The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (48 page)

By the time Maddox arrived, the driver of the silver Toyota was in full magnanimous third-party mode, confident the insurance companies would find in his favour. Maddox hated him on sight. Too
reasonable, too forthcoming. Like providing his address and insurance details was some kind of favour.

Maddox’s son Jack had got out of the car and stood staring at the small pile of shattered glass on the road, seemingly transfixed by it. Christine was visibly upset, despite the unctuous
affability of the Toyota driver and Maddox’s own efforts to downplay the situation.

“It’s only a couple of lights and a new wing. No one was hurt, that’s the main thing.”

Two days later, Maddox and Jack were walking past the top of the side street. The roadworks had been removed and a car was exiting into Goldhawk Road without any difficulty.

“Is that where the accident happened, Daddy?” asked the little boy.

“Yes.”

Jack stopped, his big eyes taking in the details. The fresh asphalt by the junction, the concealed exit from the sunken car park behind the estate agent’s.

“Is it still there?” the little boy asked.

“What? Is what still there?”

“The accident. Is the accident still there?”

Maddox didn’t know what to say.

They were getting ready to go out. Christine was ready and Maddox was nearly ready, a too-familiar scenario. She waited by the front door, smart, made-up, tall in new boots and
long coat, enveloped in a haze of expensive perfume.

“Are you nearly ready, Brian?”

That she added his name to the harmless query was a bad sign. It meant her patience was stretched too thin. But he’d lost his car key. He’d looked everywhere. Twice. And
couldn’t find it.

“Where did you last have it?” she shouted up the stairs.

The unhelpfulness of the question grated against his nerves.

“I don’t know. That’s the whole point.”

He started again. Bedroom (bedside drawer, dressing gown). Jacket pockets. Kitchen.

“Have you looked in your box?”

“Yes, I’ve looked in my box.”

They each had a box, like an in-tray, in the kitchen. Christine never used hers, but always knew where everything was. Maddox used his, but still managed to lose at least one important item
every day. Wallet, phone, keys. Chequebook, bank card. Everything always turned up, sooner or later, but in this case, not soon enough.

“I can’t find it. I’ve looked everywhere.”

Heavy sigh.

If the atmosphere hadn’t become tense he would jokingly accuse her of having hidden it, of trying to make him think he was losing his mind. But that wouldn’t play now. They were
beyond that.

“It’s probably at
the flat,
” she said, loading the word with her customary judgmental emphasis.

“How could it be at the flat when my car’s outside?” he snapped before realizing that
she
must have been joking.

“It’s a pity you don’t have a spare key,” she said.

“It’s a pity your car’s in the garage,” he retorted, “about to be declared uneconomical to repair. Look, Christine, it’s very late. I can’t find it and
I certainly won’t find it with you hovering, getting all wound up, so I suggest you get a cab and I’ll follow.”

“But what if you don’t find it?”

“I’ll find it. I’ll be there, just a little late, that’s all. You go. You’ll easily pick up a black cab on the Green. You’re only going to Ladbroke
Grove.”

Sweating, he listened as the front door was opened and shut – slammed. Gate clanged. Fading echo of footsteps receding. He felt the tension flow out of him and collapsed on to the nearest
chair. He loosened his tie and reached for a glass.

In their bedroom he pressed the power button on his laptop. While waiting, he stared blankly at the framed poster on the wall. A production he’d been in more than twenty
years ago.
Colossus.
Clive Barker’s play about Goya. He allowed the faces of cast members to run through his mind, particularly those who’d gone on to other things. Lennie James
– you saw him on television all the time now. A part in
Cold Feet.
A one-off drama, something he’d written himself. That prison series.
Buried.
Right. Buried in the
schedules.

Aslie Pitter, the most naturally talented actor in the cast. He’d done one or two things – a Channel Four sitcom, guest appearance in
The Bill –
then disappeared. Maddox
had last seen him working for a high-street chain. Security, demonstrating product – he couldn’t remember which.

Elinore Vickery had turned up in something at the Waterman’s. Maddox had liked her, tried to keep in touch, but there was an invisible barrier, as if she’d known him better than he
knew himself.

Missing out on a couple of good parts because of his size (five foot five in stocking feet, eight stone dead), Maddox had quit the theatre and concentrated on writing. Barker had helped with one
or two contacts and Maddox sold a couple of horror stories. Over the years he’d moved away from fiction into journalism and book-length non-fiction. The current project,
New Maps of
Hell
, hadn’t found a home. The publishers he’d offered it to hadn’t been able to reject it quickly enough. They didn’t want it on their desks. It made them
uncomfortable. That was fine by Maddox. He’d worry if it didn’t. They’d want it on their lists, though, when it was too late. He’d finish it first, then pick one editor and
let the others write their letters of resignation.

He read through the afternoon’s work, then closed the laptop. He opened his bedside drawer and there was his car key. He looked at it. Had it been there before? Of course it had. How could
it not have been? But he’d not seen it, so it might as well not have been. It had effectively disappeared. Hysterical blindness? Negative hallucination?

He pocketed the key and went downstairs. The door closed behind him and the car started first time. He sneaked past White City – the exhibition halls were gone, torn down for a future
shopping centre – and slipped on to the Westway. He didn’t think of Christine as he approached Ladbroke Grove, but of Christie, John Reginald Halliday. The former relief projectionist
at the Electric, who had murdered at least six women, had lived at 10 Rillington Place, later renamed Ruston Close before being demolished to make way for the elevated motorway on which Maddox was
now driving. The film, starring Dickie Attenborough as the killer and John Hurt as his poor dupe of an upstairs neighbour, who swung for at least one of Christie’s crimes, had been filmed in
Rillington Place itself. Maddox understood, from comments posted on ghoulish message boards on the internet, that the interiors had been shot in No.8 and the exteriors outside No. 10. But when the
police, acting on a tip-off from Timothy Evans, yanked open a manhole cover outside No. 10, Attenborough could be seen peering out through the ground-floor window of the end house in the terrace,
No. 10, where three of Christie’s victims had been walled up in the pantry, his wife Ethel being found under the floorboards in the front room. For Maddox it was the key shot in the film, the
only clear evidence that they’d gained access to the charnel house itself. The only other explanation being that they’d mocked up the entire street in the studio, which he didn’t
buy.

The case accounted for five pages in Maddox’s book. He concentrated mainly on the interweaving of fact and fiction, the merging of film and reality. Attenborough as Christie. No.8 standing
in for No. 10, if indeed it did. The internet also yielded a piece of Pathé film footage of the demolition of Ruston Close. Two men with pickaxes. A third man speaking to camera. A burning
house. Shots of the house at the end of the street with the white (replacement) door. Clearly the same house as that in the film. But there was no sound, the reporter mouthing inaudible commentary.
Maddox lured a lip-reader to the flat, a junior editor from one of the publishers that had turned down his book. She reminded him of Linzi with her green eyes and shoulder-length streaked hair.
Even in heels she didn’t reach Maddox’s height, but she had a confident, relaxed smile, She held his gaze when he spoke to her and appeared to be looking into his eyes, but must have
been watching his lips, as she relied heavily on lip-reading.

Maddox was careful to make sure she was looking in his direction before speaking to her, probably over-careful. She must have spent a lifetime compensating for situations in which people
wouldn’t have made such allowances. Working backwards from the first words she managed to lip-read and then having to catch up. So much information assumed rather than known for certain, but
Maddox could relate to that. In some areas of life he, too, knew nothing for certain. The deaf woman’s name was Karen. He assumed the proposal for his book had been rejected by someone senior
who had given Karen the unpleasant job of telling the author, but he didn’t know
that
for certain. Possibly she’d read it and rejected it herself and only agreed to provide
lip-reading services because she felt bad about it.

When she entered the flat, Maddox felt at ease. In control. He apologised for the loud, bass-heavy music coming from the downstairs flat, but she said she couldn’t hear it.

“I thought you might be able to feel it,” he said.

“It’s a new building,” she said. “Concrete floors. Otherwise . . .”

He showed her the footage. She said it wasn’t straightforward. The quality was poor and the picture kept pixellating, plus the reporter unhelpfully turned his head to the side on several
occasions.

Maddox asked her if she would come back and have another go if he was able to tidy the picture up a bit.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to get much off it for you,” she said.

“If you wouldn’t mind just trying one more time, perhaps when you’re less tired,” he said. “It’s very important to me, for my book, you know.”

Maddox pulled into one of the reserved spaces outside a block of purpose-built flats in the depressed residential trapezium bordered by Green Lanes and the roads of West Green,
Seven Sisters and St Ann’s. He listened to the ticking of the cooling engine for a few moments as he watched the darkened windows of the second-floor flat. The top flat.

The street door had been left open by one of his neighbours. He walked up.

Inside the flat, he left the light switched off, poured himself a drink and sat in the single armchair. He pulled out his phone and sent a short text message. Orange street-lighting cast a
deathly glow over the cheap bookshelves stacked with pulp novels, true crime, horror anthologies and dystopian science fiction. His phone chimed. He opened it, read the return message and replied
to it. When he’d lived here, the room had been dominated by a double bed. Moving into Christine’s house had allowed him to turn the tiny flat into the dedicated office he’d always
wanted by burning the bed on the waste ground out the back. He’d considered giving it away, since selling it had struck him as tiresome: placing an ad, answering calls, opening the door to
strangers. Easier to burn the damn thing and all the memories associated with it. So then he’d moved his desk from the east end of the room, under the Velux window, to the west-facing windows
overlooking the street.

Another text arrived. He read it and closed the phone without replying.

As usual, loud music was playing in the downstairs flat.

He drained his glass and let his head fall back against the soft cushion. The Artex ceiling had attracted cobwebs and grime, but he doubted he would ever feel the need to repaint or clean it.
Very few people ever came here. Linzi had spent a lot of time in the flat, of course. He laughed bitterly, then chewed his lip and stared at the ceiling, sensitive to the slightest noise in spite
of the thump of the bass from the downstairs flat. Christine had hardly stepped over the threshold. She’d been once or twice soon after they’d met, but not since. There was no reason
to. It was clear from the odd comment that she resented his keeping the flat, since it was a drain on resources, but as he’d argued, there was no room in the house for all these books and
tapes. Not to mention the stuff stored in the loft. He chewed his lip again.

He switched on the stereo and the ordered chaos of Paul Schütze’s
New Maps of Hell
clattered into battle with the beat from below. Schütze’s 1992 release was the
constant soundtrack to any work he did on the book in the flat. (On the rare occasions that he worked on it at the house, he played the follow-up,
New Maps of Hell II: The Rapture of
Metals.)
He believed it helped.
It started out as an aid to getting the mindset right
, he sometimes imagined telling Kirsty Wark or Verity Sharp in a television interview,
and soon
became a habit, a routine. I simply couldn’t work on the book without having the music playing in the background. It was about the creation of a hermetically sealed world. Which, I suppose
you have to admit, Hell is. Although one that’s expanding at an alarming rate, erupting in little pockets. North Kensington, Muswell Hill. London is going to Hell, Kirsty.

He opened a file and did some work, tidied up some troublesome text. He saved it and opened another file, “Dollis Hill”. Notes, a few stabs at an address, gaps, big gaps. He was
going to have to go back.

He replayed the mental rushes. Autumn 1986. A fine day. Gusty, but dry, bright. Walking in an unfamiliar district of London. A long road, tree-lined. High up. View down over the city between
detached houses and semis. Victorian, Edwardian.

The entry-phone buzzed, bringing him back to the present with a start. He closed the file. He got to his feet, crossed to the hall and picked up the phone.

“The door’s open. Come up,” he said, before realising she couldn’t hear him.

He remained standing in the hall, listening to footsteps climbing the interior staircase. When the footsteps stopped outside his door there was a pause before the knock came. He imagined her
composing herself, perhaps straightening her clothes, removing a hair from her collar. Or looking at her watch and thinking of bolting. He opened the door as she knocked, which startled her.