The Silent Girls (25 page)

She sighed and looked at the door, willing it to open so she could get this over with. As if her thoughts had suddenly manifested psychic power, the door did open, and a young woman in a bad suit waltzed in carrying a clipboard. She introduced herself as Detective Constable Alice Hale, shook Lena’s hand, sat down, mustered a look of sympathy and concern and leaned forward. ‘Now, what was it you wanted to talk to us about?’

Lena thought her pleasant but patronising. No doubt the woman thought she’d drawn the short straw too, and had been badgered into seeing the batty old lady who thought she’d committed murder. ‘I want to talk to you about a crime that was committed.’ Lena waited for the woman to say something, do something, write something down, ask her a question even. DC Alice Hale just smiled, which irritated Lena no end. She ploughed on anyway, ‘It’s about what happened to Sally Pollett.’

Lena paused, waiting to see a flicker of reaction, sure that the name would ring a bell, even for someone as young as Alice Hale. It took a moment but the name did seem to have an effect. ‘I see, are you referring to the historical case?’

Lena snorted, she might be old but things that had happened in her living memory hardly felt historical. ‘If you want to put it like that, though it doesn’t feel that far in the past to me.’

The indignation wasn’t lost on the woman, who raised her eyebrows. ‘Why don’t you tell me what it is that’s worrying you, Mrs Campion, and we’ll take it from there.’

Worrying her? This child had no idea – what happened to Sally hadn’t worried her, it had haunted her for her entire adult life. Decisions made in an instant that affected everything and everyone, the after effects acting like a ricochet and rattling down the years. ‘Sally was my best friend,’ she said, surprised to find that tears were pricking her eyelids. ‘Known each other since we were knee high.’ She waved a hand about a foot or so off the floor as if to indicate the longevity of her connection. ‘Always a bit of a tearaway was Sally, a wild child and a pretty thing. Had an eye for the boys and they had an eye for her. Anyway, when she was seventeen she got in with a married man, fell hook line and sinker for him – was convinced he was going to leave his wife for her, but they never do, do they?’ Alice Hale cocked her head to one side in a noncommittal gesture that said that she might, or might not, agree. Lena swallowed and went on. ‘Anyway, the inevitable happened and she got herself into trouble. She wasn’t far gone when she found out, but of course he didn’t want to know and she wasn’t left with much of a choice. Course, Beattie Morris had been locked up by then, so there wasn’t much alternative – me and Dolly had to have a go and try and help. If Sally’s dad had found out about her having a baby, well, there would have been hell to pay – he was a mean old bastard at the best of times.’ She paused to see if her bad language had caused a reaction, Alice Hale seemed unperturbed by it, so she went on. ‘Dolly reckoned she knew what she as doing, had helped her mother no end of times, said it was simple, nothing to it. Well Sal was desperate and so was I, she was my friend see, and I didn’t want to see her beaten black and blue by her father and chucked out on the street. So me and Dolly did it, we set everything up, made out Sal was staying the night, which she was, and Dolly did the procedure – only something went wrong and Sal started bleeding, pissing out all over the place it was, and she was screaming and I panicked. After what had happened to Beattie and the shame of it we didn’t know what to do, so I put a pillow over her face – just to stop her screaming, like – while Dolly tried to stop the bleeding.’ She paused, aware that unbidden tears were streaming down her face, tears that had taken many years to come. ‘She died on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. We killed her, me and Dolly, and we let John Bastin hang for it.’

Alice Hale was blinking slowly, her face not moving a muscle, but Lena could see that behind her eyes her mind was doing overtime.

‘We knew about the murders see, and we figured if we could make it look like that, it’d be all right. We couldn’t bring her back. So we did what the killer did, stuffed her knickers in her mouth and got rid of the body. There was all that Christie stuff in the news too, so we did what he did and put her down the drain out the front. Told her dad she’d never made it that night but that we knew she was meeting Bastin behind his back.’

Alice Hale frowned. ‘How did two women lift a manhole cover and move a body?’

Lena swallowed. ‘We had help. In fact it was his idea. He helped move her.’

Alice Hale raised her eyebrows. ‘Who helped?’

‘Dolly’s brother.’

Alice Hale honestly didn’t know what to do. She had heard of John Bastin of course, one of the last men to be hanged in England, and was vaguely familiar with the circumstances of his trial and conviction. The fact that this elderly woman was sitting in a comfy chair confessing to manslaughter, tampering with evidence, perverting the course of justice and possibly even perjury, was mind blowing. Alice didn’t even know if it was possible to re-open such a case after a long passage of time, or if anything that the woman had said would stand up to scrutiny. She scratched her head, as if the action might help her find some clarity – it didn’t. ‘Mrs Campion, would you mind staying here while I go and consult my colleagues? I’ll ask someone to bring you a cup of tea.’ She didn’t hang around for an answer, but left the old lady bemused and tearful while she went in search of advice.

Lena hadn’t cried like that in years, in fact she wasn’t sure she could remember the last time she’d shed a tear at all. There was a sea of them inside and they had been building for years, threatening to crash out like a tidal wave and roll over her, tugging her down to the abyss of despair that she had been avoiding all her life. She had though it would feel better, confessing. Like a pressure cooker letting off steam so that it didn’t explode. It didn’t, it had just made room for more guilt, more misery, more ghosts crowding in from the past with their hangdog faces and blame. Lena wasn’t sure she could take any more. Talking about what had happened to Sal was supposed to have made it tolerable, it was supposed to have been a gesture to her conscience, a white flag of surrender, yet it felt as though a floodgate had been opened. She couldn’t wait around for tea and questions, she had said what she had come to say and they were dithering. Lena had no time for dithering, or for people who couldn’t be bothered to take her seriously. Angry at the tears and ashamed of her stupidity in trying to appease karma with such a sorry show of truth she picked up her bag, buttoned up her coat and walked out. With no idea of where she was going to go, she just kept walking to wherever her feet chose to take her.

***

The first thing that Sophie became aware of was the sound, or the lack of it. Just the muffled hum of something far beyond where she was. The second thing was the taste, acrid, dank and rotten. The third was the cold, seeping in to her bones and settling there for the duration. The fourth was the pain in her face, which pulsated like a slow, vicious jack hammer. The fifth was the realisation that she couldn’t move and the sixth was that she wanted her mum. The seventh brought panic, if she wanted her mum, things must be really, really bad.

She felt sick, didn’t know where she was and couldn’t recall how she’d got there. A vague memory of answering the door came to her, but it was dim and distant and she wondered if she was making it up, if this was just a particularly hideous nightmare and that she was willing herself to wake up. An eighth realisation dawned, she was lying in her own pee – she had wet herself.

Her first instinct was to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse rasp that ended in a feeble squeak. Pathetic. She tried again, but her mouth felt like an Arab’s flip flop and her throat was having none of it. Thinking hurt. Everything hurt. Her wrists felt like they had been tied with cheese wire and her legs were numb, frozen and dead. Had someone hit her? An indistinct memory of a fist, blackness descending like a shutter and having something forced into her mouth. The taste of blood. And pain, lots of pain. The pain wasn’t a memory, it was all too present, searing through her face and shuddering down into her stiff, confined limbs. Sam Campion’s face loomed large behind her eyelids. He’d hit her, she remembered that much, but where the fuck was she now and why?

Opening her eyes was undertaken tentatively, a movement loaded with fear and apprehension. It felt as though it was going to hurt, and hurt bad, and not only that – she wasn’t sure she wanted any more information about where she was. If her functional senses were right, it was certainly somewhere she didn’t want to be. It felt like a cellar, tasted like a cellar and probably smelled like a cellar. With the sensation of cold, wet cloth against her nether regions too it might even have been a sewer. Oh God, had she really pissed herself?

In films people were brave, they shuffled about, found a nail, or a piece of broken glass and freed themselves. They could see in the dark on instinct and weigh and measure their options, a means of breath-taking escape always presenting itself. They were calm, collected and didn’t wet their knickers like little girls. All Sophie wanted to do was cry, but even wrinkling up her face to make the effort hurt too much and brought on such a wave of despair that she thought she might be engulfed by it. If she cried she wouldn’t be able to breathe and she might suffocate from cowardice, humiliation and the inhibition of a broken nose. If she moved, even attempted to shuffle, she was going to dislocate something and just shovel more filth into her already scum lined mouth and probably damage her face even further. Sophie knew what she was, a gobshite, a guttersnipe, a scrounger – none of which made her Houdini. Even with her eyes wide and painfully open she couldn’t see a thing except the fearsome black shapes conjured from her own wild imagination that seemed to writhe and connive in the darkness. Was it possible to actually die of fright?

Chapter Eighteen

Sam swerved the car into the car park in front of his apartment, wrenched on the handbrake and glanced into his rear view mirror before undoing his seatbelt, spotting something he wished he hadn’t. Stefan’s sleek, black BMW was parked under an archway to his rear, which meant they were here and waiting for him. Pascoe was not going to accept further delays, or excuses.

As swiftly as he had pulled in and parked, he pulled away again – screeching out of the car park as if all the demons of hell were after him. If Pascoe’s reputation was anything to go by, and Sam had good reason to believe that it was, the analogy might as well be true. If he didn’t have what Pascoe wanted by the time he saw him next, he was a dead man.

As he drove back towards town he considered the prospect of running, he had a passport and money at his mother’s, and more that he could get to if he needed it. But it meant leaving everything that he had built, which was better than Sam watching Pascoe seize it from beyond the grave, but worse than sticking around and finding out what the hell had happened to his stash. From what he had got out of the dopey kid when the Rohypnol had kicked in, that stupid bitch Edie had put it somewhere and clearly had no idea what it was. She was a dumb bitch from dumb stock.

Red lights hampered his progress and made him more tense than he had been to start with – the thought of Stefan routinely turning over the apartment was more than he could stand, that oaf ripping his life apart on the whim of an idiot like Pascoe. In Sam’s mind he should be the one calling the shots, not that jumped-up ponce and his giant flunkey. As the lights turned to amber he was away, not waiting for them to move to green. Sam was not a fan of waiting for anything he saw fit to take for his own, but he was a believer in serendipity. It was a force that had served him well and seemed about to again when he spied Edie trudging along the pavement just ahead of him. He surged ahead of her and pulled in. Rolling down his window with the touch of a button he called out to her. ‘Edie! Want a lift? I’m going back to the square.’

Edie glanced up at the sound of her name but took a moment to recognise both the car and the voice that had come from it. Sam, thank goodness – a friendly face. Though she had been released without charge her time at the police station had been arduous, having to repeat herself continually that no, she didn’t know where the diamonds had come from and no, she hadn’t known they were real, no, she hadn’t found any further items in the house that had struck her as unusual (though the dress and the locket had sprung to mind). Explaining repeatedly that she had no idea how her elderly aunt had come into the possession of such valuable items had been exhausting and she felt ready to drop – or scream at whatever entity thought that bringing all this grief into her already wrecked life was good fun. She accepted Sam’s offer of a lift gratefully and climbed into the car as if it was a life raft.

‘What’s up? You look knackered.’ Sam said, glancing at her before pulling out into the traffic.

He was a fine one to talk, he looked stressed and was showing his age. Explaining her strange day to him felt like it might all be too much, she had answered enough questions that afternoon and really didn’t want to go there with anyone. ‘Just tired, not been getting much sleep. Dolly’s old sofa isn’t exactly the Ritz.’

He laughed. ‘You should have stuck it out at Mum’s. Being forced to watch EastEnders every night is a small price to pay for a comfy bed.’

‘Maybe I should have.’ she said, adding a wan smile. But there had been Sophie to consider, even though Sophie hadn’t considered her.

‘So, what have you been up to today then, anything nice?’

Edie gave out a soft snort, even a masochist couldn’t have perceived her day as “nice”. ‘Not really, just sorting out more family business. I’ll be glad when it’s all over and I can just get on with my life.’ Never had she spoken truer words.

‘So, going home soon then? That’s a shame, it’s been nice to see you again.’

She gave him a sidelong glance; he changed like the wind. Their disastrous evening out had hardly given her the impression that he would have any regrets over her leaving. ‘I don’t know about going home, I don’t really have one as it stands. The marital home, as it were, has been sold, so it’s more a case of moving on and finding a new home.’