Rose rings the doorbell of number 40 Wyndham Terrace and a skinny fair-haired teenage girl in a school uniform answers the door.
‘Hello,’ says Moony, ‘I’m DS Moony and this is my colleague DC Rose Gifford. Are your mum or dad about?’
‘Are you the police?’ says the girl in a lispy voice, so it comes out as ‘polith’. She licks her lips and a row of dark braces on her teeth are revealed. They are evidently quite new judging by the way she is twitching her lips over her teeth, as though trying to make room for the new presence in her mouth.
‘We are,’ says Rose with what she hopes is a reassuring smile. ‘But there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’ Awkward teenage girls slay her. Sometimes she thinks she still is one, trapped inside the body of a thirty-year-old police officer.
‘Mum?’ calls the girl.
They can hear an irritable voice from inside. ‘I’m just seeing to Gran. Can’t it wait, Georgia?’
‘No!’ calls Georgia, rolling her eyes at Rose and Moony as if to say, ‘look what I have to deal with’. She turns and calls, ‘It’s the police.’
The harassed-looking middle-aged woman they saw before bustles to the door. She’s dressed in a stripy T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms with fluffy pink slippers, her slightly greasy hair pulled into a claw clip. A plastic, throwaway apron has been tied around her ample middle. She blinks almost identical brown eyes to her daughter’s, her face tight and unfriendly.
‘Have you found him yet?’ she says, without preamble. ‘The boy next door?’
‘Not yet,’ says Rose. ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Quinn?’
The woman nods. ‘I’ve already told your lot everything I can,’ she says. ‘I’m very sorry to hear about it but it’s nothing at all to do with my family.’
‘Okay,’ says Rose. ‘But we’d still like another little chat.’
The woman sighs and rubs her hand across her brow. ‘Fine,’ she says, ‘come in then.’ They follow her into a hallway painted in fresh light blue paint. ‘Georgia!’ she calls out. ‘Let us have the sitting room! Clear up your things then go and sit with Nanna while I do this.’
Georgia is hastily grabbing a range of nail polish and equipment laid out on a towel, having clearly been about to carry out a home manicure as they walk into a neatly organized living room. There’s a large flat-screen television on one wall and pale leather furniture organized around a low glass coffee table. She leaves the room.
‘Do you want drinks?’ says Mrs Quinn. ‘Only I really am in a rush. My mother-in-law lives with us, you see, and she needs a lot of care. I had only just finished giving her a wash.’
‘No, we’re okay thanks,’ says Moony, taking a seat. Rose does the same and the other woman hesitates and then reluctantly sits too. ‘It’s actually your mother-in-law we were hoping to speak to.’
Mrs Quinn looks from one of them and back to the other again. ‘Mary?’ she says. ‘What on earth for?’
‘Can we start with both your full names?’ says Rose, dodging the question, pen poised over her pad.
‘I’m Emma Quinn and my mother-in-law is Mary Quinn,’ she says, then hurriedly adds, ‘Look what’s this about? How can an old lady possibly have anything to do with that boy running away?’
‘Why do you assume he ran away?’ says Moony, half a second later. The other woman blinks, her cheeks reddening.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, clearly flustered as she begins to fiddle with her wedding ring. ‘He never looks very happy, that’s all. But I still don’t understand what all this has to do with Mary.’
‘Mrs Quinn,’ says Rose. ‘When we were here recently, we spoke to your husband and your mother-in-law in the street and she made a comment about the house next door. We think it might have some bearing on things if she can remember previous tenants at all. Do you think that’s possible? I know sometimes with the elderly, what happened five minutes ago is a problem but get them on events thirty years ago, they’re sharp as a pin.’
‘Well, I guess she might remember something like that,’ says Emma Quinn. ‘She lived on this street for a long time before she moved into her bungalow. Now she’s back with us.’ Her shoulders round a little at this. Exhaustion is written into the lines on her face. ‘She does seem to remember the past much better than where she is right now, if you see what I mean.’
‘If we could at least have a go, that would be great,’ says Moony. Then, to Rose’s great surprise, she adds, ‘My mother had dementia so I know how very hard this is for loved ones and carers. It’s not easy taking care of people 24/7, like this.’
Emma blinks hard and offers a small smile, as though close to tears at this small bit of connection and understanding. Rose wonders how often her husband is home to look after his mother and whether the bulk of the work falls to her and her daughter.
‘Well, you can certainly try,’ she says. ‘I’ll go and see if she is up to it. Hang on.’ She gets up and leaves the room.
They can hear a radio in the kitchen and the gentle ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece. Someone shouts something angrily in a foreign language from the street outside.
Rose looks over at Moony.
‘Sorry about your mum,’ she says quietly but Moony gives her a peculiar, raised eyebrow she can’t interpret.
There’s a shuffling sound then and she turns to see Emma helping the old lady they met before into the room. Her bird-like frame is dressed in soft sweatshirt and baggy bottoms that look as though they belong to someone much bigger.
Emma shoots them an apologetic look and murmurs, ‘We had an accident and this was all we had to hand. Mary?’ she then says in a loud voice. ‘As I said, these two police officers want to ask you something, okay?’
The older woman seems to have declined even since they saw her last and Rose has a sinking feeling that this is a waste of time. Mary sits down heavily in an upright chair and peers around with rheumy eyes of palest green, as though age has washed all the colour away.
‘Mrs Quinn?’ says Moony. ‘I’m Sheila and this is Rose.’
The old woman chomps at her own lips for a minute before replying and Rose realizes why her face seems to have collapsed in on itself. She hasn’t got any teeth in her mouth.
‘But what do you want?’ she says, imploringly, as if they have been going round the houses for hours already.
‘We’d like to ask you about the property next door.’ Moony gestures to the left. ‘You said something to my colleague about it being a “bad place” recently. Was there a reason for that?’
Mary Quinn peers at Sheila for a long time, then at Rose. ‘Well you’re a bloody rotten copper if you don’t know about them murders,’ she says.
‘Mary!’ says her daughter-in-law from the door. ‘There’s no need to be rude!’
‘It’s okay,’ says Moony with a broad grin. ‘You have a very good point! We do know about what happened in 2006. Is that what you mean?’
‘Of course I mean that,’ she says. ‘Horrible business. Three of them dead, just like that. It was a nightmare living here when it happened, what with all the newspapers and things. Plus we could have been burned to death in our beds too. There’s something wrong with that house. It always was trouble.’
‘In what way?’ says Rose, leaning forward a little.
‘Them hippies living there,’ says Mary, a sour expression on her face. ‘Dirty hippies all doing it with each other and taking drugs. I didn’t want any part of that nonsense.’
‘You said hippies?’ says Moony. ‘Do you happen to remember the year? Was it the Seventies, perhaps?’
But the old woman has fallen into a groove of memory now. She seems unaware of their presence, her milky eyes focused on a different time.
‘Stop all your filthy habits, I told them! Chucking things over the fence. Condoms and whatnot. The police didn’t do nothing either. Went round there myself, with my little Eric by the hand, and I told them they couldn’t go on all hours like they did. It’s a commune, says the one with the buck teeth. Artist, she calls herself. Artist, my arse.’
‘This is so helpful, Mrs Quinn,’ says Moony, clearly struggling to suppress an amused smile. ‘Do you remember if there was a teenage boy living there at the time?’
Mrs Quinn suddenly looks at Moony and her eyes have a fearful alertness about them. ‘Him!’ she says. ‘I remember him! He was the one who put dog mess through my door, the little shit! Should have done national service! That would have sorted that one out. He had a look about him. Something wrong with that one, I tell you.’
Rose is almost on the edge of her seat now, leaning forwards. ‘Can you remember his name, Mrs Quinn?’ she says. ‘The boy?’
Mrs Quinn seems out of breath suddenly and begins to cough. ‘My boy?’ she says when she’s stopped coughing, her eyes reddened. A look of pride suffuses her face. ‘My Eric is going to be home from school soon so I’ll need to get on now. He will be wanting his tea.’
Rose and Moony exchange desperate glances.
‘You were telling us about the teenage boy?’ says Moony. ‘And the hippies?’
Mrs Quinn the elder stares at Moony as though she has said something extraordinarily cheeky. ‘No hippies allowed in my house!’ she says. ‘I told you, I need to get my Eric’s tea on! We’re good people!’ She attempts to get up from her seat and all three of the younger women lurch forward to help but Emma waves them away.
‘I think we need to stop there,’ she says. ‘Come on then, Mary, let’s get you a cuppa and then you can start on Eric’s tea, okay?’ She makes a hopeless gesture at the other two women as she hauls the old lady to her feet. ‘That’s going to be as good as you’ll get, I’m afraid,’ she says quietly. ‘And I don’t think Eric would like you questioning her like this. He’s very protective of his mum, you see.’
‘That’s okay,’ says Moony, standing up. Rose follows suit. ‘You’ve been incredibly helpful and so has your mother-in-law. We’ll leave you to get on now because it’s obvious you’re a busy woman. I’m going to leave my card there and if Mary says anything else about the hippies, can you write it down and let us know? Even if you don’t think at first that it’s any use?’
Emma takes the card a little reluctantly and nods.
Out on the street again, Moony lights a cigarette and takes a deep drag.
‘So it was some sort of commune,’ she says. ‘It might be that there’s something online about it. There were a few so-called communes in London during that time, I remember.’
‘Okay,’ says Rose. ‘Shall we see if anyone is in next door? Once you’ve had your smoke, anyway.’
Moony takes two more puffs and throws the cigarette to the ground, where she puts it out with her foot then carefully picks it up and puts it inside the refuse bin in the front garden.
‘By the way,’ says Moony, ‘my mother is alive and well and living it up in Spain.’
Rose can’t suppress the laugh that springs up. ‘Okay,’ she says. That at least explains the look Moony gave her back there.
‘Sometimes you have to tell them what they want to hear,’ says Moony with a roguish, throaty laugh. Then: ‘Come on, let’s get ourselves into the house of horrors here.’