughed again on cue.

  Wiping away a tear she didn’t let him see, she lifted out the eggs and slid them sunny-side down on a plate with a spoonful of potatoes. Pushed it in front of him.

  ‘I can’t take these blessed pea-soupers no more.’ He coughed into his balled-up fist. ‘You’re a good girl, Queenie. I knew you’d understand. I’ve paid the rent on this place till February next year, so there’s no need to worry.’

  ‘Will they let me take over the tenancy?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘Really? An unmarried woman, living alone?’ Queenie knew things were starting to improve for women, but not as q
uickly as she might need them to.

  ‘You’re on good money at the club and there’s your little tailoring sideline. Anyway, didn’t you say you were off to America?’

  She stared at him while he talked about Norma. About how he would invite her over so the two of them could meet. She was being selfish, she told herself as the world turned a bruised yellow with the setting sun. He was still a relatively young man, he deserved a second chance; if clean country air helped his health, who was she to stand in his way? Her father placed his dirty crockery on the drainer for Queenie to wash and she put an arm around him, kissed his stubbly cheek. She felt him change when she did this. Felt him stiffen and pull away.

  She left him and the dirty plates; they could wait. Went up to the landing and looked out of the window that gave on to a tumble of roofs. She had nothing to say to her father. If she did start talking, she would only end up saying the wrong thing. A pigeon swooped down through its shadow and landed on the window ledge. It pecked at its reflection, the sound of its beak against the glass. She listened to it until she could no longer stand it, then clapped it away.