Thirteen Steps Down (3 page)

"You didn't put it in."

"As the actress said to the bishop."

He thought this rejoinder extremely old hat. He'd heard his stepfather

say it a good twenty years ago. "It won't start unless the key's in," he said

in a toneless voice, intended to show her he didn't think her witty. Still,

he should complain. He'd get his fifty-pound call-out fee for just coming

here.

He inserted the key, started the machine, ran it up, and to delay things

a little--why should she have it all her own way?--applied some oil

underneath the pedals. Colette switched it off herself and led him back

into the bedroom. He sometimes wondered what would happen if the

Honourable Hugo Gilbert-Bamber came back unexpectedly, but he could

always nip back into his clothes and crouch down among the machines

with screwdriver and oi1 can.

Mix intended to be famous. The only possible life anyone could wish for

these days, it seemed to him, was a celebrity's. To be stopped in the

street and asked for your autograph, to be forced to travel incognito, to

see your picture in the papers, to be in demand by journalists for

interviews, to have fans speculateabout your sex life, to be quoted in

gossip columns. To wear shades when you didn't want to be recognized,

to betransported in a limo with tinted windows. To have your own PR

person and maybe get Max Clifford to represent you.

It would be best to be famous for something you did that people liked or

because they admired you, like he did Nerissa Nash, But fame deriving

from some great crime was enviable in a way. "What would it feel like to

be the man the polices muggle out of a courthouse with a coat over his

head because if they saw him the crowd would tear him to pieces?

Assassination secured your fame forever. Only think of the killer of John

Lennon, or of President Kennedy, or Princip, who shot the Austrian

Archduke and started the First World War. But being Nerissa Nash's

escort would be better and a lot safer. Soon it would lead to celebrity

status, he would be invited on TV chat shows, asked to parties by the

Beckhams and Madonna.

Colette had been a model herself, though in a minor league, and

marriage to a stockbroker ended her career. But she and Nerissa

remained firm friends. Mix had been in the gym/dressing room, fitting a

new running belt to the treadmill, on this occasion a legitimate task.

There couldn't be any of the other because a hired cook was in the house

getting lunch for Nerissa and Colette. The two women came into the

bedroom for Colette to show her friend some new creation she had

bought for an astronomical sum in a Notting Hill boutique. Whispering

and giggling reached Mix's ears. He couldn't be sure but he thought he

heard Nerissa warn Colette to be careful about undressing because "the

man" was next door in the gym.

Mix was familiar enough with Colette's ways and tastes to know she

wouldn't care if fifty men were in the gym, all gaping at her through the

glass door, she'd like it, but he admired Nerissa's modest attitude. You

didn't come across much of that these days. Up until then he had never

seen her beyond glancing at her photograph in the tabloids. Her voice

was so pretty and her laugh so silvery that he was determined to see her.

He used a technique he always employed when needing to speak to the

lady of the house and, clearing his throat rather loudly, called out, "Are

you there, Mrs. Gilbert-Bamber?"

A giggle from Colette answered him, so he wasted no more time and

walked into the bedroom. Colette was in scarlet bra and thong but he

had seen more of her than that. In his own words, he wasn't bothered.

Besides, Colette's friend commanded all his attention. To say she was the

most beautiful woman he had ever seen was an understatement.

Immediatelyhe felt that all women, to be good to look at, should have

longblack hair, huge golden eyes, and skin the color of a cappuccino.

Apart from all this and her shape, her height, and her graceful way of

standing, instead of the hauteur he would have expected in her face, he

saw a warm sweetness, and when she smiled and said, "Hi," he was a

lost man.

After that he collected in his scrapbooks every picture of her he saw. He

even found her portrait on postcards in a tourist shop in Shepherd's

Bush. When there was a film premiere he waited, sometimes for hours,

on the pavement outside the cinema for a glimpse of her alighting from a

car. Once he was amply rewarded, having secured a position at the front

of the fans. Helped out of the car, she drew her white fur stole round the

diaphanous yellow shift she wore and seeing him—recognizing him?-bestowed on him a radiant smile.

In one of his fantasies he and she sat in a club, alone at their table,

gazing into each other's eyes. A cameraman approached them, then

another. Nerissa smiled at the photographers, then at him. She

whispered, "Kiss me," and he did. It was the most wonderful clinch he

had ever had, made even better by the flashes round them and the

encouragement of the cameramen. Their kiss was in all the papers next

day and the headline she imagined thrilled him. "Nerissa and Her New

Man" and"Nerissa Seals New Love with a Kiss." They'd call him

"Michael Cellini, the distinguished criminologist."

Meanwhile he never saw her in the flesh, that golden flesh so delicately

laid on long bones, though he had several times waited outside her

house on Campden Hill Square, waiting for a glimpse of her at a window.

Colette had told him where she lived, though she had done so

reluctantly, and he had asked her if Nerissa had any exercise equipment

in her home.

"She goes to the gym."

"Which gym?" he asked, gently biting her neck the way she liked.

"The nearest, I suppose. What do you want to know for?"

“Just curioius,” he said.

He must follow her, he knew that, though it savored of stalking, which

he didn't want to think of in connection with Nerissa. Just once he'd

follow her and when he found the gym he'd join. He wasn't as fit as he

should be in his job, and why not her gym as well as another?

He had been with Fiterama for nine years, the first eight and a bit at

their Birmingham branch. When he came to London and started looking

for a place to live, he rented for a while a room in Tufuell Park. Hilldrop

Crescent, just round the corner, was another location that fascinated

him. They hadn't changed its name, though Dr. Crippen, who killed his

wife and put bits of her under the floor, had lived there. He'd never read

anything about Crippen; his crime was so long ago, before the First

World War and practically ancient history. Then he saw a television

program about catching criminals by wireless and from that he learned

that Crippen was the first to be caught by this means. He learned too

where he had lived. Something which might be distasteful to another

man, or simply of no interest, excited Mix and he went out to take a look.

The disappointment he felt when he found the house gone and newer

buildings on the site was a precursor of his much deeper bitterness at

the destruction of Rillington Place.

It was seeing the film that started him off. He was still living at home

then and he watched it on his mother's old black-and-white television.

Never much for reading, he had found the book of the film, as he thought

of it, on a stall outside a junkshop. It came as a surprise when he looked

at the photographs and saw that John Reginald Halliday Christie looked,

not like Attenborough, but far more like himself. Of course he was a lot

younger and he didn't wear glasses. He forced himself to look in the

mirror long enough to be sure of the resemblance. In a funny way it

seemed to bring him and the mass murderer closer together, and it was

from that trifle that he began referring to him in his mind as Reggie

rather than Christie. After all, what had he done that was so terrible? Rid

the world of a bunch of useless women, hookers and streetwalkers, most

of them.

Reggie. The name sounded nice. Sort of warm and friendly. It was no

surprise to Mix to discover in his reading that people had liked Reggie,

looked up to him and admired him, a lot of them. They had recognized in

him a man of power. That was one of the things Mix liked about him,

that he was a strongman. He would have made a good father, wouldn't

have stood any nonsense from his kids but wouldn't have knocked them

about either. That wasn't Reggie's way. Fleetingly, as happened every

day, Mix thought of Javy. To his mind, women shouldn'tbe allowed to

give their children stepfathers.

Driving home from Colette's, his thoughts returned to what old Chawcer

had told him. He was still amazed by it. She had actually been to

Reggie's house. She had met Reggie. To Mix, at his age, Reggie seemed to

have lived in a far distant time, in history really, but he realized that was

not so for old Chawcer. She must be in her eighties and, when Reggie

had lived in Rillington Place, had still been young, had been a girl. Now,

as all the books said and everyone knew who was interested, Reggie had

lured his victims to his house by posing as an abortionist. Therefore, she

must have gone to him with that in view. What else?

Because he was himself young in the twenty-first century, Mix thought

things had always been the way they were now. Old Chawcer's youth, as

far as sexual encounters went, would have been much as his was, love

affairs, one-night stands, and sex as often as one could get it. Old

Chawcer would have been careless, forgotten her pill, as they did, and

found herself up the spout. What little Mix knew about the law was

concentrated on the liability of exercise equipment manufacturers and

retailers for the safety of their products. Of acts making abortion legal he

was ignorant, only supposing that when old Chawcer was young you

couldn't just go to a hospital and get it done. It stood to reason. If that

had been possible Reggie would have been out of business.

The big question was: If she'd been there and in his hands, why was

she still alive after fifty years? Maybe he would never know but he longed

to find out.

In his flat it was almost entirely quiet. All his windows overlooked

sections of flat roof and bits of gables and the wild untended garden at

the back. The gardens down here were wildernesses except one and it

was neat with mown lawn and rosebeds. Most nights, after it got dark,

which happened late, he saw two eyes, bright as green flames, staring up

at him out of the dense foliage of the ivy that climbed unrestrainedly

overwall and trellis. Old Chawcer went to bed early, he supposed.

Because the house stood alone no sound could ever be heard from

neighbors. If you slept in the front part, you might sometimes be woken

by the shrieks and shouts and bursts of music from cars he'd heard

someone call the new cries of London. In the back where he was there

was little to disturb you. A child of his time and one who had grown up

on a noisy housing estate, he would occasionally have welcomed audible

signs of life outside. Here the silent hours passed by as if time and the

world had forgotten all about you. Except for the Westway. Like a great

gray centipede it marched across west London on its hundred concrete

legs, its ceaseless moving burden making sea sounds.

He opened the fridge door. An obsessively tidy person, he thought he

had left his Boot Camp precisely in the center of the middle shelf and two

inches in from the front. It was very unlike him to have put it on the lefthand side, pushed up against a Tesco chocolate log. Thoughtfully, he

sipped it. He must have been in a hurry to get out, that was the

explanation.

His drink half-consumed, he stood in front of Nerissa's picture and said

to it, said to her, "I love you. I worship you." He raised his glass and

drank to her. "You know I adore you."

Chapter 3

Gwendolen Chawcer's home in St. Blaise Avenue had been built in 1860

by her grandfather, her father's father. Notting Hill was countrified then,

with lots of open spaces and new buildings, and was supposed to be a

healthy place to live. The Westway was not to be thought of for another

hundred years, the first section of the London Underground, the

Metropolitan Railway from Baker Street to Hammersmith, would be built

in three years' time, but the site of the street later called Rillington Place

was open land. Gwendolen's father, the professor, was born in St. Blaise

House in the nineties of that century and she herself in the twenties of

the next one.

The neighborhood went down and down. Because it was cheap,

immigrants moved in in the fifties and lived in rundown North

Kensington and Kensal Town, in Powis Square and Golborne Road, and it

was a man from the Caribbean who found the first body in the Christie

case when taking down a wall in the flat he had moved into. Hippies and

flower people lived up there in the next two decades. Ladbroke Grove was