The Silent Girls

Edie was glad of the reprieve, every time Sam came within a foot of her she started to feel like an overheated teenager and it was making her feel both stupid and uncomfortable. Even the smell of his damned handkerchief was making her feel queer, she pulled it down and let it settle around her neck while she tried to get a grip on herself and make the drinks.

When she returned to the front room Sam was pulling something out of the bottom of the china dog’s twin. ‘What on earth is that?’

‘I don’t know, it looks like a scarf. Someone must have poked it inside.’ He pulled the fabric out as if he were performing a low budget magic trick.

‘Who on earth would do something like that?’ she asked.

‘No idea, someone who wanted to hide something?’

‘Why hide a scarf?’ The strip of fabric lay creased and colourful on the dirty carpet.

Sam shrugged and picked it up. ‘Who knows? I hate to say it but your relatives were a strange bunch at the best of times.’

Edie took the scarf from him and threw it into the box where she had been collecting the smaller ornaments that she figured were probably worthless. She thought about the wooden heads upstairs wearing their scalped hair and of Dickie’s strange inventions. ‘Yep, they were an odd lot.’ She passed Sam his tea and wandered towards the window, moving the grimy net curtain aside to get a view of the street. The murder tourists were back, congregating around the drain, eager to hear its grisly history.

Sam came up behind her and draped an arm casually about her shoulder, leaning forward to follow her gaze. ‘I see the ghouls are out in force.’

Edie was acutely aware of the weight of his arm. ‘Doesn’t it bother you, that they do this right outside the house?’

‘Not a lot we can do about it, they are all legal, it’s a perfectly legitimate business. No one cares about the morality of it.’ he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze before dropping his arm.

The pressure of his fingers burned and tingled like an old scar on her skin. She shivered and turned back to the room. ‘I’m going to dump this box outside and make some space, hopefully someone will take it off my hands.’ she said, hauling the box of tat into her arms and carrying it out of the room. She manoeuvred it out of the front door and dumped it by the gate, hearing the satisfying chink of broken china as it hit the concrete. Removing the weight from her arms hadn’t lessened the heaviness in her heart, she was acutely aware that she had just unceremoniously dumped a handful of the totems that had marked her family’s existence. It felt wrong and it felt brutal. She noticed that the tour guide was staring over again, looking as though he hadn’t yet forgiven her for her previous sarcasm. She turned away from his gaze and went back into the house.

Sam had sorted through the books and offered to take them to the nearest charity shop. Edie was both grateful for the offer of help and the opportunity for a break from his company. Sam Campion was having a strange effect on her and it was becoming a most disconcerting experience.

When he had loaded the books and left, she took the opportunity to pause her activity and review the situation. When she had agreed to the task of clearing the house, she’d had no idea that she would be letting herself in for this level of challenge. Not only was the house a daunting nightmare of effort, she hadn’t bargained for the discovery that she still had feelings and female reactions that she had believed were withered and gone. For some reason she’d thought her dysfunctional relationship with Simon had killed the possibility, and was mildly surprised that he hadn’t stifled her regard for men in general. Not that being attracted to Sam was a scenario worth thinking about – she was here to dispose of the past, not cultivate thoughts of a future.

The room looked almost naked now, stripped bare of its fripperies and exposed. Its representation as a slice of life had been obliterated by the hatchet job she and Sam had performed. Now that she was alone her determination to get on with her task felt brutal, two generations of her family had lived and loved in the house and this dismantling felt like desecration. With abject disregard she had simply thrown away Dolly’s treasures. In a fit of regret she ran outside to retrieve the box of trinkets, only to find that it had already gone. Someone had been as eager to take it as she had been to get rid of it; she hoped that they wouldn’t regret their actions as much as she regretted hers.

Back inside there was little option but to carry on, but this time with a little more reverence. While she waited for Sam to return she concentrated on sorting the wheat from the chaff. By the time he came back she had rolled up the rug, piled it on top of the chaise longue and set the pieces of furniture worth money against one wall. Across the divide of dusty floorboards, under the window, lay the rest of the junk. In the middle of the room was a single box containing letters and photographs that Rose might want, on its side Edie had written KEEP ME.

Sam smiled and nodded his approval at the progress she had made. ‘Nice work Edie, I didn’t think we’d get this far.’ He wandered over to the box and peered in.

‘Not bad progress I suppose, but I’ve had enough for today. It kind of gets to you after a while – throwing away the bits of people’s lives that we find irrelevant and valueless.’ she said, feeling bizarrely emotional for a moment and hugging herself to contain it.

Sam didn’t notice, he was busy rifling through the photographs. ‘Hey look, here’s one of Mum when she was a kid.’ He moved over to where Edie stood and showed her the picture.

Five children, forever frozen in monochrome, leaned against the railings that enclosed the garden at the centre of the Square, each squinted at the camera, telling them the photograph had been taken in summer. ‘Which one is Lena?’ she asked.

Sam pointed to a skinny girl in a smocked dress and ankle socks. She was scowling at the camera. ‘That’s her, you can tell by the expression on her face. She still pulls that face when she’s pissed off with something. That one there is Sally.’ He pointed to another of the three girls in the picture. Sally had looked a little like Lena, but had more meat on her bones and a rounder, prettier face. Edie thought about the drain outside and suppressed a shudder.

‘I’m assuming that’s Dolly then, and that one is Dickie.’ She pointed to the last girl, thin and dark haired – she looked timid. Dickie just looked like a younger version of the man she remembered. ‘So who’s the other boy?’ The second boy was dark too, swarthy looking and with an intense, confident stare. He was a good looking child, whoever he was. As she peered at the picture she could see that the sun had created a halo-like aura around the boy’s head. It was quite a strange trick of the light.

‘No idea, never seen him before. I’ll ask Mum later.’ He put the photograph back in the box. ‘Right, if you’ve had enough for the day why don’t we get cleaned up and head off to the pub, you can buy me a pint for all my hard work.’

As appealing as the idea was, Edie hesitated. ‘What about Lena, won’t she mind?’

Sam chuckled and shook his head. ‘Edie Byrne, how old are you, twelve? I’ve been able to come and go as I please for a long time now, and I don’t even live there.’

Edie flushed with embarrassment, it wasn’t what she’d meant. ‘I know, but I am staying there and I don’t want her to think I’m treating it like a hotel.’

‘Don’t worry about it – besides, it’s Wednesday, she’ll be at the community centre playing bingo until six.’

Across the square, in a third floor window, a curtain twitched and someone watched as Edie and Sam left the house and made their way along the street to the pub on the corner. When they were out of sight he let the curtain go and turned to face the room. He called the place his office, but in reality it was a museum stuffed to the gills with a chaotically un-collated mess of detritus. What other people called rubbish, he deemed important artefacts of social history. Where other people saw junk, he saw evidence. One such item was now sitting on his cluttered desk forming a puddle of colour amidst the piles of buff folders and grey document boxes. He would like to think that the scarf was final proof, the one piece of evidence that he needed, but long and bitter experience told him that it wasn’t enough. Nothing ever seemed to be enough.

He looked at the fabric, at the swirling colours and the distinctive pattern and compared it to the photograph above the desk. The photograph was old, the paper yellowed and the ancient ink formed an indistinct, grainy image. Jean Lockwood had owned a scarf like this; she was wearing it in the photograph. There could be no colour match, the picture was in black and white, but the pattern was familiar, it had the same hypnotic print as the scarf on his desk. As evidence it might not be enough on its own, but it was an addition to the body of proof. Every little helped the cause.

He moved back to the window and looked across the square to Number 17. If his hunch were correct, there would be a lot more coming out of that house soon.

‘Not long now,’ he said aloud to the pictures of the dead women who lined his wall. As he turned away from them, a quietly confident smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

Chapter Three

When Edie had been younger, The Crown had been a typical spit and sawdust dive which she had glimpsed occasionally through the hatch in the ‘off sales’ cubicle. The thought made her feel old, she couldn’t think of the last time she’d been in a pub that had a separate space where people could buy their booze to drink off the premises, another tradition that seemed to have died out. That had been in the days when she and Rose could gain a few pennies for sweets by taking empty bottles back to the pub’s offie and pocketing the deposits. They called that kind of thing recycling now, back then it had just been a way of life.

Now the place had been taken over by a chain and had the generic ambience of all such places. Wednesday was pensioners’ credit crunch lunch, and curry and a pint night. Thursday was win a cirrhotic liver in the weekly quiz, and Friday was two for ten, as long as it was deep fried, microwaved and could clog your arteries at thirty paces. Edie found it frankly depressing and took no comfort from the fact that she could have free refills of her watery diet coke.

Sam seemed to catch her appraising the place. ‘Dire, isn’t it? Do you remember when old Charlie was the landlord and we used to scam him for deposits by nicking the empties from the yard and selling them back to him?’ he said it with the same impish grin he’d had as a boy.

Edie gave him a wry smile. ‘Thanks for bringing up our criminal past.’

‘We would never have got caught if it hadn’t been for you dropping all those bottles, cutting yourself and squealing like a stuck pig.’

Edie gave him a mock scowl. ‘I was five, the bottles were bigger than me and that incident scarred me for life!’ She rolled up her trouser leg and showed him the tiny white scar on her knee. ‘It didn’t hurt half as much as the pasting I got from Beattie afterwards.’ She could never think of Beattie as Nanna or Granny, those were soft terms designed for use with affection. There had been little that had been soft or affectionate about Beattie.

‘I’ll bet. She was the most terrifying woman I’ve ever encountered, and given that Lena is my mum that’s saying something.’ They both laughed, Beattie had indeed been a scourge.

Edie recalled her black crepe clad grandmother, who still loomed large in her imagination as the bringer of doom. ‘Yeah, as nannas go she was hardly the cuddly cookie baking type.’

Sam shuddered. ‘She was like terror in a black dress. No child was safe from her wrath. I always felt quite sorry for you and Rose.’

‘We didn’t have to see too much of her, only on visits, and I was only ten when she died. Rose had it worse. I always thought that Beattie disliked me because my dad ran off, like it was something I had caused.’ Frank had disappeared a few months before she had been born.

‘Of course. You never knew him, did you?’ Sam said.

Edie looked at her glass, cold beads of condensation trickled down its sides and dampened her fingers. Since her encounter with the old man at the funeral her father had been occupying space in her mind. ‘Not really, only what I’ve been told by Rose and she doesn’t talk about it much. I suppose you don’t miss what you can’t remember. Your mum must have known him, what was he like?’ She wasn’t even sure why she had asked. It was quite clear what kind of person Frank Morris had been. He was the kind of man who walked out on his pregnant wife and child. Having tolerated Simon for so many years just to prove that she hadn’t inherited Frank’s flakiness, Edie had more sympathy for her father than she wanted to admit to. Though she would never have abandoned her child, she sometimes wished she had taken Will and run for the hills.

Sam screwed up his face, as if trying to recall a distant memory. ‘Vaguely, I’ve only heard her mention him once or twice. I know him and Mum clashed, I do remember a row once with Dolly when his name was mentioned… I couldn’t tell you what it was about but I know Dolly was one of the few people that ever got the better of Mum. I think that’s why it stands out, it was the first time I ever saw Mum cry. Anyway, from what I can recall he was quite…ummm….a character.’

Edie laughed at his hesitation. ‘Do you mean arrogant? That’s what Rose always says.’

Sam pulled a face. ‘I was trying to be polite.’

‘No need, no one else is, well not about him anyway.’

‘You can’t choose your parents.’ Sam said.

‘Anyway, enough of that. What are you up to these days? We seem to have done nothing but talk about the past.’ It already felt as though she was being pulled backwards, without every conversation hauling her down memory lane.

‘This and that. Nothing special, I have fingers in a few lucrative pies.’

He’d avoided looking at her and it was clear he didn’t want to expand on his occupation. ‘So, you must live quite near. You seem to spend quite a bit of time with Lena.’

‘I’m not far, I’ve got a flat at Riverside. I see Mum most days, let her cook for me and that – she’s getting on and it gives her a reason to get up and get going. She’s had a houseful all her life, I doubt she’d cope if we left her to her own devices.’

Edie had to agree; a woman like Lena would wither and die without a familiar purpose. Maybe that’s what had happened to Dolly, without her mother and brother to look after she had quietly faded without fuss. ‘I’m glad she has a reason to crack on with it. I think you’re right. And Riverside, wow, that’s a bit posh isn’t it?’ Edie had passed the new development when she had arrived in town, it was most impressive and out of the price range of ordinary folk like her.

‘Can’t be that posh, I have shares in the company that developed the land.’ It came out casually, as if he felt it was neither here nor there that he owned part of a huge company. Fingers in pies indeed…

‘Blimey, you dark horse! I’d have made you take me somewhere much better than this if I’d known.’ Edie quipped.

Sam laughed. ‘Well you were buying so I thought I’d keep it low key. Which reminds me, you might be on free refills but I need another pint. I’ll take you somewhere posh next time.’

He walked towards the bar and left her pondering “next time”. Jesus, she was behaving like a giddy schoolgirl, and a desperate, frustrated one at that. The fact that he was clearly loaded was quite sobering, and if she thought about it, fairly intimidating. Nice as he was, he was out of her league in so many ways. Besides, he was only being kind because of past connections; there was nothing in it for her above the generosity of old friends.

Lena too was mulling over thoughts of old friends, so much so that she hadn’t been able to concentrate on the bingo and had missed the opportunity of winning twice. Not that she wanted the prizes, last year’s recycled Christmas presents and the same bottle of wine that had been re-donated as a prize three times weren’t exactly high on her list of desirables. But peace of mind was. She was going to be hard pressed to find any of that now that Number 17 was under scrutiny. There were too many ghosts hidden in that house and she for one wasn’t looking forward to any of them making their presence known. Edie was going to find things, things she probably wouldn’t understand, and the mere thought of it was breaking Lena’s heart. She sighed and hauled herself to her feet, bingo was over and everyone was leaving. If there were going to be things that Edie didn’t understand, Lena would have to make herself available to explain them.

Edie was sorry to discover that Sam wouldn’t be joining her at Lena’s; though she had to accept that he did have a life away from his mother, she had enjoyed his company. It had been good to laugh and spend time with a man she didn’t want to brain with the nearest blunt object. Thoughts of Sam were soon chased away by Lena’s demeanour, the old lady looked tired, as if she was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Edie guessed that the afternoon’s bingo session hadn’t yielded its usual pleasures. ‘Everything all right, Lena?’ she asked as the woman trudged into the house and slumped into her favourite chair.

Lena shrugged. ‘Tired, that’s all. I usually get fish and chips on a Wednesday, be a love and go and fetch them would you? I don’t think these old bones will stand another trip out today.’

Edie didn’t hesitate; it was the least she could do to repay Lena’s hospitality. Though there was some grappling over who would pay. Edie won and set off to fetch their supper.

The queue inside the shop was long; she loitered outside for a few minutes, loath to expose herself to the steamy aroma, which would linger on her clothes – l’eau d’chip shop wasn’t the most appealing perfume in the world. A man, the smart man with the military bearing from yesterday’s funeral, sat on the bench opposite unashamedly staring at her while he ate chips from a paper cone. Edie found his scrutiny wholly unnerving and tried to ignore him by peering up and looking around the square, but his attention was like a magnet and compelled her to keep glancing at him. She almost sprang back when he suddenly stood up and launched his unfinished meal into a nearby bin. From the corner of her eye she saw him step forward, hesitate, seemingly think better of it and walk away. A bizarre sense of relief washed through her and she had no idea why, it was hardly as if he had been about to attack her in such a public place. Even so, she kept her wits about her as she made her way back with two steam-sodden parcels of the nation’s favourite. The man was nowhere to be seen, though she was sure that he had walked across the green towards the opposite side of the square. Fortunately she didn’t have to cross it herself, and could cling to the more brightly lit pavement to reach Lena’s house, nonetheless she closed the front door behind her with a sigh of quiet relief.

Lena had laid the table and warmed plates in the oven, Edie found it odd that such ceremony should accompany a paper wrapped meal; surely the whole point was to have time off from preparation and clearing up. She would happily have eaten her own supper from the greasy bundle, but concluded that when in Rome it was wise to feign Italian. They sat at the table to eat, Edie picking at the congealed mess of carbohydrate while Lena ate with mechanical regularity, her fork moving from plate to mouth with instinctive precision as she focused on the television. One of the soaps was on, churning out typical storylines where someone had stupidly lied, someone else had slept with someone’s partner and yet another was developing a dangerous addiction that would result in doom and disaster. Edie found the show mindlessly oppressive and mentally tuned it out, her thoughts returning to the strange man in the square. There had been something vaguely familiar about him, more than the recalling of him at the funeral. It was something from way back that nudged at her memory. She reached for a slice of the thin white bread that Lena had provided and took a bite. A slick of margarine coated her mouth and she felt her stomach begin to lurch, she had never been able to stand the taste and texture of margarine. She discarded the bread and took a gulp of tea to wash the taste away while her memory wheeled and clicked like an enigma machine and decoded the messages of the past. Slowly images flickered across her mind, another death, another funeral – limp white bread sandwiches made with margarine and a smear of meat paste. The flush of tepid tea to take the taste away; a grimace and the glimpse of a man sitting in a corner and staring. The same man. He had been at her mother’s wake. Much of the event was a complete blur, she couldn’t look back at it without an overwhelming, confusing sense of loss and longing for the woman she had never felt able to love. She couldn’t remember who had been there other than Simon (who had insisted on repeatedly looking at his watch and sighing) and Rose, who had done all the talking and thanking people for coming. But she recalled that man and it didn’t make sense. ‘Lena, did you come to my mum’s funeral?’

Lena pulled her attention away from the TV ‘Eh? No love I didn’t. Bill was in hospital at the time, and I couldn’t make it. Why?’

Edie shrugged. ‘It’s just that I saw someone in the square who I’m sure was there. I was just trying to place him.’ She had forgotten that Lena’s husband Bill had died soon after.

Lena frowned. ‘Other than me, Dickie and Dolly I can’t think that there’d have been anyone left who’d have known your mum. Unless the Bastins went, though I can’t see that would be likely.’

That name too was familiar. ‘Who are the Bastins?’

‘You must remember Sheila Bastin – you know, always went about the place looking sorry for herself and sheepish, lived across the way with that boy of hers, Matthew. It was her bastard husband what killed Sally Pollett and them others. But like I said, there was no love lost between us lot and them, so I doubt she’d have gone to your mum’s funeral. But Matthew might have done, odd bugger that one. Spent all his life trying to prove his father’s innocence and getting nowhere – used to stalk this place like a nosy little goblin, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’d pitched up there just to have a look see. He came to Bill’s and all, cheeky swine. Didn’t get past the door for the wake though, I saw to that. We didn’t see much of him after that, I heard he joined the army or something. Not sure I’d even know him now.’

Of course! The different sections of Edie’s memory clicked into place like a combination lock set to the right sequence and released. She did remember him, Matthew Bastin, son of a killer and bully bait for the whole square. Skinny, scruffy and always hanging around as if he was waiting to be picked on. It was a fleeting thing, but Edie recalled a sense of pity for the boy which had been knocked out of her eleven-year-old self by Rose’s remonstration and a Chinese burn painfully administered by a young and spiteful Sam. All because she had offered Matt a sweet once. Was it Sam who had told her to stay away from Matt because he would chop her to little pieces and stuff her down the drain? She couldn’t recall, but someone had. It seemed that Matt Bastin was still a glutton for punishment if he had chosen to come back to the square.

Lena’s attention had drifted back to the TV where another soap with its familiar themes had begun to insinuate its immorality onto the supper eating viewers. Edie couldn’t stand it. She pushed her unfinished food away and reached for Lena’s empty plate. ‘I’ll wash these up and make some more tea.’ she said, waiting for Lena’s absentminded nod of approval. All those characters could remain faceless and unnamed to Edie; life already had more than enough drama for her.