No One Gets Out Alive (45 page)

Amber had found photographs of the installation too difficult to look at for long, but of everything that was interpreted about her, the installation was the best depiction of the place she had
survived. The sculpture sold for two million pounds.

Everybody loves a survivor.

Her experiences were only now kept alive by the success of
Nine Days in Hell
, and the genital torture films that were emerging in Eastern Europe on small budgets: a sub-genre of torture
porn that always featured a kidnapped woman in a haunted house; a young blonde woman resembling her old self, who became possessed and resorted to a torture that involved the genital mutilation of
her captors.

She had just been a minimum wage temp, who couldn’t afford to go to university, and only owned three pairs of shoes. There was nothing extraordinary about her, never had been; nor was
there anything special about most victims of killers. People were reluctant to accept she was just a girl who had rented a dusty room in a dismal house in North Birmingham. And yet she had spawned
an industry of exploitation that she had never fully understood.

She’d felt better for as long as Josh was talking, and for a few moments afterwards, but no longer. ‘I wonder if I should have come back. To this country.’

‘You had your reasons. And what was the alternative? Staying at sea for the rest of your life?’

‘Maybe, if it came to it. I felt I was . . .’

‘Getting better?’

Amber gave him the evil eye. ‘Recovering. I think I might even have been happy on a ship for the rest of my life.’

‘You had to stop and find a home eventually. And wherever we may go, or find ourselves, I believe we remain the same people. I don’t think we can change, not in any meaningful sense.
New places don’t change us. Not really. Because no one travels light. We just have to learn to take less baggage with us and to pack our cases more carefully, and then make a fist of it. But
if you ever need someone to watch your back on the
Queen Mary
, I’m up for it.’

Amber opened her hands and looked at them; they’d finally stopped trembling. ‘I came back to find them, Josh. Because it’s not finished. I didn’t come back to be found.
And that’s how I feel now, found.’

‘It’s in your head, kid.’

‘You wouldn’t understand, mate. But I can sense a connection. Always have done. I think he was there today, outside. Maybe not physically. But there all the same. I think they know .
. .’

‘Know what?’

‘Where I am, and where I was, all this time. They were just waiting.’

‘Like I said, kid, that’s the past. It’s always waiting, always. Simple things, anything at all really, can bring it up. Up inside us. It doesn’t go away. We just have to
learn to stop the past in its tracks when first we feel its reach. That’s what I was told.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Sometimes. But you have to try. Or you’re stuck back then. Stuck on a loop that goes round and round in tighter circles until you snap.’

Amber twisted her fingers, eyed the bottle of rum. ‘I’m not the same, Josh. They took something out of me. In that house. Something small, subtle, but significant, that’s hard
to pin down, because I don’t know if I can remember what it was that has gone. But I know . . . I am sure that something is gone. Gone from me. I thought . . . I want it to be over. For him .
. . For him and her to be found. Then maybe everything can rest. In me. In the others. Because I am not sure anything is at rest.’

She still had a sense of her old self, though the older she became the more distant that girl seemed to be. But she still struggled to discover any enthusiasm for anything. Only her work on the
book and film had engaged her. But her concentration was in tatters again. She was too quick to rage.

‘It’s hard to explain. It’s . . . The food on the ships, it was wonderful, but I couldn’t get excited by it. The new countries I saw. Same thing. I know things are good
but I can’t . . . unclench. My mind is like a closed hand. I can’t open myself.’ She waved her hand in the air and growled to swallow the lump that had blocked her throat.
‘Clothes, a car, all of the beautiful shit in this house, everything I ever dreamed of having, I have it now. But I can’t appreciate it. I can’t. I try. I was doing OK this week.
But I’m blocked. Again. It seems irrelevant, superficial, this . . .’ Amber looked around the room. ‘These things can’t touch me, inside. Not this part of me that is talking
to you now. That’s the same. It’s what was underneath that.’

Josh looked sad and couldn’t meet her eye. In silence he recognized what she had said, Amber could tell. He knew what she had lost. Because he too had lost things, lost important things to
the darkness.

‘But this place. In here. My first week. I was feeling . . . content, at least. Even safe. I thought it was because I knew that I had finally found a home. That I was where I was happiest
as a child. It was like I was called back here for some reason. Something important, from my childhood, made me come here. But now, after today, I don’t know . . . Maybe I only feel like
I’ve been welcomed here. That something was pleased that I came here, so I wasn’t happy at all for myself. Not really. I’ve felt relief. But maybe not my own relief.’

‘Then why don’t you go back to sea. Take another three months, or six, a year.’

‘I can’t. I can’t run any more. I want to be who I was again. Something has to be buried or burned so that I can be who I was again. I need what they call closure. That’s
what it feels like. If I hadn’t come back now, then I would have done later. Why later and not now?’

Time doesn’t matter to her.

Amber eschewed the coffee and poured herself a generous measure of rum. They sat in silence for a while and sipped their drinks.

Eventually Josh stood up and yawned.

Amber climbed off the sofa. She reached out, nervously, and touched his arm. The contact nearly made her cry. ‘Thanks, mate.’

Josh made a growling sound and gave her a quick, tight hug. ‘You’re going to be all right, kid,’ he whispered into the side of her head, then broke from the bear hug and made
his way to the stairs.

‘Shout if you need anything. Extra pillow, you know, stuff like that.’

‘I’ve stayed in good hotels, Amber. But I already prefer your place. I’ll be fine. And you make sure you shout if you hear anything, OK? If I can isolate one loose floorboard
and put your mind at rest, I won’t be annoyed if you wake me up. Agreed?’

Amber nodded, and then followed Josh up the stairs. Despite all of his reassurance and explanations and wisdom and logic, she didn’t want to be downstairs on her own.

Josh looked over his shoulder from the top of the stairs. ‘And if you hear a chainsaw, it won’t be you-know-who coming through the front door. It’ll be me snoring over in the
east wing.’

Once the light beneath Josh’s door was out, Amber pulled the door of her study closed, as quietly as she was able. For a while she sat at her desk with her face in her
hands. Number 82 was no more. The building had been erased from the earth it once contaminated. The remains of the victims had been laid to rest. So how could all of
that
come back? And
here too, where almost no one knew where she was?

They
had not been on board the ships, or in the hotels, or in the secure accommodation the police and her legal team had found for her, for the two years after she was carried from
Knacker and Fergal’s appropriated domain. But she had definitely seen a shadow outside the living room, that very afternoon, and what had cast the shadow had walked through her home: she had
heard the intruder’s footsteps. Fergal had stood in the lane outside her property, and he had wanted Amber to see him.

The dust on the stairs was not ordinary household dust, but a variety of dust she’d seen before, gathering under the beds and in the corners of rooms in another place. But a place that now
seemed intent on reforming inside her dreaming mind; what had been buried within its walls and under its floors was exhuming itself inside her nightmares. And such things might not stay within
sleep.

How?

She thought about what she could remember of the two recent dreams. An excavation of the garden to exhume human remains had been underway when she dozed that afternoon. And though the farmhouse
was very much transformed in her nightmare last night, the dead had entered her home. Each episode had been populated by the ghastly victims of Edgehill Road. The overwhelming advice from her
instincts suggested the episodes had been shown to her, in effect transmitted to her.

But how?

She had learned that hauntings in Britain were mostly regarded as having an attachment to places and past events, not to specific individuals in a variety of locations. The farmhouse had no
earthly connection to the house in North Birmingham.

So how could they have found you here?

Maybe through the deep, ephemeral and instinctive connection she had always been aware of at the back and sides of her mind. Fergal – if he was truly in Devon, in some form – then
had he carried this desolate host to her? If such horror still clung to him and orbited her, then he had to be found, and destroyed.

She would sleep with her gun beneath her pillow.

Amber took down her ‘Bennet’ files from the second steel cabinet, now more intent than ever to resume her familiarization of the case history, and the next part of the story; the
part responsible for the majority of the human remains found in the Birmingham house and garden.

As she moved the files onto her desk, she wondered again if she had restarted something by engaging with this material so intensely. And by looking hard again she might make it worse. If that
was the case then she carried a connection to the past like a taint in the blood or an anomaly in her genes. If she were a conduit for the Maggie, and the congregation of victims from Birmingham,
then reacquaintance might occur anytime, anywhere.

She reopened the Bennet files and began spreading the documents and cuttings about her desk top. Whatever tied a former occupant, or occupants, who had murdered four women around 1919, to the
Bennet family, and then connected the Bennets to Fergal Donegal, was at the very root of what occupied the house. And the answer to the question of what cast such a baleful and sinister influence
over the various households, from the very beginnings of the building’s life, would require a great leap of imagination; a leap that no one was willing to take on her behalf. So here she was,
again.

The Bennets were Peter St John’s almost exclusive obsession, but to her they were the least palatable part of the story.

With the exception of the vast store of Arthur Bennet’s pornographic paraphernalia, and what Fergal had once referred to as ‘Bennet’s pervy tat’, the Bennets had kept no
records. They were both dead. Their motivations went to the grave. Others had been assigned the unpleasant task of sifting through the grotesque relics and vulgar artefacts surviving the
Bennets’ respective careers as abusers, rapists and murderers.

Harold Bennet had died of a massive stroke in Winson Green Prison in 1985. The house had passed to his son after Arthur was released from his first stint in prison for attempted rape in a local
park. Little was known about their relationship when the men shared the house. But Amber was sure the father had not tutored the son; that had been the role of something else that cohabited with
them. An idea Peter St John, and near anyone else she had spoken to, refused to even entertain.

Arthur Bennet’s various attempts to create brothels at 82 Edgehill Road were all non-starters too, which is why he’d killed fewer women than his father; he’d always traded on
the local reputation of Bennet senior’s more successful former operations. Arthur’s most lucrative and arrest-free period ended when he killed both of his girls, Olena Kovalik and
Simona Doubrava, sometime in 2001 and 2002 respectively. His criminal entrepreneurialism was also repeatedly disturbed by the amount of time he’d spent behind bars: imprisoned four times for
attempted rape, indecent assault, common assault and theft, and cautioned for public exposure on Perry Common Playing Fields, as well as for stealing washing in Handsworth.

Numerous other fines were levied against him for nonpayment of bills and handling stolen goods, but nothing that shed any meaningful light on why he and his father emulated, in an increasingly
degenerate form, the ritualistic murders of the first four women at the same address when George V sat on the throne of England.

Harold Bennet had left nothing behind in an attic cache to incriminate himself. Nothing personal of the father had survived his son’s long infestation of the house. It was also deemed
unlikely that Bennet senior would have kept a diary; the only books found at the address were Haines Manuals for a Ford Sierra, Ford Cortina and Austin Metro, and two old editions of
The
Guinness Book of Records.

To Amber, what was most significant about Harold’s legacy was that at the time of her own residence, all of the furniture, the fixtures and fittings, had belonged to Harold Bennet and his
wife, Mary. Arthur Bennet had made no alterations or additions to the property he’d inherited. He’d either lived alone amongst his parents’ relics or shared the property with
others to whom he’d sporadically rented rooms, mostly from 1989 to 2003.

To Amber, the preservation of the parental home did not appear to be a testament to one man’s laziness and poverty, as it had seemed to the investigation; she saw the conservation of the
father’s sick realm as a deliberate enshrining of the past, and a testament to
what
had been served there.

Everything else she flicked through about the Bennets seemed innocuous. Harold Bennet had been a plasterer, a working-class man with a history of drunkenness and violence towards his wife, Mary;
a wife beater who eventually murdered his spouse.

Mary had been Harold’s first victim, killed sometime in the mid-1960s. After throttling Mary, he’d wrapped her body in polythene and concealed her remains inside a ground floor
fireplace; the fireplace in the same room in which Amber had stumbled across Arthur Bennet’s corpse. Arthur Bennet had died mere feet and one layer of bricks away from his own mother. He may
never have known. His father had told Arthur that his mother had ‘run away with a tinker’.