Thirteen Steps Down (21 page)

the body in the boot of his car and disposeof it somewhere. Reggie had

never gone so far as that. His victims had all been buried inside the

house or in the garden, but Reggie hadn't got a car, few had in those

days. Of course his own experience was very different from Reggie's. The

necrophile had killed all those women in order to have sex with them as

they lay dying or were recently dead while he, Mix, had killed someone in

self-defense because she said such dreadful things to him. What he had

done was no more than manslaughter.

In Reggie's day, forensics hadn't reached anywhere like thepeak of

expertise they had achieved now. Mix knew all about it, as anyone must

who watched television. Now, with all the tests they did, they'd be able to

tell if he'd carried a girl's body in hiscar, they'd know who she was by

DNA testing. Reggie had to conceal those bodies from his wife until she

became his victim too. He was forced to bury them. Surely things would

be far safer for himself if he left Danila where she was, where no

onewould ever have reason to go. But who had been in that room today?

Probably old Chawcer, hunting for more rubbish in the drawers of that

cabinet.

Suppose it had been Reggie's ghost, fascinated by someone else's

concealment of a body? Suppose Reggie, instead of haunting him with

intent to frighten, was watching over him? He'd feel better about it when

he'd been back to Madam Shoshana and heard what she had to say.

But a ghost was equally frightening, he thought, whether it was

threatening you or protecting you. The fact that it was aghost at all made

you look at the world in a different way. Heshivered, thinking that

perhaps it wasn't too early to mix himselfa Boot Camp.

Chapter 14

Abbas Reza noticed Danila's absence only when she failed to pay her

rent. He expected his rents to be paid in cash, preferably fifty-and

twenty-pound checks, put in an envelope and pushed through the

letterbox in his door. No checks and nocredit cards. Ms. Kovic hadn't

paid her rent last Saturday and now another week had gone by. He had

already banged on her door to ask for it and got no answer, not even at

half-past midnight. She had never seemed one of those stop-outs to him,

not a night bird at all, but he had been mistaken. Now she'd been in

London a few months she was finding her feet, changing her good ways

for bad ones, as happened to them all. Such was the corruption and

creeping evil of the western world where God was mocked and morals

had flown out of the window. Sometimeshe thought with nostalgia of

Tehran, but not for long.On the whole it was better here.

The temp, who was still at Shoshana's Spa, was efficient, better-looking

than the Bosnian girl, and a good advertisement for the spa with that

queenly figure, fine posture, and face likea Nordic goddess. Pity she

wasn't staying. Shoshana had had several replies to her ad and was

interviewing applicants. Clients were coming thick and fast. That fool

who thought he ived in a haunted house had been back and she'd had to

stop herself laughing out loud at his face when she'd told him to avoid

the number thirteen if he didn't want to see the ghost again. She had

almost forgotten Danila's existence.

Kayleigh hadn't. Before she met Mix, Danila would have said Kayleigh

was the only friend she had in London, not that they had ever seen much

of each other socially.

Danila hadn't a phone in her room in Oxford Gardens, so Kayleigh had

made several attempts to call her on her mobile. It rang and rang but

always in vain. Kayleigh wasn't worried yet. If anything had happened to

Danila, like her being mugged or attacked, it would have been in the

papers. She might be ill and not answering her mobile. Still, she wouldn't

go on beingill for a fortnight, and now it was over two weeks since

Danilahad failed to answer her phone when Shoshana called

her.Kayleigh went around to the house in Oxford Gardens.

All the rooms and the two flats had entryphones. Abbas Reza was proud

of organizing things properly. Besides, hedidn't want visitors waking him

at all hours. Kayleigh rang and rang Danila's bell and when she got no

answer, pressed the keyabove, which was written rather mysteriously:

Mr. Reza, Head of the House, as if he were a top prefect in a school. A

slender, rather handsome man with a small mustache andhair so black

and glossy it might have been painted on, answered the door. He looked

in his late thirties. "What can I do for you?"

He was polite because Kayleigh was a pretty blonde of twenty-two. "I'm

looking for my friend Danila."

"Ah, yes, Ms. Kovic. Where is she? That's what I askmyself."

"I ask myself too," said Kayleigh. "She doesn't answer my calls and now

you say she's not here. Could we get into her room, d'you think?"

Mr. Reza liked that "we." He smiled reassuringly. "We try,"he said.

They knocked on her door first. Clearly, no one was inside.The landlord

inserted his key, turned it and they were in. As he did so, the thought

came to him that she might be lying in there dead. Such things

happened, in Tehran as well as London, unfortunately. What a shock for

this tender and surely uncorrupted young girl! But no, there was

nothing. Nothing but the kind of untidiness they all seemed to live in,

discarded clothes everywhere, an empty teacup with very old tea dregs in

it and, in the sink, under cold water scummed with floating grease, a

plate, a knife, and a fork. The bed had been roughly made. Beside it, on

top of a stack of magazines, was a copy of the Shoshana's Spa brochure,

glossy turquoise and silver.

"She has done a moonshine flit," said Abbas Reza, thinkingof his rent. "I

have seen it before, many many times. They leave all like this, always it

is the same."

"I didn't think she was that sort of person. I'm reallysurprised."

"Ah, you are innocent, Miss-?"

"Call me Kayleigh."

"You are innocent, Miss Kayleigh. At your young youth you have not

seen the wicked world as I have. Your purity is unsullied." Mr. Reza had

left his wife behind in Iran years before and considered himself free in

amative respects. "There is nothingto be done. We cut our losses."

"I haven't exactly got any losses," Kayleigh said as they went down

again. "Unless you count losing a friend."

"Of course. Naturally, I count." Mr. Reza was thinking that he could sell

Danila's clothes, though they wouldn't be worth much. But while in the

room he had spotted a watch that looked like gold and a new CD player.

"Come, I make you a cup of coffee."

"Oh, thanks. I will."

An hour had passed before Kayleigh emerged once more into Oxford

Gardens, quite high on the strongest and thickest coffee she had ever

tasted and a date for the following evening with the man she was already

calling Abbas. Danila had gone out of her head but she came back into it

now and she found she couldn't altogether agree with her new friend that

his tenan thad done a moonlight flit and simply vanished. She's amissing

person, Kayleigh said to herself. The words sounded very serious to her.

She's a missing person, she said again, and the police ought to know.

It was a cooler and duller morning than of late and Mix was once more

sitting in his car at the top of Campden Hill Square. He should have been

at Mrs. Plymdale's. She had called him on his mobile to tell him, but very

nicely, that the new belt he had fixed to her treadmill had come off the

previous evening. Would he come and put things to rights as soon as

possible? Mix had said he'd be with her by eleven in the morning but

instead he was outside Nerissa's house, desperate for a sight of her. It

was as if she were his fix. He had made a call in Chelseaand another in

West Kensington but a further shot of the drug was essential before he

did any more work. Seeing her th eweek before, speaking to her and she

speaking to him, hadn't improved things. It had made them worse.

Before, he had wanted to get to know her for the fame being with her

couldconfer on him. Now he was in love.

He waited and waited, reading the last chapter of Christie's Victims, but

looking up every few seconds in case she appeared.It was half-past

midday before she did, dressed in a white skirtsuit, chic and very short,

and incongruous white trainers. She was carrying a pair of white sandals

with four-inch heels. Those shoes were for putting on, he supposed,

when she got to wherevershe was going, and the trainers were for

driving. He'd follow her. Having seen her, he couldn't bear her to be out

ofhis sight. .

She passed him but he wasn't sure if she saw him or not. He followed

her car along Notting Hill Gate and down Kensington Church Street. For

once, there wasn't much traffic and he kept behind her. From

Kensington High Street she went eastwardand he did too. At a red light

she turned around and heknew she had spotted him. He waved and she

gave a small halfsmile before driving on.

Before she went to the police, Kayleigh called Directory Enquiries and

asked them for the number of a Mrs. Kovic living somewhere in Grimsby.

They found just one woman of that name. Kayleigh phoned her and

discovered she was English, a Yorkshirewoman who had married and

divorced a man from Serbia. Danila's mother had been her sister-in-law.

She gave, her a phone number and Kayleigh spoke to Danila's stepfather,

who seemed scared of being involved.

"If anything's happened to her," he said, "I don't want to know. We

didn't get on. It's nothing to do with me."

"She'd no one else," Kayleigh said. "I've been very worried."

"Yes? I don't know what you think I can do. You want to look at it from

my point of view. I've lost my wife, I've got two young boys to bring up.

Me and Danny didn't never have a good relationship, and when I saw her

at the funeral I said I'dgo my way and she'd go hers--right?"

It had begun to seem to Kayleigh that no one had cared very much

about Danila. Madam Shoshana had quickly forgotten her existence.

This indifference frightened her. It was very unlike the feelings in her

own family where her parents took a keen interest in everything their

three children did and worried themselves into small frenzies if one of

them wasn't immediately available on the phone. Kayleigh went to the

police in Ladbroke Grove and filled in a missing person form, saying

nothing about the conversation she had had with Danila's stepfather.

Lunch with her agent was Nerissa's reason for going to the restaurant in

St. James's, and the request from a glossy magazine of international

prestige to feature her on their frontcover and run a four-page article

about her, the reason for thelunch. She parked the Jaguar on a meter in

St. James's Square and changed her trainers for the stilt-heeled white

sandals. The lunch would have to be a short one or she'd get clamped. As

she locked the car that man arrived, the one who had spokent o her on

Thursday outside the old lady's house. This was the third time she had

encountered him and she knew with as lightly sick feeling that he was

following her.

He wasn't the first stalker in her life. There had been several, notably

one who persistently called at her parents' house when she was very

young and still lived at home, but her father, who was very large and

very black, a formidable threat in the caller's eyes, had finally

intimidated him. Darling Dad made a wonderful bodyguard. The other

stalker had been rather like the present one, waiting outside her house

and following her. It had been the police who had warned him off. The

funny thing was, Nerissa thought, as she walked through into

St.James's Street, that they all looked very much alike. All were of middle

height, in their early thirties, fair-haired with characterless faces and

staring eyes. This one was following her along King Street now, probably

fifty yards behind. She was a little early for her lunch and she wondered

if she could make some move to shake him off.

The shops in St. James's Street are not the sort a woman can go into

and browse about, if necessary concealing herself behind racks of clothes

or disappearing into the ladies' powderroom. There was nowhere to hide.

If she stopped to look into the hat shop window or crossed the street to

linger outside the rather grand wine merchant's, would he make this as a

reason to speak to her? The thing she mustn't do was look back. The

strap above the high heel of her sandal had slipped down and the shoe

flapped. She bent down to adjust it, felt the presenceof someone standing

close by her, unwillingly looked up--andinto the face of Darel Jones.

She couldn't have been more delighted if it had been herfather and said,

almost involuntarily, "Oh, I'm so pleased to see you!"

He seemed surprised. "Are you?"

"There's a man stalking me. Look. No, he's gone. That's your doing, I'm

sure. He saw you, thought you were a friend of mine, and--and

disappeared. How marvelous."

If he minded being taken for a friend of hers he didn't show it. "This