The Silent Girls (24 page)

She looked at Matt, as if he could offer some alternative to her; he shrugged. Other than the locket he had no knowledge of any jewellery.

She heaved the box to the floor. ‘Of course. But I can tell you now that I have no idea what you’re talking about, that jewellery belonged to my aunt.’

‘Perhaps we’d better discuss that at the station where we’ll need to interview you under caution.’ He proceeded to reel off what her rights were and were not.

She looked at Matt again, her face creased with concern. ‘Could you stay and deal with the woman from the theatre?’

‘Sure. Is there anything else you want me to do?’ He wasn’t sure what, maybe phone a solicitor or perhaps Rose?

She shook her head. ‘Just look after things, I’m sure I won’t be long. Is that OK?’

He nodded, and glanced at the two more senior looking officers in case they should have any objection.

‘You may stay sir, but should not remove anything from the house until my team have searched it. I take there is no objection to us searching the premises?’

Matt raised his eyebrows and turned back to Edie. She was fumbling about for her bag amongst the coats hanging from the pegs at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Not at all but I’m expecting someone to come and collect that box. Is that going to be a problem?’

‘Nothing should be removed for the time being, Mrs Byrne.’

She sighed, threw her bag over her shoulder and turned to Matt. ‘If she turns up, will you explain? I’m so sorry, I have no idea what this is about.’

He nodded and gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wait.’

To his surprise she stretched across the gap between them and reached for his hand, giving it a tight, brief squeeze. ‘Thank you.’ Her face was as pinched as the gesture had been.

After they had gone he stood in the hallway, realising that he had got the opportunity he’d been looking for, the chance to poke around the house at will. The circumstances of it weren’t what he would have chosen, but it seemed silly to complain even if he did feel for Edie. A den of murderers he’d anticipated, but jewel thieves he had not. He shook his head in a gesture of mild amusement, there was quite clearly more to the Morris family than anyone would have anticipated. The two officers who’d remained had started their search on the lounge.

Realising that he would only have a short time to explore before the police moved through the house he turned to the stairs and tried to decide where to look first. They weren’t going to like him poking around, so time was of the essence. In turning, he had knocked something off the hall table and sent it clattering onto the tiled floor. It was Edie’s phone. He stooped down to pick it up, hoping that he hadn’t damaged it. It was only then that he noticed the smear. In fairness the floor was so filthy it would have been hard to notice it at all from a distance, but up close he could see it clearly. A distinct, relatively fresh smear of blood, recently disturbed by the heavy shoe of a flat-footed policeman. As he suspected, it was still wet – a point that he proved by sticking his finger in it and testing it against his skin. Mingled with the dirt from the floor it provided little information other than the fact that to the best of his knowledge neither he, Edie or any of police officers had been bleeding.

Sophie sprang to mind, had she hurt herself in her rush to leave? Curious, he stood up and looked down the length of the hall towards the kitchen. Sure enough, there were several small spots of blood leading right up to the back door. He was surprised that he hadn’t noticed them before, but then again, he hadn’t been looking. The kid must have cut herself on something, or had a nose bleed. Given that she hadn’t even bothered to leave Edie a note, Matt could only assume that she’d been in a hurry to leave. She must have been more upset by Edie’s disapproval the night before than either of them had realised, poor kid. He felt guilty, it was his fault she’d felt like that, he was the one who had pushed her to let him into the house behind Edie’s back. He wondered where she had gone and whether she would be all right, and whether chance would let them bump into each other again so that he could tell her how sorry he was for wrecking her chances with Edie.

The thought of Edie made him walk up the stairs and into Dickie’s bedroom where he could peer out from behind the curtains and stare down at the square. Sure enough, a police car was parked outside. Out of curiosity he walked through to Dolly’s room and took a look at the back of the house, just to see how seriously they were taking this. The alleyway was clear, no police, no cars. He was about to turn away when a movement caught his eye. The gate of the house opposite, a building that looked boarded-up and abandoned, opened and through it came Sam Campion. He was carrying something bulky, holding it away from him as if it offended him in some way; it looked like a bag of some sort. For reasons that Matt couldn’t fathom Sam wandered along the alley, opened a wheelie bin and dumped the bag inside it before disappearing out of sight.

Matt’s curiosity was rudely interrupted by the officers who’d come upstairs. They were brisk and efficient about the task, their only attempts at conversation were to ask what items had recently been removed and where they had been removed to. Matt wasn’t entirely sure, and wasn’t about to admit that some of them were currently residing in his bedsit, not that he believed that anything he’d retrieved would be of interest to them – old murders, considered solved, were not what they were here for.

It took them a couple of hours to ascertain that the only thing that Dolly’s belongings were evidence of were her terminal bad taste and addiction to kitsch. Matt had to suppress a sly smile as they finished up, frustrated and empty handed. When they were gone it looked as if the house had been ram-raided by a whirlwind. All Edie’s neatly packed bags and boxes had been gone through and left in disarray. Drawers had been pulled out, emptied and hastily shoved back. Cushions had been unzipped and disembowelled and it seemed as though every fixture and fitting had been turned inside out. If they were looking for more jewellery then they’d had no luck, unless the single plastic earring found down the back of the sofa and the cheap cufflinks that had emerged from Dickie’s room had been relevant. They hadn’t, as both items now lay on the kitchen table, making the whole situation look even more irredeemably sad than it had before.

Now that he was alone, Matt was unsure of what he should do. Having followed the police around the house looking over their shoulders, he was well aware that nothing that might be pertinent to his needs had shown up. The Morris house had given up all its secrets as far as the Bastins were concerned. Should he just sit tight and wait for Edie? After everything that had happened it didn’t seem appropriate to do much else. He could deliver the wigs to the theatre, he supposed. The woman had arrived, somewhat perturbed at the police presence and had left again, mollified by Matt’s offer to drop the wigs off at a later time. She had struck him as the type who didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and despite her curiosity at what might be going on inside, had gladly agreed to still take the wigs and “anything else that might be useful”. Casting his eyes around at what was left, Matt couldn’t see much that might appeal unless the local am dram group were planning on staging series of sixties kitchen sink dramas. The whole place had the distinct flavour of Spring and Port Wine.

Deciding that he should wait for Edie, he began to tidy up after the police, repacking boxes, re-stuffing cushions and sliding drawers back into their proper positions. The black sack full of hair that they had rifled through was particularly revolting. The hair stubbornly refused to be replaced and clung to him as if he were some kind of magnet for the stuff. Even when he had rammed the bulk of it back in, strands of it remained on his sleeves and trousers. When he’d been a kid, his mother had always used a rubber glove to brush down his clothes. Remembering this he headed towards the bathroom in search of such a thing, nose wrinkled in distaste at the thought of what had attached itself to his person. Sure enough Edie had left a pair of rubber gloves in the bathroom, resting in an empty bucket by the side of the toilet. He took one, stretched it onto his large hand and began to stroke the hair off his clothes, rolling them off in matted, stringy clumps.

He hated the feel of rubber gloves on his skin and once finished, ripped the thing off and flung it into the bucket. He had to wash his hands to get rid of the sensation, the smell of the rubber was nauseating. As he rinsed and soaped his hands something struck him as odd. There were still two toothbrushes in the glass on the shelf above the sink. Sophie had been so thorough in taking everything else that she owned (which hadn’t been much) surely she would have taken her toothbrush too?

Matt had an instinctive feeling that not everything was adding up quite right. Though he didn’t know Edie or Sophie that well he’d had the impression that the two of them had been drawn together in some meaningful way, it seemed unlikely that Sophie would have cut and run just over the previous night’s upset. She was the kind that would have stormed out immediately or not at all. He thought about the drops of blood, the toothbrush and the keys. Sophie had a set of keys, but she hadn’t left them. If she was intending to come back it seemed unlikely that she would have taken
all
of her other belongings with her. Something was badly wrong with everything connected to this house and he wanted to work it out, but didn’t have a clue where to start.

Most of the mess that the police had created had been put to rights, just a few boxes of paperwork remained. They had been tipped out and their contents stuffed back inside hastily. With a lack of anything else to do but keep busy and wait for Edie, Matt began to sort through them, stacking everything back neatly and thinking all the while of the day’s events and how his own mission had been completely derailed by them. With the girl missing and Edie carted off to the police station under suspicion of handling stolen goods, the events of his childhood seemed to pale, not into insignificance, but into perspective. It felt as though the whole thing had been a distraction, a way of not living but merely existing. He couldn’t remember a time where he hadn’t lived through the filter of the past. Even his years in the forces had been tarnished by the reality that he was giving his service to a country whose laws had wrongfully convicted and executed his father. Life had been lived with the acrid taste of a bitter pill, and in that moment he profoundly regretted having allowed it to go on for so long. None of his relationships had survived the obsession, and he had nothing to show for it other than a pile of old junk that no one was interested in. A sense of utter despair washed over him and he sat back, knocking into one of the boxes that was piled on top of another and sending it flying, its contents sprawling across the floor in an untidy heap. For a moment he just looked at it, almost at the point where he could have cheerfully got hold of the rest and trashed the room, bringing it up to the level of turmoil and chaos that he was feeling. A feeling of rage was burgeoning, triggered by the sheer pointlessness of everything he had tried to achieve and the realisation that it meant absolutely nothing. Had he really spent his whole life trying to prove a point that only mattered to him? The senselessness of it caused the rage to rise and he lashed out with his foot, sending the heap of papers flying out further into the room. To add insult to injury, and to his absolute frustration, a letter had stuck to the bottom of his shoe, no doubt adhering there due to the filth and grime that clung to every surface of this fucking house. In sheer temper he tore at it, ripped it away and was about to fling it across the room in disgust when a name caught his eye. Richard Morris. It would have meant nothing but for the date next to it. The letter was dated three months previously, but Dickie had been dead for five years.

Confusion replaced temper and Matt stared at the letter, taking in the words as a new realisation dawned and the gears of his mind began to grind into place and make connections. He had never questioned Dickie’s death – it had been the one funeral he hadn’t gone to – having heard on the grapevine that the man had died of a stroke and had been cremated in a quiet family service. According to local gossip only Dolly had attended, and had told no one of her brother’s death until after the event. That was the point when the community gave up on her, feeling that she had finally lost her marbles. It was surprising how people could turn on you when you denied them in what they perceived as your hour of need. Dolly had shunned the community and they in turn had shunned her. What no one had done, including Matt who prided himself on his powers of observation, was ask any questions. According to the letter – which had been shoved in a box unread, still in its envelope until Matt’s temper had dislodged it – Dickie was alive and in a residential care home. A home which had invoiced Dolly for its fees just three months ago.

Quickly he rifled through the box, finding several more invoices, his heart was beating with anticipation. It occurred to him that Edie didn’t know and must have just piled the papers in there to look at after the house was cleared, she had mentioned passing everything to her sister, so finding out that Dickie might still be alive would change everything. Matt had no idea what the legalities might mean, or even whether the house would need to be sold at all. It seemed that every time a stone was turned in Number 17 a new set of confusing circumstances crawled out from underneath.

It was decision time. He could either break the news to Edie himself, or go and find Dickie and try to ascertain what the hell had been going on. He decided to go and find Dickie rather than waste time waiting for Edie to come back and face yet more difficult news.

Chapter Seventeen

Lena had been left sitting in the interview room for a long time. It was a featureless place, but not quite as barren and utilitarian as she’d been expecting – quite plush in fact, with comfortable chairs and a coffee table. But she wasn’t under arrest and had come to talk, so maybe it was different for others. Perhaps they were hoping that if they left her for long enough she would change her mind and save them the hassle of having to listen to her story. If they thought that then they didn’t know Lena Campion; once she had made her mind up to do something a ten ton truck couldn’t stop her. She set her face into the stony look that Sam always said made her look like the Giles granny in the paper. Lena was not a fan of newspapers and saw them as only useful for fish and chip wrappings, so she had no idea what he was on about, but assumed it was some slight against her. It seemed that life was full of slights these days. Edie throwing her over for some homeless kid had stung, but it was nice to see that Edie had a heart – Sam had no heart, not unless it served him anyway. Out of the two of them it was nice to see that one of them had grown up on the right side of the line. She wasn’t sure who to blame where Sam was concerned, herself she supposed. She’d spoiled him, let him think he was a little god, and now he acted like one. If she were honest she had to admit that sometimes it worked in her favour, she doubted that she’d have survived so long in the square if Sam hadn’t decided he was going to rule it. Accelerating the rot had seemed to suit him down to the ground, the more rough and needy the place had become, the more Sam thrived – he was like a pig in shit, rolling around and lapping it up. For all her bluff and bluster it couldn’t be right to be afraid of the man you called son. Not that she was afraid of him physically, he’d never hurt her, but she feared what he was capable of. He thought she didn’t know what he was, thought he’d pulled the wool over her eyes, but she knew him all right. If you weaned a child on secrets and lies you were bound to invite trouble.