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PIMP MURDERED AT BIRMINGHAM BROTHEL.

That had been the first headline. And it was the first cutting Amber considered the evening she resumed the search.

Memory swiftly brought nausea.

The opening story broke the afternoon that she and Svetlana were found at the house by two police officers and a paramedic, who had been first on the scene. Amber had heard a news report on a radio at the police station. For a few moments she had not realized the story was about her and Svetlana. No names were mentioned at that stage; she wished it had stayed that way.

The news of the ‘murder’ initially only made headlines in Midlands’ newspapers and media. But further revelations from 82 Edgehill Road were blaring from national news broadcasters by ten p.m. Within weeks, hundreds of hours of coverage about the case were screened in Great Britain, following the gruesome reports of what had been found in a scrappy back yard in North Birmingham. Once it had been widely established that the case was unique, most major European news services and broadcasters were also following the minutiae of the criminal investigation too. From Europe the story quickly found a global audience.

POLICE SEARCH GARDEN AT 82 EDGEHILL ROAD.

One entire wall, from desk top to eye level, contained only the highlights: the triggers to help Amber organize her memories. Her recollections would inform the wider research she now needed to embark upon. Because this story was a long way from finished.

SEX WORKER TURNED KILLER.

The cuttings had a pertinent subtext. A second, more personal story was being told on the wall, about the world’s endlessly changing perception of her former self, Stephanie Booth: victim, perpetrator, collaborator, martyr, victim.

Amber guessed she could paper the entire first floor interior of the farmhouse with stories about her old identity, and with stories solely from the British media.

PIMP CASTRATED AND BURNED WITH ACID: WHAT A SEX WORKER DID TO SURVIVE.

Only now, sat in her study, and looking at the patchwork mosaic of newsprint, photocopied pages from online sites, and photographs secured during the research for her book, could she better comprehend what the world’s perspective of Stephanie Booth had been, and also of the victims and their killers. And she remembered very quickly that she’d never cared for much of it, and still didn’t.

SECOND KILLER STILL AT LARGE.

Even with the horrors of the house still fresh in her mind, the media had shown no quarter. They had made her absorb a peculiar brand of vindictive persecution to accompany the black horror she had literally crawled through, stained by blood and urine.

POLICE TEAR DOWN WALLS.

It was the media that had driven her into what two doctors had called ‘emotional breakdowns’, not the house. The house had left scars, had stolen things from her she could not replace, but she had beaten the house and escaped whatever occupied it. The world, however, could not be defeated, and its media was incalculably different. Her best defence had been the screaming of her own story straight into the maelstrom of competing voices; the opinionated and ill-informed voices that always knew better. So she’d screamed and then disappeared.

My name is Amber Hare.

But she would never forgive the world for what it had done, nor trust it again. Because of how it had interpreted her without restraint or remorse, for the purposes of its own entertainment.

CASTRATRIX GETS DOZENS OF MARRIAGE PROPOSALS EVERY WEEK.

The words and images on the wall jerked awake a flurry of dormant feelings that simultaneously made her panic, want to laugh hysterically, and also made her feel as though her heart was bursting. After one year at sea, gazing into a distance so old and dark, an immensity she’d hoped would scour her mind in the way salt water cleaned all traces of former occupation from shells upon the shore, Amber had feared these very cuttings. It had taken a long time to rediscover the courage, and the will, to return to this time in her life. She had never underestimated the past, but had also never anticipated the force with which memory could return. Memory might even be insanity.

In a clinch of terror, accompanied by what she sensed was a plummet in her blood’s temperature, she was briefly convinced that she must never leave her sanctuary.

Just in case.

Stop!

Only three people in the world – a solicitor, her agent, and a private security consultant – knew she was here, why she was here, and who she was.

STEPHANIE GOES INTO HIDING.

Amber was under no illusion as to why she now sat in the largest room upstairs in her new home, why she had made herself sit inside a space dedicated to one of the worst cases of serial murder, abduction, torture and sexual depravity that Great Britain had known. She was sitting here, as she had known she would during those months at sea, for the same reason she had stopped the course of anti-depressants during the first year following her release from the house. And even though she had observed the recommended course of counselling for victims of violence and sufferers of post-traumatic shock, and gracefully submitted to numerous psychological and physical tests, she had resisted most opportunities to forget, to forgive, or to ameliorate her experience.

She wanted to remember. And even when she took her mother’s maiden name, Hare, and transformed herself into Amber Hare, anonymous lottery winner, her need for the truth endured as her mind endured.

She may have survived, but she would not fool herself that she was free, or ever would be free. What happened inside 82 Edgehill Road would, and should, distinguish the rest of her life, and define her, and no one could persuade her otherwise. It would take a long time to put back that which had been taken from her.

But more than anything else, what had occurred at 82 Edgehill Road had not finished, not even when she was stretchered out of the building, because he was still missing.

Fergal.

And what he took from the bowels of the abomination that had masqueraded as an ordinary rundown residential address in North Birmingham, had never been recovered either.

It.

Black Maggie.

The details of the coroner’s long inquest and the theories of criminologists, the Serious Crimes Analysis, Behavioural Profiling, Geographical Profiling and Physical Evidence teams, the essays by forensic psychiatrists, the arguments of lawyers and journalists – all of these records, filed inside the steel cabinets that surrounded her desk, were only part of the story: the acceptable surface and the last known chapter, but not much more.

Now was the time to go back in. It was an acknowledgement that brought her no joy, but a recognition of a duty; a duty supported by a desire for resolution. Nor was the plunge she was about to take into that place a descent to be taken solely for herself. This was for her friends up there on the wall.

Amber swallowed the last of her drink. Then went and retrieved the bottle of Sailor Jerry rum from the kitchen.

She returned to the study and refilled her glass. The measure was larger and she didn’t add Coke.