Thirteen Steps Down (15 page)

below. Mix stood on the top landing, listening.

He turned left and set off along the passage. Of course there was a

possibility he would see the ghost but he was making resolute efforts not

to accept that there was a ghost. He had imagined it. The cat had opened

that door itself. To be on the safeside, he closed his hand over the cross

in his jeans pocket. Thelight he had switched on quickly went out as it

always did, but he had brought a flashlight with him. In the dark, he

opened the first door on his left and found himself inside a room that

must have been adjacent to his own living room. The gleam from the

flashlight was rather feeble but because the window in here was

uncurtained, it wasn't dark but dimly lit from stilllighted backs of houses

and by the faint moonlight.

Just the same, he would have liked more. He couldn't see a switch on

any of the walls and when he looked where the hanging cable and lampholder should have been, there hung only a strange object with two metal

strings suspended from it. If anything could have distracted him from the

matter in hand, this did. He directed the torch beam upward. It took him

a few momentsto realize that what he was looking at was a gas mantle.

He had once seen a television program about the electrification of London

replacing gas in the twenties and thirties.There were houses in Portland

Road, not far from here, still lit by gas in the sixties.

The room contained a bedstead and a tall chest of drawers with a

mirror on top. Anyone wanting to look in that mirrorwould have had to

be nearly seven feet tall to reach it, Mix calculated. A stack of

bookshelves, sagging under the weight of heavy tomes stuffed beside and

on top of each other, nearly filled one wall. He went back into the

passage and into theroom opposite where the yellow light from St. Blaise

Avenue flowed in brightly, showing him that here too the system had

never been replaced by electricity.

It made him feel as if he had strayed back in time, back beyond Reggie

and all his works, back behind modern technologyand everything that

made life easy. He shuddered. Supposehe really had gone back in time

and found it impossible to return? Suppose it was a dream, all of it was a

dream, the killing, the blood, the gas, and the darkness? But he had

been through that one before and he knew it wasn't.

The air felt close. It had been another hot day. On this whole top floor

only the windows in his own flat were everopened. The closeness was

dusty and although no fresh aircame in, flies lived up here in swarms,

crawling on the windowglass in the dark. He turned around, passed his

own front door,and set off along the right-hand passage. Electric light

was available in the first room on the ight but there was no bulb inthe

fitment, Here the gleam of street lamps outside had curtainsto penetrate.

He pulled them back, too roughly, for fragmentsof cloth and dust fell off

onto the sill. This room was partly furnished with an iron bedstead, a

deckchair with no seat, a dressing table and an upright chair with a

broken leg propped up on a jamjar. The deckchair again reminded him of

Reggie. At least one of his later victims, Kathleen Maloney, he had put in

a deckchair with a makeshift seat of woven string, in order to administer

gas to her in his kitchen.

A folded newspaper lay on the floor. This copy of the Sunwould be ages

old, Mix thought, dropped there in the fifties probably. But when he

picked it up and, in the yellow light, made out the date on it, he saw it

was only from the previousOctober. More upsetting was the date, the

thirteenth. The old bat must have been up here and left her paper

behind. Who would have thought she'd read the Sun? She'd left this one

with that date on it behind to frighten him, he thought. Thatmust be it.

The room opposite, on the other side of the wall where Nerissa's picture

hung and Danila had died, also had electricity, also lacked a lightbulb

and was just as stuffy. It was empty but for a bedstead without a

mattress. He pulled back the thin curtains. Outside, he could just make

out what he could only glimpse from his own windows, gables and annex

roofs of nextdoor, the pointed trees and squat bushes in pots the old

mankept on the roof of a carport, a great chimney with a dozen flues

spanning an expanse of tiles, the broken glass top of a derelict

conservatory. All this would make access to the nextroom along easy, he

thought. Anyone could climb up and getin. But when he tried the door, it

was locked and no key was visible as he squatted down and tried to look

through the keyhole. At least Chawcer had locked the door. She had

taken that much precaution against burglars, though a flimsy one. A

wonder the atmosphere didn't choke her.

One last room remained. It was quite empty, even to the extent of being

stripped of what it might once have contained. There was a curtain rail

but no curtains. Some sort of carpet there had been nailed, and in places

glued, to the floor but it had been torn up, leaving nail holes and stickylookingpatches. She came up here sometimes, he could tell that, but not

into the gas-lit rooms. The first one he had gone into, the room which

had surprised him because of the means by which it had been lit, that

would be Danila's resting place.

Christie had put Ruth Fuerst's body under the floorboards. Mix

remembered how, years ago, when he was in his teens, one of the water

pipes had frozen in the house where he lived with his mother in

Coventry. She said she had a bad back and couldn't do anything, it was

one of the times Javy had left her--he always came back again till the

last time--so he went up into the icy-cold bathroom and, with her telling

him how to do it, tookup three of the floorboards. He'd had to prise up

the tiles first. This would be much easier, nothing but the boards and

these very old, to lift.

The only tools he had now were those he used in the maintenance of

exercise machines. He let himself into his own flat, almost stumbling

over the body he had laid in the little hallway,and searched through the

bag that held his toolkit with fingers damp with sweat. Spanners, a

hammer, screwdrivers ... The biggest spanner would have to do and, if

necessary, he'd ruin the screwdriver by using it to prise up the boards.

He went back on to the landing and, leaving his door open, stood

listening to the house. It seemed to him that, though it was always quiet,

this silence was uncanny. Of course, at half past midnight, the old bat

had been asleep for hours, but where was the cat? It nearly always spent

its nights somewhere on the staircase. And why hadn't Reggie appeared?

Because he'd protected himself with the cross or because he'd imagined

it, he told himself sternly. But that maddening imagination was still

functioning, creating now the figure in its shiny glasses standing beside

him, watching what he did, until he shut his eyes against it. He plunged

back into the lighted flat, breathing fast. Another drink. The door closing

him inside, he poured his biggest gin of the night and, sitting on thefloor

beside the body, drank it down neat and ice-less. It filled him with fire

and when he got to his feet, set him staggering.

But after another reconaissance and another listening at the top of the

stairs, he dragged the body out. He pulled his redwrapped bundle along

the passage and into the first room onthe left. Quietly he closed the door

and switched on his flashlight. Someone had said it was never dark in

London and morelight came in--thank God for the guinea fowl man who

seemedto keep lights on until the small hours-~ show him the pins that

held the floorboards in place. "With the aid of the screwdriver and the flat

shaft of the spanner, they came up quite easily. Beneath was a space

between the joists, as far as he could see about a foot deep, though

intersected with cables and old lead pipes. How dust could get in there

was a mystery but when he brought his hands out they were furred with

thick gray powder.

The beam of light wakened the flies and they began dancing round it.

He had intended to take a last look at the body beforehe put it into the

recess he had made but now he had forgotten why and he couldn't bring

himself to unwrap that face and again see that wound. The featherl ight

body slid into the gap he had made with scarcely a sound. Its grave

might have been measured to fit it so well. Replacing the boards took

only a moment. A fly crawled across his hand and he swatted at it with

disproportionate fury. He dared not hammer the pins in, not at this hour.

He'd do it in the morning when she or anyone would expect him to be

banging a bit, putting up a picture, say.

A shivery sensation made him feel that Reggie was behind him,

watching his movements, perhaps bending close over his back, and this

time he was afraid, rigid with fear. He liked Reggie, admired him really

and felt sorry for him meeting such a dreadful fate, but he was terrified

too. You were when the persony ou admired was the dead come back. If

he turned now and saw Reggie, he would die of fright, his heart wouldn't

be strongenough to stand the terror. Mix shut his eyes and rocked back

and forth on his haunches, whimpering softly. If he had felt a hand on

his shoulder, then too he would have died of fear; if the thing had

breathed and its breathing been heard, his heart would have cracked

and split.

He grasped the cross. There was nothing there. Of course not, there

never had been. All the sounds, the single sighting, the opening door,

everything was an illusion brought about by the horror-film setting, the

nasty creepiness of this house. Just getting back into his flat relieved

him enormously. The silence now was welcome, the proper condition of

this place at this hour. And the bodily sensations he had were a sour

taste in his mouth, nausea rising and the start of a drumming in his

head. He knew how unwise it would be to drink anything more but he

did, filling the same glass that had held gin with the sweet cheap Riesling

she had brought. As it hit him, he stumbled into the bedroom where her

clothes lay as she had placed them, irritating him by arranging them

neatly over a chair.

Reggie had wrapped Ruth Fuerst's body in her own coat and buried the

rest of her clothes with her. He should have done the same. Collapsing

onto the bed, noticing through glaze deyes that it was twenty to two, he

knew he couldn't go back in there tonight, he couldn't take those boards

up again, replace them again. In the morning he would take the clothes

out of the house in a carrier bag and put them in a litter bin, or several

litterbins. No, a better idea. He'd put them in one of the bins where the

proceeds from their sale went to sufferers from cerebral palsy or some

such thing.

And now he would sleep ...

Chapter 11

Today was the anniversary of the first time he had come into the drawing

room to have tea with her. Half a century ago. She saw that she had

made a ring in red round that date on the Beautiful Britain calendar that

hung on the kitchen wall on top of last year's kitten calendar and the

tropical flowers one fromthe year before. Gwendolen had kept all the

calendars forevery year back to 1945. They piled up on the kitchen

hookand when there was room for no more, the bottom ones were all

stuffed away in drawers somewhere. Somewhere. Among books or old

clothes or on top of things or under things. The only ones whose

whereabouts she was positive about were those from 1949 and 1953.

The 1953 calendar she had found and now kept in the drawingroom for

obvious reasons. It recorded all the dates onwhich she had had tea with

Stephen Reeves. She had comeupon it by chance last year while looking

for the notice which had come from some government department telling

her abouta £200 fuel payment due to be made to pensioners. And there,

alongside it, was the Canaletto Venice calendar. Just seeing it again

made her heart flutter. Of course she had never forgotten a single one of

their times alone together but seeing it recorded--"Dr. Reeves to tea"-somehow confirmed it, made it real, as if she might otherwise have

dreamt it. Under the heading of a Wednesday in February she had

written, in a rarecomment, "Sadly, no Bertha or any successor to bring

our tea."

Sheltered and quiet as Gwendolen's life had been, perhaps as unruffled

as a life can be, it had included a very few peaks of excitement. All of

these she thought about from time to time but none with such wonder as

her visit to Christie's house. It too was more than fifty years ago now and

she had been notmuch over thirty. The maid who carried up the hot

water and perhaps even emptied the chamber pots had been with

themfor two years. She was seventeen and her name was Bertha. What

else she was called Gwendolen couldn't remember, if shehad ever known.

The professor never noticed anything about people and Mrs. Chawcer

was too wrapped up in working for the Holy Catholic Apostolics to have