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

by Rebecca Griffiths

Stupid girl, didn’t she know the danger she was in and how unwise she was to rile him?

  ‘You dare to speak to me like that? You? A dirty little scrubber off street. I were a policeman during war, I could have you arrested just like that.’ He clicked his fingers.

  ‘Supposed to impress me, is it? Being a copper still don’t make you a proper man. All a bit soft down there, aren’t you, mister?’ A hand, ghostly as her hair, was wafted in the general direction of his groin. ‘What are you?’ She laughed. ‘Some kinda queer?’

  A sudden dangerous anger spurted inside him. ‘Shut your filthy mouth.’ He pushed his face close to hers, close enough to smell the remnants of a recent cigarette on her breath.

  The girl didn’t make a sound when his fist smashed into her cheek. And when a trickle of blood from the soft young mouth ran down over her chin, into the bony cleft between her breasts, she just stared at him. Then, in the dangling seconds before trying to make her getaway, he punched her again. Harder this time. Enough to make her stagger backwards and drop to her knees on the wet pavement. Her piteous cry of pain meant nothing to him as he stepped around her and carried on his way.

  15

  This was how Dorset, with its wind-blown bluffs and sea views, was to become their place. In the same way the Serpentine Café had become their place. Smuggler’s Cove was out of the way. Winding up from Swanage on unadopted lanes, its position beneath looming chalk cliffs came as a complete surprise to Joy. As did the fake wedding ring Charles slipped onto her finger before checking them in as Mr and Mrs Smith at the boarding house that faced the sea.

  ‘But we mustn’t,’ Joy protested when the landlady went to fetch their key. ‘It’s unlucky to pretend you’re married when you’re not.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. That’s just superstitious nonsense,’ Charles gently chided, then kissed her cheek. ‘What can possibly go wrong for us?’

  ‘Sorry the weather’s not better for you, my dears. It’s supposed to cheer up nicely later,’ the landlady, a hearty, jolly sort, said when she returned. ‘Not that you young lovers will mind, I’m sure. If you’re stuck in your room, I mean.’ Her laugh was as brassy as she was.

  * * *

  Rain pushed its way along the headland. A grey curtain sweeping eastwards over the town. It crackled against her straw hat and slid down inside her collar. This was summer. It should be hot, but the salt wind coming in off the sea was sharp. Apart from the wellington boots she’d borrowed from someone at work with bigger feet, it seemed they had both brought the wrong clothes. Not that Joy cared. Pink-nosed and happy, she was having the time of her life. They stood holding hands at the lip of the sea, listened to the mesmeric shhh… shhh of the surf as it swept the shore. When they stretched their necks to watch a white-winged Cessna make its airy flight over the bay and head inland, Joy let her thoughts haul her back to her childhood on the Essex coast. She was remembering the German pilot and how his plane had crashed to earth.

  ‘Penny for them?’ His eyes were as shocking as a kingfisher’s wing.

  ‘They’re worth more than that.’

  She knew it was flippant, but she didn’t know how to share what was in her heart. She had so much to thank the likes of Charles, Terrence and Buster for. It was why she tolerated Buster and forgave him for his clumsy advances, his coarseness and insobriety. Because without men like them, France would have been done for, as it so nearly was.

  They turned and walked away from the sea’s edge and headed for the town. Found a tiny, dark-beamed inn called the Bluebell, with leather benches that had been ravaged by time. She shrugged out of her blue wool jacket, worried it might have shrunk in the rain, and hung it on a peg by a rack of newspapers neither was interested in looking at. The walls were full of sepia photographs. Tiered rows of rugby and cricket sides. Men who’d never come home from the war with families who still lived in this parish. They made Joy sad. These men, no older than her, their faces full of hope and youth, oblivious of the horrors to come.

  Charles left his wet umbrella and fedora with her and sauntered to the bar with his pipe between his teeth. Returned minutes later with two glasses of beer.

  ‘Sorry, Joy.’ He dripped rainwater onto the floor. ‘It was all they had. Well, this and Guinness.’

  ‘Oh, I quite like Guinness.’ She picked up a beer mat with a picture of a toucan balancing a glass of the dark Irish stout on its beak, tucked it into her handbag.

  ‘You do?’ Charles brushed sand from his sleeve. ‘Aren’t you full of surprises?’

  They drank their beer and watched the rain thrash the pub’s windows. Her face glowed with pleasure as she studied the grooves Charles’s comb had left behind in his glossy, pomade-dressed hair. She rested her head on his shoulder, felt the beer track through her. The press of his thigh against her own beneath the table as she breathed in his smell, his aftershave, storing it away for when she was back in London, alone in her basement room.

  ‘This place is for sale.’ The clunk of teeth against his pipe. ‘We should buy it, now I’ve finally given up my commission in the army.’ He lifted her hand and kissed it, the bristles of his moustache tickling her. ‘We could stay here forever… be far from the madding crowd.’ He laughed at his witticism. ‘Be a great place to bring up our children.’

  Joy went along with his daydream, furnishing and equipping the Bluebell’s rooms in a way she’d have done had they been kitting it out for real. But she knew it could be nothing more than that. From what Charles had already said, he would never be allowed to break away from the family firm.

  They finished their drinks and left the pub with the idea of exploring the town. Sharing his umbrella, they set off through the rain towards a row of stalls facing the shore. Despite the dreadful weather, the town was busy with day trippers and dogs on leads. Young men in tight suits and old school ties. People eating iced buns out of paper bags, others sucking sticks of rock. A dog, ownerless and self-governing, stopped to sniff their ankles, making them giggle before it trotted off to cock its leg against a lamp post.

  ‘I want to buy you something.’ Charles put his arm around her. ‘Something to mark this special time we’re having. This place looks nice.’ Charles pointed to a window crammed with the razzle-dazzle of lavender bags and crystal glasses.

  ‘Bit expensive. I’d prefer to go in here.’

  From the moment they stepped inside the market, Joy loved it. The untreated floor, the artisan shops laid out as comfortably as the interiors of ordinary people’s houses. The wooden rafters reminded her of the roof of Saint-Géry in Arras. The craftsmen’s handiworks, proudly set out for tourists, were touching in their simplicity, and it was an enamelled brooch with red and green apples she liked best.

  ‘Are you sure? It only costs pennies.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she enthused, and pushed the pin into the lapel of her jacket. ‘I’ll wear it always.’

  They stepped out of the market to find the sun had come out and a band had struck up.

  ‘I bet you’d like something to eat?’ Charles asked. ‘Come on, I know just the place.’

  The sun was shining. They had seen Dorset at its worst and now they were seeing it at its best. Hand in hand, they weaved through the holiday crowd and the scrape of trams that circled the town. The tea terrace was surprisingly empty and, after ordering fish and chips, they sat listening to the tide scuff the beach below. Staring out through the huge plate-glass windows, Joy trailed the progress of a cloud sailing over the broken spine of a castle, romantic and melancholy, perched on its rocky promontory. Watched a distant sheepdog dart over the bracken-covered slopes gathering sheep behind the town.

  ‘Did you come to Smuggler’s Cove with your family?’ She touched the enamel brooch.

  ‘Most summers.’

  Joy was imagining Charles and his brother as children splashing around the shallows as the tea terrace filled up around them. Raw-skinned men, sporting brick-red bands of sunburnt foreheads, escorted by wives and children, their hair hang
ing like seaweed down their backs. She smiled into the general cheerfulness and, reaching across the bottle of OK Sauce, took a serviette. It had the name of the establishment and a line drawing of the bay and rise of cliffs. She liked it and folded it away in her bag.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just a little memento.’ Joy took souvenirs from everywhere they went; it was as if she was squirrelling memories away because she couldn’t believe something this good would last.

  ‘You took a beer mat from the pub too.’

  ‘I’m collecting things to remember our holiday by.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk as if we’re never coming back.’ His expression clouded. ‘Because I promised you. This place is ours now.’

  * * *

  It was on their drive back to London the following afternoon that Charles asked her. His hand resting on her thigh as she breathed in the leather interior of his Riley. He talked of his precarious position in his late father’s firm, the demands being placed on him by his mother as he swayed and hooted, cutting in and out of the stream of traffic.

  The day was warm enough to drive with the hood down and Joy’s hair flapped around her face, adding to the drama as they put the desolate headlands behind them and followed the route of the Viking Norsemen. Charles was explaining how the business was about to make a big push into the emerging markets of South Africa, and that his mother expected him to head up the new division there. Listening to his voice as she silently bid goodbye to the heaving waves along the chain of coastal roads, his agitation punctured by views of ancient abbeys and patch-eyed cows, she remembered his mother and her rudeness from the morning she had accidentally collided with her in the street – it came as no surprise that his move to Cape Town was non-negotiable.

  ‘Marry me,’ he announced brightly, his fingers still gripping her thigh.

  ‘Marry you?’ She gasped her astonishment.

  ‘Please say you will. We could go to Africa together. I could bear it with you. I could bear anything with you.’

  16

  The swoop of a large bird flying low between the buildings made him jerk his head up. He wasn’t spooked by it, he barely noticed it. In the same way he barely noticed the paring of moon swinging like a hammock between the stars he had never bothered to identify. A cold, clear night. Rare, falling as it did between the rain and thick smog that plagued this city.

  It was the second time he’d done this. The idea finding him when he followed the girl home one night. Seeing her lighted window and positioning himself in the entrance of an abandoned shop next door, it was the perfect place to hide and watch her. Lucky for him, there was that large, front-facing window that gave an eagle’s view of her ochre-lit life. Craving excitement and stimulation, it was not in his nature to sustain his humdrum existence with his wife as other men his age might do; the temptation to come here and spy on the girl was too strong.

  He lit a cigarette and crossed to the railings to peer down on her basement room that was as transparent as a goldfish bowl and left nothing to the imagination. Tonight, the girl was in blue. Something homespun and man-sized. It did nothing for her. Too big, it fell down over her bottom and he couldn’t distinguish where her breasts began and ended. He felt thwarted, having made the effort to come out tonight, not to mention the cost of the fare from Ladbroke Grove to Gloucester Road he could ill afford. She was heating something in a pan on a single gas ring. Singing to herself as she stirred it around, her face over the steam. Then her hand tugged at the neck of her pullover and she blew down inside her clothes.

  ‘Go on, lass.’ He willed her with his stare, safely concealed from the lights of any passing car. ‘Take it off.’

  Then, ‘’Eh up.’ Eyes straining, shifting around in his hiding place, to his delight she yanked the pullover off and was wearing next to nothing underneath. Only a flimsy chemise that left little to the imagination.

  He shivered, not from the cold, as she tipped forward and gave him a generous eyeful, down to the smooth cleft of flesh between her small yet beautifully firm breasts.

  17

  The house came as a surprise. Positioned on a corner and sheltered from the bustle of the Bayswater Road by a row of trees, it looked too grand to be occupied by anyone they were friends with. What also came as a surprise was, instead of Joy, it was Charles, in black tie and dinner jacket, who greeted them. The last of the evening sun through the glass-panelled porch trickling over him like water. Handsome. The only way to describe him. And Queenie, arm in arm with Terrence, gobbled Charles down as if handsome was something she had been starved of.

  ‘Oops, I think I may be a little underdressed,’ Terrence said as they pushed into the shadow-filled garden.

  ‘Don’t be silly, you’re perfect,’ she assured, keeping to herself the idea he might be.

  Queenie, on the other hand, knew she looked fabulous. Hadn’t Terrence said as much when he’d met her from the Tube? Not that she needed his endorsement; she’d already caught people’s appreciative glances. There weren’t many who could carry off this fox fur stole, never mind the dress beneath it. Her best dress. A hot red in shot silk. Something that, like the fox fur, belonged to her mother and Queenie had skilfully enhanced.

  ‘What an awfully splendid couple you make.’ Charles beamed at them. He was right, they did. She could be herself with Terrence: he demanded nothing from her, unlike other men. There was a peck on the cheek for Queenie and a pat on the back for Terrence. ‘How’s your friend? I heard he got into a spot of bother.’

  Terrence swallowed: a dry, anxious sound. Did Charles know about him and Malcolm? Queenie didn’t think so.

  ‘He was very shaken up.’

  ‘The police can be awfully heavy-handed with our West Indian friends.’

  ‘Heavy-handed with us all. I was worried they wouldn’t release him.’

  ‘But he’d done nothing wrong. He was the one who was set on.’

  ‘Not how the police saw it.’

  ‘God help us all.’ Charles gave Terrence another pat on the back. Compensatory this time, or so Queenie thought.

  When the matter was dropped, she was free to concentrate on Charles again. Could a man of his standing seriously be interested in a little doe-eyed innocent like Joy? The question, scythe-shaped, cut into her and made her wince. She didn’t like thinking it, but surely Charles required someone with more sophistication. Someone to complement his stylish clothes, his poise, the fine cut of his jaw. Someone like her – was that what she was thinking? The idea shocked her. This was her best friend’s fiancé; they were to be married before the year was out. It was why they were here; she and Terrence had been invited to celebrate their engagement. She hated herself for thinking these things, but they were out now and couldn’t be boxed away again. A flush reddened her neck. She felt its telltale fingers spreading over her chest.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Terrence enquired.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She jollied him along. ‘We’re going to have a wonderful time.’

  When, at last, they went inside, it was as if to step into another world. She heard Terrence gasp when he tilted his head to the ceiling. To the lofty hall and grand curve of staircase.

  ‘Dorothy will take your things.’ Charles nodded to a stout woman in a grey uniform, and Terrence obediently handed over his coat and hat.

  ‘And you, madam?’ A raw red hand shot out.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Queenie, wary of it, clutched the stole to her chin. ‘I’ll hold on to this.’

  They followed Charles and his cane up to the first floor and into an elegant suite of rooms with fine views of Hyde Park. Loving the feel of the place, the subdued tranquillity infused with the chalky London light pouring in through the tall sash windows, Queenie, a little awestruck, circled the room. Her heels sinking into the plush pile carpet as if walking on sand. All the while keeping one eye on Charles, who was demonstrating the correct way to open a champagne bottle to the housekeeper. Terrence, meanwhile, was admiring the t
iles around the fireplace. The whimsical blue-green peacocks, dragons and fishes he would later tell her had been designed by the famous William De Morgan. It seemed to delight Charles to watch his guests look about them with such appreciation. To see them marvel at the oils and watercolours that hardly left a space for a hand between the frames, the rosewood cabinets sagging under the weight of silver trinkets.

  ‘Do sit.’ He motioned them to a couch and handed them coupes of champagne.

  Queenie sipped from hers, felt the bubbles spread through her like sunshine. The opulent surroundings had the question she’d tried to bat away pushing forward in her mind again. Why had Charles chosen Joy? It was Queenie who knew what men wanted. Joy was charming, on many levels. Sweet, the way she always had her nose in a book and her appreciation for the smallest of things. She would be ideal for someone less polished, but falling short of what a man of Charles’s calibre would want from a wife. It was why Queenie was making sure he got a good look at her beautiful legs, just in case he might have overlooked her in some way.

  ‘A glorious evening,’ Charles addressed her directly.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ She crossed her legs again, pleased with the way he looked at her.

  ‘And you found us easily?’ A flash of his eyes – he was flirting.

  ‘You live here, do you?’ Terrence restless beside her; obviously not enjoying the experience as much as she was.

  ‘Since the end of the war. Polishing a desk at Wellington Barracks until recently, of course. All finished now – I think the army having thirteen years of me is quite enough. Quite enough for anyone.’ An awkward glance at the floor. ‘I’ve been looking for my own place, but no luck so far.’ Charles leant against the mantelpiece, smoking his cigarette and inspecting his cufflinks.

  ‘I wouldn’t be in any hurry.’ Queenie pressed her varnished nails to her lips and gave Charles a coquettish smile he seemed to appreciate.