by Ann Troup
‘Who are your friends?’ Sophie asked, nodding towards the wooden heads as she manoeuvred into the room carrying the tea.
Edie smiled, glad of the distraction. ‘Funny you should ask – this one is Jean, this one Anne, the redhead is Elizabeth – very fitting if you consider her resemblance to old Gloriana herself – that one is Sal, maybe for Aunt Sally? And that one is Mary, though the wig looks more like Harpo to me.’
Sophie didn’t laugh and instead looked horrified, which made Edie feel slightly foolish for having made a joke of it. ‘Yeah, you’re right, not particularly funny is it?’
Sophie, still frowning, sat on the bed and shuddered. It occurred to Edie that the girl was attaching far more meaning to an old woman’s oddness than she needed to.
‘What did you go and give them those names for? It’s fucking freaky, Edie.’ Sophie said, hugging herself and looking positively upset.
‘I didn’t name them, Dolly did. Poor old soul must have been more far gone than we originally thought. Anyway, they’ll be gone tomorrow, a woman from the theatre is coming to pick them up.’
‘Thank Christ for that! It’s like something out of the chamber of horrors. Can’t you stick a blanket over them or something?’
Edie pursed her lips and shook her head. ‘You have a very active imagination.’ She searched around for something suitable, found an old shawl hanging over the back of a chair and used it to cover the boxes. ‘Better?’
‘I will be when they’re gone. Did all this hair come from dead people?’
Edie laughed. ‘Of course not, what on earth makes you think that?’
‘Well, where else does it come from then?’ Sophie’s indignation was mild, but tangible all the same.
‘People sell it, mostly women from the eastern bloc – that’s the good quality stuff. The cheaper stuff is from China, but Asian hair is more coarse so it’s not used for the quality wigs.’
Sophie fingered her own hair; it was long, messy and limp from her poor diet and long-term neglect. ‘Can’t see me getting much for mine.’
Edie raised her eyebrows as if to indicate her own short locks. ‘Me neither, I doubt my sweepings would fetch much.’
‘Weird thing to do for a living really, making wigs – still, I suppose someone has to do it.’
‘Dolly was one of the best in her day. She did a lot of work for the RSC and the BBC, all those lavish costume dramas – chances are she made the wigs. She used to take such a pride in her work, it’s a shame to see it all in tatters like this.’
Sophie looked around the room, taking in all the chaos and clutter. ‘What do you think went wrong? I didn’t know her that well, she was just nice to me sometimes, would give me a few quid and that, but I never got further than the kitchen most times, and to be honest never wanted to. I know I sleep rough, but even I have standards.’
Edie laughed. ‘I suppose we all have our limits. I’m not sure what went wrong. It’s been so long since I spent time with her, over thirty years in fact. I’m guessing that after Dickie died things just went to pot.’
Sophie sipped her tea, fished a hair out of her mouth, grimaced and asked, ‘How come you didn’t see them?’
Edie sighed and perched on the corner of the bed. ‘I don’t really know, I think there was some kind of falling out with my mother – not that that was difficult, my mother was a strange woman, I think she could have found fault with Mother Theresa! I know she never believed that my father had left us, and blamed Dolly and Dickie for keeping something from her. The only reason I saw them at all was because Mum sometimes had bouts of time in hospital, and we were always sent to stay here.’
‘What was wrong with her, was she ill then?’
‘Yes, she had mental health problems. They called it “manic depression” then, which meant sometimes she was so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed, and sometimes she was so high there was no stopping her. It made her a somewhat mercurial person; you never knew how she was going to be from one day to the next. It was hard to live with. She was sectioned a few times when I was younger, which was why we ended up here sometimes.’
‘Shit, that sounds pretty rubbish. What happened to her in the end then?’
Edie closed her eyes; she could only ever deal with it with them shut, as if keeping the event isolated in her mind’s eye would somehow contain it there forever. ‘She cried wolf. We had heard her say that she was going to kill herself so many times over the years that we had got into the habit of ignoring it, assuming that it was just a cry for help or her seeking attention again. She threw herself off a railway bridge and broke her neck.’
‘Shit!’ Sophie looked shocked.
‘Yes, quite. But it was a long time ago. Want to give me a hand with the wardrobes?’
‘S’pose.’
Edie had needed to change the subject, her mother’s suicide was yet another source of guilt. Guilt felt as if it ran through her like a seam of coal, ready to be tapped into and mined at the drop of a name. There were times when she wondered if all she was capable of feeling was remorse; love could have leapt up and bit her in the backside and she wouldn’t have known what it was. She even felt guilty about Simon, despite his abusiveness. Maybe she had deserved it? She had certainly never loved him and had married him out of desperation and need, in a bid to get away from home and her imperfect, unlovely mother. Unlovely, unloved, broken and gone. Yet Edie missed her. She shook her head in that habitual way she had, as if the action could dismiss the pang of regret and longing for the woman she had never understood.
What kind of insanity was it, to miss a woman who blamed you, her unborn child, for the absence of her husband? Edie’s mother had always rationalised that if he had left, it must be because he hadn’t wanted Edie. And who had ever wanted Edie? Not even her own son, if their relationship were to come under scrutiny. Edie seemed to have that effect on people, the ability to alienate them by her mere existence. Only Rose seemed to need her, and even that seemed as if it was just to do the dirty work. Clearing this house was certainly dirty work, both literally and metaphorically. Dolly’s life could be quantified by the layers of dirt and detritus, an existence marked by neglect and a magpie-like hoarding of things. And, boy, had Dolly hoarded things.
The wardrobes were like a voyage of discovery; a life lived through objects. In the bottom of one Edie even found a box full of baby clothes, crisp and fragile with age. A knitted shawl, so fine it looked as if it had been spun from single fibres, and a nightdress, tiny and delicate, the yoke hand smocked and exquisite. How sad they looked, lovingly made yet clearly never worn. ‘I wonder who these were made for?’ she said, holding up the tiny nightdress for Sophie to see.
‘Dunno, you?’
Edie looked at the little garment. ‘Maybe.’ It seemed likely; no other children had been born. It would be typical of her mother to have turned down such a gift, she would not have wanted anything from Dolly and had even resented the fact that her sister-in-law had cared for her children when she couldn’t. Shame, it seemed, was a powerful motivator for bad behaviour. She should know, it had motivated most of her own. With another shake of her head and a sigh, she consigned the baby clothes to a rubbish bag and moved on.
Chapter Eleven
While Edie took an early evening bath in readiness for her dinner date with Sam, Sophie took the opportunity to slip out of the house and across the square to visit Matt. The wig blocks had been bothering her, though Edie hadn’t attached any significance to the names, Sophie had and the knowledge that Dolly must have become obsessed with the murder victims had been bothering her all day. She’d been hard pressed not to blurt everything out to Edie as soon as she’d spotted them and had been sitting on her horror and revulsion for hours.
This time she didn’t climb through the window, though in the time it took for Matt to answer it might have been quicker if she had. ‘Bloody hell mate, you took your time,’ she complained, noticing the dribble of blood above his lip and the smear of soap n
ear his ear. His shirt was buttoned up all wrong too. ‘Sorry to interrupt like, but you’ve got your chance to get in the house tonight. Edie’s going out with that cretin from next door.’
She noticed a smile start to tilt the corners of his mouth. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You calling Sam Campion a cretin. It amuses me.’
Sophie scowled at him. ‘Well he is. So, she’s going out at eight. I’ll put the front bedroom light on when she’s gone so you’ll know it’s all right to come over, but come round the back otherwise old mother cretin will see you.’
‘I could just give you my mobile number and you can text me. There’s a difference between being discreet and resorting to cloaks and daggers.’
Sophie treated him to her best, most practised look of utter contempt. ‘Most days I don’t even have enough money to eat bud, let alone own a mobile bloody phone.’
Matt sighed. ‘OK, I’ll wait until you turn the light on.’
Sophie nodded. ‘Good, there’s something you’re going to want to see.’ She turned on her heel and left him standing in the doorway, his question not even half asked. It wasn’t often that Sophie found herself in a position of power, and as it went this wasn’t much, but she was going to enjoy it while she could.
Once she was out of his sight she slowed her pace and ambled across the street to the garden in the middle of the square.
She knew a fraction of a second before that something was about to happen, a creeping sensation, that feeling on the back of your neck that someone is far too close and that their intentions aren’t good. She could smell his breath, curling and sour as it crept round her neck while he grabbed her hair, hauling her head back and wrenching the breath from her lungs with the shock and pain of it. ‘I fucking told you to get off the square and fucking stay off, you stinking little cunt.’
He twisted her hair in his hands so that it pulled at the skin around her eyes and made them water. ‘What’s it to you what I do, Johnno? I’m not fucking bothering anyone.’
‘You’re bothering me and if I see your fucking ugly face here again I’ll fucking cut it off.’
She knew he was capable of it, she’d seen his handiwork on one of the girls who had tried to stand up to him. The girl was drug addled and scarred now, fit for nothing except turning tricks for the lowest of the low and grovelling for mercy and her next bag of smack from Johnno. ‘I don’t have anywhere else to go.’ She didn’t know why she’d even bothered saying it; he wasn’t a man who had a conscience he could battle with.
‘Like I give a flying fuck,’ he confirmed, yanking down on her hair so abruptly that she felt the bones in her neck crunch. ‘When I tell you to go, you go – got it?’
Sophie could neither nod nor speak at that point, any movement at all felt like too much of a risk. He could break her neck and no one would give a shit.
‘John Butler, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Let go.’ Sophie recognised Lena’s voice, and for the first time ever thanked God for the appearance of the interfering old woman. Johnno’s grip slackened slightly, but he didn’t let go.
‘None of your business Mrs Campion.’ He said, his voice tight with the effort of controlling his temper, or so it seemed to Sophie.
‘I beg to differ boy, what goes on in this square is every bit my business, as you well know. Let go of the girl or I’ll have to call my son.’
Sophie sensed his hesitation, he tightened his grip in defiance, then seemed to think better of it. He let go and pushed her away from him so violently that she stumbled forward and would have gone headlong onto her face had it not been for a park bench breaking her fall. She turned to the woman who had literally saved her neck.
‘Go home.’ Lena said.
Sophie went to speak, but Lena gave her a look, ‘I said go home.’ There were certain tones of voice that Sophie had learned not to ignore, and it seemed that Lena had mastered them. Without hesitation she started to walk, her instinct was to run, but she was damned if she was going to give in to it, the day she agreed to run because she had been told to would be the day she lost the battle for good.
As she walked, fully aware of the fact that Johnno was scathing her back with his most venomous stare, she contemplated how easily he had given up his control to the old woman. Lena had threatened him with Sam, the man who was climbing out of his car in front of Edie’s house as if conjured there by Sophie’s thoughts. ‘Well, well, well, you learn something new every day…’ she muttered to herself as she skirted him and made her way to the alley at the back of the houses.
Edie had already gone by the time she got back to the house, leaving Sophie alone and shaken by the encounter in the square. Johnno was a thug and a bastard and he treated everyone as if they were objects which either existed to serve him or provide him with psychopathic entertainment. It was nothing new to Sophie; she had grown up with people like him who were all about the power and control that they believed they could wield. It was amusing and gratifying to discover that Johnno was a puppet too, but of some concern that it might be to Sam Campion. Until this point Sophie had just considered Sam to be a bit of a sleazebag, she had no idea that he might be well up on the local gangland food chain. It put a whole new light on her enthusiasm about Edie going out with him, though even before this it had been more about getting her out of the house – and Matt in – than it had been a genuine concern for Edie’s social life.
Calmer now, she walked upstairs and into Dickie’s room where she turned on the light, as she had promised Matt that she would. She needed to show him the wig blocks and the baby clothes that she had surreptitiously removed from the rubbish when Edie’s back was turned. She knew that she was betraying Edie’s trust in doing all of this and repaying her generosity in the worst way possible. But Matt was right, it looked like the Morris family were involved with these murders up to their necks, and it would be better if Edie found out from her rather than anyone else.
Matt must have been waiting for her signal because he tapped gently on the back door almost as soon as she reached the bottom of the stairs. She let him in, thankful that Lena was out and about and wouldn’t have spotted his arrival. ‘No one saw you, did they?’ she asked for good measure.
‘I’m pretty sure they didn’t, what happened in the square? I was watching you, what did you do to upset that thug?’
Sophie didn’t want to dwell on it. ‘My mere existence seems to offend him.’
Matt nodded. ‘I know that one, I grew up with my presence causing offence. I always assumed that I must be some kind of uncomfortable reminder for people and that maybe my existence made them feel bad about something. I assume it was because they knew that hanging my father was a mistake.’
Fair play to him, Sophie thought, he made no bones about his beliefs. ‘Yeah, well I don’t know about Johnno, I suppose to him if I’m not earning him money by buying his drugs or whoring for him then I have no place here.’ No one owned an area, but once the rot had set in patterns formed. As she led Matt up the stairs to Dolly’s room she wondered if the canker had set in with the murders – Dolly had always told her what a nice place the square had been in the old days. It was difficult to see that now, there were too many layers of filth and decay to rake through to find any decency. Even this wasn’t decent, allowing a stranger to rifle through someone else’s house was hardly the mark of good behaviour and respect. Sophie dismissed the thought; she had always found the moral high ground to be an exceptionally lonely place.
Lena waited until Johnno had sloped off to whichever dive he might be planning to menace that night. She might have saved the girl from a beating, but someone would cop it and she had no doubt that the animal would be picturing her face when he did it. She might be old but she wasn’t stupid, she knew that in a place like this shit floats to the top. Given that Sam was higher up than Johnno in the local criminal hierarchy, she had to consider her own part in things. After all, she had brought him up and taught him the basics of life, like how to
fight for what you believed in, how to hold your head high above the rest and how to do what needed to be done, no matter what. Only it had all gone a bit wrong in Sam, maybe the error had occurred in his nature, rather than her nurture? It wouldn’t surprise her; he had come from bad blood.
She reached her front door and fumbled for the key, remembering a time when no one had locked their doors because no one had needed to, communities operated on trust back then. They operated on the same thing now, only what you could trust had changed. You could trust that someone would want what you had, you could be sure they would try and take it and you damned well knew that given half a chance they would get one over on you as quick as blinking. The only advantage of Sam’s local status as far as Lena could see was the fact that she was relatively protected from such proclivities. If you disrespected Mrs Campion, you were signing your own death warrant.