by Ann Troup
What if everything you knew was a lie…
This house has a past that won’t stay hidden, and it is time for the dead to speak.
Returning to Number 17, Coronation Square, Edie is shocked to find the place she remembers from childhood reeks of mould and decay. After her aunt Dolly’s death Edie must clear out the home on a street known for five vicious murders many years ago, but under the dirt and grime of years of neglect lurk dangerous truths.
For in this dark house there is misery, sin and dark secrets that can no longer stay hidden. The truth must come out.
Finding herself dragged back into the horrific murders of the past, Edie must find out what really happened all those years ago. But as Edie uncovers the history of the family she had all but forgotten, she begins to wonder if sometimes it isn’t best to leave them buried.
An unforgettable and addictive story, perfect for fans of Lesley Thomson, Diane Chamberlain and Tracy Buchanan.
Praise for ANN TROUP
‘Atmospheric, haunting and quite dark’ – Book Boodle
‘An unusual, beautifully written mystery.’ – The Disorganised Author
‘A fabulous book that gripped me and left me wanting more!’ –- Compelling Reads
‘You won't spot the twists and turns coming and they will keep you on the edge of your seat!! You just won't want to put this book down until you find out what happens at the end!’ – Becky Lock
‘Very fascinating, mysterious novel with secrets and twists hiding behind every page’ – Reviewed the Book
‘Captivating debut novel’ – Crime Fiction Lover
‘I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who loves a mystery and a bit of intrigue, I would say it is on a par with the brilliant Lynda La Plante’ – Sincerely Book Angels
Also by Ann Troup
The Lost Child
The Silent Girls
Ann Troup
www.CarinaUK.com
ANN TROUP
tells tales and can always make something out of nothing (which means she writes books and can create unique things from stuff other people might not glance twice at). She was once awarded 11 out of 10 for a piece of poetry at school – and now holds that teacher entirely responsible for her inclination to write.
Her writing process is governed first by the fine art of procrastination, a field in which she is outstanding. Once that phase is complete, she knuckles down and writes, completely abandoning the careful plans made during the procrastination phase. At some point a story emerges and after a bit of tweaking and a re-acquaintance with the concepts of grammar, punctuation and the myriad glories of the English language, she is surprised to find that she has written a book!
Her writing space is known as ‘the empty nest’, having formerly been her daughter’s bedroom. She shares this space with ten tons of junk and an elderly West Highland Terrier who is her constant companion whether she likes it or not. He likes to contribute to the creative process by falling asleep on top of her paperwork and running away with crucial Post-it notes, which have inadvertently become stuck to his fur. She is thinking of renaming him Gremlin.
She lives by the sea in Devon with her husband and said dog. Two children have been known to remember the house which they call home, but mainly when they are in need of a decent roast dinner, it’s Christmas or when only Mum will do.
In a former incarnation she was psychiatric nurse, an experience that frequently informs her writing and which supplies a never-ending source of inspiration.
You can contact Ann on Facebook, at anntroup.wordpress.com or follow her on Twitter @TroupAnn
My thanks to the ever lovely, supportive and brilliant team at Carina – may your days be filled with more chocolate and less emails. Gratitude to book blogger extraordinaire Sophie Hedley for her generosity to good causes and for allowing me the privilege of borrowing her name (I’m afraid my Sophie is just a mite less ladylike and lovely…)
My immense appreciation to every single blogger, reviewer, fellow author and reader who has supported me, shared their enthusiasm for my writing and indulged me in this most lovely of occupations, I will never stop being bowled over by you.
Finally a pre-emptive apology, I took a few liberties with jurisprudence in this one, but hey, it’s a novel not a text book and I hope I’ll be forgiven for that (and the bad language - sorry mum).
For Tom and Ellie.
Contents
Cover
Blurb
Praise
Book List
Title Page
Author Bio
Acknowledgement
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Excerpt
Endpages
Copyright
Prologue
Tuesday 8th September 1964
On Tuesday 8th September 1964, the State hanged John Bastin for the brutal murder of five women.
While his wife and child stood outside the prison gates waiting for the execution bell to toll, a distraught young woman took a coal shovel and beat a man to death. She brought it down again and again, slicing through cloth and flesh and hitting bone as her victim squirmed and cowered under the torrent of blows. Finally his movements ceased and all that remained was the battered pulp of his body and a glistening ooze of blood. The woman felt no sense of regret, even though she paused to feel for it. All she could locate was the heightened pulse of her adrenaline-fuelled heart and the sound of quiet sobbing from the woman beside her.
‘Oh Jesus! What have you done?’ the other woman cried. Her words were loaded with fear and whistled out through her misery like the thin strain of a battered bugle.
The woman looked at the blood-gored shovel and noticed that her heart rate had started to slow into a dull, regular thump. She glanced at the body and prodded it with the toe of her shoe, bristling at the realisation that some of his filthy blood had stained the leather. ‘The right thing, that’s what.’ She could feel nothing but relief now that the nightmare was over.
She turned to the woman she had believed was her friend and said the words exactly as she meant them. ‘You owe me for this.’
There was no such thing as a favour that didn’t have to be repaid and she had a clear price. The other woman glanced down at the dead man, and then at her own ruined body. She paid her debt four months later.
Chapter One
August 2010
At first glance Coronation Square didn’t seem to have changed much in over thirty years; it still had its postage stamp patch of green in the middle and still boasted its tall Victorian houses on all four sides. It still looked blowsy and overdone, and it still had a baleful air that marked it out as somewhere to be wary of. On closer inspection, Edie could see that things had altered – the square had faded like an old rose and its previously respectable veneer
had degenerated into a flimsy, fragile facade.
As she walked past the buildings she noticed the addition of new doorbells, up to six per house, each one bearing a flimsy weather faded label that left people none the wiser as to who might live there. Old family homes had been carved up, mutating into flats and bedsits to house a cheapskate, shifting population. The street drinkers and off duty prostitutes made a desultory change from the sherry sipping matriarchs who had twitched their net curtains and traded in gossip. Edie remembered them well and shuddered at the thought.
Number 17 was just as it always had been, and as familiar to Edie as looking back at her own childhood face in photographs. The house stood out like a rotten tooth, seedy and discoloured from neglect, ancient blue paint flaked from the window frames and peeled in curling sheets from the front door. The brass knocker hung precariously from a single remaining screw, the metal pockmarked and dulled by years of inattention. Edie regarded the whole place with a reluctance that sat like a brooding gargoyle at the centre of her being. This was not a visit she would have chosen to make had she not been forced to by circumstances, and the state of the house represented everything that she felt about her extended family – neglected, old-fashioned, out of kilter and more than a little embarrassing. The Morris family would never have been singled out for the voracity of their housekeeping or their ability to embrace change. Edie doubted that the Morris family would have been singled out for much, though she might have won the prize for most inept midlife crisis, most acrimonious divorce and person never likely to amount to much (if anyone had held a competition).
Not that any of it mattered, she had arrived and there was work to do. To her surprise the old key worked perfectly and gave her easy entry into a cluttered, dingy, pungent past.
The first thing she did was open the kitchen window to dissipate the foetid air; the second was to ring her sister. ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m here.’
‘Oh God, how bad is it?’ Rose asked, her voice laden with false concern. They both knew that she couldn’t have cared less, so long as she didn’t have to deal with it.
Edie surveyed her surroundings, she had perched herself on the edge of a rickety chair and from there she could see only a fraction of the desuetude that had beset the house. Grease had trickled and congealed on the walls and mould had started to mount an onslaught in neglected corners. It looked like Aunt Dolly hadn’t deigned to lift a cloth in some time. ‘A combination of Steptoe’s front yard and 10 Rillington Place springs to mind, and that’s just based on the smell. It’s bad Rose, really bad.’
‘Oh Lord, I wasn’t sure what it would be like. Are you sure you can do this on your own?’
Edie sighed, Rose’s feigned empathy was a constant source of irritation. ‘There isn’t much choice, you can’t help and there isn’t anyone else.’ Rose was about to embark on a month long cruise with her husband – a long awaited trip that couldn’t be put aside, even for the death of a relative. ‘I can’t see this place fetching much; it will need gutting and half rebuilding looking at the state of it. Is anyone going to want to take it on?’
‘Someone will, the property prices in that area of Winfield are going through the roof. It’s up and coming, Edie, someone’s going to get an absolute bargain.’
Edie thought about the one stop shop, the street drinkers and the bedsits. ‘That someone will need to have a lot of vision then. Rose, should we feel bad that we let it go on so long, should we have done more?’ Edie hadn’t set foot in the house since 1980 when it had been untidy and in need of a clean, but not on the point of ruin. She had been a child then, and how people lived hadn’t been her primary concern. At that age she had been preoccupied by ponies that she would never own and contemplating a career as an air hostess, not worrying about how her strange relatives chose to live their lives. It had been a nice age, a time to have fantasies, a time to be unaffected by the knowledge that ponies were expensive manure producing machines and that air hostesses were just glorified waitresses. Reality always bit eventually.
‘How could we have known? She never told us how bad things were, I used to phone her once a month and she never said a word. I suppose we could have done more, but how were we to know?’ Rose was being unusually generous in her use of the word ‘we’ – Edie had never phoned or ever checked in on her elderly aunt to pass the time of day, she had been too busy having a life. Now she wasn’t, and this hasty, unwanted task felt like too little done too late. ‘Do you think there is much of any value in there?’ Rose asked.
Edie looked around again. ‘I have no idea, most of it looks like junk at the moment, and filthy junk at that. But I’ll sort through it and let you know.’ Rose wasn’t being greedy, Dolly Morris had died with debts and the money had to come from somewhere. Being executor of this particular will came with responsibilities, not benefits.
‘Will you go to the funeral?’
‘I suppose I should, I’m taking apart her life and selling it for scrap, it would seem mercenary not to.’ Edie said, wondering if Simon felt the same obligation to her now that their house was in the process of being sold and their property was being divided. She doubted it, his only obligation seemed to be to himself these days. ‘I know one thing though, we’ll have shares in Lever by the time I’m finished, I may well make a dent in the European bleach mountain tackling this mess.’
Rose laughed. Edie asked her how she was feeling. There had been some complaining about a twisted ankle that Rose worried might ruin the cruise.
‘Sore and bored. Evan is being good though, helping out, and the girls are calling in every day. I might die of the boredom though. I can’t wait until we leave.’ Of course Evan was being good, he was the kind of husband who would be. Rose’s daughters were pretty perfect too; they had stayed close to home and close to their mother. Sometimes Edie envied her sister that perfect family. She thought of her own child, made in his father’s image and doing his own thing ten thousand miles away, and of her home being sold, all her things and furniture packed up in crates and boxes which were sitting in a storage unit. Gah! She needed to get over herself, at this rate she would end up just like Dolly had, sick and lonely in a house that held the bones of the past like an ossuary for the forgotten.
‘I doubt that Rose, give it a few weeks on that cruise and you’ll be back better than before.’
‘Well I’ll try and enjoy myself, though it will be hard thinking of you tackling this great big mess. Good luck with the clear out.’ Her tone was full of sympathy, which grated on Edie like sandpaper being dragged over her skin. It was pointless saying anything. Rose was going on her trip regardless. Edie had pulled the short straw and had to live with it.
‘Thanks, I might need it.’ Edie ended the call with the usual niceties and turned to contemplate her task. Good sense dictated that she try and make the kitchen semi hygienic first, she would be staying a while and she would need to eat. The prospect of food poisoning wasn’t pleasant and by the look of it several new life forms were breeding in the kitchen. She daren’t dwell on the thought too long for fear of throwing up at the horrors that her imagination might conjure, let alone the ones that faced her in in the filthy kitchen.
A quick survey of the cupboards told her that Dolly hadn’t been a fan of cleaning products; a tin of petrified Vim and a dribble of disinfectant weren’t going to cut it. Neither was the rock hard, blackened cloth that was welded to the waste pipe. It was time to go to the one stop shop and stock up.
If old Mrs Vale (the terrifying matriarch that still loomed large in her memory) had still owned the shop Edie’s basket would have raised questions. The copious quantities of cleaning products and three rolls of black bags would have garnered curiosity, and in an hour the whole square would have known that Edie Byrne was clearing out the Morris house. On this occasion the gum-chewing girl behind the till didn’t show a flicker of interest, and barely looked up when Edie paid. Edie guessed that Dolly’s fate was no one’s business and nobody’s concern these days.
There was something to be said for net curtain twitchers, they missed little and would never have allowed an old lady to lie for days at the bottom of the stairs with a broken hip – she had lain there so long that she had died helpless and alone. Dolly’s plight had been noticed not by her neighbours, but by a persistent meter reader determined to do his job, even if it did mean peering in through dirty windows and discovering dead old women. Every time she thought of it, Edie felt a flush of guilt – Dolly’s lonely death had been inevitable simply because no one had cared, and she was one of the few who had been obliged to.
She lugged her shopping bags back across the square, using the central garden as a short cut. There had been a time when the garden had been a pleasant place where kids could play. It seemed to be the haunt of the druggies and drunks now, if the litter of cans and needles were evidence of anything. As she approached the gate opposite number seventeen, she spied a group of people congregated outside the house and listening rapt as a man lectured them. He was pointing at the main drain in the road at the front of the house.
‘Sally Pollett had been missing for four days when the residents of number fifteen called in the water board to complain that the drain was blocked and that an awful smell was pervading the street. When the workmen arrived and pulled up the manhole cover, they discovered her remains wedged into the shaft and starting to decay. She had been strangled, her underwear forced into her throat and her hair sheared off. Her female organs had been mutilated while she was still alive. It was the last in a string of murders which rocked the borough of Winfield.’ The man announced his tale with dramatic flair, his voice wringing every drop of shock and horror that it could from the story.
The group blocked Edie’s path, she edged up to them and lingered on the fringes, catching the attention of a man with a camera. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘Murder tour, we’re visiting the sites where all of John Bastin’s victims were found.’ he said in a thick West Country accent. ‘Done ‘em all now. Ripper tour in London, ghost tour in Edinburgh and now Winfield. It’s dead interesting.’