Ann Troup - The Silent Girls

She turned to the woman she had believed was her friend and said the words exactly as she meant them. ‘You owe me for this.’

There was no such thing as a favour that didn’t have to be repaid and she had a clear price. The other woman glanced down at the dead man, and then at her own ruined body. She paid her debt four months later.

Chapter One

August 2010

At first glance Coronation Square didn’t seem to have changed much in over thirty years; it still had its postage stamp patch of green in the middle and still boasted its tall Victorian houses on all four sides. It still looked blowsy and overdone, and it still had a baleful air that marked it out as somewhere to be wary of. On closer inspection, Edie could see that things had altered – the square had faded like an old rose and its previously respectable veneer had degenerated into a flimsy, fragile facade.

As she walked past the buildings she noticed the addition of new doorbells, up to six per house, each one bearing a flimsy weather faded label that left people none the wiser as to who might live there. Old family homes had been carved up, mutating into flats and bedsits to house a cheapskate, shifting population. The street drinkers and off duty prostitutes made a desultory change from the sherry sipping matriarchs who had twitched their net curtains and traded in gossip. Edie remembered them well and shuddered at the thought.

Number 17 was just as it always had been, and as familiar to Edie as looking back at her own childhood face in photographs. The house stood out like a rotten tooth, seedy and discoloured from neglect, ancient blue paint flaked from the window frames and peeled in curling sheets from the front door. The brass knocker hung precariously from a single remaining screw, the metal pockmarked and dulled by years of inattention. Edie regarded the whole place with a reluctance that sat like a brooding gargoyle at the centre of her being. This was not a visit she would have chosen to make had she not been forced to by circumstances, and the state of the house represented everything that she felt about her extended family – neglected, old-fashioned, out of kilter and more than a little embarrassing. The Morris family would never have been singled out for the voracity of their housekeeping or their ability to embrace change. Edie doubted that the Morris family would have been singled out for much, though she might have won the prize for most inept midlife crisis, most acrimonious divorce and person never likely to amount to much (if anyone had held a competition).

Not that any of it mattered, she had arrived and there was work to do. To her surprise the old key worked perfectly and gave her easy entry into a cluttered, dingy, pungent past.

The first thing she did was open the kitchen window to dissipate the foetid air; the second was to ring her sister. ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m here.’

‘Oh God, how bad is it?’ Rose asked, her voice laden with false concern. They both knew that she couldn’t have cared less, so long as she didn’t have to deal with it.

Edie surveyed her surroundings, she had perched herself on the edge of a rickety chair and from there she could see only a fraction of the desuetude that had beset the house. Grease had trickled and congealed on the walls and mould had started to mount an onslaught in neglected corners. It looked like Aunt Dolly hadn’t deigned to lift a cloth in some time. ‘A combination of Steptoe’s front yard and 10 Rillington Place springs to mind, and that’s just based on the smell. It’s bad Rose, really bad.’

‘Oh Lord, I wasn’t sure what it would be like. Are you sure you can do this on your own?’

Edie sighed, Rose’s feigned empathy was a constant source of irritation. ‘There isn’t much choice, you can’t help and there isn’t anyone else.’ Rose was about to embark on a month long cruise with her husband – a long awaited trip that couldn’t be put aside, even for the death of a relative. ‘I can’t see this place fetching much; it will need gutting and half rebuilding looking at the state of it. Is anyone going to want to take it on?’

‘Someone will, the property prices in that area of Winfield are going through the roof. It’s up and coming, Edie, someone’s going to get an absolute bargain.’

Edie thought about the one stop shop, the street drinkers and the bedsits. ‘That someone will need to have a lot of vision then. Rose, should we feel bad that we let it go on so long, should we have done more?’ Edie hadn’t set foot in the house since 1980 when it had been untidy and in need of a clean, but not on the point of ruin. She had been a child then, and how people lived hadn’t been her primary concern. At that age she had been preoccupied by ponies that she would never own and contemplating a career as an air hostess, not worrying about how her strange relatives chose to live their lives. It had been a nice age, a time to have fantasies, a time to be unaffected by the knowledge that ponies were expensive manure producing machines and that air hostesses were just glorified waitresses. Reality always bit eventually.

‘How could we have known? She never told us how bad things were, I used to phone her once a month and she never said a word. I suppose we could have done more, but how were we to know?’ Rose was being unusually generous in her use of the word ‘we’ – Edie had never phoned or ever checked in on her elderly aunt to pass the time of day, she had been too busy having a life. Now she wasn’t, and this hasty, unwanted task felt like too little done too late. ‘Do you think there is much of any value in there?’ Rose asked.

Edie looked around again. ‘I have no idea, most of it looks like junk at the moment, and filthy junk at that. But I’ll sort through it and let you know.’ Rose wasn’t being greedy, Dolly Morris had died with debts and the money had to come from somewhere. Being executor of this particular will came with responsibilities, not benefits.

‘Will you go to the funeral?’

‘I suppose I should, I’m taking apart her life and selling it for scrap, it would seem mercenary not to.’ Edie said, wondering if Simon felt the same obligation to her now that their house was in the process of being sold and their property was being divided. She doubted it, his only obligation seemed to be to himself these days. ‘I know one thing though, we’ll have shares in Lever by the time I’m finished, I may well make a dent in the European bleach mountain tackling this mess.’

Rose laughed. Edie asked her how she was feeling. There had been some complaining about a twisted ankle that Rose worried might ruin the cruise.

‘Sore and bored. Evan is being good though, helping out, and the girls are calling in every day. I might die of the boredom though. I can’t wait until we leave.’ Of course Evan was being good, he was the kind of husband who would be. Rose’s daughters were pretty perfect too; they had stayed close to home and close to their mother. Sometimes Edie envied her sister that perfect family. She thought of her own child, made in his father’s image and doing his own thing ten thousand miles away, and of her home being sold, all her things and furniture packed up in crates and boxes which were sitting in a storage unit. Gah! She needed to get over herself, at this rate she would end up just like Dolly had, sick and lonely in a house that held the bones of the past like an ossuary for the forgotten.

‘I doubt that Rose, give it a few weeks on that cruise and you’ll be back better than before.’

‘Well I’ll try and enjoy myself, though it will be hard thinking of you tackling this great big mess. Good luck with the clear out.’ Her tone was full of sympathy, which grated on Edie like sandpaper being dragged over her skin. It was pointless saying anything. Rose was going on her trip regardless. Edie had pulled the short straw and had to live with it.