No One Gets Out Alive (38 page)

By the end of her first week in the farmhouse, and her first week back in England for ten months, having spent fifteen thousand pounds on the bed and its accessories was bothering her less than
it had at the beginning of the week.

Do people actually live like this?

Six days in residence, six whole days and nights without going any further than the garden and the fragrant interior still surprised her each morning. Right from the moment she rose from the
bed, an array of scents wafting through the expanse of open space and misting over every pristine surface seemed to rush forth like eager servants to welcome her into the new day: recent paintwork,
fresh plaster and the astringent traces of cut timber mingled with the pollen of new fabric released by the waffle-cream curtains and thick rugs.

Can this be mine?

If she chose to sit for a while in the living room or the dining room to admire her new home, the Aspen leather furniture that moulded her body released little welcoming puffs of exclusivity.
And moving through the building put her within reach of an ostentatious tang of polish that dispersed from the hand-scraped, tobacco oak floors in the hall and ground floor rooms.

She never opened the windows of the new house, all recently triple-glazed and fitted with the best Saxon locks. She kept them closed and locked and told herself that she would not countenance
the idea of airing the house because these aromas should be preserved. She also knew this was not the sole reason for keeping every point of access secure.

Amidst the scents of the discreetly luxurious she continued to observe the same ritual: wake naturally, make coffee in the kitchen, and then leisurely tour the freshly renovated farmhouse,
finishing in the study. From the study she would walk to the new bathroom. Shed her briefs and t-shirt and step into the granite-tiled wet room. To shower for so long her whole body steamed until
it was time to be swallowed by a white towelling robe.

After nearly a week, the various floors within the farmhouse began to issue a reassuring sense of permanence beneath her tanned feet; a stability combined with the novelty of being in a new
place, particularly comforting when she feared she had become addicted to transience.

On this, her sixth morning in residence, with a mug of hot coffee in one hand, she moved again, carefully and patiently like a discharged patient returning home after a long illness, drifting
through the four bedrooms on the first floor. Virgin carpets, as thick as bear fur, engulfed her feet to the ankle bone.

The floors of the house were too precious for shoes. There would be a rule about shoes. She wanted nothing from
out there
getting inside. Not that she was planning on entertaining
anytime soon. But only on this day of her occupation did she realize that the interior felt less like a show home and more like the best room in a top hotel that she had spent a week inside. Soon
it might even feel like a home.

Amber promised herself she would never take the house for granted; she would always notice and appreciate everything inside of it. She had never lived anywhere like this before, nor had she ever
expected to.

When she passed through the doorway of the room selected to be the study, air sharpened by the scent of the new leather chair stung the top of her nose. As usual, she made herself look at the
view, while toying with the idea of what came next: what she needed to revisit inside the room.

Through the broad double windows she watched the wind ruffle the lawn and move through the trees bordering the garden, gently swaying the tips of the branches. A seagull hovered and trembled
high above, as if temporarily trapped against an invisible force-field, until it followed the current of air in the opposite direction to glide away. Before the bird sank from view its large beak
opened, but Amber heard no cry.

Inside her home, the atmosphere would remain still, cool and silent in any weather. Not a single draught had prickled her skin in any part of the house.

Sealed.

Even the loudest sounds generated by the outside world seemed unable to penetrate the pristine walls, new doors, or the reglazed windows in their deep casements. Yesterday, from the kitchen
windows, with her freshly pedicured feet spread on the flagstone while she made an espresso from her new Grigia coffee machine, she’d watched a helicopter pass over the house. She had
strained her ears to catch the faintest whop-whop or buzzy grind of the rotors, but heard nothing.

Opening the doors of the house was like leaving a cinema to return to the grip of a briefly forgotten air temperature, and an immersion in the hectic energy of the street – what people
called the real world.

Looking out across the gentle contours of the maize fields beyond the foot of her property, she wiped her eyes. She felt safe.

She would stay here.

This is mine.

Home.

By the time Amber had carried all of the treasury boxes into the study and distributed the files through the brushed steel cabinets, and after she had finished attaching all of
the selected clippings, pictures and notes to the cork boards mounted on the walls, the view outside her windows had dissolved into darkness and turned the panes of reinforced glass into
mirrors.

There was no light pollution from neighbouring properties, because there were no neighbours. There were no primary road routes for three miles either and the closest lane was unlit. The nearest
town, Shaldon, could not be seen from anywhere on her property. Even if someone stood in the lane connected to the front drive, the house would not be visible to them.

The original brick walls of the farm yard, further reinforced by an inner ring of mountain ash trees, planted years before, entirely concealed the house from the north-facing front and the
building’s two sides.

The occupants of the nearest houses had been investigated by a security consultant on her behalf. There were three farming families, and sundry locals comfortably retired. A sparse population
that had failed to raise a single criminal record, and not one of them knew who she was. There would be no house warming either. She was entirely alone.

A relocation agency had found the property through a search arranged by her solicitor. The agency had met her requests for total privacy with an exactitude that startled Amber the first time she
visited the farmhouse.

Almost one year ago, when the first of her three ocean cruises ended, she’d been driven to the house from Southampton docks by a chauffeured car service to approve the agency’s find.
After five hours of deliberation and a consultation with an architect, Amber decided this was indeed the place that would become her first home: a building close to the settings of some of the
happiest periods of her life, defined by holidays with mum and dad in Goodrington and Torquay, way back when she was eleven, before her mum died, and probably the last time in her life she had been
truly happy.

Even after all that had happened during the last three years, the very idea that she could now make bespoke requests to discreet professional firms, established to serve a wealthy clientele,
still retained the novelty to swamp her with diffidence and feelings of unworthiness. Though of late she was less surprised by such things. After years of making do and never having much money, she
was quickly becoming accustomed to what money concealed and altered beyond recognition. She was even starting to feel less guilty.

Only after the work on her new home was complete and the security system operational, did Amber finally return to the house to find it transformed beyond recognition. Six days ago.

Nine months of the house’s new life had been spent under the auspices of master builders and interior designers, who partially rebuilt, and then completely renovated the building’s
interior to her taste. For the entire time that others searched for her future home, and then remade the farmhouse, she had been at sea, though Amber had not left land to forget. While sailing
around the Mediterranean, the West Indies, the Florida Keys, and the Eastern Seaboard of America, she had sought and found distance. And then she’d returned to land to resume the search.

For him.

For it.

For them.

Amber turned in her chair and faced her reflection in the window. A pale face amidst short, blue-black hair peered back at her. She’d never be blonde again.

Out there, beyond her reflection, beyond the boundary of her property, she’d found that she could happily watch the land undulate towards the coast of Torbay for hours, a book open upon
her lap and a pot of tea beside her. Three miles of fields used for maize, flanked by pasture for grazing sheep, that she surveyed in the same way she’d so recently surveyed the great tumult
of heaving oceans.

On the first day, when she walked in the garden, the nervous bleat of a ewe had carried to her from the distance. She’d seen birds in the trees and on her lawn, but no animals inside the
walls. Nothing much bigger than a fox could get inside the grounds without her knowing.

The security system had been installed by a firm endorsed by members of the royal family and a myriad celebrity clients. Any form the size and weight of a small child upwards would activate the
halogen security lights and a series of motion sensors connected to alarms that would get a local security company on the phone in seconds, and to her door in twenty minutes guaranteed, if she
wished.

The front gate of the grounds could only be opened from inside the house, or with a key fob if she was on foot, or sat inside her Lexus RX 450 on the lane outside. Every point of access could
also be locked automatically by Amber from inside the building. On security she had placed no limits on budget.

She reclined her seat before the desk in the study. Sipping at a chilled glass of spiced rum and Coke Zero, she attempted to wipe her mind clear of the emotions and thoughts and memories that
had amassed during the day, while she reopened the files and fixed key visual materials to the walls. Alcohol always helped.

When she was ready, she took a long look at the faces tacked on the wall above her desk. Faces she had refused herself more than a glance at through the day, and only to establish their
placement on the walls, as if she had merely been hanging framed watercolours to enliven the room. Now she looked right into their eyes.

‘I came back. I said I would.’

During the long investigation, the inquest and the writing of her account that had absorbed the first year after her escape, the strangers in the photographs had begun to feel like a group of
friends. A strange sense of kinship had occurred between the dead and living victims of the house. By the time she was released into the world and began work on the first of two films she
executive-produced, she knew she would never be able to leave the dead people behind; they were not to be ignored or forgotten in the way they had been for so many years.

Besides the only two people she had known – the sole male victim, Ryan Martin, who had once been a boyfriend in her other life, and the girl who had briefly been a housemate, Margaret
Tolka, whom she’d only known in passing – Amber had learned all that she could about the murdered strangers, the other victims: the fifteen.

Amber arranged fifteen tea lights in the long, horizontal pewter holder at the rear of her desk. Carefully, using one of the cook’s matches that she kept inside her
study, she lit a single candle for each of the victims, including the two who had yet to be identified because they were found without any teeth in their skulls.

Thirteen victims were matched by photographs. For each of the two unidentified women an inclusion on the wall was signified by the picture of a white and pink rose respectively. She called them
‘Top Girl Walker’ and ‘Bedfellow’.

If the first four victims of the house – Lottie Reddie, Virginia Anley, Eudora Fry and Florence Stockton – all murdered ninety years before Amber set foot inside 82 Edgehill Road,
had ever been photographed individually, their pictures had not survived or been discovered. An investigative reporter, Peter St John, had found the only photograph that included images of the
four: a formal group portrait of a spiritualist society called The Friends of Light. The picture was taken in 1919 on a Bank Holiday weekend, with the members of the society arranged before the
bandstand of Handsworth Park in Birmingham.

This was also the biggest of the photographs attached to the wall because Amber had enlarged her copy so that the relevant faces could be seen more clearly. The faces of the four victims were
neatly circled in black ink.

Virginia Anley had a face Amber would never forget, a face she had once dreamed of: the eyes open, the body hanged beneath a tree branch.

Two of the first four victims, Lottie Reddie and Virginia Anley, were found buried in the foundations of the house. Post-mortem, it was determined that their bodies had been cemented into a pair
of bespoke soil cavities, dug into the foundations, and laid side by side.

The other two victims from the early twentieth century, Eudora Fry and Florence Stockton, were entombed within fireplaces in the building. Eudora was bricked inside the original fireplace of the
second floor bedroom that Amber initially occupied; Eudora had been the first presence to speak at the address, during Amber’s first night inside the house.

The fourth woman, Florence Stockton, was the oldest of the four: a widow, who was found behind a walled-up fireplace in the first floor room that Amber had been imprisoned inside for one night,
before Fergal had introduced her to the rooms of the ground floor. And it had been Florence Stockton that Amber must have heard on the ceiling of the room, reciting scripture. Verse, she’d
since discovered, to be from chapter three of Titus in the
King James Bible
.

The rope used in the executions of all of the first four victims was once popular for hanging washing in turn-of-the-century Birmingham yards.