The Silent Girls (33 page)

His car, with which she was all too familiar having spent a good deal of time in its boot, was parked at the side of the house. She felt an impending sense of claustrophobia begin to rise as she anticipated becoming reacquainted with the confines of the boot and came to a dead stop on the gravel, causing him to give her a painful shove in the back. He swung her around and slammed her into the side of the car, knocking the wind out of her chest and making her sag to her knees with the effort of not throwing up into her sealed mouth. She would rather hang than choke to death on her own vomit.

He crouched in front of her, his face in line with hers, and cocked his head to one side, looking at her as if she was some curious specimen in a zoo.

‘Here’s the deal, lady. I’m not going to hurt you, but I will if you so much as think about taking the piss. We’re getting out of here and we can do it the easy way, or the hard way. The easy way is that you promise not to give me any shit and you can sit in the car with me all nice like. Or you can go in the boot and I’ll dump you in the nearest ditch and leave you for dead.’

Everything she was feeling – confusion, fear, panic – must have shown in her eyes, because he reached out, knife in hand, and slit the duct tape that he had bound around her head. The tape was ripped from her mouth, bringing what felt like half her skin and a good portion of her hair with it. She squealed and gasped as the pain rang through her nerve endings like an electric shock. In films it would have been a tiny strip of tape, no worse than a waxing strip, its removal causing no more than a brief sting and a haughty look of objection. In films she would have screamed her head off and called for help. In reality screaming was no use, Simon had bought the house for its splendid isolation and had always been inordinately smug about their lack of neighbours. Edie had always thought it the loneliest place on earth.

Bracing her heels into the hard ground beneath the gravel, she pushed her shoulders against the car and used both forces to lever herself up. He rose with her, watching her progress and giving her a sly grin of appreciation for her determination.

‘Gutsy little piece, aren’t ya.’ he said.

She treated him to the best look of utter contempt that she could muster. ‘I have my moments.’

He folded his arms and smirked at her, shaking his head in what looked like amused disbelief.

‘Why didn’t you just leave me in the house if you want to get away? Why bother with all this?’

‘Now that there is a very good question. I could, and if you piss me off again I will, but the people who are coming here are not people you want to be dealing with. Right now they don’t know you’re here, but if they found you, well, let’s just say they’d make me look like a pussy cat in comparison.’

‘Doesn’t that suit you, getting someone else to do the dirty work?’

He laughed and shook his head again. ‘Consider it part of my payback. It’s not me that wants you dead lady, frankly I couldn’t give a shit, but it amuses me to put one over on that bastard in there. Now, we’re going to get in the car, I’m going to drive you back to civilisation and I’m going to drop you off. Win win.’

‘I don’t get it, why do you care what happens to me?’

‘I don’t, not really. But I look at it this way, if I kill you, or leave you to die, I’m wanted for your murder too. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t intend to be hanging around to answer for anything, but you never know do you? So, I look after you and when the shit hits the fan I’m the good guy. They can arrest me for being a cunt, but they can’t charge me for it.’

Edie almost wanted to laugh at his bizarre logic, it was as if he believed that arson, attempted murder, kidnapping, GBH, ABH and God knows what else were minor infringements. Perhaps they were to someone like him, but it wouldn’t pay her to argue. Besides, her only way out of this was to play along. ‘OK, it suits me.’

‘Good girl. Now let’s get the fuck out of this God forsaken shit hole.’

To her surprise he cut the tape on her hands and let her sit in the front of the car. He didn’t seem remotely concerned that she might grab the wheel or try to overpower him. The thought of that made her laugh. As if she could – her arms felt like they were made of rubber and she was so exhausted she doubted that she could knock the skin off a rice pudding, let alone take on a thug in a moving car. That kind of bravery was for TV and idiots. Edie had been surviving brutality for too many years to be an idiot.

They drove in silence for a few miles, him concentrating on the winding country lanes, her nursing her privations and willing life to come back into her limbs so that the dull, intense, nagging pain would stop. Her head was hurting like a bastard and the motion of the car was making her feel sick. She had to focus on something other than how lousy she felt.

‘How come you decided to do the dirty on Sam, I thought you two were best buddies?’

He glanced at her with an amused smile on his face. ‘No such thing as best buddies in my world lady, just money and favours – and respect. Sam disrespected me. Torching a house is one thing, finding out that there are two people inside is another. I’m a lot of things lady, but a killer isn’t one of them, not by choice anyway.’ He seemed to add this as if it was an afterthought. ‘He ripped me off and screwed me over, so I returned the favour.’

Edie gathered that honour amongst thieves must be the myth she had always suspected it to be. There was a bag on the back seat, she’d heard them talking about it, about how much of the contents Sam intended to give Johnno in ‘compensation’. She guessed that Johnno hadn’t thought it was enough and had simply helped himself. ‘Dog eat dog,’ she said, under her breath. ‘Aren’t you worried that I’m going to go to the police?’

He gave out a derisive snort. ‘Do what you fucking like love, I’ll be long gone.’

Edie felt suddenly utterly defeated. All her life she had felt stifled and punished through everyone else’s need for power and control. She had been nothing but a chattel to everyone. Even on her good days her mother had treated her as if she was a prize of some sort – like something she’d won in a raffle, not valued, but coveted because it was hers. No wonder she’d ended up with Simon, his attentions had held a familiarity that wasn’t so much appealing, as compelling. People were drawn towards what they knew. Even Rose treated her like a servant, assuming that she would do her bidding without question. And now there was Sam, who had used her as a means to an end and considered her ultimately disposable. Even Johnno, sad article of humanity that he was, seemed to have more compassion for her than the people who had declared their love; at least he was giving her a chance. Not that Sam had ever expressed any love, but she’d felt something between them at one point – a spark of attraction that had seemed to feel deeper than just an appreciation of each other’s aesthetics. How ridiculous it had all been and what a sad, sorry article she was. Poor Edie, everybody’s pawn. It occurred to her that she had turned into Dolly, everybody’s helpmeet. A future of loneliness, neediness and eventual madness was more than she could bear and for a moment she considered grabbing the wheel and sending them both to their deaths. The world would be better off without Johnno, and nobody would miss her. Sophie came into her mind as someone who might, and the thought of it seemed to ignite a little flame inside her that began to illuminate the darkness of her mood. There might be life beyond all this yet.

They seemed to drive for hours, in silence now, Edie had nothing more to say to Johnno – there was little point in trying to convince him of the error of his ways, and any such conversation was more likely to result in mortal injury to her, not his sudden conversion to the light. She had even dozed for a while, resting her head against the window and drifting in and out of sleep, only the tension of her current situation and the pain in her head preventing her from slipping into oblivion. Having been lulled by the motion of the car, and the comparatively benign situation, she felt a profound sense of apprehension when he finally pulled up. They were opposite a railway station, she had no idea where, he had parked in the shadows away from the lights and a tree obscured the sign.

‘This is it lady, this is where me and you part company.’ He leaned across the back of the seat and rummaged in the bag, then threw a bundle of money into her lap. There must have been at least two grand there. ‘Buy yourself a ticket and give the rest to the kid.’

Edie stared at the money, then at Johnno, and couldn’t help what came out of her mouth. ‘Sophie? I thought you hated her? When I first found her you’d beaten her up and made her life a misery.’

Johnno shrugged. ‘My kid, my prerogative. Didn’t want her living on the square, did I? No one’s kid should have to live there, it’s a bad place, lady. I should know, I made it that way. She didn’t want to leave nicely so I gave her a little incentive.’

Edie couldn’t see how a busted face and bruised ribs would be much of an incentive for anything except depression and fear. Johnno seemed to have taken feral parenting to a whole new low. ‘Does she know?’

‘That she’s mine? Maybe, dunno. Just tell her there’s no such thing as bad blood, she can be whoever she wants to be. Time to go lady, out you get.’ He leaned across and opened the car door, less an invitation, more a demand.

Edie scrambled out, clutching the bundle of money and wasting little time in putting as much distance between herself and Johnno as she could. Out of curiosity she paused in the shade of the tree, watching what he did next and surprised that he hadn’t driven off immediately. She could see by the light of the screen that he was making a phone call. It didn’t take long and when the call ended, he wound down the window and hurled the phone into some bushes. Had it not been pitch black she would have tried to retrieve it once he’d driven away, but she’d been through enough and the thought of foraging about in the dark was just too much. If she could work out where she was, she’d just tell the police where they could find it.

The station was tiny, unmanned, had no toilets and no payphone, but there were seats and a late train bound for London due to arrive in a few minutes. Edie fed one of the notes from her pile into the automated machine, took her ticket and waited. According to the little card she was in Chartham, wherever that was, and she would arrive in London just before midnight.

Mercifully the train held hardly any passengers, but even so she headed straight into the toilet, bolting the door behind her and sinking down onto the tiny loo. She knew that she was filthy, she had crawled around a cellar, then across an attic and had been practically barbecued in a fire. Blood had crusted and dried into her hair from where she had hit her head falling out of the attic. On shaking legs, less firm now that the shock was beginning to set, she stood and took a look in the small mirror. The only part of her that was remotely clean, even if it was red raw, was the area of skin that had been covered with tape. She did the best she could with the thin trickle of water and the tiny sink, but still looked like an extra from a zombie film when she’d finished. Not unusual in central London, a bit of a rarity on a late night train coming in from the sticks. She spent the rest of the journey locked inside the toilet, hoping against hope that the train had no conductor.

For once fate seemed to be on her side and the change at Ashford not only told her that she was in Kent, but also allowed her to find some better toilet facilities where she could clean herself up a bit more, though the whole thing felt like an exercise in moving the dirt around. When she came out, looking only slightly less dishevelled than when she’d gone in, she realised that she had missed the connecting train. In that moment all her tolerance snapped and her stoicism failed under the strain. In a mess of tears she looked around for a member of staff but there was no one around. In her chaotic and hysterical state she drew a few horrified glances from the people moving through the station but no one came to help. She probably wouldn’t have either, had she been them. What she did find was a payphone so she made her way over to it, dialled 999 and asked for the police. For a few moments she knew that the woman at the end of the phone thought she was a crank, it was only when she mentioned Sam’s name that things changed and all she could assume was that his name had triggered some kind of alert which changed everything about the attitude of the woman on the other end of the line.

Alone, bereft, filthy and terrified she waited for the police to arrive. All her gumption had ebbed away and she sat, head on her knees on the floor beside the phone. She didn’t even have the energy to laugh when some pitying person threw fifty pence at her feet, even though she was literally sitting on a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of ill-gotten gains.

When they came, she told them everything – by that time she would have sold her soul for a hot cup of tea and a bath. When it was all over, and she had learned about the extent of the fire and that Number 17 was a no go zone, that the body of an unknown man had been found on the premises and that Lena Campion had passed away, they asked her where she wanted to go. Having handed over the money, which had been stowed away in an evidence bag, she was penniless, homeless and struggling to find any semblance of hope. They asked her if she had any friends or family that she could go to. With Rose currently on a ship somewhere and Will in Australia, the answer was no – there were no friends, Simon had seen to that. The only person that she could think of who might fit that description was Matt, so she asked to be taken there. The irony of her needing him after everything that had happened was not lost on her, but the fact of the matter was, she was way past caring.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Matt had come to a decision. Now that he knew that he’d been right all along, and that Frank Morris had been responsible for the murders, his obsession had ground to a halt and fizzled out. He was sick of looking at the dead women’s faces and staring at the files. He no longer cared where his carefully pinned strands of red string led, and the map was just a huge meandering symbol of how trapped he felt by everything that Winfield stood for. He’d had enough.