SIXTY-EIGHT

GARDEN OF EVIL: TWO MORE BODIES.

Amber rose from her chair to touch the pictures of Simona Doubrava and Olena Kovalik, pinned side by side beneath the tabloid headline that took the investigation and media interest to a whole new level: the gamechangers.

One week after the discovery of Ryan and Margaret, the rear grounds of the entire property were excavated on her insistence that there were more bodies. And five feet from the poorly interred bodies of Margaret Tolka and Ryan Martin, two other sets of human remains were discovered on the first day of the excavation.

She had never subsequently considered one girl without thinking of the other; they were even found buried in the garden like occupants of a family plot. The horrible and painful way in which they were extinguished at the hands of Arthur Bennet, and embraced by the arms of death, was something the two girls also shared.

Halfway through her third or fourth glass of rum, Amber felt a surge of bitterness that became a cinnamon-tinged reflux. This point in the investigation signalled the first indication of police unease. And the distrust in her statements lingered until she was finally released without charge, one year after being stretchered out of the house covered in Svetlana and Knacker McGuire’s blood.

Six feet from the oak tree, Olena Kovalik had been found in the overgrown garden; she was lying face down beneath three foot of black, stony soil and refuse-strewn weeds. Naked and wrapped in an opaque polythene sheet, Kovalik’s remains had been reduced over time to a foul soup of hair, decomposed tissue and bodily organs, through which mottled bones had protruded like dead tree branches from a marsh.

Forensic analysis of the position of Kovalik’s leg bones, and the position of the ligature, created a belief that her ankles had once been tied to her throat by garden twine. This had been the cause of death: the twine had slowly and fatally strangled the twenty-four-year-old woman, but only after she had been buried alive beneath the cold earth.

Olena Kovalik’s grave had been dug into the uneven ground ten feet before the garden shed, itself situated close to the rear fence and a row of fir trees screening 82 Edgehill Road from the adjoining properties in the next street.

Simona’s remains were found three feet away from Olena’s in much the same condition, face down again. But it was believed that although Doubrava’s wrists and ankles had been tied, and she had been strangled, the girl had additionally been buried with her pelvis and buttocks raised over a crude cairn of broken house bricks, as if in provocation. In death as in life she had been denied dignity.

Olena Kovalik was Ukrainian; Simona Doubrava was Czech. They were known to have worked as prostitutes at 82 Edgehill Road between 1999 and 2001. They were identified by their dental records and gold fillings. Their teeth were intact. Determining missing hair was not possible, but each girl had a toe missing. Murdered by strangulation and then mutilated. Murders attributed to the life-long sex offender Arthur Bennet, deceased; the last owner of what would soon become the most notorious house in Britain.

Amber sniffed and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

Only one of the girls had ever been reported missing: Simona Doubrava.

Olena Kovalik’s family had not notified the authorities of her disappearance, a fact that Amber realized was still capable of making her cry whenever she saw the girl’s photograph. The same fate of contemptuous neglect would probably have been her own had she died with her face wrapped inside Knacker’s cheap plastic bag.

When Amber first saw pictures of Olena, photographs mostly from various European police departments who had arrested the girl for soliciting and minor drugs offences in Belgium and Germany, Stephanie immediately knew where she had seen the girl before: standing in the garden beside an abandoned and soiled mattress, smoking a cigarette.

Olena Kovalik had turned tricks to feed a drug habit that an old boyfriend and petty criminal had introduced her to in 1996. How she came to Britain was not known, but she had probably begun working for Bennet voluntarily, though the full facts of their arrangement were not known and probably never would be; few records were kept in the criminal underworld.

More was known about Simona Doubrava. She had left home and crossed the borders of her country without realizing her visa was fraudulent; she had thought she was going to work as a PA to a managing director of a software company in Munich, but soon discovered she had been duped by an organized criminal gang and was put to work in various brothels across Europe, initially in Odessa where she was forced to pleasure long-distance freight drivers.

By the time Simona Doubrava was shipped to England, prostitution was all she had known. Effectively, she had been a sex slave from the age of seventeen. She was acquired by Bennet through someone he’d met in prison, while serving time for attempted rape in 1997.

Several customers of 82 Edgehill Road around the time of Simona Doubrava’s death were traced; two had even come forward to assist the police investigation. Both men recognized the petite, raven-haired girl who bore a distinct resemblance to a young Jane Seymour. They said she had spoken good but heavily accented English.

To widespread horror, it was believed that Simona had probably never actually been outside 82 Edgehill Road once she’d first entered the building; two witnesses admitted she had been secured to the bed while ‘entertaining’ them. One was certain he had met Simona Doubrava on many occasions in a first floor room – the very room, Amber realized, that was next to her own at the address.

When the same witness, who’d been a regular customer at the house, was told by Arthur Bennet that Simona was no longer working from number 82, and that the girl had returned home to Poland, the witness had become suspicious but had felt unable to share his concerns. At the time he had been married with three children, but the witness had known Simona was Czech and not Polish because they had often spoken about Prague.

The witness, or her ‘boyfriend’ as he referred to himself, had been upset by the girl’s sudden departure and admitted to having fallen in love with her. He’d always wondered what had become of her, and even claimed that he and Simona Doubrava had discussed her escape from Bennet, whom she loathed. It is possible that such a scheme for Simona Doubrava’s liberation had hastened her death. As Amber knew, the house had an uncanny way of learning everything about a person.

Against the advice of her solicitor, Amber had insisted on telling the detectives that she had never been sure, at the start of her residency, whether the other girls that she had seen or heard inside the house were even alive. She assured the police that she had seen Olena Kovalik in the garden on two occasions; and possibly once more too, ascending the stairs and then entering a room on the second floor.

Enough evidence of Olena Kovalik’s hair was discovered to attest to the fact that she had indeed once occupied the improperly cleaned second floor room.

Amber also speculated that it had been the Ukrainian, Simona Doubrava, who had wept nightly in the room next to her own on the first floor. An exhaustive forensic sweep of that room also confirmed Amber’s hunch, with the discovery of just enough DNA belonging to Doubrava.

Neither the police, nor the judiciary, nor the press believed in ghosts, which disinclined them to believe Amber, despite the uncanny accuracy of her testimony. The investigators surmised that Amber had been told by her captors, ‘the McGuires’, which rooms had once belonged to the murdered women, and that they must have received the same information from the girls’ killer, Arthur Bennet, before he died of pneumonia caused by exposure in the bedroom of the ground floor flat. Which was exactly what her solicitor advised Amber would happen if she ever claimed to have seen or heard Doubrava and Kovalik at the address, because the girls had been murdered over a decade before she ever set foot in Birmingham. And, as everyone knows, the dead don’t speak, or move.

Amber insisted she had experienced their apparitions, and the supernatural direction of her testimony contributed to the success of her book, the popularity of the Kyle Freeman documentary, and the record-breaking success of the Hollywood film. But the paranormal angle that Amber championed accounted for officialdom’s distaste for both her and her testimony, as well as the total condemnation by the other victims’ surviving families. And that had been the hardest thing of all to endure.

You saying that my daughter is not at peace? That she is still in hell? That he is still raping them . . . You are wicked, wicked . . . as wicked as he was. How could you? My Kelly. My girl. My little girl . . .

Amber would never forget the day of the inquest when the elderly mother of Kelly Hughes, whose remains were found beneath the first floor bathroom, broke down and had to be removed from the room. And as Amber thought of the scene again, her eyes thickened afresh with tears.

‘I am not a liar’. Amber had stated that simple fact over and over again to police officers and lawyers and psychiatrists and counsellors and horrified parents for one entire year.

Her own father had never lied and she had followed the example of the kindest man she had ever known. And in the darkest places only kindness matters.