Tuesday 8th September 1964
On Tuesday 8th September 1964, the State hanged John Bastin for the brutal murder of five women.
While his wife and child stood outside the prison gates waiting for the execution bell to toll, a distraught young woman took a coal shovel and beat a man to death. She brought it down again and again, slicing through cloth and flesh and hitting bone as her victim squirmed and cowered under the torrent of blows. Finally his movements ceased and all that remained was the battered pulp of his body and a glistening ooze of blood. The woman felt no sense of regret, even though she paused to feel for it. All she could locate was the heightened pulse of her adrenaline-fuelled heart and the sound of quiet sobbing from the woman beside her.
‘Oh Jesus! What have you done?’ the other woman cried. Her words were loaded with fear and whistled out through her misery like the thin strain of a battered bugle.
The woman looked at the blood-gored shovel and noticed that her heart rate had started to slow into a dull, regular thump. She glanced at the body and prodded it with the toe of her shoe, bristling at the realisation that some of his filthy blood had stained the leather. ‘The right thing, that’s what.’ She could feel nothing but relief now that the nightmare was over.
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.
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