Thirteen Steps Down

THIRTEEN

STEPS

DOWN

By Ruth Rendell

First published in 2004

A classic Rendellian loner, Mix Cellini is superstitious about the number

13. Living in a decaying house in Notting Hill, Mix is obsessed with 10

Rillington Place, where the notorious John Christie committed a series of

foul murders. He is also infatuated with a beautiful model who lives

nearby - a woman who would not look at him twice. Mix's landlady,

Gwedolen Chawcer is equally reclusive - living her life through her library

of books. Both landlady and lodger inhabit weird worlds of their own. But

when reality intrudes into Mix's life, a long pent-up violence explodes.

Chapter 1

Mix was standing where the street should have been. Or where he

thought it should have been. By this time shock and disbelief were past.

Bitter disappointment, then rage, filled his body and climbed into his

throat, half choking him. How dared they? How could they, whoever they

were, destroy what should have been a national monument? The house

itself should have been a museum, one of those blue plaques high up on

its wall, the garden, lovingly preserved just as it was, part of a tour

visiting parties could have made. If the had wanted a curator they need

have looked no further than him.

Everything was new, carefully and soullessly designed. "Soulless"-that

was the word and he was proud of himself for thinking it up. The place

was pretty, he thought in disgust, typical yuppie-land building. The

petunias in the flowerbeds particularly enraged him. Of course he knew

that some time backbefore he was born they had changed the name from

Rillington Place to Ruston Close but now there wasn't even a Ruston

Close anymore. He had brought an old map with him but it was useless,

harder to find the old streets than searching for the child's features in

the fifty-year-old face. Fifty years was right. It would be half a century

since Reggie was caught and hanged. If they had to rename the streets,

surely they could have putup a sign somewhere that said, Formerly

Rillington Place. Or something to tell visitors they were in Reggie country.

Hundreds must come here, some of them expectant and deeply

disappointed, others knowing nothing of the place's history, all of them

encountering this smart little enclave of red brick and raised flowerbeds,

geraniums and busy lizzies spilling out of window boxes, and trees

chosen for their golden and creamy white foliage.

It was midsummer and a fine day, the sky a cloudless blue. The little

grass plots were a bright and lush green, a pink climbing plant draping a

rosy cloak over walls cunningly constructed on varying levels. Mix turned

away, the choking anger making his heart beat faster and more loudly,

thud, thud, thud. If he had known everything had been eradicated, he

would never have considered the flat in St. Blaise House. He had come to

this corner of Notting Hill solely because it had been Reggie's district. Of

course he had known the house itself was gone and its neighbors too but

still he had been confident the place would be easily recognizable, a

street shunned by the faint-hearted, frequented by intelligent

enthusiasts like himself. But the feeble, the squeamish, the politically

correct had had their way and torn it all down. They would have been

laughing at the likes of him, he thought, and triumphant at replacing

history with a tasteless housing estate.

The visit itself he had been saving up as a treat for when he was settled

in. A treat! How often, when he was a child, had a promised treat turned

into a let down? Too often, he seemed to remember, and it didn't stop

when one was grown-up and a responsible person. Still, he wasn't

moving again, not after paying Ed and his mate to paint the place and

refit the kitchen. He turned his back on the pretty little new houses, the

trees and flowerbeds, and walked slowly up Oxford Gardens and across

Ladbroke Grove to view the house where Reggie's first victim had had a

room. At least that wasn't changed. By the look of it, no one had painted

it since the woman's death in 1943. No one seemed to know which room

it had been, there were no details in any of the books he'd read. He gazed

a the windows, speculating and making guesses, until someone looked

out at him and he thought he'd better move on.

St. Blaise Avenue was quite up-market where it crossed Oxford

Gardens, tree-lined with ornamental cherries, but the farther he walked

downhill, it too went down until it was all sixties local authority housing,

dry cleaners and motorcycle spare parts places and corner shops. All

except for the terrace on the otherside, isolated elegant Victorian, and the

big house, the only one like it in the whole neighborhood that wasn't

divided into a dozen flats, St. Blaise House. Pity they hadn't pulled that

lot down, Mix thought, and left Rillington Place alone.

No cherries here but great dusty plane trees with huge leaves and bark

peeling off their trunks. They were partly responsible for making the

place so dark. He paused to look at the house, marveling at its size, as

he always did, and wondering why on earth the old woman hadn't sold it

to a developer years ago. Three floors high, it was of once--white, now

gray stucco, with steps up to a great front door that was half hidden in

the depths of a pillared portico. Above, almost under the eaves, was a

circular window quite different from the other oblong windows, being of

stained glass, clouded by the accumulation of grime built up over the

years since it had last been cleaned.

Mix let himself in. The hallway alone, he had thought when he first saw

the place, was big enough for a normal-size flat to fit inside, big, square,

and dark like everything in there. Big dark chairs with carved backs

stood uselessly against the walls, one of them under a huge mirror in a

carved wooden frame, its glass all spotted with greenish blots like islands

on a map of the sea. Stairs went down to a basement but he had never

been in it and as far as he knew no one else had for years and years.

When he came in he always hoped she wouldn't be anywhere about and

usually she wasn't, but today he was out of luck. Dressed in her usual

garments, long droopy cardigan and skirt with a dipping hemline, she

was standing beside a huge carved table that must have weighed a ton,

holding up a colored flyer advertising a Tibetan restaurant. When she

saw him she said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Cellini," in her upper-class

drawl, putting, he thought, a lot of scorn into her voice.

When he spoke to Gwendolen Chawcer, when addressing her was

unavoidable, he did his best to shock her--so far without marked

success.

"You'll never guess where I've been."

"That is almost a certainty," she said. "So it seems pointless to attempt

it."

Sarcastic old bitch. "Rillington Place," he said, "or where it used to be. I

wanted to see where Christie buried all those women he killed in his

garden but there's not a trace of it left."

She put the flyer back on the table. No doubt, it would lie there for

months. Then she surprised him. "I went to his house once," she said,

"when I was young."

"You did? Why was that?"

He knew she wouldn't be forthcoming and she wasn't. "I had a reason

to go there. The visit lasted no more than half an hour. He was an

unpleasant man."

He couldn't control his excitement. "What sort of an impression did he

make on you? Did you feel you were in the presence of a murderer? Was

his wife there?"

She laughed her cold laugh. "Goodness, Mr. Cellini, I've no time to

answer all these questions. I have to get on."

With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She

must have read thousands of books, she was always at it. He felt

frustrated after her unsatisfactory but provocative response. She might

be a mine of information about Reggie but she was too standoffish to talk

about it.

He began to mount the stairs, hating them with a fierce hatred, though

they were not narrow or precarious or winding. There were fifty-two and

one of the things he disliked about them was that they were composed of

three flights, twenty-two in this stretch, seventeen in the next, but

thirteen in the topflight. If there was anything that upset Mix more than

unpleasant surprises and rude old women, it was the number thirteen.

St. Blaise House, fortunately, was number 54 St. Blaise Avenue.

One day when old Chawcer was out he had counted the bedrooms, not

including his own, and found there were nine. Some were furnished, if

you could call it furniture, some were not. The whole place was filthy. In

his opinion, no one had done any housework in it for years, though he

had seen her flicking about with a feather duster. All that woodwork,

carved with shields and swords and helmets, faces and flowers, leaves

and garlands and ribbons, lay under an ancient accumulation of dust.

Banister was linked to banister and cornice to picture rail by ropes of

cobwebs. She had lived here all her long life, first with her parents, then

with her dad, then alone. Apart from that he knew nothing about her. He

didn't even know how she happened to have three bedrooms on the top

floor already converted into a flat.

The stairs grew narrower after the first landing and the last flight, the

top one, was tiled, not carpeted. Mix had never seen a staircase of shiny

black tiles before but there were many things in Miss Chawcer's house

he had never seen before. No matter what kind of shoes he wore, those

tiles made a terrible noise, a thump-thumping or a clack-clacking, and

his belief was that she had tiled the stairs so that she would be able to

tell what time her tenant came in. He had already got into the habit of

removing his shoes and continuing in his socks alone. It wasn't that he

ever did anything wrong but he didn't want her knowing his business.

The stained glass window speckled the top landing with spots of colored

light. It was a picture of a girl looking into apot with some sort of plant in

it. When old Chawcer brought him up here for the first time she had

called it the Isabella window and the picture, Isabella and the Pot of

Basil, made very little sense to Mix. As far as he was concerned, basil

was something growing in a bag you bought at Tesco. The girl looked ill,

her face was the only bit of the glass that was white, and Mix resented

having to see her each time he went into or came out of his flat.

He called his home an apartment but Gwendolen Chawcer called it

"rooms." She lived in the past, in his opinion, and not thirty or forty

years ago like most old people but a hundred years. He had put in the

bathroom himself with Ed and his mate's— help and fitted the kitchen. He

paid for it, so Miss Chawcer couldn't really complain. She ought to have

been pleased; it would still be there for the next tenant when he was

famous and had moved out. The fact was that she had never been able to

see the need for a bathroom. When she was young, she told him, you had

a chamber pot in your bedroom and a basin on the washstand and the

maid brought you up a jug of hot water.

Mix had a bedroom as well and a large living room, dominated by a

huge poster photograph of Nerissa Nash, taken when a newspaper

started naming the models as well as the clothes designers. That was in

the days when they called her the poor man's Naomi Campbell. They did

so no longer. Mix stood in front of the poster, as he often did when he

first came in, like a religious contemplating a holy picture, his lips

murmuring, "I love you, I adore you," instead of prayers.

He was earning good money at Fiterama and he had spent freely on this

flat. The chrome-encased television and video and DVD player were on

the hire purchase as was most of the kitchen equipment but that, to use

one of Ed's favorite expressions, was par for the course, everyone did it.

He had paid for the white carpet and gray tweed suite with ready cash,

buying the black marble statue of the nude girl on an impulse but not for

a moment regretting his purchase. The poster of Nerissa he had had

framed in the same chrome finish as the TV: In the black ash shelving he

kept his collection of Reggie books: 10 Rillington Place, John Reginald

Halliday Christie, The Christie Legend, Murder in Rillington Place, and

Christie's Victims among many others. Richard Attenborough's film of 10

Rillington Place he had on video and DVD. It was outrageous, he

thought, that one Hollywood movie after another was remade while you

never heard a thing about a remake of that. The one he possessed he

often played and the digital version was even better, clearer and brighter.

Richard Attenborough was wonderful, he wasn't arguing about that, but

he didn't look much like Reggie. A taller actor was needed with sharper

features and burning eyes.

Mix was inclined to daydream and sometimes he speculated as to