Thirteen Steps Down (6 page)

another rep-engineer at Fiterama and Mix's friend, Steph his live-in

partner. The other girl kept running her finger along the chair legs and

under thetables and holding it up to show everyone.

"You remind me of my gran," said Steph.

"A place where people eat ought to be clean."

"Eat! Chance'd be a fine thing. It's a good three-quarters of an hour

since we ordered those prawns."

The other girl, whose name was Lara, and who had hay fever or

something that made her sniff a lot, resumed her fingerdusting of the

area below their table. Steph lit a cigarette. Mix, who didn't approve of

smoking, calculated that it was her eighth since they had come in here.

The music, which was hiphop, was too loud for normal speech, and to

make yourself heard you had to shout. How Steph managed with her

damaged lungs, Mix didn't know, imagining the villi all lying prone in

there. Just as the waitress appeared with curried prawns for the girls

and cottage pie for the men, Lara's questing finger touched his knee and

was pulled away as if he'd stung her.

They exchanged resentful looks. What with the noise and this awful girl

and the cottage pie smelling as if green curry had got into it, Mix felt like

going home. He wasn't very old, but he was too old for this. Lara said a

waitress dressed like that was an insult to all the women patrons.

"Why? She's lovely. I love her skirt."

"Yes, you would, Ed. That's my point. More like a belt than a skirt, if

you ask me."

"I didn't ask you," Ed yelled at the top of his voice. "As for insults, I'm

only looking, I'm not going to screw her."

"You wish."

"Oh, shut up," said Steph, taking Ed's hand affectionately.

No one was much enjoying themselves. But they stayed. Ed bought a

bottle of Moravian champagne and he and Steph tried to dance, but the

tiny floor space was too crowded, not just to move but to keep upright.

Lara started sneezing and had to use her table napkin for a tissue. They

didn't leave till two. That was the earliest any of them felt the heavens

wouldn't fall if they went home. Mix got into one of his fantasies, a

vindictive one this time, in which he gave a lift to Lara but instead of

driving her home to Palmers Green--that was a fine distance at this time

of night for a bloke who lived in Notting Dale—he imagined taking her up

to Victoria Park or London Fields and pushing her out of the car to find

her own way home. If by that time she hadn't been the prey of the

homicidal maniacs who allegedly haunted those places. Reggie, he

thought, Reggie would have dealt with her.

They proceeded in silence up to Hornsey, Mix imagining Reggie luring

her to Rillington Place on the grounds of curing her hay fever with his

inhaler, which would actually gas her. He'd make her sit in his deckchair

and breathe in the chloroform ...

"Why have you been so horrible?" she asked him after his distant "Good

night" and opening of the passenger door for her. He didn't answer, but

turned his face away. She let herself in through the front door of number

thirteen--it would be—and banged it loudly after her. There were

probably at least ten other occupants of that building and all of them

would have woken up. It seemed to Mix that the place was still

reverberating when he got back into the driving seat.

The night was cold and out here the wind screens of parked cars had

frost on them. He didn't know the area very well, missed his turning and,

after driving for what seemed like hours, found himself around the back

of King's Cross station. Nevermind. He'd take the Marylebone Road and

the fly over. Day and night it was busy. Traffic never ceased. But the side

streets were deserted, the lamps which should have cheered them

making them seem more stark and less safe than darkness.

He had to drive up and down St. Blaise Avenue and up again before he

found a space in the residents' parking to put his car. If he left it on the

yellow line he'd have to be out there before eight-thirty in the morning to

move it. At this hour of the night, the street was packed with cars and

empty of people. It was so dark between the pillars and inside the portico

that it took him awhile to find the lock and slide the key into it.

Crossing the hall, he saw himself in the big mirror like a stranger,

unrecognizable in the dimness. All the lights on staircase and landings

were on time switches and turned themselves off, he'd calculated, after

about fifteen seconds. The bulbs in the hanging lamps in hall and stairs

being of very low wattage, great pools of darkness lay ahead in the twists

and bends. Cursing the length of this staircase, he began to climb. He

was very tired and he didn't know why. Perhaps it had something to do

with the emotional stress of tracking down Nerissa and discovering

where she went, or it was due to that Lara who was such a contrast to

her. His legs dragged and the calf muscles began to ache. After two

flights, at the first landing, where Miss Chawcer slept behind a big oak

door set in a deep recess, the lights grew even dimmer and went out

faster. It was impossible to see the top of the next flight. From here the

floor above was lost in dense black shadow.

The place was so big and the ceilings so high that it had a creepy feel

even on a bright day. By night the flower and fruit carvings on the

woodwork turned into gargoyles and in the silence he seemed to hear soft

sighs coming from the darkest corners. Mounting slowly because he was

as usual panting, here called, as one does in such situations, his halfbelief in ghosts. He had often said, of some particular old house, that he

didn't believe in ghosts but he wouldn't spend a night there for anything.

The habit he had got into of counting the stairs in this top flight as if he

could make the figure twelve or fourteen was hard to break. He seemed

to do it automatically once he had pressed the switch at the foot. But he

had reached only to three when he seemed to see, in the light's feeble

gleam, a figure standing at the top. It was a man, tallish, glasses on its

beaky nose catching the colored light from the Isabella window.

The sound that rose to his mouth came out as a thin whimper, the kind

you utter in a bad dream when you think you are screaming loudly. At

the same time, he squeezed his eyes shut. With one hand stretched out,

he stood there until a darkening inside his eyelids told him the light had

gone out again. He took a step backward, pressed the switch again,

opened his eyes and looked. The figure was gone. If it had ever been

there, if he hadn't imagined it.

It still took all the nerve he could summon to go up those stairs past

the spot where it had stood and across the spots of Isabella light to let

himself into his flat.

A bright morning and the terrors of the night were dispelled by sunshine.

Mix was having a lie-in because it was Saturday. He lay in bed in the

stifling warmth of his overheated bedroom, watching a flock of pigeons, a

single heron flying low, an aircraft leaving a trail like a string of cloud

across the blue sky. Now he could tell himself the figure on the stairs

was a hallucination or something caused by that stained glass window.

Drink and darkness played strange tricks on the mind. He had drunk

quite a bit and that house where she lived being thirteen was the last

straw.

Getting up to make tea and take it back with him, he saw Otto far

below, a dark chocolate silhouette, sitting on one of the crumbling walls

against which ancient trees leaned and from which an ancient trellis

drooped. In the almost identical wilderness at the end of this garden, two

guinea fowl with crinolines of gray feathers pottered among dead weed

stalks and brambles. Otto spent hours watching these guinea fowl,

plotting how to catch and eat them. Mix had often watched him,

disliking the cat but half hoping to witness the hunt and the kill. Keeping

the birds was almost certainly illegal but the local authority remained in

ignorance of their existence and no neighbor ever told.

He lifted out of a drawer his Nerissa scrapbooks and took them back to

bed with him. This bright morning would be a good time to take a

photograph of her house and perhaps another of the health club. And

there would be a chance of seeing her again. Turning the pages of this

collection of Nerissa pictures and cuttings, he slipped into a fantasy of

how he could meet her. Really meet her and remind her of their previous

encounter. A party would be the sort of occasion he wanted, one that she

was attending and to which he could get himself invited. A niggling fear

crept into his mind that she might have spotted him outside her house

and known it was he following her to the health club. He must be more

careful.

Could he persuade Colette Gilbert-Bamber to give a party? More to the

point, could he persuade her to invite him to it if she did? The husband,

whom he'd never met, was an unknown quantity. Mix had never even

seen a picture of him. Maybe he hated parties or only liked the formal

kind, full of business people drinking dry wine and fizzy water and

talking about gilts and a bear market. Even if the party happened, would

he have the nerve to ask Nerissa out? He'd have to take her somewhere

fabulous, but he'd started saving up for that, and once he'd been seen

out with her--or, say, three times--he'd be made, the TV offers would

start rolling in, the requests for interviews, the invitations to premieres.

He must hedge his bets. He'd call the health club this morning and ask

about joining. Suppose he found out who her guru was, or her

clairvoyant or whatever? That would be easier than a party. He knew she

had one. It had been in the papers. He wouldn't have to be invited to a

guru's place. He could just go, provided he paid. There were ways of

finding out when Nerissa's appointments were and then somehow he

would get his to precede or follow hers. It wouldn't be all pretending

either, it wouldn't just be a ploy. He wouldn't mind seeing someone who

knew about the supernatural. If there really were ghosts and spirits and

whatever or if sighting them was always in the mind. A guru or a

medium could tell him.

Mix finished his tea, closed the scrapbook, and forced himself to walk

over to the long mirror that was a cheval-glass framed in stainless steel.

He shut his eyes and opened them again. There--nothing and no one

behind him, what a mad idea! Naked, he confessed to himself that there

was room for improvement. In his job and with his ambition, he ought to

have a perfect figure, a six-pack belly, fleshless hips, and a small hard

bum. Once it had been like that-and would be again, here solved. All

those chips and chocolate bars were to blame. His face was all right.

Handsome, according to Colette and others , the features regular, the

eyes a steady honest blue. He could tell they admired his fine head of

light brown hair with the blond highlights, but his skin ought not to be

so pale. She would be used to men of perfect physique and magnificent

tan. The gym was the answer to that, and the tanning place round the

corner. He couldn't see his back, but he knew the scars were all gone

now, anyway. Pity, really. He still nursed a fantasy that had begun when

his back was still bleeding, of showing someone--the police, the social

services--what Javy had done and seeing him handcuffed and taken

away to prison. It was either that or killing him.

For five years Mix had been his mother's darling. He was her only child,

his father a boyfriend who had moved out when he was six months old.

She was only eighteen and she loved her little son passionately. But not

enduringly or exclusively, for when Mix was five she met James Victor

Calthorne, fell for a baby and married him. Javy, as everyone called him,

was big and dark and handsome. At first he took very little notice of Mix

except to smack him and at first it seemed to the boy that his mother

loved him as much as ever. Then the baby was born, a dark-eyed, darkhaired girl they called Shannon. Mix couldn't remember feeling much

about the baby or seeing his mother pay her more attention than she

paid him, but the psychiatrist they made him go to when he was older

told him that was his trouble. He resented his mother withdrawing her

love from him and transferring it to Shannon. That was why he tried to

kill--thebaby.

Mix remembered nothing about it, nothing about picking up the tomato

ketchup bottle and hitting her with it. Or not quite hitting her. Bashing

inside the cot but missing. He couldn't remember Javy coming into the

room, but he remembered the 'beating Javy gave him. And his mother

standing there and watching but doing nothing to stop him. He had used

the leather belt, from his jeans, pulling Mix's T-shirt over his head,

lashing at his back till it bled.

That never happened again, though Javy went on smacking him

whenever he didn't toe the line. Apart from the psychiatrist talking about

it, the only way he knew he had tried to kill Shannon was because Javy