Thirteen Steps Down (9 page)

another murder but it went wrong? Would he come back to the place

where it went wrong?"

"He might," Steph said rather dubiously, and then, "Look, is this really

happening? That funny old place you live in, is it haunted or what?"

"Funny old place" was right, but Mix didn't much like someone else

calling it that. It seemed an insult to his beautiful flat. "I reckon I may

have seen--something," he said carefully.

"What sort of something?" Ed was agog.

The more sensitive and perhaps intuitive Steph read the expression on

Mix's face. "He doesn't want to talk about it, Ed. I mean, would you? You

know what Ed said, Mix. You need help."

"Do I?"

"Look, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll let you have a loan of this and you can

drive the thing away with it if it comes again." She unfastened the Gothic

cross of purple and black stones thathung round her neck from a silver

chain. "Here, you have it."

"Oh, no, I might lose it!"

"Not the end of the world if you do. It only cost me fifteen quid. And my

mum says I shouldn't wear it, she says it's what's the word, Ed?"

"Blasphemous," said Ed.

"That's it, blasphemous. My mum knows a medium and she said it

would work. If I needed it. She said any cross would work."

Mix studied the cross. He thought it ugly, the stones so obviously glass,

the silver so evidently nickel. But it was a cross and as such might do

the trick. If he threw it at Reggie or evenif he only held it up in front of

him, the ghost might melt away like a spiral of smoke or a genie going

back into a bottle.

Gwendolen had found a plastic bone in her bedroom. At first she couldn't

think what it was doing there or where it had come from and then she

remembered Olive's little dog playing with it. She offered it to Otto, who

shrank away with an expression of contempt on his face, as if repelled by

the smell of dog. The bone wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper and put

inside the washing machine for safekeeping, she waited for Olive to

phone and complain about her loss.

With the diminishing of her income, Gwendolen had become very

careful with money and disliked spending it on unnecessary phone calls.

If Olive wanted her animal's toy, let her phone or come around and fetch

it. But the days went by and there was no call and no visit. Gwendolen

used the washing machine only when she had accumulated a stack of

dirty laundry. When this happened she nearly washed the bone and the

newspaper, stuffing the clothes in before she noticed. There were a

number of small Asian-run shops as well as the bigger grocers in

Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Grove where she did her shopping,

carefully comparing prices--every single penny piece counted--before

making up her mind. To reach any of them she had to pass the block of

flats where Olive lived. Putting on her good black silk coat with the tiny

covered buttons, now some thirty years old, and an all round straw hat

because the day looked warm, she set off with the bone in the bottom of

her shopping trolley. This was covered in Black Watch tartan and, being

only nine years old, quite smart still.

Dropping in on Olive, she rang her bell in the lobby. No answer. Nor did

the porter get an answer when she asked him to phone Mrs. Fordyce in

11C. He thought he had seen her go out. Gwendolen was extremely

annoyed. It was feckless leaving your rubbish in other people's houses

and then giving no sign of the social solecism you had committed. She

was tempted to drop the bone in its wrapping into the nearest litter bin

but a niggling doubt about the validity of doing that stopped her. It might

amount to stealing.

After reading, Gwendolen liked shopping best of what she did. Not

because of what she bought or the layout of the shops or the friendliness

of staff but solely on the grounds of comparing prices and saving money.

She was no fool and she knew very well that the amounts she saved on a

tin of gravy powder here and a piece of Cheddar cheese there would

never amount to more than, say, twenty pence a day. But she

acknowledged to herself that it was a game she played and one that

made trekking all the way over to the Portobello Road market or up to

Sainsbury's a pleasure rather than a chore. Besides, crossing Ladbroke

Grove, if she followed a certain route, took her past the house where, all

those years ago, Dr. Reeves had had his surgery. By now the pain had

gone from her memories of him and only a rather delightful nostalgia

remained, that and a new hope, brought about by the announcement in

the Telegraph.

Just after the war the Chawcers had thought of going to Dr. Odess. The

first symptoms of Mrs. Chawcer's illness had showed themselves about

that time. But Colville Square was rather a long walk away, while Dr.

Reeves was in Ladbroke Grove and reached by simply taking Cambridge

Gardens. It wasn't till the trial and all the publicity in the newspapers

that Gwendolen discovered Dr. Odess had been Christie's doctor and had

attended him and his wife for years.

She was tempted to go up to the market this morning. The sun was

shining and flowers were out everywhere. The council had hung baskets

of geraniums on all the lampposts. I wonder what that costs, thought

Gwendolen. Sometimes when she went to the market for her vegetables,

her cooking apples, and her bananas--the only fruit Gwendolen ever ate

were bananas and stewed apple--she was able to save a lot and

sometimes have forty pence more than she expected in her purse at the

end of the day. She stopped outside the four-story house with basement

and with steep stairs climbing to the front door, where Stephen Reeves

had practiced. It was run-down now, its paint peeling, a pane in a front

bay window broken and patched up with a plastic Tesco bag and tape.

Inside there had been the waiting room where she had sat and waited

for prescriptions for her mother. In those days doctors had no lights and

bells to signify they were ready to receive the next patient, often no

receptionist or nurse on the premises. Dr. Reeves used to come to the

waiting room himself, call out the patient's name, and hold the door open

for him or her to pass through. Gwendolen never minded how long she

had to wait for the prescription to be handed to her for he would do this

himself and might come two or three times into the waiting room to

receive the next patient before he did so. She knew he only did this so

that he could catch glimpses of her and she have sight of him. He always

smiled and the smile for her was different from those directed at others,

warmer, wider, and somehow more conspiratorial.

It was as if they shared a secret, as indeed they did-their love for each

other. She hadn't minded having to leave the surgeryon her own. He

would be at St. Blaise House in a day or two and then they would be

alone, having tea and talking, talking, talking. To all intents and

purposes they were alone in the house. Bertha, the last maid, was long

gone, and by this time domestic workers wanted higher wages than the

Chawcers could afford. Mrs. Chawcer was asleep, or certainly immobile,

upstairs. The professor might be home by five but seldom before,

threading his way on the old bicycle through the increasing traffic on the

Marylebone Road into the complexities of Bayswater and Notting Hill. It

was very quiet in St. Blaise House in the fifties while Stephen Reeves and

Gwendolen sat side by side and talked and whispered, putting the world

right, laughing a little, their hands and knees very close, their eyes

meeting. Because of these sessions and the intimacy that had grown up

between them, because he had once said he was awfully fond of her, she

considered herself irrevocably bound to him. In her mind it was an untildeath-us-do-part agreement.

For a long time she had been bitter against him, seeing him as

treacherous, a man who had jilted her. If he had never said he loved her

in so many words, actions spoke louder. Later on, she had looked at the

situation more rationally, understanding that he had no doubt been

entangled with this Eileen before he had met her, or before he had got to

know her, and had perhaps been threatened with an action for breach of

promise. Or her father or brother had threatened him with a horsewhip.

Such things happened, she knew from her reading. Dueling, of course,

was illegal and long since gone out of fashion. But he must have been

inescapably entangled with the woman, so what could he do but marry

her? As for her, Gwendolen, she too was tied to him, as good as his wife.

It was interesting, she thought as she pushed her trolley along

Westbourne Grove, the number of people she had heardof lately who,

widowed or losing their wives in old age, came back to their past and

married the sweetheart of their youth. Queenie "Winthrop's sister was

such a one and so was a certain member of the St. Blaise Residents'

Association, a Mrs. Coburn-French. Of course, Gwendolen was a realist

and had to face the fact that women lost their husbands more often than

men lost their wives. But sometimes women were the first to die. Look at

her father. Not that he had married any long-lost sweetheart, but Mr.

Iqbal from the Hyderabad Emporium had done just that, meeting outside

the mosque in "Willesden a lady he had known from the same village in

India fifty years before.

And now Eileen was dead ...

Stephen Reeves was a widower now. Would he come backfor her? If she

had married someone else and that someone had died, she would look

for him. The bond between them must be as fixed and enduring for him

as it was for her. Perhaps she should take steps to find him ... ? He

might be shy, he might even feel guilty about what he had done and be

afraid to face her. Men were such cowards, that was a well-known fact.

Look how squeamish the professor had been about taking on any of the

tending of her mother when she was so ill.

It was half a century since last she had seen Stephen, or it soon would

be. There were ways of finding people these days, much easier and surer

ways than when she was young. You didi t somehow with a computer.

You used this computer and got into something called the "net" or the

"web" and it would tell you. There were places--there was one in

Ladbroke Grove called Internet cafes. For a long time Gwendolen had

thought that meant a place to have coffee in and eat cakes, but Olive,

laughing stupidly, had set her right. If she went to such a place would

she be able to find Stephen Reeves after fifty years?

She thought about all this as she walked home with her shopping. After

he had told her she was a nice girl and he was fond of her, she sat up in

her bedroom and practiced writing her name as it would soon be.

Gwendolen Reeves or G. L. Reeves, she would sign herself, but on

invitation cards she would be Mrs. Stephen Reeves. Mrs. Stephen Reeves

at home and Dr. and Mrs. Stephen Reeves thank you for your kind

invitation but regretthey cannot accept ... As it turned out, these last had

been reserved for Eileen. That need not trouble her now, for Eileen was

dead. Somehow she knew it hadn't been a happy marriage, in spite of

that "beloved wife." He had to put it like that, everyone did, it was the

convention. Possibly, when he and Eileen quarreled, as no doubt they

often did, he told her he should never have married her.

"I should have married Gwendolen," he would have said.

“She was my first love."

Gwendolen had never expressed her feelings to him. It wouldn't have

been right for a woman to do that then but things seemed to be different

now. He might not know how she felt, he might never have known.

Somehow she must manageto tell him and then everything would come

right.

Chapter 7

He had read Christie's Victims before but a long time ago, six or seven

years ago when he began collecting his Reggie library. Of course he

remembered it. But it was still fascinating to retrace his steps through

the Notting Hill of those days and through the life of one of the most

famous serial killers ofall time.

"John Reginald Halliday Christie came to live in London in1938," Mix

read while eating his breakfast,

and with him came his wife, Ethel. He was a curious man.There must be

something strange, not to say appalling, about any necrophile. Not only is

the idea of necrophilia repugnant to everyone, but in order to indulge his

desire, the sufferer from this aberration must, unless he has unlikely

accessto a morgue, first kill his victims.

Looking at it from the perspective of the twenty-first century,Christie's

marriage was not a happy one. Five years after their wedding, Ethel left

him and went to live in Sheffield. Their separation lasted for several years

until Christie wrote to her, asking her to return to him. After their reunion,

she was often away staying with her relatives in the north. Christie had

been a cinema operative, a mill-worker and a postman, in connection with