by Ann Troup
Sophie’s first thought was to run, tangling with strangers never ended well in her experience. She set off with only one glance back, a glance that nearly stopped her in her tracks as her eyes spied what the man was picking up. She immediately recognised the notebook and the tin. Sophie’s gut feelings had always been greater than her curiosity and she kept running, finally bursting into the kitchen of Number 17 in a breathless flurry of panic and subsequent relief that Edie was back and the man hadn’t followed her.
Edie was sitting at the kitchen table sorting through a pile of tangled jewellery. As Sophie launched herself through the door, taking her by surprise, Edie leapt from her seat and sent a gold locket that she had just disentangled flying from her fingers – it landed at Sophie’s feet. ‘Bloody hell! You frightened the life out of me, what the hell’s going on?’
Sophie bent to pick up the locket. ‘Nothing, just saw someone I didn’t want to run into, that’s all. What’s this then?’ she said, holding the locket up so that it caught the light. The sheen on the metal made it look far more glamorous an object than it actually was.
‘Are you in trouble?’ Edie asked, reaching for the necklace.
Sophie handed it back and slumped into a chair. ‘No – I’m avoiding it. What you doing?’ she said, nodding towards the knot of jewellery.
Edie frowned at her for a moment, a look which Sophie pointedly ignored. ‘Trying to sort out Dolly’s stuff. My sister reckoned there were some nice pieces of jewellery that might be worth something, but all I can find so far is this old tat. I mean, look at this.’ She held up a diamante earring in a dull grey setting, which glinted and sparkled like a tiny chandelier as she dangled it from her fingers. ‘Hideous eh? I can’t see this kind of thing being worth much.’
Sophie took it and examined it. Edie was right; the thing was vile. ‘Bloody hell, I never had old Dolly down as a glamour puss.’
‘Me neither, she was always pretty shambolic as I remember. Look. There’s a ton of it.’ She pushed a small heap of glittering paraphernalia towards Sophie. ‘She must have looked like a Faberge bag lady in this little lot!’ she said, laughing at her own joke.
Sophie offered a polite snigger in return, then she began to poke around in the pile, fishing out a particularly over the top necklace and holding it against herself ‘What d’you reckon, could I get away with this in a T-shirt and jeans?’
Edie laughed. ‘It’s very “you”. You can have the locket if you like, it has some pretty engraving on the front.’ She passed it across the table.
‘You sure? Cool, cheers,’ the spontaneous gift made Sophie feel quite touched. The locket wasn’t her taste, not that she’d had much of an opportunity to develop a taste in jewellery, but the gesture was kind and who knew when she might need a few quid. Someone would buy the thing for a tenner if she ever got desperate. She tried to open it, but it was stiff and she had no nails to use as a lever.
‘I couldn’t get it open either, but it’s yours if you want it. Might as well have something from the spoils – I mean, there isn’t much!’
Sophie shrugged and hooked the long chain over her head, dropping the locket beneath her T-shirt where it nestled, cold and hard against her skin. ‘Ta. I’ve never had a necklace – unless you count daisy chains and I was never any good at those.’
Edie smiled. ‘Neither was I. Anyway, put the kettle on will you, while I untangle this lot? I’m parched, I haven’t had a cuppa since Lena called in earlier full of high dudgeon.’
Sophie stood up and moved towards the sink. ‘Oh yeah? What was up with her then?’
‘Oh I lost the plot with a neighbour, she heard it and came round. It’s fine, I think she’s just upset that this place is being sold. I suppose it’s been a big part of her life and she doesn’t like change – and she wasn’t too keen on losing me as a house guest. She almost cried when I gave her the flowers I’d bought to say thank you.’ Edie grimaced in an attempt to illustrate the awkwardness of the interaction with Lena.
‘Yeah? So she knew them all then, Beattie too?’ Sophie filled the kettle and set it on the gas to boil. Why someone couldn’t have bought a decent electric one she didn’t know.
Edie didn’t look up, but carried on picking at tangled chains. ‘Oh yes, she grew up with them. Has known them all her life. I think her mum and Beattie were thick as thieves way back when. Speaking of Beattie, the room looks good, you did a great job clearing it out by the way.’
‘Yeah, well, didn’t take long. What was she like? Beattie I mean.’ Sophie wanted to know how well Edie had known her grandmother before she even contemplated dropping any bombshells.
Edie paused, screwed up her face and cocked her head to the side. Sophie thought it made her look like a naughty little kid. ‘Hmmmm. I don’t remember her that well, she was mostly quite quiet and brooding. She never missed a trick though, and had a filthy temper, seemed to lose it with me on sight.’ She said with a weak giggle. ‘Rose reckons that she never quite got over my dad leaving like he did. Apparently he was the apple of her eye.’
The kettle was far from boiling, so Sophie sat back down. ‘Your dad left you? I never knew mine. My mum said he came from round here, and I suppose that’s why I came, to see if I could find him. I mean – he has to be a better bet than my mum, she’s nothing but an old slapper.’
Edie put down the clump of jewellery she had been fiddling with and looked directly at her. To Sophie’s surprise she didn’t have the look of shock on her face, which most people had when she “disrespected” her mother. ‘I was still a bump when he left, so I didn’t know mine either. He just walked out on us one day – said he was going for cigarettes and never came back. My mum never got over it, she had what people would call a breakdown I suppose. Being a mum isn’t as easy a thing as people assume.’
She looked wistful, and it bothered Sophie more than she wanted to admit. Sophie had thought that she was a rarity, that neglected kids only came from scruffy sink estates and from single parent mothers with overactive sex drives and a propensity for recreational drugs. Edie seemed quite middle class and was the last person on earth that Sophie would have expected to report a tough childhood. Neither did she seem the kind of woman who might have struggled with being a mother. ‘Have you got kids then?’
Edie looked away again. ‘A boy, Will. He’s abroad now, so I don’t see much of him. That kettle’s boiling.’
As a diversion it worked perfectly and Sophie allowed herself to be distracted by making the drinks. There had been an edge to Edie’s voice that had suggested that any discussion of her son was no go territory. She placed a mug of tea in front of Edie just as the woman gave up on her task of unravelling the jewellery.
‘I bloody give up on this, it’s like the Gordian knot!’
Sophie had a vague idea what the Gordian knot might be, something to do with Greek myths and seemingly impossible tasks. ‘Give it here, I’ll have a go.’
Edie sighed and pushed the lump of tangled metal and stones across the table. ‘Getting all that hair out of it was bad enough, and I doubt any of it is worth much. Just a load of old paste costume jewellery and a bit of market stall tat by the looks of it. Still, it might be worth something to someone I suppose. If we can get it undone I’ll take it somewhere tomorrow and see if I can get it valued. But right now it feels like the least of my problems. The whole house is full of dry rot by the look of it.’
Sophie froze, a cameo broach half untangled from its gilded bonds in her hand. ‘Oh. You found the hole, I was going to mention that…’ She went on to explain what had happened with the bed, but didn’t mention what she’d found under the floorboards.
Edie rubbed her face, as if the action would erase the weariness that pinched her features. ‘Don’t worry about it. I have a feeling that this whole house is rotten to the core. Anyway, what shall we eat tonight?’
Sophie said that she didn’t mind and thought to herself that Edie didn’t know the truth of her own words. With what she had
found out about Beattie Morris that day, the house was indeed rotten to its core.
Chapter Eight
Lena straightened the net curtains with a sigh and turned around to face the empty room. The house wasn’t the same without people in it and not even Georgia had called round today. She was used to seeing a fair bit of Sam too, but even he had been conspicuous by his absence. And now Edie had gone after much too brief a stay.
Lena didn’t enjoy being alone, the distraction of other people helped to keep the phantoms of the past at bay. Since Dolly’s death they seemed to be swarming thick and fast, coming out at her from the shadows with demonic glee and latching on to her with their cat claw determination. Lena might be old, but she wasn’t stupid. She had been sitting in the way of the past for too many years and, like King Canute, had to face the fact that the tide was coming in – whether she wanted it to or not.
Matthew Bastin turning up like a bad penny wasn’t helping. That kid had always been like a dog with a bone and his long absence from the square now seemed like an all too brief reprieve. Had it really been over twenty years since their last run in? Lena remembered it as if it were yesterday. Him, on Dolly’s doorstep, shouting the odds as if he knew it all, Dolly quaking in her boots and she, Lena, having to wade in and sort it out. It had always been the same – Dolly screwed up, and Lena fixed it. The truth was that Matthew probably knew more than he realised. What he didn’t know, and couldn’t know, was why.
Lena knew, and she’d carried the burden of it for a lot of years, too many to think about, and more than she cared to dwell on. It was all water under the bridge, and she’d always figured that the bloodstains had been washed away with the flow. How wrong she’d been to make that assumption, and equally wrong to believe that time was the healer everybody said it was. What you buried then was twice as bad when it got dug up. Past events were like wine and cheese; they just got stronger with age, more pungent and probably harder to stomach.
Not that there was anything she could do now, she was too old and too tired to want to worry about it. Edie was going to find out for sure, and trying to pin her down and distract her was only going to delay the inevitable. Perhaps it was time anyway, time to just let it unfold and be done with it. Lena was seventy-six years old, she had varicose veins, a dicky ticker, a dodgy hip and not that many more years left anyway – if she was forced to spend them in prison, so be it.
Sometimes she pondered whether she felt guilty for her part in things and whether lying on the witness stand about John Bastin’s guilt ought to feel like a burden. In her mind she often balanced the scales by telling herself that a lot more innocent people would have died if she hadn’t and it had put a stop to things. It wasn’t as if Bastin hadn’t played his part, he’d been as guilty as any of them, cheating on his wife and playing the lothario like he was God’s gift. And she’d believed it at the time, had got caught up with the baying mob and bought into the belief that someone had to be accountable. Five girls had died, the police had caught their man and though Lena couldn’t undo what had gone before she’d certainly done her bit in bringing about a satisfactory conclusion. It might not have been the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it had brought an abrupt stop to things that couldn’t be controlled by law or reason. No, Lena did not feel guilty – burdened, yes – but the load she carried was not the unbearable weight of guilt, it was more the weight of secrets, secrets gone stale and mouldy from years of being kept in the dark.
The room had grown gloomy since she had begun her reverie, it was time to put the lights on and chase the ghosts back to their corners. They had lived there a long while now, a bit more time would do them no harm – they would have their voice soon enough. With a heavy sigh she leaned across and switched on the lamp, then drew the curtains. There was a drama starting on the TV in a minute, if she looked lively she could get a cuppa on the go and be settled in her chair and ready by the time the credits had started to roll. Lena liked a good drama – they made her feel at home.
Sam was pacing, it wasn’t helping but he had to do something. With his third glass of vodka in hand he swept past the picture window once again – the fact that he might wear a groove in his high gloss wooden flooring was the last thing on his mind. Things were going to come undone if he wasn’t careful, and he really hadn’t been that careful. He’d assumed that Edie Byrne would be a pushover and – being the desperate divorcee that she appeared to be – that she would have fallen for his charms without faltering. Sam had hoped to have her fully cooperative by now and to have worked his way into her affections enough for her to let him have free rein on that house. There were things in there that he needed to get his hands on before anyone else did. Things that Edie wouldn’t understand, things that could bring trouble. He knew that he’d been an idiot to leave it so long, what he wanted might have been as safe as houses so far, but that house was far from safe now with two women poking around in it.
It would be easy enough to persuade someone to break in and retrieve the goods – but his power and control rested on him being the only one who knew. He might have to break in himself, but with the guttersnipe in residence that might not be so easy. He’d have to up his powers of persuasion with Edie, turn on the charm, get into her good books – if it meant getting her into his bed, he was OK with that – he’d had worse and you didn’t have to look at the mantelpiece when you were stoking the fire. Besides, enough booze on board and he wouldn’t have to think about her at all. The thought brought a spiteful smile to his face, until the thought of Pascoe crept back in and wiped it away.
Something would have to be done, and soon. Pascoe was not a man with a reputation for patience, but he was a man with a reputation – and it wasn’t one that Sam relished tangling with.
Edie had finally managed to persuade Sophie to take a bath, and had coaxed enough hot water out of the ancient and terrifying boiler to make it a decent one. While Sophie soaked, Edie washed the girl’s paltry collection of clothes and pondered on the child’s circumstances. Not that she was a child – 23 according to her – but she felt like a child to Edie, who still had far too much mothering instinct left over from Will to want to let it go completely. It was hard to know whether Sophie needed her, or whether she needed Sophie. Or whether it even mattered if it was benefitting them both. Sophie’s previous existence – the neglectful mother, the running away, the tangling with people of dubious motivation – bothered Edie greatly. No one should be forced to live like that because there wasn’t an alternative. Had the mother sounded like a more stable sort, Edie might have contacted her and tried to restore Sophie to her home and her family. However, from what Sophie had imparted, Karen Hedley was not the nurturing sort, much preferring a line of coke and a good party to the idea of a quiet night in with a DVD and the company of her daughter. It was a tragic waste, and if Edie chose to dwell on the scenario, it might just break her heart. Edie could empathise to a degree; her own mother, Shirley, hadn’t been easy and it had been like growing up with a chameleon. Shirley had changed her colours and her attitude with alarming and destabilising regularity. Edie often wondered what it was that broke such women so irredeemably.
With Sophie’s clothes draped and dripping over Dolly’s rickety clothes horse Edie turned her attention to the jewellery that Sophie had so patiently sorted out. A pile of junk more than likely, but what did Edie know? She wrapped it carefully in some kitchen roll and stowed it in her bag with the intention of taking it to be valued the following day. She hoped the jeweller wouldn’t laugh at her; she would have laughed at herself if the whole thing didn’t feel so depressing. She had tried to maintain an indifference to the task of clearing the house, but it was hard. Trawling through other people’s possessions gave you a sense of the person. A feeling of their intrinsic presence crept up on you whether you liked it or not. By handling Dolly’s belongings, Edie had started to form a more complete picture of the woman, a more intact vision than she’d ever held when her aunt had been
alive. In Edie’s memory Dolly had been a vapid sort of woman, someone who had existed but in a peripheral way – someone there, yet insubstantial; real, but not recognised as significant. Edie had never considered her to be a person with thoughts, feelings, wants and needs. Dolly had seemed to exist purely to serve others – Beattie and Dickie, then Rose and Edie and their mother, the emotionally unstable Shirley. All except Rose were long gone, and Edie wondered why they loomed so large in her mind now that it was too late for her to say or do anything that might have led to a different outcome. You could only validate the dead with a gravestone and flowers, which felt to Edie like much too little, much too late. It was a shame that sadness and sorrow could not transcend the veil between life and death. Dolly would never know that Edie was sorry (and desperately curious to know where all the money had gone, and why her aunt had lived such a squalid, cluttered life).
Sophie lay in the bath, her thoughts meandering along a similar path to Edie’s, but reaching a fork in the road and taking an entirely different direction. She was thinking about the guy she’d bumped into and why he’d been stealing Edie’s rubbish. She’d checked the bags earlier, and sure enough the tin and the notebook were gone and the incident hadn’t been the weird coincidence she’d been hoping for. What kind of freak stole other people’s rubbish? Sophie could smell a rat, and she wasn’t kidding – this house stank, literally, like something had died in here and was festering in a corner. It must be the rot Edie had mentioned, but bloody hell it got up your nose and lingered – even the smell of the soap couldn’t mask it. Anyway, that bloke and what he was up to was niggling. She knew where he lived and had seen him about a few times. When you were surviving on your wits you tended to notice things that other people didn’t, and clean-cut blokes moving into bedsit land were one of them. The man was out of place and up to no good, and it was a different kind of no good to the usual whoring, boozing and drug dealing that defined the square. Sophie considered herself nobody’s fool and was determined to find out what he was up to at the soonest opportunity. But for now she was bloody enjoying this bath – if she were to die and could have her choice of heavens, one with a huge luxurious bath would be the one she’d choose.