SIXTY-SEVEN

MAN KILLED WITH BRICK. WOMAN STRANGLED.

Until the police took her back to the house to move the investigation into the second stage, Amber had never been in the garden of 82 Edgehill Road; she had only ever seen the rear of the property from the kitchen and stairwell windows, and she had only ever known that part of the address as a patch of neglected, unpleasant, and yet incongruously fecund land that encroached upon the refuse-strewn patio. The patio appeared in her mind now as a polluted shoreline, between the house and the explosion of wild vines, hanging fruit and weeds that reached near head height to the rear fence of the garden.

But for a long time, the police did not believe her encounters with the garden had been so slight. The press certainly didn’t believe this was the case, and as a consequence the general public were also convinced of her deeper involvement in the murders.

Only a self-prescribed treatment of work had sufficed as an effective escape: telling her own story, the true story, that most had refused to believe, with the help of Peter St John. And then telling the story again with a documentary film-maker, Kyle Freeman, in the film Closer by Darkness than Light. Before she added weight to the feature film adaptation of her book, Nine Days in Hell, by taking the role of executive-producer. Nine Days in Hell was still being seen by a great many people around the world, and the movie was already three months into a theatrical run in the UK. Nine Days was only an interpretation of her story, but Amber acknowledged that the feature film had achieved a greater rehabilitation of her image than her release from police custody and the verdict of the coroner’s inquest.

The film recast her as an innocent victim, a role that had finally begun to stick, to the disappointment of so many for whom fifteen murders and an incalculable number of rapes was not sufficient sensation. They wanted a living scapegoat into which to pour their bile, and in some cases, their desire. But Amber’s newly returned status of victim-survivor would never be universally shared or observed; she only had to look online to understand this.

Revisiting the exacting detail of her experiences, and all that was discovered about 82 Edgehill Road, may have been painful and exhausting enough to leave her close to collapse twice, but the process was just and ultimately rewarding. For Amber, the book and films were not entertainment; they were testimony. And the truth had subsequently made her very rich.

Amber closed her eyes and recalled her first breathless, jumbled accounts at Perry Barr Police Station; how she had wept with relief, horror, sorrow and despair, when trying to speak, to communicate so much, and all at once.

She clenched her eyes shut and moved on.

There had been treatment for her injuries, and her clothes bearing three blood types were taken away and put inside evidence bags. Within hours of her arrest for Knacker’s murder, she had told the solicitor appointed to her and the detectives that first interviewed her that she believed Ryan Martin and a prostitute from Albania, known as Margaret, were buried in the garden, and probably inside polythene and probably behind the oak tree.

She had been correct on both accounts.

Two of the house’s last three fatalities had suffered massive head traumas. Ryan Martin had been kicked unconscious and then finished off with a house brick. He had to be identified by a distinctive birthmark on his left ankle.

The girl she had known as Margaret had also suffered a massive head trauma, but had been killed by strangulation with ligature; her killer had left the garden twine in place and within her plastic shroud. The spool of twine the garrotte had been cut from was discovered in the kitchen of the disused ground floor flat.

What the press never knew at the time was that, unlike all of the other victims, whose spindly and disarticulated remains would soon be discovered and brought back into the world from various unconsecrated tombs scattered about the property, only Margaret and Ryan were buried fully dressed. The only other distinguishing feature of their murders was missing hair and teeth.

Once her week-old remains were recovered from a shallow grave, a large section of Margaret’s hair was found to have been removed post-mortem. Ryan had lost six teeth, two from his upper jaw, four from the bottom. Only four of these teeth were ever recovered by forensic detectives.

For most of the life of the investigation, this was not seen as significant when considering everything else that would soon, literally, be unearthed at the address. The inquest only served to record the known facts of the case and the details of her own gruelling experience. What few were able to accept was the greater and older mystery that she alluded to, and that remained unsolved. The role of the stolen teeth and hair in the story would never be understood until Fergal Donegal was apprehended; or, as Amber hoped, his own tatty remains were uncovered in a place as lonely and miserable as the one where he had interred his victims.

Amber closed her eyes and clenched her hands until her fingernails hurt her palms. Reliving this was going to be the hardest part of being alone in the house. The pain in her hands returned her to the present. She opened her moist eyes and stared at the next headline.