Chapter 4

For the third time in a week, Mix sat in his car on Campden Hill Square with the windows shut and the engine running to keep the air‑ conditioning on. It was a hot day and getting hotter every minute. He felt like a stalker and didn't much like it, partly because it reminded him of Javy. When he was twelve Javy had caught him looking through a pair of binoculars that belonged to his elder brother and beaten him for being a peeping Tom. Useless to say he hadn't been looking at the woman next door but at someone's new motorbike parked by the curb.

Forget it, he said to himself, put it out of your mind. He always said that when he started thinking of his mother and Javy and life at home but he never really forgot it. Reading Christie's Victims would have passed the time while he waited, but he might get immersed in it and miss her. It must be half an hour he'd been there, waiting for her to come out, keeping his eyeon her front door or shifting it to the golden Jaguar parked on her drive. Of course he'd seen her on previous visits butit had always been with some man escorting her or she'dbeen dressed in one of those semitransparent shifts she liked so much, under a fur wrap or sequin‑ embroidered denim jacket, or else in skin‑ tight jeans and stilt heels that permitted only small mincing steps. On those occasions she got into the chauffeur‑ driven limo.

It wouldn't be long before a traffic warden appeared and moved him on. Having a client in Campden Hill Square would have been a help but he didn't. Judging by the bronzed, taut muscled young men who called at several of these houses, the residents mostly had personal trainers. He was wondering if there was any point in staying, he had several calls to make before lunchtime, when a woman out walking a dog banged on the car window. She had a cigarette in her hand and the dog, not much bigger than a Beanie Baby, was wearing a redcollar with a diamante tag hanging from it. They were all richround here.

" You know, " she said in a voice like Colette Gilbert‑ Bamber's, " it's very wrong of you to sit there with your engine on like that. You're polluting the environment. "

" How about you with your smoke? " The combination of waiting about and her voice made him angry. " Why don't you get lost and take that toy on a lead with you? "

She said something about how dared he and marched off, dropping ash. He was on the point of giving up when Nerissa came out of her front door and got into her own car. She wore a rose‑ pink sleeveles stop and white jeans, her hair tied on the top of her head with a pink silk ribbon. Mix thought she looked lovelier than ever, even in the big black shades that half covered her face. Casual suited her. But what kind of fashion didn't?

To follow her was essential, even if it made him late for the appointment he had at twelve in Addison Road. He'd give the woman there a call and say he'd been held up. Nerissa drove into Notting Hill Gate and turned up toward the Portobello Road but avoided it and went on to Westbourne Grove. For once, there was very little traffic, nothing to separate his car from her car or hold them up. Roadworks at the top slowed them both and he saw her put her head out of the window in an attempt to see what was going on. But finally they were through the barriers and past the cones. More suddenly than he expected‑ she didn't signal‑ she swung the car into a meteredspace in a side street, dropped in her coins and ran up to a door with the number 13 Charing Terrace on it and " Shoshana's Spa and Health Club" in big chrome letters. By then, staring after her, he was holding up a stream of traffic. A chorus of hooting and yells of rage from other drivers at last forced him to move.

He was ten minutes late for the woman in Addison Road. All the way to the back of this big house and down the basement stairs, she lectured him on punctuality as if she were his employer, not his client. Mix nearly told her that, in his opinion, the damage to the climbing machine was caused by disuse, not wear and tear, and he wasn't surprised when he looked at the shape and size of her. But he didn't. She had an elliptical cross‑ trainer on order from Fiterama Accessories, and if he was rude she'd withdraw her custom.

Nothing like that mattered now he'd found the gym Nerissa went to. Pity about the number though. Along with his other occult beliefs and fears, Mix was superstitious, especially about walking under ladders and the number thirteen. He always avoided having anything to do with it when he could. When this phobia or whatever it was had started he didn't know, though it was true that Javy, whom his mother had married on the thirteenth of the month, had his birthday on the thirteenth of April. The day he had beaten Mix so badly it had nearly killed him had very likely been the thirteenth, but Mix had been too young then to remember or even to have known.

The Cockatoodle Club in Soho was overheated, smelled of various kinds of smoke and Thai green curry and was none too clean. So, at any rate, said the girl who Ed's girlfriend Steph had brought along for Mix. Ed was 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 half‑ belief 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, dark‑ haired 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 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 fifty‑ two stairs, you'll frighten yourself to death.