SIXTY-FIVE

By the time Amber had carried all of the treasury boxes into the study and distributed the files through the brushed steel cabinets, and after she had finished attaching all of the selected clippings, pictures and notes to the cork boards mounted on the walls, the view outside her windows had dissolved into darkness and turned the panes of reinforced glass into mirrors.

There was no light pollution from neighbouring properties, because there were no neighbours. There were no primary road routes for three miles either and the closest lane was unlit. The nearest town, Shaldon, could not be seen from anywhere on her property. Even if someone stood in the lane connected to the front drive, the house would not be visible to them.

The original brick walls of the farm yard, further reinforced by an inner ring of mountain ash trees, planted years before, entirely concealed the house from the north-facing front and the building’s two sides.

The occupants of the nearest houses had been investigated by a security consultant on her behalf. There were three farming families, and sundry locals comfortably retired. A sparse population that had failed to raise a single criminal record, and not one of them knew who she was. There would be no house warming either. She was entirely alone.

A relocation agency had found the property through a search arranged by her solicitor. The agency had met her requests for total privacy with an exactitude that startled Amber the first time she visited the farmhouse.

Almost one year ago, when the first of her three ocean cruises ended, she’d been driven to the house from Southampton docks by a chauffeured car service to approve the agency’s find. After five hours of deliberation and a consultation with an architect, Amber decided this was indeed the place that would become her first home: a building close to the settings of some of the happiest periods of her life, defined by holidays with mum and dad in Goodrington and Torquay, way back when she was eleven, before her mum died, and probably the last time in her life she had been truly happy.

Even after all that had happened during the last three years, the very idea that she could now make bespoke requests to discreet professional firms, established to serve a wealthy clientele, still retained the novelty to swamp her with diffidence and feelings of unworthiness. Though of late she was less surprised by such things. After years of making do and never having much money, she was quickly becoming accustomed to what money concealed and altered beyond recognition. She was even starting to feel less guilty.

Only after the work on her new home was complete and the security system operational, did Amber finally return to the house to find it transformed beyond recognition. Six days ago.

Nine months of the house’s new life had been spent under the auspices of master builders and interior designers, who partially rebuilt, and then completely renovated the building’s interior to her taste. For the entire time that others searched for her future home, and then remade the farmhouse, she had been at sea, though Amber had not left land to forget. While sailing around the Mediterranean, the West Indies, the Florida Keys, and the Eastern Seaboard of America, she had sought and found distance. And then she’d returned to land to resume the search.

For him.

For it.

For them.

Amber turned in her chair and faced her reflection in the window. A pale face amidst short, blue-black hair peered back at her. She’d never be blonde again.

Out there, beyond her reflection, beyond the boundary of her property, she’d found that she could happily watch the land undulate towards the coast of Torbay for hours, a book open upon her lap and a pot of tea beside her. Three miles of fields used for maize, flanked by pasture for grazing sheep, that she surveyed in the same way she’d so recently surveyed the great tumult of heaving oceans.

On the first day, when she walked in the garden, the nervous bleat of a ewe had carried to her from the distance. She’d seen birds in the trees and on her lawn, but no animals inside the walls. Nothing much bigger than a fox could get inside the grounds without her knowing.

The security system had been installed by a firm endorsed by members of the royal family and a myriad celebrity clients. Any form the size and weight of a small child upwards would activate the halogen security lights and a series of motion sensors connected to alarms that would get a local security company on the phone in seconds, and to her door in twenty minutes guaranteed, if she wished.

The front gate of the grounds could only be opened from inside the house, or with a key fob if she was on foot, or sat inside her Lexus RX 450 on the lane outside. Every point of access could also be locked automatically by Amber from inside the building. On security she had placed no limits on budget.

She reclined her seat before the desk in the study. Sipping at a chilled glass of spiced rum and Coke Zero, she attempted to wipe her mind clear of the emotions and thoughts and memories that had amassed during the day, while she reopened the files and fixed key visual materials to the walls. Alcohol always helped.

When she was ready, she took a long look at the faces tacked on the wall above her desk. Faces she had refused herself more than a glance at through the day, and only to establish their placement on the walls, as if she had merely been hanging framed watercolours to enliven the room. Now she looked right into their eyes.

‘I came back. I said I would.’

During the long investigation, the inquest and the writing of her account that had absorbed the first year after her escape, the strangers in the photographs had begun to feel like a group of friends. A strange sense of kinship had occurred between the dead and living victims of the house. By the time she was released into the world and began work on the first of two films she executive-produced, she knew she would never be able to leave the dead people behind; they were not to be ignored or forgotten in the way they had been for so many years.

Besides the only two people she had known – the sole male victim, Ryan Martin, who had once been a boyfriend in her other life, and the girl who had briefly been a housemate, Margaret Tolka, whom she’d only known in passing – Amber had learned all that she could about the murdered strangers, the other victims: the fifteen.

Amber arranged fifteen tea lights in the long, horizontal pewter holder at the rear of her desk. Carefully, using one of the cook’s matches that she kept inside her study, she lit a single candle for each of the victims, including the two who had yet to be identified because they were found without any teeth in their skulls.

Thirteen victims were matched by photographs. For each of the two unidentified women an inclusion on the wall was signified by the picture of a white and pink rose respectively. She called them ‘Top Girl Walker’ and ‘Bedfellow’.

If the first four victims of the house – Lottie Reddie, Virginia Anley, Eudora Fry and Florence Stockton – all murdered ninety years before Amber set foot inside 82 Edgehill Road, had ever been photographed individually, their pictures had not survived or been discovered. An investigative reporter, Peter St John, had found the only photograph that included images of the four: a formal group portrait of a spiritualist society called The Friends of Light. The picture was taken in 1919 on a Bank Holiday weekend, with the members of the society arranged before the bandstand of Handsworth Park in Birmingham.

This was also the biggest of the photographs attached to the wall because Amber had enlarged her copy so that the relevant faces could be seen more clearly. The faces of the four victims were neatly circled in black ink.

Virginia Anley had a face Amber would never forget, a face she had once dreamed of: the eyes open, the body hanged beneath a tree branch.

Two of the first four victims, Lottie Reddie and Virginia Anley, were found buried in the foundations of the house. Post-mortem, it was determined that their bodies had been cemented into a pair of bespoke soil cavities, dug into the foundations, and laid side by side.

The other two victims from the early twentieth century, Eudora Fry and Florence Stockton, were entombed within fireplaces in the building. Eudora was bricked inside the original fireplace of the second floor bedroom that Amber initially occupied; Eudora had been the first presence to speak at the address, during Amber’s first night inside the house.

The fourth woman, Florence Stockton, was the oldest of the four: a widow, who was found behind a walled-up fireplace in the first floor room that Amber had been imprisoned inside for one night, before Fergal had introduced her to the rooms of the ground floor. And it had been Florence Stockton that Amber must have heard on the ceiling of the room, reciting scripture. Verse, she’d since discovered, to be from chapter three of Titus in the King James Bible.

The rope used in the executions of all of the first four victims was once popular for hanging washing in turn-of-the-century Birmingham yards.

The four women had been murdered around 1920 and then buried with the ligature still knotted about their necks. It was proven by the damage to the bones in their spinal columns, and through the way the twine had been cut while suspending a heavy weight, that all of the victims had been hanged first.

Any evidence of what had been presumed to be a sexual motive in the first murders had long been erased by decomposition. But each set of remains was found missing a finger.

This was the second significant connection between each murder at 82 Edgehill Road: the evidence of a missing body part – ears, fingers or teeth, and missing hair in Margaret Tolka’s case. The first connection across every era of murder at 82 Edgehill Road was the cause of death: strangulation by ligature.

Peter St John, who became Amber’s researcher and coauthor in the year after her escape, did discover some information about The Friends of Light, and their spiritual leader, Clarence Putnam, though it was scant. At its peak, the organization had boasted a treasurer, chairman, secretary, and established international links with several churches and spiritualist colleges. Clarence Putnam had been the first owner of 82 Edgehill Road when it was a new build, and also the founder of The Friends of Light. With key members of his congregation, he’d moved from the country to the city before the Great War. He was originally a pastor from Monmouthshire, and a respected authority on pre-Roman British history, who’d become a zealous devotee of spiritualism. Many believed he was gifted with second sight. Any remaining records of his time on earth suggested he had lived an honourable life and he was now buried in St Mary’s Church in Handsworth, amongst the fathers of the industrial revolution.

Peter had also connected women reported missing in the Midlands at the time, to the first four victims who were featured in the photograph of The Friends of Light, all of whom possessed a connection to 82 Edgehill Road, which had been used by the group as a spiritualist meeting house. Peter had even beaten the police to the information and broken the Friends of Light story, and it had been Peter St John’s feature in The Sunday Times that had compelled Amber to make contact with him through her barrister.

All four victims had been declared missing by their families between 1920 and 1924. Although initially treated as suspicious by local police, no one had ever been suspected of their murder, nor held responsible for their disappearances.

The membership of the group was unremarkable: a collection of grieving Christian souls, many of whom had lost sons and husbands and fathers at the front in the Great War.

Peter and Amber hadn’t provided much information about the first four murders in their co-authored book, No One Gets Out Alive, because they’d discovered little evidence, material or anecdotal, about the disappearances. Someone known to all four of the women, and probably a member of The Friends of Light, perhaps Clarence Putnam himself as it was his house, had murdered them and hidden their bodies at 82 Edgehill Road. And as Peter had said to Amber on numerous occasions: ‘This part will go all Jack the Ripper, but no one will ever really know who killed the first four, or why.’

Following the demise of The Friends of Light sometime around 1926, the house was left mostly vacant for twenty-five years until it was bought at auction by plasterer Harold Bennet in 1952. The house had remained the property of the local church to whom Clarence Putnam bequeathed it, and was subsequently occupied and quickly vacated at least five times between 1926 and 1952. No explanation was ever discovered for why the building could not keep its tenants.

Only one other interesting fact about the earlier life of the address had been uncovered by Peter St John: during the Second World War, a local council report claimed that gypsy émigrés had occupied the building: an elderly woman and her blind grandson. They had been evicted, judged insane, and rehoused in a Somerset asylum during the Blitz.

Amber finished her drink. She’d known for a long time that the nine days she’d spent at 82 Edgehill Road, three wearying years ago, needed to take a backseat; there was little more she could ever learn about that period of time. Her time. Despite Peter St John’s dead ends, the new search must concern the preceding one hundred years; a story that occurred long before she crossed the threshold of that place.

The last time they’d spoken on the phone, Peter had claimed he had something for her. Not much, but it was the something that was now burning a hole through her mind.