No One Gets Out Alive (46 page)

Freed of a marital incumbent, Harold had gone on to kill another six women at the address, while his young son, Arthur, who became his teenage son, lived in the same house. Did young Arthur
Bennet know of the murders? Had he ever witnessed one? No one would ever truly know, but it was widely assumed Arthur not only knew, but probably assisted during some form of apprenticeship to his
father, before embarking on his own less prolific career as a killer after his father died.

When the police identified the remains of the woman they had disinterred from the ground floor fireplace as belonging to Mary Bennet, Amber also realized that Mary had been the
presence
that repeatedly asked her for the time. And given the evidence of her recent dreams, it seemed that Mary Bennet’s yearning for the time may not have abated, despite an official burial.

Harold Bennet’s other victims were procured from various sources. He had always provided rooms for known prostitutes, a category to which the victim Angie Hay belonged, who was found under
the floor of the street-facing second floor bedroom that Amber had never seen inside.

Harold had also taken in vulnerable women as lodgers and then coerced them into prostitution, as in the case of Ginny MacPherson, who was discovered under the flooring directly beneath the bed
that Amber had slept in during her first night in the house.

Both sets of remains had been bound inside polythene.

A factory worker missing since 1967, Susan Hopwood was found with her head mummified in parcel tape beneath the ground floor bedroom, only feet away from Mary Bennet in the fireplace. Hopwood
had been on the run from domestic violence. Though it was never established whether Hopwood was buried alive, Amber had cultivated her own thoughts on that subject. Harold Bennet abducted at least
one girl too, Kelly Hughes, whose remains had been discovered beneath floorboards on the first floor, on top of which a bath tub had been mounted when Harold turned a box room into a bathroom,
presumably during the year of her death.

All of Harold’s known victims had been reported missing between the years of 1965 and 1981.

Besides those whose identities had been established, the toothless bodies of two nineteen-year-old girls were also discovered within a second floor wall cavity that had once contained an airing
cupboard; it was believed that they had been killed by Harold Bennet within days of each other. They were also assumed to have been foreign nationals – perhaps exchange students, tourists, or
even hitchhikers.

Amber had referred, in her old notebook, to a presence as ‘the woman who moves’. At the time of the discovery of these two unidentified corpses, she began to believe that the mobile
presence she had encountered may have been two separate entities: the presence that climbed into her bed, and the presence that rummaged inside her bags. Though the presence that became a chilling
bedfellow had spoken English and had not been foreign.

There was still much to learn, and Peter St John’s obsession with the father and son act also moved attention away from the victims. This seemed grossly unfair, because at 82 Edgehill Road
the killing had always been easier than the dying.

Neither Bennet had been religious. They had no connection to anything of a spiritual or an occult nature, or none Peter St John or the police had ever established. As far as the police and media
were concerned, the sins of a violent, abusive, alcoholic father were passed on to a son with learning difficulties, who developed his dad’s predatory and aggressive sexuality. But this was
an inadequate explanation of why the house’s next generation of violent pimps and killers had adopted the house’s repellent traditions. Amber had always considered the Bennets and
Fergal as mere tools, homicidal tools, susceptible vessels for something that found them useful, a presence that compelled others to kill on its behalf: ‘for company’, as Fergal Donegal
had once told Knacker in Amber’s presence. But was
company
the whole story? Perhaps death increased the power and reach of what had been served in that building. Death became
her.
If so, was Amber to become a tool or a victim? The enormity of that thought made her breath catch. ‘Jesus Christ.’

Every woman killed at the house was murdered by strangulation, suggesting a ritualistic aspect to the murders. Official conclusions at the inquest had settled for ‘copycat behaviour’
in the matter of the close connection between Harold Bennet’s modus operandi and that of whoever had killed the first four women in the 1920s, who were all strangled with a washing line.

Harold Bennet had used garden twine to strangle his victims, before burying their remains in fireplaces, wall cavities and under floorboards. Arthur Bennet had merely deposited his two victims
in the garden, in shallow graves, but had strangled each of them with the same garden twine his father had used on all of his known victims. Fergal had used the same twine as Harold and Arthur
Bennet to kill his sole female victim, Margaret Tolka. Several spools of the twine were discovered by police in the ground floor flat.

The significant links between the murder of each woman across one hundred years, the use of a ligature and the taking of a trophy, demonstrated to Amber that an entire facet of the bloody
history still remained unexplained. The killers changed; the methods and intent remained the same.

So she must have directed them: Black Maggie.

But how can she be here?

Amber left the study and went to her room. Undressed and sat in bed, propped up by goose-feather pillows, her body warmed by the finest cotton sheets and a duvet covered in
Mulberry silk. Trinkets of a lifestyle designed to entirely relocate and redesign her away from poverty, its dust and dross, the cheap sub-lets and slum lords, the criminal lowlife, the indignity,
the hopelessness of being at the bottom and having less than nothing. And yet here she was, inside her very own palace, feeling that she was still within the grip of history’s dirty hand.

The clock said two forty-five a.m. She had hardly slept the night before and the day had been full of driving and shopping and panic and strange men in her home, searching the rooms for what she
had escaped from three years before. Thinking about the Bennets had reduced her to a headachy and nervy state. She was also frightened, but her fear was tinged by the beginnings of a loose and hot
anger; a volatile and vengeful anger she could feel inside her teeth.

Amber slid her body under the covers. She was not far from a coma of exhaustion, the kind of marrow-deep fatigue that follows the turning of a tide of terror.

She chose to end her inner debate by revisiting Josh’s logic:
Fergal cannot know that you are here . . . it is virtually impossible . . . he is probably dead . . . no trace for three
years . . . he disappeared because
he
was disappeared by other criminals . . . they’re all sociopaths and they don’t trust each other . . . rats and weasels . . . you opened
the case files when you were drunk and had a relapse . . . that’s all . . . too much of a coincidence to be anything else . . . the files, the dreams . . . just dust . . . an old house . . .
that’s all . . .

She was not abandoning her new home. Not to the past. Not to
them.
Never.

Just try and get through the night.

Don’t go inside the study, not for a while. Pace yourself.

Take a few days
off.
Go to Cornwall. Look at the sea. Read some books. Eat, drink, walk. Spend time outdoors . . .

Stay away until the weekend. Peter’s coming. He’ll stay for the weekend . . . you won’t be alone . . .

Either feeling marginally more secure, or just too tired to think any more, Amber fell asleep in her brightly lit bedroom.

*

‘Not bad. But I seen better. You should have seen the place I done up in Ibeefa.’

Amber tried to answer Knacker as he cockily strutted about the black room and inspected the walls. His big pale eyes were wide with an eagerness she knew well; eyes lit up with an intent to
undermine and wound, to criticize and torment.

She was desperate to spit her anger into his bony face. But she couldn’t speak and her legs and arms were numb. There was something jammed inside her mouth that tasted of rubber. Saliva
dripped off her chin. Her head was filling with the smell of empty hot water bottles, of diving masks pulled over a dry face.

Knacker paced around her, backwards and forwards. ‘I fink I will be very happy here. Fink I’ll take this room.’ A new pair of red training shoes on his strutting feet trailed
laces and paper price tags.

The room was pitch black. The walls and floor were thick with layers of oily emulsion. Light from the four candles glimmered against the paint like moonlight on the ocean at night. A smell of
dried damp, dust, and the stale woody air that collects under floorboards interfered with Amber’s thoughts, made her forget things, and seemed to increase her helplessness like an
anaesthetizing gas.

‘We got a deal. An agreement. You fink we’d forget about that? Was you finking we is the kind of wankers that might overlook promises you made?’

She tried to scream ‘No!’ in defiance, but her mouth was blocked. All of her strength and will was exhausted by trying to remain on the floor. Her body was so insubstantial and weak,
her feet had drifted a few inches above the ground.

And there was something above her, on the ceiling, drawing her upwards with an overpowering magnetism. The urgent desire to have her up there made her struggles and her rage dissolve into
despair. She was no longer sure what produced the strongest and most paralyzing bondage: the tough green string that tied her legs together at the ankle and knee, and secured her arms to her torso,
or the burning frustration at being unable to cry for help.

This reaction pleased whatever it was that drew her up and up and steadily upwards, off the floor. Her consciousness was open and being rifled like a handbag stolen in a crowd. She sensed an
amused satisfaction, and an intimate awareness of her feelings. It wasn’t enough that she was helpless and bound; they were all inside her head too, whispering like horrible children she had
been shut inside a wardrobe with.

‘And if you is finking you is staying here, then you better start producing the readies, like. You’s got all them bills to pay off too. Council’s on my back. Gas,
’lectric, water. These fings don’t come cheap, neither. So you’s best start earning what you owe on all this, yeah?’

‘Yeah. You heard him,’ Fergal said from the doorway. ‘And you can make a start wiv our visitor. He’s quite partial to you, and you know you want it.’

The scents of Knacker’s aftershave and Fergal’s rancid clothes gave way to a smothering cloud of bad breath from behind her head. She tried to turn to see who had pressed themselves
into her buttocks and was now panting over her scalp. But the little pudgy fingers inside her hair made sure she stared straight ahead. A bristly chin scraped the nape of her neck. A small, fat
hand began to untuck the shirt from the waistband of her jeans.

‘And he wants to watch, like,’ Fergal said from the doorway, and grinned at what he carried in his dirty fingers.

Held by the wet hair on top of his head, Ryan’s face was offered up for her inspection. His forehead looked to have been painted red and only one of his eyes was visible; the other eye had
been covered by a blue bulb of flesh the size of a potato. His lower jaw jutted out at an angle and something flopped out one side of his mouth.

Amber closed her eyes to avoid the sight of the figure drooping from Fergal’s stained paw. And silently, desperately, with what little mobility she retained, she struggled within the
embrace of the stinking thing that now rubbed itself against her back. This only diverted her efforts to stay near the ground, to add substance to her growing weightlessness as she began to rise up
through the darkness with the oily, fat man clinging to her body. He was breathing quickly now, nasally, almost asthmatic with excitement. He wrapped his small legs around her waist. Holding the
hair on the top of her head, he yanked her head back to show her the thing that clung to the ceiling.

Amber refused to look at it, but whatever was up there slipped inside her mind.

I will come unto thee. For I have determined there to winter.

Now she was writhing on the linoleum floor of an old kitchen, amidst broken glass, wood and crockery. Mindless, she chanted at the swallowing darkness on a cold floor: ‘Their blood for my
blood. You think these rats can keep you? You deserve better company.’

Amber came up from the mattress and out of the bedclothes with the duvet gripped between two clenched fists. The animal sound she made from deep inside her stomach vibrated
against the bones of her face.

‘No. No. I didn’t. I never did . . .’ She spoke and panted at the same time, until the real world reformed around her. Her eyes opened upon her bedroom: cream carpets, Selva
furniture, long linen drapes, Zenza Filisky light fittings, a walk-in wardrobe lined with the shelves she had filled with designer shoes – Zanotti, Westwood, Geiger, Choo – none of
which could walk her away from this.

They
had gathered inside her head: Knacker, Fergal, Bennet; she remembered that much. They had come into her head and her house and taken it over and changed it and made her a captive
and a prostitute. Amber sobbed. And whatever had been slowly moving around the ceiling had directed them like puppets.

Amber clutched her face and rocked backwards and forwards and pushed at the lingering images of those faces that remained in her mind: spittle-flecked mouths, thin lips, broken noses, ferrety
eyes alert to opportunity, devious reptile minds concocting their next ploys, subterfuge, disingenuous offers, entrapping demands, accusations.

She breathed deeply of the air inside her room. And she was pleased to discover that her bedroom still brandished the aromas of elegance and new luxury. The stink of the black room and its
occupants had cleared. She took another deep breath to entirely rid her sinuses of the miasma from the past, powerful enough to bring her out of sleep. And her nose detected another scent, one
unique to the night but instantly familiar. A fragrance to awake and pour remembrance through her; memories thick with a sadness so great her heart broke.