EIGHTY

‘I’ve some more anecdotal stuff on Bennet senior from the children of former neighbours, and some council records of complaints about number eighty-two. But nothing earth shattering on that front.’ Peter St John turned his laptop round so Amber could see the screen. ‘I have the hard copies at home, but scanned these for you. You can take the memory stick. It’s all on there.’

Amber collected their lunch plates and stacked them on the room service trolley so they would have more space to work. Prompted to do the same, Peter arranged the coffee things. ‘Coffee? Or you staying on the wine?’

Peter’s sandy hair and thin features looked good with the new tan; his green eyes glittered like a warm sea. He’d been in Spain. A white cotton shirt and cream linen jacket further defined the impression of a well-heeled and comfortable man. A marked difference from the pale, chain-smoking journalist, pathologically anxious about money, that she’d met three years before. They may have done each other a world of good financially, but Amber now envied Peter’s effortless self-assurance, his aura of serenity.

‘Wine, thanks.’

For privacy they’d eaten in her room at the Duke. Peter had arrived in Plymouth at noon. On Monday Amber called him and mentioned problems with the farmhouse and Peter assumed the building project was unfinished.

Though their book had included as much detail about the history of 82 Edgehill Road as was available at the time of publication, as well as material uncovered during the first year of the police investigation, Peter had spent the next two years researching the building and its occupants in more detail, discovering and poring over applications for planning permission, censuses, local history, any rental agreements, tracing individuals known to have lived at the address across one hundred years. He’d even undertaken a foray into genealogy.

Peter’s fastidiousness, Amber knew, had not been down to his ingrained investigative thoroughness alone, nor was it taken to satisfy Amber’s desire for alternative theories about the house and its previous occupants. The case had become the making of Peter St John, the uniqueness of the story a vertical accelerant for his career. Four generations of murderers had lived and been active at the same address in North Birmingham, and not one of them had been brought to justice. Peter had written the definitive book about the murders and made the story his life’s work; he was the first person to be summoned by the international media, as a talking head, for any feature about, or similar to, the case. In their entire careers most journalists would never encounter such a sensational story, not to mention his exclusive access to one of two surviving cast members; the second survivor, Svetlana Lanka, spoke poor English and had long ago returned to her home country. Her official testimony about the presence of anything unnatural in the house had never been substantial. She and Margaret had not resided at the house for long either, but had both heard voices and noises in unoccupied rooms, and even become frightened of the second floor room that Amber had spent her first two nights inside.

‘So what’s that?’ Amber asked, while peering at the official-looking form, loaded onto the laptop screen; the first document Peter wanted her to see.

‘This is one of three official complaints by neighbours in Edgehill Road about flies and a bad smell that they all cite rising from number eighty-two. The complaints match one of Harold Bennet’s frequent periods of renovation.’ Peter didn’t elaborate.

‘And these,’ he said, as he opened a new folder on the screen, ‘are new scans of court records, some Crown, of the Bennets’ respective prosecutions under The Sexual Offences Act of 1956. I’ve found others for kerb crawling, keeping a brothel, disorderly conduct at or very near the address. All new material.’

‘Supplementing what we already know.’

‘Yes, but it focuses the picture. Reveals more of the legacy. The pattern of repeat behaviour that was never perceived as being part of a bigger picture. Of something much worse. Even when some of the victims’ last known addresses were number eighty-two, connections were never made by the authorities.’

It was nothing Amber wanted to read, and a further sign they were moving in different directions. Here Peter was again, collating even more actual and anecdotal evidence of violence and dysfunction, anti-social behaviour, disturbing stories of sexual offences against women; more interminable and unpleasant accounts of what awful human beings Harold and Arthur Bennet had been. Their ghastliness explained little about what dwelled inside the building before they took up residence.

‘I do have something on Knacker too. Stories and so forth, from people who ran with him for a while.’

‘Keep ’em.’ Her retort came out sharper than she’d intended.

‘Knacker McGuire’, as he’d called himself, was someone for whom Amber would have considered a programme of electric shock treatment to entirely erase him from her memory.

While carrying out his fourth sentence at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for an assault on a Russian prostitute in Bayswater in 2004, when he had been ‘on a bender’ in London, Arthur Bennet had briefly shared a prison cell in Wormwood Scrubs Prison with the house’s next generation of pimps and killers: Fergal Donegal and Nigel Newman; the latter being the real name of the habitual liar ‘Knacker McGuire’.

After their own releases Fergal and Knacker had travelled to Birmingham. The purpose of their trip was to divest the ageing and terminally ill misfit, Arthur Bennet, of what he had boasted was a profitable brothel in North Birmingham; a ‘family business’ from whose complement of young girls he had taken his pick as lovers.

Amber hadn’t read the book about the Bennets, Deadly Inheritance, but she had read the book about Knacker and Fergal, The Devil’s Entrepreneurs, a fairly sensational red and black jacketed, true crime offering aimed at the airside market of airports. The author had acquired information on the killers before Peter: morbidly predictable histories of petty crime and violence, burglary and drug dealing; careers founded in broken homes, suspensions and expulsions from secondary schools, and time endured under the fists of violent fathers.

Interestingly to Amber, what The Devil’s Entrepreneurs revealed was that neither Fergal nor Knacker had any previous convictions for violence against women; those appetites only appeared to have manifested in Edgehill Road.

More urgently than ever, Amber needed Peter to target his research solely upon the spiritualist activity at the house between 1912 and 1926, with particular emphasis on anything connected to the name ‘Black Maggie.’ She’d been pushing him to do this for over a year. But maybe not hard enough.

She’d paid for all of his expenses and for his time researching the house’s past since the completion of their first book. If there was a second book, she had promised Peter an endorsing preface and assured him the jacket could carry her name. The sizeable publishing advance for No One Gets Out Alive had gone to her and she had paid Peter a ghost writer’s fee, as well as sharing the not inconsiderable royalties with him; the book had been translated into thirty-five languages and been involved in seven publishing auctions. Even then, Peter still needed to work; the proceeds from each film had been Amber’s alone, and that had made her fortune. Peter had done well but he still needed to earn.

In the hotel room, Amber struggled to smother her impatience. ‘Peter, the Bennets are conquered ground. There’s not much more I can stand to read about them. Don’t you have anything about The Friends of Light? And Clarence Putnam? We know he was their first leader. How could he have not known about the first four murders?’

Peter looked surprised and then hurt at Amber’s outburst. But unless he discovered something soon about the pre-Bennet era, she’d really have no choice but to seek a desperate alternative form of investigation into what had followed her to Devon.

Peter fidgeted in his own disappointment. ‘Amber, you just never know what will join dots to something else further back in time, a clue about the past. This whole case has shown a connectivity from the start. I still feel it necessary to examine every piece of material evidence and anecdotal detail, even hearsay. You just have to understand that the further back we go, the less there is to examine. I can’t work any faster than I am.’

‘I don’t doubt your principles or your amazing ability to uncover all of this, Peter, but I want to know about the first victims. And The Friends of Light. I know there is something there.’

Peter gave her a look she recognized from Josh: one of pity and sadness, familiar in the eyes of anyone who recognized her determination to investigate a mystical origin to the crimes. To Peter, the first era was ancient history; he doubted the murderer of the first four victims had a relationship with either of the Bennets beyond copycat behaviour. Harold Bennet had relaid the ground floor of the house sometime in the early 1960s, and may have discovered the remains of two of the first victims. And if Harold Bennet had unearthed the bones of Lottie Reddie and Virginia Anley, he had reburied them without reporting the grim find. It was also possible Harold Bennet had been inspired by what could be done within the privacy of one’s own home, using the very bricks and mortar that his new family seat was constructed from. It was the most logical theory, which officialdom, the media and the public had mostly since accepted.

The inability to explain her need for the missing information began to stoke the fire of Amber’s panic. Unchecked, she knew how quickly such feelings turned to anger. She already felt like breaking something in the hotel room.

Of those involved in the investigation, or on her behalf, only the director Kyle Freeman believed links existed between The Friends of Light, the Bennets and her captors, the Devil’s Entrepreneurs: Knacker and Fergal. Kyle had accepted Amber’s story at face value, and so easily she had even questioned his readiness to believe her. But within a week of moving into the farmhouse, Amber now knew it no longer mattered who believed her, or whether her ideas were suitable for Peter’s new book.

She covered her face with her hands and groaned quietly with frustration and what was swiftly becoming despair; an emotion she had prayed she would never feel again in relation to that place. But here it came, as leaden as it had been three years ago.

‘Hey, come on,’ Peter said. ‘It’s not that bad. And anyway, forget the court reports. In fact, forget the Bennets. I did find something else.’

Amber’s hands were off her face. ‘What?’

Peter grinned. ‘Or rather a friend of mine did. George Ritchie. He teaches history at Birmingham University and specializes in folklore. He’s been on the case of the Black Maggie for a year. But . . .’

‘What, what?’

‘I wouldn’t get too excited.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a tad bizarre, I’m afraid. I was in two minds whether I should even show you. Afraid it all seems a bit tenuous to me. But I put it on the memory stick. The folder is called “Black Maggie.” Here it is.’