by Adam Nevill
‘Keep ’em.’ Her retort came out sharper than she’d intended.
‘Knacker McGuire’, as he’d called himself, was someone for whom Amber would have considered a programme of electric shock treatment to entirely erase him from her memory.
While carrying out his fourth sentence at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for an assault on a Russian prostitute in Bayswater in 2004, when he had been ‘on a bender’ in London, Arthur Bennet had briefly shared a prison cell in Wormwood Scrubs Prison with the house’s next generation of pimps and killers: Fergal Donegal and Nigel Newman; the latter being the real name of the habitual liar ‘Knacker McGuire’.
After their own releases Fergal and Knacker had travelled to Birmingham. The purpose of their trip was to divest the ageing and terminally ill misfit, Arthur Bennet, of what he had boasted was a profitable brothel in North Birmingham; a ‘family business’ from whose complement of young girls he had taken his pick as lovers.
Amber hadn’t read the book about the Bennets, Deadly Inheritance, but she had read the book about Knacker and Fergal, The Devil’s Entrepreneurs, a fairly sensational red and black jacketed, true crime offering aimed at the airside market of airports. The author had acquired information on the killers before Peter: morbidly predictable histories of petty crime and violence, burglary and drug dealing; careers founded in broken homes, suspensions and expulsions from secondary schools, and time endured under the fists of violent fathers.
Interestingly to Amber, what The Devil’s Entrepreneurs revealed was that neither Fergal nor Knacker had any previous convictions for violence against women; those appetites only appeared to have manifested in Edgehill Road.
More urgently than ever, Amber needed Peter to target his research solely upon the spiritualist activity at the house between 1912 and 1926, with particular emphasis on anything connected to the name ‘Black Maggie.’ She’d been pushing him to do this for over a year. But maybe not hard enough.
She’d paid for all of his expenses and for his time researching the house’s past since the completion of their first book. If there was a second book, she had promised Peter an endorsing preface and assured him the jacket could carry her name. The sizeable publishing advance for No One Gets Out Alive had gone to her and she had paid Peter a ghost writer’s fee, as well as sharing the not inconsiderable royalties with him; the book had been translated into thirty-five languages and been involved in seven publishing auctions. Even then, Peter still needed to work; the proceeds from each film had been Amber’s alone, and that had made her fortune. Peter had done well but he still needed to earn.
In the hotel room, Amber struggled to smother her impatience. ‘Peter, the Bennets are conquered ground. There’s not much more I can stand to read about them. Don’t you have anything about The Friends of Light? And Clarence Putnam? We know he was their first leader. How could he have not known about the first four murders?’
Peter looked surprised and then hurt at Amber’s outburst. But unless he discovered something soon about the pre-Bennet era, she’d really have no choice but to seek a desperate alternative form of investigation into what had followed her to Devon.
Peter fidgeted in his own disappointment. ‘Amber, you just never know what will join dots to something else further back in time, a clue about the past. This whole case has shown a connectivity from the start. I still feel it necessary to examine every piece of material evidence and anecdotal detail, even hearsay. You just have to understand that the further back we go, the less there is to examine. I can’t work any faster than I am.’
‘I don’t doubt your principles or your amazing ability to uncover all of this, Peter, but I want to know about the first victims. And The Friends of Light. I know there is something there.’
Peter gave her a look she recognized from Josh: one of pity and sadness, familiar in the eyes of anyone who recognized her determination to investigate a mystical origin to the crimes. To Peter, the first era was ancient history; he doubted the murderer of the first four victims had a relationship with either of the Bennets beyond copycat behaviour. Harold Bennet had relaid the ground floor of the house sometime in the early 1960s, and may have discovered the remains of two of the first victims. And if Harold Bennet had unearthed the bones of Lottie Reddie and Virginia Anley, he had reburied them without reporting the grim find. It was also possible Harold Bennet had been inspired by what could be done within the privacy of one’s own home, using the very bricks and mortar that his new family seat was constructed from. It was the most logical theory, which officialdom, the media and the public had mostly since accepted.
The inability to explain her need for the missing information began to stoke the fire of Amber’s panic. Unchecked, she knew how quickly such feelings turned to anger. She already felt like breaking something in the hotel room.
Of those involved in the investigation, or on her behalf, only the director Kyle Freeman believed links existed between The Friends of Light, the Bennets and her captors, the Devil’s Entrepreneurs: Knacker and Fergal. Kyle had accepted Amber’s story at face value, and so easily she had even questioned his readiness to believe her. But within a week of moving into the farmhouse, Amber now knew it no longer mattered who believed her, or whether her ideas were suitable for Peter’s new book.
She covered her face with her hands and groaned quietly with frustration and what was swiftly becoming despair; an emotion she had prayed she would never feel again in relation to that place. But here it came, as leaden as it had been three years ago.
‘Hey, come on,’ Peter said. ‘It’s not that bad. And anyway, forget the court reports. In fact, forget the Bennets. I did find something else.’
Amber’s hands were off her face. ‘What?’
Peter grinned. ‘Or rather a friend of mine did. George Ritchie. He teaches history at Birmingham University and specializes in folklore. He’s been on the case of the Black Maggie for a year. But…’
‘What, what?’
‘I wouldn’t get too excited.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a tad bizarre, I’m afraid. I was in two minds whether I should even show you. Afraid it all seems a bit tenuous to me. But I put it on the memory stick. The folder is called “Black Maggie.” Here it is.’
EIGHTY-ONE
Peter could not stop grinning as if embarrassed by what he was telling Amber. ‘It’s pretty silly. But the first thing George sent me were song lyrics. From a call and answer folk song used by Warwickshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire field workers up until enclosure. And it’s quite a salacious ditty. But George thinks the origins of the folk song are pre-Roman.
‘The version of the song we have words for includes remnants of an old fertility rite from deep midwinter. Performed to usher out the cold and darkness and bless the coming crops, that kind of thing. Apparently, a version of this rite was performed for centuries in various incarnations.
‘George’s notes are at the bottom. Here you go: “In the song, four maidens, probably low-born virgins, we can only assume, were restrained and deflowered in honour of a pagan deity, known as Black Maggie in Tudor times. Though the practice probably never survived the fifteenth century, a song about the rite was still sung until the 1800s in some counties.”
‘George can’t find any evidence of the song past the First World War. Someone wrote the lyrics down in 1908 for posterity. A priest called Mason, from out Hereford way, who bemoaned the end of rural life, blah, blah, blah, and the industrial revolution. He tried to record all the local folk songs before they were lost forever. Mason didn’t have much luck because this is all obscure stuff that George dug up.
‘But at least it’s local.’ Peter smiled and relaxed back into his chair to drink a second cup of coffee. ‘All the Black Maggie stuff I have for you is on there. You want me to try and sing the song?’
Amber’s attempt at a conciliatory smile failed. She read what Peter had pulled onto the screen.
When four bonny lasses are laid upon the green
grass
When four bonny, bonny lasses are laid upon the green grass
And tied fore and aft, the black lamb will dance a jig
When four bonny lasses are laid upon the green grass
When four bonny, bonny lasses are laid upon the green grass
Old black mag will lift her skirts and dance a jig
When four bonny lasses are laid upon the green grass
When four bonny, bonny lasses are laid upon the green grass
Black oxen will draw her wagon hither, far Queen Black Mag
When four bonny lasses are laid upon the green grass
When four bonny, bonny lasses are laid upon the green grass
Thine honour, these maidens, thine honour, the corn doth rise like grass
Amber scrolled onto the next page of the file.
Peter leant forward to guide her through the notes. ‘George says there are vestiges of an older idea inside this verse. Fragments of a similar theme were found on some Roman-British ruins in Wales, that were used for storing grain around 400 AD. Wasn’t old Clarence Putnam from Wales? I seem to recall he was, but the link is so thin it’s barely there. There’s a wall mosaic. Here it is.’
Peter highlighted some text and a black and white photograph of chipped stone fragments on a square card. ‘George thinks the connection to the folk song can be found through the images of four maidens on the tiles of the ruined grain store. The fertility rite stuff is there too. And George says that these ideas always travel and change over time. But the interpretation of the painting, most widely accepted by historians, is of four maidens being laid beneath the grass. Suggesting death. Probably sacrifice. Here you go…’
Peter scrolled down the screen and pointed his index finger at the brief footnotes. He read them aloud:
‘“Though the maidens on the mosaic are depicted with torcs, or neck rings, in serpent form, de vermis, possibly to represent a Goddess that we have no name for.”
‘George thinks the mosaic and the folk song developed out of an even older Northern-European-wide practice, between 100 BC and about 500 AD, in which people were tied down and throttled in peat bogs. Started back in the bronze age, continued through the iron age. It’s in his notes. See here: “Often young women or common criminals were used, to ensure the end of winter and a good harvest come spring.”
‘Eerily coincidental, but I don’t think we need go back that far for the Bennets, do you? Or The Friends of Light. I mean, they were devout Christians. It’ll get our book stocked in the New Age section of Waterstones.’ Peter found this incredibly funny; Amber was nearly sick into her lap.
‘But this is all I can dredge up about your Black Maggie. You all right? You look a bit peaky.’
EIGHTY-TWO
Three days later, Amber opened the front door of the farmhouse and turned off the alarms.
The first thing she noticed on the hall floor and connecting staircase was the dust. Small mounds the size of mice and rats exploring the clean, new spaces, as if poised to clamber further up the polished steps to the bedrooms.
The second thing she noticed was the smell. Competing with the fragrance of the new furniture, floors and walls, was a pungent undercurrent of damp wood, sour emulsion, tangy loft spaces and stale underfloor cavities. The stench of 82 Edgehill Road.
Such was the dross on the floor of the living room, she might have been inside a tomb; one recently opened and excavated by explorers. Only she had not just walked inside a cave in the Valley of the Kings, or ducked inside a Saxon barrow, she had entered her own home. A place so newly renovated it should have retained its pristine condition after only being occupied by a single person for a mere seven days. Yet the interior now looked to have been shuttered and derelict for decades.
With hands she could barely feel, Amber drew the curtains and allowed more of the sun’s illumination to fill the wide space of the living room and adjoining dining room. Bales and rolls of sooty dust, amidst disintegrating clumps and lumps, reared up the skirting and seemed in the process of crossing the wooden floors from one side of the room to the other.
Bands of morning light pierced the clean glass of the patio doors to reveal myriad diaphanous motes wafting on air currents. The harder she looked, the more the very air became a perpetual shower of dust particles, forever falling, constantly stirred, moving, relocating, glittering, gathering, growing.
She peered at the sole of one bare foot; it was blackened by the filth spread around the floor. Same thing in the kitchen. Her fingertip came away black, time after time, on every flat surface the kitchen boasted. The surfaces, the pots and pans hanging above the central work station, the breakfast bar, the oven, microwave and sink, were all filmed with dust, a multitude of specks accumulating and spread finely to fade the room to grey. Twenty thousand pounds to build, but now as dirty as a long-abandoned squat.
Amber opened the patio doors and stepped outside. She sat on the first of the three steps that led to the grassy pasture of the rear lawn and began to cry. Could not stop crying; the tears of bitterness, rage, frustration and outright despair would not end. Tears of the helpless. Her body trembled, her hands twitched as if cold.
The late summer sun was warm and bright, and only the most talented fine artist could have adequately captured the quiet and gentle beauty of the Devonshire morning: a most English idyll, with a subtle, intense power. Maize shivered in a faint cooling sea breeze; momentarily the heads of the nearest plants swayed sideways in the capricious air currents, and then nodded towards her. The crop beyond her garden gate might have become an audience to her wretchedness, raising thousands of hands to the air to wave above a vast crowd that whispered and rustled in anticipation of what came next.
Thine honour, these maidens, thine honour, the corn doth rise like grass.
‘My God, my God,’ she said to herself, and to the earth and trees and sky, to whatever bore witness to her misery.
You took her back, you took her back to the green grass … the harvest, to the country. Took her from the city. From out of the darkness. And you carried her back here. You are a carrier.
‘No.’
Or did she take you back?
Black Mag let you run, you stupid bitch. She let you run here. She found you here. She went through your mind. She found your memories of the seaside. Of Dad, Mum. She made you come here. She wanted it for herself. Because she’s inside you.
Used. Used like the others.
You took an oath. You promised to keep her. You would have said anything to get out of that place … did you?
‘I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!’
You did.
‘I can’t remember. Oh Jesus, I can’t remember.’
She couldn’t fully recall her night on the kitchen floor of the ground floor flat, surrounded by broken glass and crockery and splintered wood; the night she had truly lost her mind through sustained terror. A time in which she had become convinced that she was no longer inside the house, or even part of a recognizable world; a time in which she seemed to have existed on the border between one world and another.
And in such places, didn’t she know only too well, that the precision of a person’s recall could not be relied upon. Memory developed a second life, and the imagination cultivated the visuals of memory and embellished them over time. Isn’t that what the therapist had said: that her memory and imagination had combined within that house, and continued to do so after she escaped it? Because in hindsight she remembered herself looking down at her body on the kitchen linoleum, and not lying amongst the wreckage and peering up and into the black, so it was never a true memory, or she would have recalled the room from the floor?
Like so much of that time in her life, she seemed to have walked within a perpetual nightmare that began the very moment the front door of that place closed behind her. And what she had experienced in the rooms of the ground floor flat had made her want to die, and quickly. That she had not forgotten. She had desired the void. Total extinc
tion. An end to consciousness. Had prayed for it. Because she had seen things no mind was built to withstand.
So maybe the building had been a prison, a place of exile for something older than the house, even the city? The house was a place it had scrabbled back into, when called. A temple. Perhaps called upon innocently and inadvertently by those idiots of ‘Light’. Had they invited something back to twist the minds of the simpletons that occupied its tomb? Or had Clarence Putnam brought it to the big city from Wales? He had been an amateur historian. But whose will drove his purpose? She would never know. Those fools may have continued a degenerate rite once practised freely. An ancient honour. And what if they were answered when they called out to the darkness?
Nonsense. Nonsense. It was nonsense.
The song. Maidens beneath the grass … the nursery rhyme of the gypsy boy in the dream she had a thin recollection of. He had been at the house during the Second World War with his grandmother. They had been committed to an asylum. Four maids. Had he sung something about four maids? To open a door.
Women hanged by washing line. Buried in soil. Cemented into foetal positions like the unborn. Walled up, the crouching bones.
Amber suspected she was going to throw up. She was breathing too quickly and her heartbeat was accelerating her panic to a place where she worried she might need an injection to calm down. She was mad; these were the thoughts of the damaged, the deranged, the impaired.
Amber stood up and turned upon the house. ‘Who are you? Where are you!’
Her shaking vision raked the window panes for the sight of an unwelcome face; one that might peer out at her, gleeful, triumphant, sated, with little white eyes open. A thing that had followed her here.
There had been no nightmares, no intrusions, no trespassers, no darkness beyond the doors of her hotel suite in Plymouth. Whatever she had fled from, whatever she had encountered in her first week in this new house, had followed her here, to this building. So would it follow her anywhere and eventually appear wherever she settled? At sea she had been moving. In sheltered accommodation she had never been alone.