Chapter 2

It was a funny part of the world altogether. Mix hadn't got used to it yet, the Westway to the north and Wormwood Scrubs and its prison not far away, a tangle of little winding streets, big houses, purpose‑ built blocks, ugly Victorian terraces, Gothic places more like churches than homes, cottages cunningly designed on different levels to look as if they had been there for two hundred years, corner shops, MOT testing centers, garages, meeting halls, real churches for Holy Catholic Apostolics or Latter Day Saints and convents for Oblates and Carmelites. The whole place populated by people whose families had always been there and people whose families came from Freetown and Goa and Vilnius and Beirut and Aleppo.

The Gilbert‑ Bambers also lived in West Eleven but the upmarket fashionable part. Their house was in Lansdowne Walk, not as big as Miss Chawcer's but more imposing, with Corinthian columns all along the front and urns with bushes in them on the balconies. It took Mix no more than five minutes to drive there and another five to park his car on a meter, costing him nothing after six‑ thirty. Colette gave him one of her sexy looks as she opened the door, a look that wasn't in the least necessary as both knew why she had sent for him and what he had come for. For his part, he put up a show of formality, smiling as he marched in with his case of tools and saying it was upstairs if he remembered rightly.

" Of course you remember rightly, " Colette said, giggling.

More stairs, but these were wide and shallow and anywaythere was only one flight to go up. " How's Miss Nash these days? "

He'd known she wouldn't like that and she didn't. " I'm sure she's fine. I haven't seen her for a couple of weeks. "

It was at the Gilbert‑ Bambers' that he had first met Nerissa Nash. " Encountered" might be the better word. Until he saw her he had thought Colette beautiful, her slenderness and her long blond hair and her full lips, even though she'd told him about the collagen implants. The difference between them, he had thought, was that between the Hollywood star and the prettiest girl in the office.

Colette preceded him into the bedroom. " What she called her gym was really a dressing room that opened out of it next to the bathroom, and had been originally designed for the master of the house.

" He'd knock on her door when he wanted a bonk, " Colette had explained. " They were all bonkers in those days. Isn't that funny it's the same word? "

The room was now furnished with a treadmill, a step machine, a stationary bicycle, and an elliptical cross‑ trainer. There was a rack of weights, a rolled‑ up yoga mat, a turquoise colored inflatable ball, and a fridge that had never seen the like of Boot Camp but held only sparkling spring water. Mix could see at once why the treadmill wouldn't start. Colette was no fool and was probably well aware of the reason herself.

The machine had a safety device in the form of a key that slotted into a keyhole and a string attached to it with a clip on the other end. You were supposed to fasten it to your clothes while you used it so that if you fell over the key would be pulled out and the motor stop running. Mix held up the key.

" 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 left‑ hand 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. "