Ann Troup - The Silent Girls

Back inside there was little option but to carry on, but this time with a little more reverence. While she waited for Sam to return she concentrated on sorting the wheat from the chaff. By the time he came back she had rolled up the rug, piled it on top of the chaise longue and set the pieces of furniture worth money against one wall. Across the divide of dusty floorboards, under the window, lay the rest of the junk. In the middle of the room was a single box containing letters and photographs that Rose might want, on its side Edie had written KEEP ME.

Sam smiled and nodded his approval at the progress she had made. ‘Nice work Edie, I didn’t think we’d get this far.’ He wandered over to the box and peered in.

‘Not bad progress I suppose, but I’ve had enough for today. It kind of gets to you after a while – throwing away the bits of people’s lives that we find irrelevant and valueless.’ she said, feeling bizarrely emotional for a moment and hugging herself to contain it.

Sam didn’t notice, he was busy rifling through the photographs. ‘Hey look, here’s one of Mum when she was a kid.’ He moved over to where Edie stood and showed her the picture.

Five children, forever frozen in monochrome, leaned against the railings that enclosed the garden at the centre of the Square, each squinted at the camera, telling them the photograph had been taken in summer. ‘Which one is Lena?’ she asked.

Sam pointed to a skinny girl in a smocked dress and ankle socks. She was scowling at the camera. ‘That’s her, you can tell by the expression on her face. She still pulls that face when she’s pissed off with something. That one there is Sally.’ He pointed to another of the three girls in the picture. Sally had looked a little like Lena, but had more meat on her bones and a rounder, prettier face. Edie thought about the drain outside and suppressed a shudder.

‘I’m assuming that’s Dolly then, and that one is Dickie.’ She pointed to the last girl, thin and dark haired – she looked timid. Dickie just looked like a younger version of the man she remembered. ‘So who’s the other boy?’ The second boy was dark too, swarthy looking and with an intense, confident stare. He was a good looking child, whoever he was. As she peered at the picture she could see that the sun had created a halo-like aura around the boy’s head. It was quite a strange trick of the light.

‘No idea, never seen him before. I’ll ask Mum later.’ He put the photograph back in the box. ‘Right, if you’ve had enough for the day why don’t we get cleaned up and head off to the pub, you can buy me a pint for all my hard work.’

As appealing as the idea was, Edie hesitated. ‘What about Lena, won’t she mind?’

Sam chuckled and shook his head. ‘Edie Byrne, how old are you, twelve? I’ve been able to come and go as I please for a long time now, and I don’t even live there.’

Edie flushed with embarrassment, it wasn’t what she’d meant. ‘I know, but I am staying there and I don’t want her to think I’m treating it like a hotel.’

‘Don’t worry about it – besides, it’s Wednesday, she’ll be at the community centre playing bingo until six.’

Across the square, in a third floor window, a curtain twitched and someone watched as Edie and Sam left the house and made their way along the street to the pub on the corner. When they were out of sight he let the curtain go and turned to face the room. He called the place his office, but in reality it was a museum stuffed to the gills with a chaotically un-collated mess of detritus. What other people called rubbish, he deemed important artefacts of social history. Where other people saw junk, he saw evidence. One such item was now sitting on his cluttered desk forming a puddle of colour amidst the piles of buff folders and grey document boxes. He would like to think that the scarf was final proof, the one piece of evidence that he needed, but long and bitter experience told him that it wasn’t enough. Nothing ever seemed to be enough.

He looked at the fabric, at the swirling colours and the distinctive pattern and compared it to the photograph above the desk. The photograph was old, the paper yellowed and the ancient ink formed an indistinct, grainy image. Jean Lockwood had owned a scarf like this; she was wearing it in the photograph. There could be no colour match, the picture was in black and white, but the pattern was familiar, it had the same hypnotic print as the scarf on his desk. As evidence it might not be enough on its own, but it was an addition to the body of proof. Every little helped the cause.

He moved back to the window and looked across the square to Number 17. If his hunch were correct, there would be a lot more coming out of that house soon.

‘Not long now,’ he said aloud to the pictures of the dead women who lined his wall. As he turned away from them, a quietly confident smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

Chapter Three

When Edie had been younger, The Crown had been a typical spit and sawdust dive which she had glimpsed occasionally through the hatch in the ‘off sales’ cubicle. The thought made her feel old, she couldn’t think of the last time she’d been in a pub that had a separate space where people could buy their booze to drink off the premises, another tradition that seemed to have died out. That had been in the days when she and Rose could gain a few pennies for sweets by taking empty bottles back to the pub’s offie and pocketing the deposits. They called that kind of thing recycling now, back then it had just been a way of life.

Now the place had been taken over by a chain and had the generic ambience of all such places. Wednesday was pensioners’ credit crunch lunch, and curry and a pint night. Thursday was win a cirrhotic liver in the weekly quiz, and Friday was two for ten, as long as it was deep fried, microwaved and could clog your arteries at thirty paces. Edie found it frankly depressing and took no comfort from the fact that she could have free refills of her watery diet coke.

Sam seemed to catch her appraising the place. ‘Dire, isn’t it? Do you remember when old Charlie was the landlord and we used to scam him for deposits by nicking the empties from the yard and selling them back to him?’ he said it with the same impish grin he’d had as a boy.

Edie gave him a wry smile. ‘Thanks for bringing up our criminal past.’

‘We would never have got caught if it hadn’t been for you dropping all those bottles, cutting yourself and squealing like a stuck pig.’

Edie gave him a mock scowl. ‘I was five, the bottles were bigger than me and that incident scarred me for life!’ She rolled up her trouser leg and showed him the tiny white scar on her knee. ‘It didn’t hurt half as much as the pasting I got from Beattie afterwards.’ She could never think of Beattie as Nanna or Granny, those were soft terms designed for use with affection. There had been little that had been soft or affectionate about Beattie.

‘I’ll bet. She was the most terrifying woman I’ve ever encountered, and given that Lena is my mum that’s saying something.’ They both laughed, Beattie had indeed been a scourge.

Edie recalled her black crepe clad grandmother, who still loomed large in her imagination as the bringer of doom. ‘Yeah, as nannas go she was hardly the cuddly cookie baking type.’

Sam shuddered. ‘She was like terror in a black dress. No child was safe from her wrath. I always felt quite sorry for you and Rose.’

‘We didn’t have to see too much of her, only on visits, and I was only ten when she died. Rose had it worse. I always thought that Beattie disliked me because my dad ran off, like it was something I had caused.’ Frank had disappeared a few months before she had been born.