Chapter 10

He went slowly to the window, opened the slats instead of raising the blind, and looked down. Lights in the backs of houses in the street behind lit the gardens. There was no one about. Nothing stirred, no human being, no cat, no bird. A pale crescent moon had risen in a sky streaked with cloud. Behind hisfront door he listened. Out there too all was still and silent.

" No one knows anything about it, " he said aloud. " They don't know what's happened, no one knows but me. " And then, as if someone had accused him and he was defending himself, " I didn't mean to do it, but she asked for it. It just happened. "

His instinct was to shut himself in the bedroom, where he couldn't see what he had done, and hide himself. For sometime, though with the door still open, he sat on the bed with his head in his hands. The phone ringing frightened him moret han anything ever had. He gave a galvanic start so violent thathe feared he might have broken a bone. I was wrong and people do know. Police, he thought, someone's phoned them.

They heard her scream and me drop the statue. The ringingstopped but started again after a few seconds. This time he had to answer it and he did so in a hoarse, quavering voice.

" You sound as if you've got the dreaded flu too, " said Ed. " I'm okay. "

" Yeah. Well, good. I'm not. I think I've got a virus, so could you do two of my calls tomorrow? They're the important ones. " Ed named the clients and gave their phone numbers. Or Mix supposed that's what he was doing. He couldn't take it in. " I realize it's Saturday but they won't take long, it's more theywant reassuring. "

" Okay. Anything you say. "

" That's brilliant. And, Mix, me and Steph are getting engaged Wednesday. I've got to be back to normal for that. Drinks on me in the old Sun at eight‑ thirty, so be there. "

Mix put the phone down. He went slowly back to the livingroom, feeling his way with his eyes shut. The idea came to him before he opened them that he might have dreamt it all, it was some hideous nightmare. There would be nothing on thefloor. She had gone home. Blindly he fumbled his way into an armchair, sat there, facing straight ahead, and the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the blood on the glass. It was drying by now. Some of the thin streams had never reached the floor but dried into blackish‑ crimson lines and globules. What he thought was a sigh became a sob, and a long shudder passed through him.

Had Reggie felt like this? Or was he made of stronger, sterner stuff? That wasn't something Mix wanted to admit to. The girl had asked for it‑ which seemed to be true of some of Reggie's victims. He knew he must do something. He couldn't just leave her here. If it took him all night, he must clean up and decide what to do about the thing on the floor. Her eyes, which he had tried to close, remained open under the wound in her forehead, looking up at him. He took a gray linen napkin out of a drawer and laid it over her face. After that it was better.

He was still wearing nothing but his underpants. Some spots of blood had got on them. He took them off, threw them on the floor and put on jeans and a black sweatshirt. She had fallen beyond the edge of the carpet, so that most of the blood was on the pale polished wood surround, on the walls, and on the glass of the portrait. A good thing he had decided to splash out and have it glazed. That he could think like this comforted him. He was recovering. The first thing must be to wrap the body and move it. What was he going to do next? Do with it, he meant. Take it somewhere in the boot of the car, a park or a building site, and dump it? When they found it they wouldn't know he'd done it. No one knew they'd spent any timetogether.

He found a sheet that would do. When he came to St. Blaise House he'd bought all his bed linen new but he had some left from Tufnell Park days. His tastes had changed from when he was buying red sheets! Still, red was good for this purpose, it wouldn't show blood. Keeping his eyes averted as best hecould, he rolled the body up in the sheet. She felt very lightand fragile and he wondered if she'd been anorexic. Maybe. He knew very little about her, he hadn't been interested. When he'd dragged the bundle out into his narrow hall, hefetched a bucket and detergent and cloths from the kitchen and set about cleaning up. He began with the portrait and when it was spotless and gleaming once again, he felt enormously better. His fear had been that some of the blood‑ there had beenso much‑ might have got inside the glass and the frame onto Nerissa's photograph, but not a drop had. It occurred to him that the Psyche looked a lot like Nerissa, she might have been the model for it. He washed the figurine in the kitchen sink, under the running tap, first hot water, then cold, the bloodsliding off its head and breasts, red water, then pink, then clear.

Just the edge of the carpet was stained. He scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed and dried and he thought it was all out. Getting it off the polished boards wasn't a problem, they wereheavily lacquered and stains slid off. If only the wall behind hadbeen one of the dark green ones. He'd probably have to repaint it; he'd still got a two‑ liter tin of the shade called Cumulus and he'd do it on Sunday.

By the time he'd finished, the fourth bucketful of reddened water down the sink and the cloths in the washing machine, he sat down with a stiff Bombay gin. It tasted wonderful, as if he hadn't had a drink for months. One thing was for sure: the body couldn't stay here. And if he tried to put it in Holland Park, for instance, he couldn't do it without someone seeing. The trouble was, the first and only time he and she went outtogether they might have been seen by any number of people in KPH. She said she'd told no one but how could he believe her? She'd admitted telling Madam Shoshana she had a boyfriend even if she hadn't said his name. Then there was the barmaid at KPH. She might remember. Miss Chawcer might not have answered the doorbell that evening, but she'd remember it had rung if anyone asked. She might even have seen Danila through the window. No, he couldn't just dump the body.

His eye fell on Christie's Victims she or he had dropped onto the coffee table. Reggie, he thought, had faced the same difficulty. He'd been seen about with Ruth Fuerst, he'd eaten in the Ultra Works canteen with Muriel Eady and been out with herand her boyfriend. He dared not risk leaving their bodies to befound in case he was connected with their deaths. Something safer yet bolder had to be done. Mix referred to the book. Even though the neighbors saw what he was doing, even though they chatted to him and he to them, he had managed to dig a pit for Fuerst in his garden and put the body into it after dark. Muriel Eady he also buried a little way from the first grave.

Mix came upon a photograph of the garden in the next pages of illustrations. A white ring marked the spot where the leg bone had been found, and a cross marked Muriel Eady's grave. If the marks hadn't been made there was nothing to show where the burial had been. Before interment, all the bodies of the women he had killed had been temporarily stowed under the floorboards or in the washhouse. Mix wondered if either would be available to him‑ was there a washhouse here? Certainly there was a cellar‑ but it might be possible, though difficult, to get into the garden. However he lived in a house immeasurably larger than Reggie's half‑ house; well, half of a small terraced cottage, really.

He closed the book, put his keys into his pocket, and let himself out of his front door, noticing on his way out that itwas eleven‑ thirty. The old bat had amazing hearing for her age, but she would be asleep two floors below. Mix stood on the top landing, listening.

He turned left and set off along the passage. Of course there was a possibility he would see the ghost but he was making resolute efforts not to accept that there was a ghost. He had imagined it. The cat had opened that door itself. To be on the safeside, he closed his hand over the cross in his jeans pocket. Thelight he had switched on quickly went out as it always did, but he had brought a flashlight with him. In the dark, he opened the first door on his left and found himself inside a room that must have been adjacent to his own living room. The gleam from the flashlight was rather feeble but because the window in here was uncurtained, it wasn't dark but dimly lit from stilllighted backs of houses and by the faint moonlight.

Just the same, he would have liked more. He couldn't see a switch on any of the walls and when he looked where the hanging cable and lamp‑ holder should have been, there hung only a strange object with two metal strings suspended from it. If anything could have distracted him from the matter in hand, this did. He directed the torch beam upward. It took him a few momentsto realize that what he was looking at was a gas mantle. He had once seen a television program about the electrification of London replacing gas in the twenties and thirties. There were houses in Portland Road, not far from here, still lit by gas in the sixties.

The room contained a bedstead and a tall chest of drawers with a mirror on top. Anyone wanting to look in that mirrorwould have had to be nearly seven feet tall to reach it, Mix calculated. A stack of bookshelves, sagging under the weight of heavy tomes stuffed beside and on top of each other, nearly filled one wall. He went back into the passage and into theroom opposite where the yellow light from St. Blaise Avenue flowed in brightly, showing him that here too the system had never been replaced by electricity.

It made him feel as if he had strayed back in time, back beyond Reggie and all his works, back behind modern technologyand everything that made life easy. He shuddered. Supposehe really had gone back in time and found it impossible to return? Suppose it was a dream, all of it was a dream, the killing, the blood, the gas, and the darkness? But he had been through that one before and he knew it wasn't.

The air felt close. It had been another hot day. On this whole top floor only the windows in his own flat were everopened. The closeness was dusty and although no fresh aircame in, flies lived up here in swarms, crawling on the windowglass in the dark. He turned around, passed his own front door, and set off along the right‑ hand passage. Electric light was available in the first room on the ight but there was no bulb inthe fitment, Here the gleam of street lamps outside had curtainsto penetrate. He pulled them back, too roughly, for fragmentsof cloth and dust fell off onto the sill. This room was partly furnished with an iron bedstead, a deckchair with no seat, a dressing table and an upright chair with a broken leg propped up on a jamjar. The deckchair again reminded him of Reggie. At least one of his later victims, Kathleen Maloney, he had put in a deckchair with a makeshift seat of woven string, in order to administer gas to her in his kitchen.

A folded newspaper lay on the floor. This copy of the Sunwould be ages old, Mix thought, dropped there in the fifties probably. But when he picked it up and, in the yellow light, made out the date on it, he saw it was only from the previousOctober. More upsetting was the date, the thirteenth. The old bat must have been up here and left her paper behind. Who would have thought she'd read the Sun? She'd left this one with that date on it behind to frighten him, he thought. Thatmust be it.

The room opposite, on the other side of the wall where Nerissa's picture hung and Danila had died, also had electricity, also lacked a lightbulb and was just as stuffy. It was empty but for a bedstead without a mattress. He pulled back the thin curtains. Outside, he could just make out what he could only glimpse from his own windows, gables and annex roofs of nextdoor, the pointed trees and squat bushes in pots the old mankept on the roof of a carport, a great chimney with a dozen flues spanning an expanse of tiles, the broken glass top of a derelict conservatory. All this would make access to the nextroom along easy, he thought. Anyone could climb up and getin. But when he tried the door, it was locked and no key was visible as he squatted down and tried to look through the keyhole. At least Chawcer had locked the door. She had taken that much precaution against burglars, though a flimsy one. A wonder the atmosphere didn't choke her.

One last room remained. It was quite empty, even to the extent of being stripped of what it might once have contained. There was a curtain rail but no curtains. Some sort of carpet there had been nailed, and in places glued, to the floor but it had been torn up, leaving nail holes and sticky‑ lookingpatches. She came up here sometimes, he could tell that, but not into the gas‑ lit rooms. The first one he had gone into, the room which had surprised him because of the means by which it had been lit, that would be Danila's resting place.

Christie had put Ruth Fuerst's body under the floorboards. Mix remembered how, years ago, when he was in his teens, one of the water pipes had frozen in the house where he lived with his mother in Coventry. She said she had a bad back and couldn't do anything, it was one of the times Javy had left her‑ he always came back again till the last time‑ so he went up into the icy‑ cold bathroom and, with her telling him how to do it, tookup three of the floorboards. He'd had to prise up the tiles first. This would be much easier, nothing but the boards and these very old, to lift.

The only tools he had now were those he used in the maintenance of exercise machines. He let himself into his own flat, almost stumbling over the body he had laid in the little hallway, and searched through the bag that held his toolkit with fingers damp with sweat. Spanners, a hammer, screwdrivers… The biggest spanner would have to do and, if necessary, he'd ruin the screwdriver by using it to prise up the boards. He went back on to the landing and, leaving his door open, stood listening to the house. It seemed to him that, though it was always quiet, this silence was uncanny. Of course, at half past midnight, the old bat had been asleep for hours, but where was the cat? It nearly always spent its nights somewhere on the staircase. And why hadn't Reggie appeared?

Because he'd protected himself with the cross or because he'd imagined it, he told himself sternly. But that maddening imagination was still functioning, creating now the figure in its shiny glasses standing beside him, watching what he did, until he shut his eyes against it. He plunged back into the lighted flat, breathing fast. Another drink. The door closing him inside, he poured his biggest gin of the night and, sitting on thefloor beside the body, drank it down neat and ice‑ less. It filled him with fire and when he got to his feet, set him staggering.

But after another reconaissance and another listening at the top of the stairs, he dragged the body out. He pulled his redwrapped bundle along the passage and into the first room onthe left. Quietly he closed the door and switched on his flashlight. Someone had said it was never dark in London and morelight came in‑ thank God for the guinea fowl man who seemedto keep lights on until the small hours‑ ~ show him the pins that held the floorboards in place. " With the aid of the screwdriver and the flat shaft of the spanner, they came up quite easily. Beneath was a space between the joists, as far as he could see about a foot deep, though intersected with cables and old lead pipes. How dust could get in there was a mystery but when he brought his hands out they were furred with thick gray powder.

The beam of light wakened the flies and they began dancing round it. He had intended to take a last look at the body beforehe put it into the recess he had made but now he had forgotten why and he couldn't bring himself to unwrap that face and again see that wound. The featherl ight body slid into the gap he had made with scarcely a sound. Its grave might have been measured to fit it so well. Replacing the boards took only a moment. A fly crawled across his hand and he swatted at it with disproportionate fury. He dared not hammer the pins in, not at this hour. He'd do it in the morning when she or anyone would expect him to be banging a bit, putting up a picture, say.

A shivery sensation made him feel that Reggie was behind him, watching his movements, perhaps bending close over his back, and this time he was afraid, rigid with fear. He liked Reggie, admired him really and felt sorry for him meeting such a dreadful fate, but he was terrified too. You were when the persony ou admired was the dead come back. If he turned now and saw Reggie, he would die of fright, his heart wouldn't be strongenough to stand the terror. Mix shut his eyes and rocked back and forth on his haunches, whimpering softly. If he had felt a hand on his shoulder, then too he would have died of fear; if the thing had breathed and its breathing been heard, his heart would have cracked and split.

He grasped the cross. There was nothing there. Of course not, there never had been. All the sounds, the single sighting, the opening door, everything was an illusion brought about by the horror‑ film setting, the nasty creepiness of this house. Just getting back into his flat relieved him enormously. The silence now was welcome, the proper condition of this place at this hour. And the bodily sensations he had were a sour taste in his mouth, nausea rising and the start of a drumming in his head. He knew how unwise it would be to drink anything more but he did, filling the same glass that had held gin with the sweet cheap Riesling she had brought. As it hit him, he stumbled into the bedroom where her clothes lay as she had placed them, irritating him by arranging them neatly over a chair.

Reggie had wrapped Ruth Fuerst's body in her own coat and buried the rest of her clothes with her. He should have done the same. Collapsing onto the bed, noticing through glaze deyes that it was twenty to two, he knew he couldn't go back in there tonight, he couldn't take those boards up again, replace them again. In the morning he would take the clothes out of the house in a carrier bag and put them in a litter bin, or several litterbins. No, a better idea. He'd put them in one of the bins where the proceeds from their sale went to sufferers from cerebral palsy or some such thing.

And now he would sleep…