Thirteen Steps Down (7 page)

was always telling him. He got on quite well with his little sister and with

the babyboy, Terry, who was born a year later, but if ever Javy caught

him even disagreeing with Shannon or taking a toy awayf rom her, he'd

repeat that story and say how Mix had tried tokill her.

"You'd be dead by now," he'd say to his daughter, "but for me stopping

that murdering kid." And to his little son, "You want to watch him, he'll

kill you as soon as look at you."

That would be a way to get famous, Mix sometimes thought, killing

one's stepfather out of revenge. But Javy had left them when he was

fourteen. Mix's mother wept and sobbed and had hysterics until Mix got

fed up with it and slapped her face.

"I'll give you something to make you cry," he had shouted in his anger.

"Standing there and watching him beat me up."

They sent him to the psychiatrist for hitting his mother. A domestic

violence perpetrator waiting to happen--that was the description he

overheard one social worker call him. She was still alive, his mother, not

yet fifty, but he'd never see her again.

It was Saturday, so he could park more or less anywhere he could find a

space in Westbourne Park Road. As it happened he got on to the same

eter as Nerissa had used. Mix was besotted enough to get a thrill out of

that, just as he would have from touching something she had touched or

reading somesign she had read hours before. He went up to the door and

rang the lowest one of a series of bells. The door growled open on to an

unprepossessing hallway smelling of incense, a steep and narrow

staircase, and a smart new lift, all steel and glasslike his mirror. It took

him up a couple of floors where, to Mix's relief, everything was like itself,

streamlined, glittering, and sleek. Doors opened off the hallway, labeled

Reflexology and Massage and Podiatry. The gym was full of young people

laboring away on treadmills and skiers and stationary bikes. Through a

big picture window he could see girls in bikinis and men looking the way

he wanted to look, either in or sitting round the edge of a large bubbling

Jacuzzi. A thin dark girl in a leotard with an open white coat over it

asked him what h ewanted. Mix had had an idea. He explained his trade

and asked if anyone was needed to service and maintain the machines.

His company would consider taking Shoshana's on.

"It's funny you should say that," said the girl, "because the guy who was

going to do ours let us down yesterday."

"I think we could fit you in," said Mix. He asked what rates the

defaulters had charged. The answer pleased him. He could undercut

that. And he began to think daringly of taking it on privately, strictly

against the company's rules, but why should they find out?

"I'll have to ask Madam Shoshana." She had a falteringvoice and the

bright nervous eyes of a mouse. "Would you like to give me a call later?"

"I'll do that small thing. What's your name then?"

"Danila. "

"That's a funny one," he said.

She looked about sixteen. "I'm from Bosnia. But I've been here since I

was a kid."

"Bosnia, right." There had been a war there, he thought vaguely, back

some time in the nineties.

"I was afraid for a moment you wanted to join," said Danila.

"We got a waiting list as long as your arm. Most of them don't come more

than four times--that's the usual, four times—but they're on the books,

aren't they? They're members."

Mix was interested in only one member. "I'll call you later," he said.

Suppose Nerissa was here now? He wandered along the aisle between

the machines. Small television transmitters hung at head height in front

of each one and all were showing either a quiz show or a very old Tom

and Jerry cartoon. Most were watching the cartoon while pumping or

pedaling away. She wasn't there. He wouldn't have had to look closely.

She stoodout from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer. Those

long legs, that gazelle's body, that raven hair must cause a sensation in

here.

Contemplating going to a film, later a drink with Ed in the Kensington

Park Hotel, the pub Reggie had used and called KPH, he thought of the

figure he had hallucinated on the stairs. Suppose it wasn't a

hallucination but a real ghost? Suppose it had been Reggie? His ghost,

that is. His spirit, doomed to haunt the environs of where he’d once lived.

Mix knew Reggie didn't really look like Richard Attenborough; or like

himself, come to that. He'd looked quite different, taller and thinner and

older. There were plenty of photographs in his books. Mix became very

frightened when he tried to conjure up an image of the man on the stairs.

Besides, he couldn't do it. He just about knew it was a man and not very

young and maybe wearing glasses. Yes, he couldn't have made up the

glasses, could he? They couldn't have been in his mind.

Reggie might have been in St. Blaise House while he was alive. Why

not? Miss Chawcer had escaped him, but he might have come there after

her. Mix, who thoroughly knew the details of Reggie's life after he came to

Notting Hill, pictured her going to Rillington Place, as it then was, for an

abortion, but getting cold feet and running away. A lucky escape. Had

Reggie tried to persuade her to let him do the deed at her ownplace? No,

because he had to get rid of the body. He went there to get her to return

...

Were there ghosts and if so, was it the murderer whose spirit he had

seen? Why had he come back? And why there and not to Rillington Place,

which had been the graveyard for so many dead women? Why not was

pretty obvious. He wouldn't know the place after what they'd done to it,

his three-story Victorian house and all the others like it razed to the

ground. All those smart new rows, the trees and the cheerful atmosphere

would have put him off ever returning. He could have gone to the place in

Oxford Gardens where his first victim, Ruth Fuerst, had had a room. She

was the one whose leg bone they had found propping up the fence in

Reggie's garden. Or to that of his second, Muriel Eady, who had lived in

Putney. But St.Blaise House was nearer and unchanged. He would like

that, a house just the same as it had been in the forties and fifties. He'd

feel comfortable there, and besides, he still had unfinished business to

attend to.

She was old now but he wasn't. He was the same age as when they'd

hanged him and would always be. What more likely than that he had

come back to find old Chawcer and take her back with him to wherever

he came from?

Don't think like that, stop it, Mix said to himself as he climbed the fiftytwo stairs, you'll frighten yourself to death.

Chapter 5

In her house in Campden Hill Square, Nerissa Nash was getting ready to

go to her parents' for supper. If it had been her mum alone she was going

to see, say when her dad was at work, she would have put on jeans and

boots and an old jumper under her sheepskin. But her dad liked to see

her dressed up, he took such pride in her.

Though she had no idea of this, her life was one they didn't begin to

understand. If not everyone could lead it, she supposed everyone would

want to. It was bounded by the body and the face, hair--lots of it on the

head and none anywhereelse--clothes, cosmetics, aids to beauty,

homoeopathy, workouts, massage, sparkling water, lettuce, vitamin

supplements, alternative medicine, astrology and having her fortune told,

the images and activities of other celebrities, her mum and dad and her

brothers and sisters. Of music she knew very little, of painting, books,

opera, ballet, scientific advances, and politics she knew nothing and

wasn't interested in them. Taking part in fashion shows, she had visited

all the major capitals of the world and seen of them only the studios and

changing rooms of designers, the insides of clubs and gyms, the

premises of masseurs, and her own face in the mirrors of cosmeticians.

But for one lack in her life, she was extremely happy.

From both parents, somewhere in the genes, she had inherited a sunny

disposition, a faculty for enjoying simple pleasures,and a kindly nature.

People said of her that Nerissa would do anything to help a friend.

Almost everything she did she enjoyed. Especially delightful was sitting

at her huge dressingtable, a white cotton cape covering her Versace

trouser suit,her long hair looped back, making up her face. On the CD

player Johnny Cash was singing her favorite song, loved by her because

it was her dad's preference over all others, the one about the teenage

queen, prettiest girl they'd ever seen, she who loved the boy next door,

who worked at the candy store. Nerissa identified with this successful

beauty in most respects.

Her dad liked her hair hanging loose, so she left it that way. If only it

had been cold, she could have worn her new fake fur that was made to

look like Arctic fox. No real fur for her, she loved animals too much. The

very thought made her shudder. But no, it had better be something thin

and silky. Dropping the cape on the floor, she inadvertently swept off the

dressing table the lid of a pot and three earrings. What should she take

her parents? She should have bought something but she'd been working

out most of the day and hadn't got around to it. Nevermind. Two bottles

of champagne came out of the drinks cupboard and a jar of cocktail

sticks fell out, scattering everywhere. Next that huge box of chocolates

Rodney had given her--he was so sweet but was he crazy, thinking she'd

so much as look at a chocolate?

Nerissa left a trail of litter behind her through the house. Even the

flowers toppled out of the vases. Magazines tumbled out of the rack,

handfuls of tissues spilled onto surfaces and under tables, lamps fell

over, glasses broke, and odd bits of jewelry glinted from the carpet pile

and the windowsills. Lynette, who came to clean, was so well paid she

didn't mind. She went about the house, picking everything up, admiring

a ring here, a bottle of scent there, and if she was at home, Nerissa

would give it to her.

It was raining, the heavy crashing rain of summer. Nerissa put on her

white shiny raincoat over her silk shift and leapt into the car with her

champagne and her chocolates, her wet umbrella-white and with a

picture of the seafront at Nice on it--slung onto the backseat. She

stopped in Holland Park on adouble yellow line to buy flowers for her

mum, orchids and arum lilies, roses and funny green things the florist

couldn't identify. Luck was with her, as it usually was. All the wardens

were indoors watching Casualty on TV: She was going to be late--when

wasn't she?--but Dad wouldn't mind. He liked eating closer to nine than

eight.

They lived in Acton, in a street of semidetached mock-Tudor houses,

theirs with an extra bedroom over the garage. Nerissa and her brothers

had grown up there, gone to the local schools, visited the local cinema,

and shopped at the localshops. Both of her brothers were older than

Nerissa and both were now married. When she started to make a lot of

money, she had wanted to buy her parents a house near her own,

perhaps a smart cottage in fashionable Pottery Lane, but they would

have none of it. They liked Acton. They liked their neighbors and the

neighborhood and their big garden. All their friends lived nearby and

they were staying put. Besides, her father had made three ponds in his

garden, one in the front and two in the back, and filled them with

goldfish. Where in Pottery Lane would he be able to have three ponds or

even one? And the goldfish were very active tonight, enjoying the rain.

It was her father who answered the door. Nerissa threw her arms

around him, then around her mother, presented her gifts. These were, as

always, received rapturously. She never touched alcohol, she drank

bottled water, but now she accepted with pleasure a large cup of

Yorkshire tea. You could get very fed up with water thrust at you

wherever you went. Her mum always announced dinner in the same way,

and uttered it in an atrocious French accent. Nerissa would have

wondered what waswrong if she had deviated from this practice.

"Mademoiselle est servie. "

She only ate food like this when she went to her parents' house. The

rest of the time she picked at grapefruit and Japanese rice crackers at

home or green salad in restaurants. It was a miracle, she sometimes

thought, that her insides could weather with no ill effects the shock of

digesting thick soup, rolls and butter, roast meat and potatoes, batter

pudding, and Brussels sprouts. Her mother thought this was her normal

diet.

"My daughter can eat as much as she likes," she told friends.

"She never puts on a scrap of weight."

When they had reached the apple charlotte and baked Alaska stage of

the meal, Nerissa asked her mother about their neighbors. These people

were great friends, as close as cousins.

"Fine, I think," her mother said. "I haven't seen much of them for a few

days. Sheila's got a new job, I do know that---oh, and Bill's got the allclear from the hospital."