No One Gets Out Alive (49 page)

‘So what’s that?’ Amber asked, while peering at the official-looking form, loaded onto the laptop screen; the first document Peter wanted her to see.

‘This is one of three official complaints by neighbours in Edgehill Road about flies and a bad smell that they all cite rising from number eighty-two. The complaints match one of Harold
Bennet’s frequent periods of renovation.’ Peter didn’t elaborate.

‘And these,’ he said, as he opened a new folder on the screen, ‘are new scans of court records, some Crown, of the Bennets’ respective prosecutions under The Sexual
Offences Act of 1956. I’ve found others for kerb crawling, keeping a brothel, disorderly conduct at or very near the address. All new material.’

‘Supplementing what we already know.’

‘Yes, but it focuses the picture. Reveals more of the legacy. The pattern of repeat behaviour that was never perceived as being part of a bigger picture. Of something much worse. Even when
some of the victims’ last known addresses were number eighty-two, connections were never made by the authorities.’

It was nothing Amber wanted to read, and a further sign they were moving in different directions. Here Peter was again, collating even more actual and anecdotal evidence of violence and
dysfunction, anti-social behaviour, disturbing stories of sexual offences against women; more interminable and unpleasant accounts of what awful human beings Harold and Arthur Bennet had been.
Their ghastliness explained little about what dwelled inside the building before they took up residence.

‘I do have something on Knacker too. Stories and so forth, from people who ran with him for a while.’

‘Keep ’em.’ Her retort came out sharper than she’d intended.

‘Knacker McGuire’, as he’d called himself, was someone for whom Amber would have considered a programme of electric shock treatment to entirely erase him from her memory.

While carrying out his fourth sentence at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for an assault on a Russian prostitute in Bayswater in 2004, when he had been ‘on a bender’ in London, Arthur
Bennet had briefly shared a prison cell in Wormwood Scrubs Prison with the house’s next generation of pimps and killers: Fergal Donegal and Nigel Newman; the latter being the real name of the
habitual liar ‘Knacker McGuire’.

After their own releases Fergal and Knacker had travelled to Birmingham. The purpose of their trip was to divest the ageing and terminally ill misfit, Arthur Bennet, of what he had boasted was a
profitable brothel in North Birmingham; a ‘family business’ from whose complement of young girls he had taken his pick as lovers.

Amber hadn’t read the book about the Bennets,
Deadly Inheritance
, but she had read the book about Knacker and Fergal,
The Devil’s Entrepreneurs
, a fairly
sensational red and black jacketed, true crime offering aimed at the airside market of airports. The author had acquired information on the killers before Peter: morbidly predictable histories of
petty crime and violence, burglary and drug dealing; careers founded in broken homes, suspensions and expulsions from secondary schools, and time endured under the fists of violent fathers.

Interestingly to Amber, what
The Devil’s Entrepreneurs
revealed was that neither Fergal nor Knacker had any previous convictions for violence against women; those appetites only
appeared to have manifested in Edgehill Road.

More urgently than ever, Amber needed Peter to target his research solely upon the spiritualist activity at the house between 1912 and 1926, with particular emphasis on anything connected to the
name ‘Black Maggie.’ She’d been pushing him to do this for over a year. But maybe not hard enough.

She’d paid for all of his expenses and for his time researching the house’s past since the completion of their first book. If there was a second book, she had promised Peter an
endorsing preface and assured him the jacket could carry her name. The sizeable publishing advance for
No One Gets Out Alive
had gone to her and she had paid Peter a ghost writer’s
fee, as well as sharing the not inconsiderable royalties with him; the book had been translated into thirty-five languages and been involved in seven publishing auctions. Even then, Peter still
needed to work; the proceeds from each film had been Amber’s alone, and that had made her fortune. Peter had done well but he still needed to earn.

In the hotel room, Amber struggled to smother her impatience. ‘Peter, the Bennets are conquered ground. There’s not much more I can stand to read about them. Don’t you have
anything about The Friends of Light? And Clarence Putnam? We know he was their first leader. How could he have not known about the first four murders?’

Peter looked surprised and then hurt at Amber’s outburst. But unless he discovered something soon about the pre-Bennet era, she’d really have no choice but to seek a desperate
alternative
form of investigation into what had followed her to Devon.

Peter fidgeted in his own disappointment. ‘Amber, you just never know what will join dots to something else further back in time, a clue about the past. This whole case has shown a
connectivity from the start. I still feel it necessary to examine every piece of material evidence and anecdotal detail, even hearsay. You just have to understand that the further back we go, the
less there is to examine. I can’t work any faster than I am.’

‘I don’t doubt your principles or your amazing ability to uncover all of this, Peter, but I want to know about the first victims. And The Friends of Light. I know there is something
there.’

Peter gave her a look she recognized from Josh: one of pity and sadness, familiar in the eyes of anyone who recognized her determination to investigate a mystical origin to the crimes. To Peter,
the first era was ancient history; he doubted the murderer of the first four victims had a relationship with either of the Bennets beyond copycat behaviour. Harold Bennet had relaid the ground
floor of the house sometime in the early 1960s, and may have discovered the remains of two of the first victims. And if Harold Bennet had unearthed the bones of Lottie Reddie and Virginia Anley, he
had reburied them without reporting the grim find. It was also possible Harold Bennet had been inspired by what could be done within the privacy of one’s own home, using the very bricks and
mortar that his new family seat was constructed from. It was the most logical theory, which officialdom, the media and the public had mostly since accepted.

The inability to explain her need for the missing information began to stoke the fire of Amber’s panic. Unchecked, she knew how quickly such feelings turned to anger. She already felt like
breaking something in the hotel room.

Of those involved in the investigation, or on her behalf, only the director Kyle Freeman believed links existed between The Friends of Light, the Bennets and her captors,
the Devil’s
Entrepreneurs
: Knacker and Fergal. Kyle had accepted Amber’s story at face value, and so easily she had even questioned his readiness to believe her. But within a week of moving into the
farmhouse, Amber now knew it no longer mattered who believed her, or whether her ideas were suitable for Peter’s new book.

She covered her face with her hands and groaned quietly with frustration and what was swiftly becoming despair; an emotion she had prayed she would never feel again in relation to
that
place
. But here it came, as leaden as it had been three years ago.

‘Hey, come on,’ Peter said. ‘It’s not that bad. And anyway, forget the court reports. In fact, forget the Bennets. I did find something else.’

Amber’s hands were off her face. ‘What?’

Peter grinned. ‘Or rather a friend of mine did. George Ritchie. He teaches history at Birmingham University and specializes in folklore. He’s been on the case of the Black Maggie for
a year. But . . .’

‘What, what?’

‘I wouldn’t get too excited.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a tad bizarre, I’m afraid. I was in two minds whether I should even show you. Afraid it all seems a bit tenuous to me. But I put it on the memory stick. The folder is
called “Black Maggie.” Here it is.’

Peter could not stop grinning as if embarrassed by what he was telling Amber. ‘It’s pretty silly. But the first thing George sent me were song lyrics. From a call
and answer folk song used by Warwickshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire field workers up until enclosure. And it’s quite a salacious ditty. But George thinks the origins of the folk song
are pre-Roman.

‘The version of the song we have words for includes remnants of an old fertility rite from deep midwinter. Performed to usher out the cold and darkness and bless the coming crops, that
kind of thing. Apparently, a version of this rite was performed for centuries in various incarnations.

‘George’s notes are at the bottom. Here you go: “In the song, four maidens, probably low-born virgins, we can only assume, were restrained and deflowered in honour of a pagan
deity, known as
Black Maggie
in Tudor times. Though the practice probably never survived the fifteenth century, a song about the rite was still sung until the 1800s in some
counties.”

‘George can’t find any evidence of the song past the First World War. Someone wrote the lyrics down in 1908 for posterity. A priest called Mason, from out Hereford way, who bemoaned
the end of rural life, blah, blah, blah, and the industrial revolution. He tried to record all the local folk songs before they were lost forever. Mason didn’t have much luck because this is
all obscure stuff that George dug up.

‘But at least it’s local.’ Peter smiled and relaxed back into his chair to drink a second cup of coffee. ‘All the Black Maggie stuff I have for you is on there. You want
me to try and sing the song?’

Amber’s attempt at a conciliatory smile failed. She read what Peter had pulled onto the screen.

Amber scrolled onto the next page of the file.

Peter leant forward to guide her through the notes. ‘George says there are vestiges of an older idea inside this verse. Fragments of a similar theme were found on some Roman-British ruins
in Wales, that were used for storing grain around 400 AD. Wasn’t old Clarence Putnam from Wales? I seem to recall he was, but the link is so thin it’s barely there. There’s a wall
mosaic. Here it is.’

Peter highlighted some text and a black and white photograph of chipped stone fragments on a square card. ‘George thinks the connection to the folk song can be found through the images of
four maidens on the tiles of the ruined grain store. The fertility rite stuff is there too. And George says that these ideas always travel and change over time. But the interpretation of the
painting, most widely accepted by historians, is of four maidens being laid
beneath
the grass. Suggesting death. Probably sacrifice. Here you go . . .’

Peter scrolled down the screen and pointed his index finger at the brief footnotes. He read them aloud:

‘“Though the maidens on the mosaic are depicted with torcs, or neck rings, in serpent form, de vermis, possibly to represent a Goddess that we have no name for.”

‘George thinks the mosaic and the folk song developed out of an even older Northern-European-wide practice, between 100 BC and about 500 AD, in which people were tied down and throttled in
peat bogs. Started back in the bronze age, continued through the iron age. It’s in his notes. See here: “Often young women or common criminals were used, to ensure the end of winter and
a good harvest come spring.”

‘Eerily coincidental, but I don’t think we need go back that far for the Bennets, do you? Or The Friends of Light. I mean, they were devout Christians. It’ll get our book
stocked in the New Age section of Waterstones.’ Peter found this incredibly funny; Amber was nearly sick into her lap.

‘But this is all I can dredge up about your Black Maggie. You all right? You look a bit peaky.’

Three days later, Amber opened the front door of the farmhouse and turned off the alarms.

The first thing she noticed on the hall floor and connecting staircase was the dust. Small mounds the size of mice and rats exploring the clean, new spaces, as if poised to clamber further up
the polished steps to the bedrooms.

The second thing she noticed was the smell. Competing with the fragrance of the new furniture, floors and walls, was a pungent undercurrent of damp wood, sour emulsion, tangy loft spaces and
stale underfloor cavities. The stench of 82 Edgehill Road.

Such was the dross on the floor of the living room, she might have been inside a tomb; one recently opened and excavated by explorers. Only she had not just walked inside a cave in the Valley of
the Kings, or ducked inside a Saxon barrow, she had entered her own home. A place so newly renovated it should have retained its pristine condition after only being occupied by a single person for
a mere seven days. Yet the interior now looked to have been shuttered and derelict for decades.

With hands she could barely feel, Amber drew the curtains and allowed more of the sun’s illumination to fill the wide space of the living room and adjoining dining room. Bales and rolls of
sooty dust, amidst disintegrating clumps and lumps, reared up the skirting and seemed in the process of crossing the wooden floors from one side of the room to the other.