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.
‘Thanks, I might need it.’ Edie ended the call with the usual niceties and turned to contemplate her task. Good sense dictated that she try and make the kitchen semi hygienic first, she would be staying a while and she would need to eat. The prospect of food poisoning wasn’t pleasant and by the look of it several new life forms were breeding in the kitchen. She daren’t dwell on the thought too long for fear of throwing up at the horrors that her imagination might conjure, let alone the ones that faced her in in the filthy kitchen.
A quick survey of the cupboards told her that Dolly hadn’t been a fan of cleaning products; a tin of petrified Vim and a dribble of disinfectant weren’t going to cut it. Neither was the rock hard, blackened cloth that was welded to the waste pipe. It was time to go to the one stop shop and stock up.
If old Mrs Vale (the terrifying matriarch that still loomed large in her memory) had still owned the shop Edie’s basket would have raised questions. The copious quantities of cleaning products and three rolls of black bags would have garnered curiosity, and in an hour the whole square would have known that Edie Byrne was clearing out the Morris house. On this occasion the gum-chewing girl behind the till didn’t show a flicker of interest, and barely looked up when Edie paid. Edie guessed that Dolly’s fate was no one’s business and nobody’s concern these days. There was something to be said for net curtain twitchers, they missed little and would never have allowed an old lady to lie for days at the bottom of the stairs with a broken hip – she had lain there so long that she had died helpless and alone. Dolly’s plight had been noticed not by her neighbours, but by a persistent meter reader determined to do his job, even if it did mean peering in through dirty windows and discovering dead old women. Every time she thought of it, Edie felt a flush of guilt – Dolly’s lonely death had been inevitable simply because no one had cared, and she was one of the few who had been obliged to.
She lugged her shopping bags back across the square, using the central garden as a short cut. There had been a time when the garden had been a pleasant place where kids could play. It seemed to be the haunt of the druggies and drunks now, if the litter of cans and needles were evidence of anything. As she approached the gate opposite number seventeen, she spied a group of people congregated outside the house and listening rapt as a man lectured them. He was pointing at the main drain in the road at the front of the house.
‘Sally Pollett had been missing for four days when the residents of number fifteen called in the water board to complain that the drain was blocked and that an awful smell was pervading the street. When the workmen arrived and pulled up the manhole cover, they discovered her remains wedged into the shaft and starting to decay. She had been strangled, her underwear forced into her throat and her hair sheared off. Her female organs had been mutilated while she was still alive. It was the last in a string of murders which rocked the borough of Winfield.’ The man announced his tale with dramatic flair, his voice wringing every drop of shock and horror that it could from the story.
The group blocked Edie’s path, she edged up to them and lingered on the fringes, catching the attention of a man with a camera. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘Murder tour, we’re visiting the sites where all of John Bastin’s victims