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
