The Silent Girls

At first glance Coronation Square didn’t seem to have changed much in over thirty years; it still had its postage stamp patch of green in the middle and still boasted its tall Victorian houses on all four sides. It still looked blowsy and overdone, and it still had a baleful air that marked it out as somewhere to be wary of. On closer inspection, Edie could see that things had altered – the square had faded like an old rose and its previously respectable veneer had degenerated into a flimsy, fragile facade.

As she walked past the buildings she noticed the addition of new doorbells, up to six per house, each one bearing a flimsy weather faded label that left people none the wiser as to who might live there. Old family homes had been carved up, mutating into flats and bedsits to house a cheapskate, shifting population. The street drinkers and off duty prostitutes made a desultory change from the sherry sipping matriarchs who had twitched their net curtains and traded in gossip. Edie remembered them well and shuddered at the thought.

Number 17 was just as it always had been, and as familiar to Edie as looking back at her own childhood face in photographs. The house stood out like a rotten tooth, seedy and discoloured from neglect, ancient blue paint flaked from the window frames and peeled in curling sheets from the front door. The brass knocker hung precariously from a single remaining screw, the metal pockmarked and dulled by years of inattention. Edie regarded the whole place with a reluctance that sat like a brooding gargoyle at the centre of her being. This was not a visit she would have chosen to make had she not been forced to by circumstances, and the state of the house represented everything that she felt about her extended family – neglected, old-fashioned, out of kilter and more than a little embarrassing. The Morris family would never have been singled out for the voracity of their housekeeping or their ability to embrace change. Edie doubted that the Morris family would have been singled out for much, though she might have won the prize for most inept midlife crisis, most acrimonious divorce and person never likely to amount to much (if anyone had held a competition).

Not that any of it mattered, she had arrived and there was work to do. To her surprise the old key worked perfectly and gave her easy entry into a cluttered, dingy, pungent past.

The first thing she did was open the kitchen window to dissipate the foetid air; the second was to ring her sister. ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m here.’

‘Oh God, how bad is it?’ Rose asked, her voice laden with false concern. They both knew that she couldn’t have cared less, so long as she didn’t have to deal with it.

Edie surveyed her surroundings, she had perched herself on the edge of a rickety chair and from there she could see only a fraction of the desuetude that had beset the house. Grease had trickled and congealed on the walls and mould had started to mount an onslaught in neglected corners. It looked like Aunt Dolly hadn’t deigned to lift a cloth in some time. ‘A combination of Steptoe’s front yard and 10 Rillington Place springs to mind, and that’s just based on the smell. It’s bad Rose, really bad.’

‘Oh Lord, I wasn’t sure what it would be like. Are you sure you can do this on your own?’

Edie sighed, Rose’s feigned empathy was a constant source of irritation. ‘There isn’t much choice, you can’t help and there isn’t anyone else.’ Rose was about to embark on a month long cruise with her husband – a long awaited trip that couldn’t be put aside, even for the death of a relative. ‘I can’t see this place fetching much; it will need gutting and half rebuilding looking at the state of it. Is anyone going to want to take it on?’

‘Someone will, the property prices in that area of Winfield are going through the roof. It’s up and coming, Edie, someone’s going to get an absolute bargain.’

Edie thought about the one stop shop, the street drinkers and the bedsits. ‘That someone will need to have a lot of vision then. Rose, should we feel bad that we let it go on so long, should we have done more?’ Edie hadn’t set foot in the house since 1980 when it had been untidy and in need of a clean, but not on the point of ruin. She had been a child then, and how people lived hadn’t been her primary concern. At that age she had been preoccupied by ponies that she would never own and contemplating a career as an air hostess, not worrying about how her strange relatives chose to live their lives. It had been a nice age, a time to have fantasies, a time to be unaffected by the knowledge that ponies were expensive manure producing machines and that air hostesses were just glorified waitresses. Reality always bit eventually.

‘How could we have known? She never told us how bad things were, I used to phone her once a month and she never said a word. I suppose we could have done more, but how were we to know?’ Rose was being unusually generous in her use of the word ‘we’ – Edie had never phoned or ever checked in on her elderly aunt to pass the time of day, she had been too busy having a life. Now she wasn’t, and this hasty, unwanted task felt like too little done too late. ‘Do you think there is much of any value in there?’ Rose asked.

Edie looked around again. ‘I have no idea, most of it looks like junk at the moment, and filthy junk at that. But I’ll sort through it and let you know.’ Rose wasn’t being greedy, Dolly Morris had died with debts and the money had to come from somewhere. Being executor of this particular will came with responsibilities, not benefits.

‘Will you go to the funeral?’

‘I suppose I should, I’m taking apart her life and selling it for scrap, it would seem mercenary not to.’ Edie said, wondering if Simon felt the same obligation to her now that their house was in the process of being sold and their property was being divided. She doubted it, his only obligation seemed to be to himself these days. ‘I know one thing though, we’ll have shares in Lever by the time I’m finished, I may well make a dent in the European bleach mountain tackling this mess.’

Rose laughed. Edie asked her how she was feeling. There had been some complaining about a twisted ankle that Rose worried might ruin the cruise.

‘Sore and bored. Evan is being good though, helping out, and the girls are calling in every day. I might die of the boredom though. I can’t wait until we leave.’ Of course Evan was being good, he was the kind of husband who would be. Rose’s daughters were pretty perfect too; they had stayed close to home and close to their mother. Sometimes Edie envied her sister that perfect family. She thought of her own child, made in his father’s image and doing his own thing ten thousand miles away, and of her home being sold, all her things and furniture packed up in crates and boxes which were sitting in a storage unit. Gah! She needed to get over herself, at this rate she would end up just like Dolly had, sick and lonely in a house that held the bones of the past like an ossuary for the forgotten.

‘I doubt that Rose, give it a few weeks on that cruise and you’ll be back better than before.’

‘Well I’ll try and enjoy myself, though it will be hard thinking of you tackling this great big mess. Good luck with the clear out.’ Her tone was full of sympathy, which grated on Edie like sandpaper being dragged over her skin. It was pointless saying anything. Rose was going on her trip regardless. Edie had pulled the short straw and had to live with it.

‘Thanks, I might need it.’ Edie ended the call with the usual niceties and turned to contemplate her task. Good sense dictated that she try and make the kitchen semi hygienic first, she would be staying a while and she would need to eat. The prospect of food poisoning wasn’t pleasant and by the look of it several new life forms were breeding in the kitchen. She daren’t dwell on the thought too long for fear of throwing up at the horrors that her imagination might conjure, let alone the ones that faced her in in the filthy kitchen.

A quick survey of the cupboards told her that Dolly hadn’t been a fan of cleaning products; a tin of petrified Vim and a dribble of disinfectant weren’t going to cut it. Neither was the rock hard, blackened cloth that was welded to the waste pipe. It was time to go to the one stop shop and stock up.

If old Mrs Vale (the terrifying matriarch that still loomed large in her memory) had still owned the shop Edie’s basket would have raised questions. The copious quantities of cleaning products and three rolls of black bags would have garnered curiosity, and in an hour the whole square would have known that Edie Byrne was clearing out the Morris house. On this occasion the gum-chewing girl behind the till didn’t show a flicker of interest, and barely looked up when Edie paid. Edie guessed that Dolly’s fate was no one’s business and nobody’s concern these days. There was something to be said for net curtain twitchers, they missed little and would never have allowed an old lady to lie for days at the bottom of the stairs with a broken hip – she had lain there so long that she had died helpless and alone. Dolly’s plight had been noticed not by her neighbours, but by a persistent meter reader determined to do his job, even if it did mean peering in through dirty windows and discovering dead old women. Every time she thought of it, Edie felt a flush of guilt – Dolly’s lonely death had been inevitable simply because no one had cared, and she was one of the few who had been obliged to.

She lugged her shopping bags back across the square, using the central garden as a short cut. There had been a time when the garden had been a pleasant place where kids could play. It seemed to be the haunt of the druggies and drunks now, if the litter of cans and needles were evidence of anything. As she approached the gate opposite number seventeen, she spied a group of people congregated outside the house and listening rapt as a man lectured them. He was pointing at the main drain in the road at the front of the house.

‘Sally Pollett had been missing for four days when the residents of number fifteen called in the water board to complain that the drain was blocked and that an awful smell was pervading the street. When the workmen arrived and pulled up the manhole cover, they discovered her remains wedged into the shaft and starting to decay. She had been strangled, her underwear forced into her throat and her hair sheared off. Her female organs had been mutilated while she was still alive. It was the last in a string of murders which rocked the borough of Winfield.’ The man announced his tale with dramatic flair, his voice wringing every drop of shock and horror that it could from the story.

The group blocked Edie’s path, she edged up to them and lingered on the fringes, catching the attention of a man with a camera. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘Murder tour, we’re visiting the sites where all of John Bastin’s victims were found.’ he said in a thick West Country accent. ‘Done ‘em all now. Ripper tour in London, ghost tour in Edinburgh and now Winfield. It’s dead interesting.’

Edie’s presence had caught the attention of the tour guide. ‘Excuse me madam, would you mind stepping back, the tour is for paying customers only.’

Edie bristled, ‘Happy to, if you could move your paying customers away from the front of my house. Or do I get a cut of the profits from your tawdry tour?’

The man looked indignant and chivvied his entourage towards the gardens, where he explained that the naked body of Elizabeth Rees had been found, laid out on a park bench for all to see.

Edie felt inordinately irked by the presence of the group and their macabre interest in Winfield’s darker history. She had little issue with ghost tours and Ripper tours, they were based in a period that no one living could remember, but the Winfield murders had happened only fifty years before. Relatives of the victims were still living in the area, or at least had been when she was a child. Mrs Campion who lived at Number 15 had been Dolly’s neighbour, and both had been friends of Sally Pollett. It couldn’t be right that people should profit from such recent tragedies.

By the time Edie had rested her heavy bags in the porch and had found the key, the group were milling around the garden taking photographs. The man in charge was staring at her, not with hostility, but curiosity. Edie shrugged and turned her back to him, but not without noticing that she was also being watched from next door. It seemed that at least one of the net curtain twitchers was alive and kicking, and still surveying her demesne from behind an anonymous veil of greying lace.

It took three hours to clear the kitchen of its clutter, and a further two just to clean it. By the time she had finished Edie had two black sacks full of out of date food, including tins of things that might be museum pieces if they hadn’t been so rusty and rimed with age. Some of the items she had consigned to the rubbish were artefacts of social history, but too far gone to be of any value or interest. A silver tea service, black with tarnish but complete with the original tray might be worth something and had been consigned to a box for further consideration and cleaning. Alongside it lay a variety of storage tins, possibly of interest to collectors of vintage kitsch and tawdry paraphernalia. There had been a ton of them, but some still contained detritus of dubious origin, which had turned Edie’s stomach and it had been too much trouble to attempt to salvage the tins.

The huge metal teapot – beloved of Dolly, and her mother before her – had been consigned to the bin. Edie couldn’t face a cup of anything brewed inside its tannin lacquered innards and settled instead for a tea bag in a chipped coronation mug, filled with water from the ancient enamel kettle which still functioned, though it had lost its whistle long ago. Edie was weary from her labours, but satisfied that she had made a dent and brought a measure of civilisation back to the proceedings. At least she knew she was less likely to contract something systemically untenable from the kitchen. The toilet had to be her next port of call and by the look of it anything might be mutating in there. It had received a whole bottle of bleach a few hours before and she hoped the substance would live up to its claims and kill ninety-nine percent of all known germs, though she could hazard a guess that Dolly had nurtured a few million as yet uncharted by biology. At this stage it was tempting to just cordon everything off with biohazard tape and throw petrol on it. Unfortunately it wasn’t an option; arson wouldn’t pay the debts. The debts were a puzzle, there had been no evidence that Dolly had been short of money, yet she had released equity from the house and left it mortgaged to the hilt. There was even less evidence of where the money had gone. It certainly hadn’t been spent on the high life or home improvements.

At five o clock Edie started to feel hungry and contemplated revisiting the shop in search of food. A quick glance in Dolly’s dusty hall mirror told her that she would probably need a bath and a change before venturing out. The grime of the kitchen had transferred itself to her and she ran the risk of being picked up for vagrancy if seen in public in that state. She had yet to assess the condition of the upstairs bathroom and dreaded what she might find. Halfway up the stairs her progress was interrupted by a sharp knock at the door.

A young girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, stood on the doorstep. She surveyed Edie’s dishevelled state with utter disdain but delivered her message anyway. ‘Nan says to ask if you are Rose or Edie.’

‘I’m Edie, why?’

‘Nan says if you’re one of them you’re to come round for a cup of tea.’

Edie was taken aback, ‘That’s very kind of your nan, but it’s really not necessary.’

‘Nan said you would say that, and told me to tell you to wind your neck in and do as you were told and that Beattie would have tanned your hide for being so rude.’ The girl said it as if she had rehearsed her speech thoroughly. ‘Who’s Beattie?’ she added as an afterthought.

Edie smiled, ‘Beattie was my nan, and she was twice as terrifying as yours. Tell Lena I’ll be round in twenty minutes. And tell her I said thank you.’

The girl nodded and made to turn away, ‘So, what’s your name?’ Edie asked.

‘Georgia.’ the girl said as she flitted back down the front steps.

So, Lena Campion was still alive and more than likely the quiet observer behind the lace. Edie remembered her well, but had forgotten the neighbourliness that would make a person invite a virtual stranger to tea. Perhaps it was an artefact of the days when Coronation Square had been the kind of place where no one locked their door and there had been a lively trade in bartered cups of sugar and shillings for the meter. Edie shrugged off the reverie and returned to the task of cleaning herself up, dwelling on the past could serve no useful purpose.

The bathroom was just as bad as everywhere else and even ten minutes of scouring couldn’t bring the bath up to any acceptable shade of white, but Edie figured it was clean, if not attractive. A tepid, shallow bath was run from the worryingly ancient hot water heater that needed a match to light it and a prayer to stop it from exploding. Edie wondered that Dolly had survived at all, alone in such a house; it seemed booby trapped by antiquity and liable to be the death of someone sooner or later.

At six twenty-five she had managed some semblance of humanity again and set off to Lena’s for the promised tea.

In juxtaposition to Number 17, Lena’s house had always been a riot of family life. People drifted in and out at will and there were always children haring about. A pot of fresh tea was always on the go. It seemed quieter now and there was no sign of the girl Georgia, but Lena hadn’t changed in the thirty-five years since Edie had last been in her company. She was a little more bent, softer around the middle and her face was lined, but her personality hadn’t altered a bit. Her tilted smile of welcome was wry and gave some indication that the loud mouthed matriarch of old was still fully present.

‘Sit yourself down.’ Lena said, indicating a chair to the side of a cloth covered table. The seating was marked out by the addition of place mats showing ‘scenes of old Winfield’, scenes that Edie couldn’t remember. Winfield as a verdant residential paradise was long before her time. She did as she was told and sat, smiling her thanks at the old woman. ‘It’s very kind of you to invite me round, I wasn’t sure if anyone who knew Dolly would still be living around here.’

Lena hauled the huge teapot over the bone china mugs and poured expertly, a thin stream of golden liquid releasing its enticing perfume as it hit the china. Lena was so adept at this ritual that she could complete it without a drop being dribbled or splashed onto the white linen cloth beneath. As Edie watched she knew that she would never be able to achieve the same, everything would have been sullied if left in her hands.

‘Well, I think I might be the last, they’ve almost all gone one way or the other.’ Lena said, setting the pot down as if it weighed no more than a piece of fine blown glass. ‘So, you just back for the funeral then?’

Edie tried to smile but couldn’t. ‘That, and I’m here to clear out the house and put it up for sale,’ she said.