SIXTY-NINE

HELL HOUSE: GIRL BURIED UNDER BATH.

There she was, young and blue-eyed and blonde and happy. Kelly Hughes. A musician, a devout Christian, unquestionably a virgin, who had taken a place at the Birmingham Conservatoire to study violin but disappeared one week before term started, presumably abducted from a bus stop in West Bromwich in 1979. Never to be seen again until her bones and their parchment flesh, the colour of age-spotted papyrus, were brought lipless and grimacing from beneath a cheap bath on the first floor of 82 Edgehill Road.

Strangled and wrapped in polythene. But not murdered and hidden by Fergal or Knacker, because Hughes had died twenty-seven years before the McGuires’ reign as the kings of ruin and depravity at number 82; nor had Kelly Hughes died in the grubby clutches of the convicted sex offender Arthur Bennet.

It was soon determined by the age of Kelly’s remains that Arthur Bennet had been a mere apprentice to a master. And the master was Harold Bennet, his own father; a man who had murdered seven women inside the building.

Amber closed her eyes. The darkness juddered behind her eyelids. She stood up before the judder became a swoop, went for a window to gulp fresh air. Then paused and decided against opening the study window. She closed the blinds instead.

Too much. Too much rum. Too many memories, too much horror. Too much all at once.

Amber left the study and closed the door on it all.

Number 82 had pulled her back inside itself; yanked her out of comfort and back between the dim brownish walls, close to the relics the house had reluctantly given up after her escape.

The house had been demolished; every trace of the building to its black foundations had been removed and covered with cement, poured deep and wide. There was no number 82 any more. Between numbers 80 and 84 there was a smooth concrete surface that Birmingham City Council swept twice a week. And in the middle of the concrete plane stood a simple memorial, upon which fresh flowers were still thrown over floral tributes that had withered and blackened.

But the house had maintained a second life inside her mind for three years; in a quiet back street of her memories, 82 Edgehill Road had been rebuilt, brick by brick. And Amber had just called again upon a house that was still full of voices and footsteps and the cries of women and fierce white faces contorted into snarls that spat and shouted . . .

. . . and they rose inside their plastic shrouds . . .

. . . and round the table in the black room they still peered at the ceiling in ecstasy . . .

. . . around their hidden feet she uncoiled heavily and . . .

. . . opened white eyes.

‘No!’

Amber wanted to slip her fingers inside her mind and pluck out, from the moist black roots, the returned images of the slim female bones, browned by age and carelessly abandoned inside silty polythene wrappers. And she wanted to scrape out the photographed faces with their freckles and smiles and braces and mousy hair faded by time and the sunlight’s bleach. Because they were all inside her mind again and jostling for attention. Pleading for release and for salvation. Like they had when she’d lain shivering in the old beds of those strange rooms.

But Amber had told them they must stay on the walls and outside of her heart; that was the deal. And not pour through her mind like screaming children released from the iron doors of some terrible school, every time she looked at their faces.

As she moved away from the study on unsteady legs, the spiteful words and hurtful looks of those who’d investigated and interviewed her also flickered alive, and loudly broadcast their voices from her mind’s memory tracks, all on repeat with no fade. They were interspersed with looped flashes of interview rooms, courtrooms, ante chambers, and so many other municipal rooms that she had lost count of; plain rooms she had sat inside, on plastic chairs, to repeat her story, and repeat her story, and repeat her story . . .

You mutilated him. You burned the genitals off his body with acid.

You cut his tongue in half with your dirty fingernails.

You cut his throat with broken glass.

You stamped on his face while he was in agony.

You threw acid in a man’s face.

Disproportionate response . . . disproportionate response . . . what were you thinking? . . . You expect us to believe that you saw ghosts?

‘No! No! Piss off! I am not a liar!’

Inside her own mind she could return to that house at any time, just like she had done every day for the first year in custody.

The police had tried to grind the truth out of her with their raised voices in their plain rooms; the very same truth that she had uttered within three hours of being carried out of that place on a stretcher.

Too much. Too hasty.

One thing at a time. She had been careless. Was drunk. Hadn’t paid attention to how many of those spicy rums had been slipping down her throat so easily, unlocking inner doors like gatecrashing oafs at a house party; doors that should only be opened one by one, day by day, week by week, and not too many at once. Time could rewind quicker than she could think.

In the corridor outside her study, Amber stopped moving until her vision and balance were partially, but not wholly, restored. Applying more effort than dignity was ever comfortable with, she carefully moved to her bedroom.

She turned on all of the first floor lights as she made uneasy progress through the farmhouse, including all of the lights in her room, before she undressed and climbed into her bed.