Thirteen Steps Down (39 page)

would be bound to spo tthat, it was the kind of thing they noticed. He

found himself trembling all over, his hands shaking and out of control.

But they came out of the room after about ten minutes andhe heard Ma

Fordyce say as they went down the stairs, "I feel sure there's something

we've missed, Queenie. It's just a feeling I have."

"So have I, dear. There's something in this house that if wecould find it

would tell us at once where she is and whatshe's up to."

"I'm not so sure of that."

The rest of what Ma Fordyce said he could no longer hear .By that time

she was down in the hallway and all that was audibleto him was the

twitter of their voices. He listened for thefront door to open and close.

Putting her coat on, Queenie said that the weather was getting hot

again. There was something unnatural about it, didn't Olive think?

"Global warming," said Olive. "I expect the earth will burn up but at

least we won't still be here to see it."

"Now isn't that being a wee bit morbid, dear?"

"Just realistic. I've been thinking about that missing sheet.

Gwen is such a peculiar woman, perhaps she never used a topsheet, just

a blanket and an eiderdown."

"Oh, no, dear. I don't mean she's not peculiar. I absolutely agree with

you there. But as to not using a top sheet, I know she did. I distinctly

remember seeing one when we used to go in to her bedroom before she

went into hospital. Very grubby it was, too."

"Then where is it?" said Olive as they closed the front door behind them

and went down the path into St. Blaise Avenue.

It was the middle of the afternoon before Mix succeeded in buying a

sufficiently large and stout plastic bag. The pain in his back which had

eased a little that morning now came back with stabbing shafts and a

very unpleasant kind of prickling like red hotneedles being dragged up

and down his vertebrae. Once the principal aim of his errand was

satisfied, he had meant to go into the Job Centre, but he was finding that

he could scarcely walk upright and the negligible weight of the plastic

bag was almost too much for him. If he went into the Job Centre like that

they'd think he'd come in to apply for incapacity benefit. At this rate,

maybe it would come to that ....

Once he was home again, a little comforted by a large BootCamp--he

had run out of gin--he braced himself to take thebody out of its sheet

wrapping and transfer it to the bag. He crawled toward it on his hands

and knees but, as he pulled himself up by holding on to the cocktail

cabinet, he knew he would be unable to move even so relatively light a

piece of furniturewithout injuring his back perhaps beyond cure, and

there was no other way of getting the body out from behind it, for thetwo

rear corners of the cabinet were close up against the walls that met at

right angles.

Panic took hold of him. Tears started in his eyes and he drummed on

the floor with his fists. After a while, doing his best to control himself, he

crawled into the kitchen and, once more hauling himself up, took four

strong ibuprofen and swallowed them down with the Boot Camp dregs.

Some hours later Olive came back to St. Blaise House, bringing her niece

Hazel Akwaa. She felt she needed the support of a sensible younger

person. The sun was setting and crimsonlight lit up the sky over

Shepherd's Bush and Acton when the two women went out into the

garden. On the other side of the wall, where the fairy light palm tree

rivaled the sunset, Mr.Singh was throwing down handfuls of corn for his

geese.

He said, "Good evening, Mesdames," with exquisitepoliteness.

"I love your tree," said Hazel. "It's gorgeous."

"You are very kind. In the absence of a gardener, my wife and I felt the

place needed a soupcon of beautifying. How is Miss Chawcer?"

"She seems to have gone away to convalesce with friends."It was the

middle of the afternoon before Mix succeeded in buying a sufficiently

large and stout plastic bag. The pain in hisback which had eased a little

that morning now came back withstabbing shafts and a very unpleasant

kind of prickling like redhotneedles being dragged up and down his

vertebrae. Oncethe principal aim of his errand was satisfied, he had

meantto go into the Job Centre, but he was finding that he could"

To the countryside, I hope? That will do her good."

Olive was looking round for Otto. "D'you know," she said,"I haven't set

eyes on that cat since the day before yesterday."

"Now you mention it," said Mr. Singh, "nor have I. Not, I must say, that

I find this a matter for regret. It is such a predator that I fear my poor

geese may meet the same fate as my guinea fowl."

Throwing a final handful of corn, he gave Olive and Hazel akind of court

bow and went off into his house. The geese cackledand gobbled.

"Have a look at that flowerbed," said Hazel. "Doesn't it look as if

someone's been digging a grave?"

"You've got too active an imagination, Hazel."

"If I have it's because when I'm round here I always think of the

murderer Christie. He only lived a stone's throwaway. I was a baby when

it happened but when we were little kids we used to go around to

Rillington Place and stare at his house."

"I remember it well," said Olive. "First they renamed it, then they pulled

it down. I don't remember that happening anywhere else a murderer

lived."

"Like what the Romans did to Carthage. They razed it t othe ground,

Tom told me, and plowed over the site. Christie buried several of those

women in his garden."

"Well, no one's buried Gwendolen. That earth's been turned like that

quite a while ago. Thistles are starting to grow on it. But I do wonder

what's become of that cat. Whatever Gwendolen says, I'm sure she's

quite fond of it and if it's missing when she gets back from wherever

she's got to, no prizes forguessing who gets the blame."

It may have been the effect of the pills or the strong spirit or both, but

after Mix had slept for a while he awoke feeling dizzy,the pain still tere

but weak like the memory of a past backache or the anticipation of one

still to come. When he first lay down and closed his eyes, it was with an

uneasy feeling that something had happened earlier that was vitally

important but thatfor some reason he hadn't recognized for what it was.

It nagged at his mind but drifted away when sleep came. Now, as

hisdizziness subsided, his mind seemed to clear. He knew what had

happened earlier and understood perfectly what it would have said to

him if he had been open to receive it.

Ma Winthrop had touched his arm, his bare arm, with one finger. It was

when she was asking him if old Chawcer had confided in him. Her finger

had touched him and it had been warm, as warm as the skin it touched.

And that should have told him, but told him only now, that old people

weren't cold to the touch, their temperature was the same as in young

ones. So if old Chawcer was ice-cold it was because she was

deadalready.

She had been dead before he entered the room, before he looked at her,

before he touched her. That was why her skin felt like ice and why she

hadn't struggled when he held the pillow over her face. Sweat broke out

across his face and the palms of his hands, yet a great chill passed

through him. He had killed a dead woman. It seemed to him an awful

thing to have done and a stupid thing. He had killed someone who was

already dead.

In a way it was like what Reggie did. No wonder the ghost had seemed

sympathetic to him. Of course he hadn't touched her like Reggie did--the

horror of that brought him out in a fresh sweat. But there had been

points of resemblance. Was h eunder Reggie's influence, then? Had the

ghost directed him?

He got up and walked across the room to where the body was. He put

his hands on the top of the cocktail cabinet andl eaned on it. Gradually it

was coming to him that if he had known, if only he had realized, he could

have simply looked ather, touched that cold skin and left her there. She

couldn't have said anything to the police. She was dead. Instead, he had

held a pillow over her face while counting to five hundred. He hadpulled

a sheet from her bed and wrapped up in it a woman who had been dead

for hours. It must have been hours for the bodyto be so cold.

In doing so he had incriminated himself, for who would now believe she

had died a natural death? He had taken awayher body and hidden it, he

had removed a sheet from her bed,perhaps left some of his DNA-he was

vague about this adheringt o her skin, told those two old women she had

gone away, said he had seen her waiting for a taxi. And now he had her

body up here. Would the police be able to find out she died naturally?

Would a coroner? It mustn't come to that.

Whatever it might do to his back, even if it crippled him for life, he had

to get it into the bag tonight and stowed away under the floorboards. His

ankle felt more painful than ever, a pulse throbbing under the stretched

purplish skin.

Chapter 26

When he first went into the room it looked pitch dark, dark as the inside

of a black box, and he thought he might have to leave his task until it

grew light at six-thirty in the morning. But gradually his eyes grew

accustomed to this absence of light. The sky outside the window began to

seem transparentand luminous and the moon was gone. He switched off

the flashlight and still -had enough light to see by. He closed thedoor. As

he knelt down and got to work he told himself not to think about the

ghost, to force himself to dismiss it from his mind in case fear paralyzed

his hands.

When it was done he made sure the boards were back exactly as they

had been when the floor was first laid: dovetailed, parallel, and with no

protruding edges. Gwendolen's body he had sealed up in the heavy

plastic, first tying up the mouth ofthe bag with wire, then making his

confidence in the security of this fastening absolutely sure with

superglue. All the time heworked his back hurt him, the pain sometimes

a steady achebut sometimes hammering instruments of torture into

hisspine. These totally incapacitated him for whole minutes at a time so

that he had to bend forward until his chest was almost on his knees, and

hold his hands pressed into the small of his back.

When he had finished and the body was gone, he felt more than relief. It

was as if he or someone had utterly destroyed it, by burning perhaps or

by some chemical process. Or as if she had never died, only been hidden

away beyond talking to the police, beyond return to this house. In the

gloom the bedroom looked the same as ever with all tools and glue and

wire put away. There were the old gas lamp, the tall chest of drawers

with the crazed mirror on its top, the naked bedstead, the windowthat

refused to open. Cobwebs still hung from the ceilingand dust still lay on

the windowsill. This was the Westway's uietest time, its breakers almost

stilled and its sighings muted.

A great weight seemed to be lifted from him. His back stillached, his

ankle was still throbbing and he was very tired, buthe felt that his

troubles would soon be over. All the time he was in there he had quite

successfully kept away thoughts of the ghost, but they returned when he

was out on the landing. Insidethe flat, he tried to relax, to read himself to

sleep with theone Christie book he hadn't yet opened, though he'd had it

forweeks. He lay on his bed and turned the pages of The Man WhoMade a

Judge Cry but every chapter heading he read and every illustration he

looked at reawakened fears that he might haveleft some incriminating

evidence behind. The book too remindedhim of his fate if he were

discovered, not the same as Christie's, for his killings had been in the

time of capital punishment, but bad enough. It was at this point that he

realized he had stopped calling the murderer Reggie and begun

referringto him in his mind by his surname.

To stop himself repeating over and over, I killed a deadwoman, I killed a

dead woman, he turned his thoughts to the problem of where Gwendolen

was supposed to have gone. There was no way they could prove she

hadn't gone, no way they could discover where she had or had not gone.

Those two old women would soon grow tired of speculating about her.

The house would remain empty for a while but for himself. He'd have no

rent to pay in old Chawcer's absence and he'd stay where he was just

until he'd become Nerissa's boyfriend.

There seemed no impediments now to getting to know her properly. She

had always been so nice to him that she was probably waiting for him to

come and see her, she might evenbe disappointed that he hadn't come

yet and was thinking he'dl et her down. He'd go over to Campden Hill

today. Thus he reassured himself.

It was two in the morning now. He anointed his back withthe antiinflammatory preparation the pharmacist had recommendedand felt the

glowing warmth it produced spread through his muscles. He took two