Chapter 26

When he first went into the room it looked pitch dark, dark as the inside of a black box, and he thought he might have to leave his task until it grew light at six‑ thirty in the morning. But gradually his eyes grew accustomed to this absence of light. The sky outside the window began to seem transparentand luminous and the moon was gone. He switched off the flashlight and still ‑ had enough light to see by. He closed thedoor. As he knelt down and got to work he told himself not to think about the ghost, to force himself to dismiss it from his mind in case fear paralyzed his hands.

When it was done he made sure the boards were back exactly as they had been when the floor was first laid: dovetailed, parallel, and with no protruding edges. Gwendolen's body he had sealed up in the heavy plastic, first tying up the mouth ofthe bag with wire, then making his confidence in the security of this fastening absolutely sure with superglue. All the time heworked his back hurt him, the pain sometimes a steady achebut sometimes hammering instruments of torture into hisspine. These totally incapacitated him for whole minutes at a time so that he had to bend forward until his chest was almost on his knees, and hold his hands pressed into the small of his back.

When he had finished and the body was gone, he felt more than relief. It was as if he or someone had utterly destroyed it, by burning perhaps or by some chemical process. Or as if she had never died, only been hidden away beyond talking to the police, beyond return to this house. In the gloom the bedroom looked the same as ever with all tools and glue and wire put away. There were the old gas lamp, the tall chest of drawers with the crazed mirror on its top, the naked bedstead, the windowthat refused to open. Cobwebs still hung from the ceilingand dust still lay on the windowsill. This was the Westway's uietest time, its breakers almost stilled and its sighings muted.

A great weight seemed to be lifted from him. His back stillached, his ankle was still throbbing and he was very tired, buthe felt that his troubles would soon be over. All the time he was in there he had quite successfully kept away thoughts of the ghost, but they returned when he was out on the landing. Insidethe flat, he tried to relax, to read himself to sleep with theone Christie book he hadn't yet opened, though he'd had it forweeks. He lay on his bed and turned the pages of The Man WhoMade a Judge Cry but every chapter heading he read and every illustration he looked at reawakened fears that he might haveleft some incriminating evidence behind. The book too remindedhim of his fate if he were discovered, not the same as Christie's, for his killings had been in the time of capital punishment, but bad enough. It was at this point that he realized he had stopped calling the murderer Reggie and begun referringto him in his mind by his surname.

To stop himself repeating over and over, I killed a deadwoman, I killed a dead woman, he turned his thoughts to the problem of where Gwendolen was supposed to have gone. There was no way they could prove she hadn't gone, no way they could discover where she had or had not gone. Those two old women would soon grow tired of speculating about her. The house would remain empty for a while but for himself. He'd have no rent to pay in old Chawcer's absence and he'd stay where he was just until he'd become Nerissa's boyfriend.

There seemed no impediments now to getting to know her properly. She had always been so nice to him that she was probably waiting for him to come and see her, she might evenbe disappointed that he hadn't come yet and was thinking he'dl et her down. He'd go over to Campden Hill today. Thus he reassured himself.

It was two in the morning now. He anointed his back withthe anti‑ inflammatory preparation the pharmacist had recommendedand felt the glowing warmth it produced spread through his muscles. He took two ibuprofen, stripped off his clothes and lay on his bed, thinking, I killed a woman who was already dead.

Although she had resolved on the night of Darel's party that she would never go near a fortune‑ teller again, that it was obvious nonsense and she should never have fallen for it, everyone said so, Nerissa was again consulting Madam Shoshana. It would be the last time, she was determined on that, but she hadto have the soothsayer's opinion on whether or not she had achance with him. Before she went out she tidied her bedroom, putting used tissues and scraps of cotton wool into the wastebasket, picking up discarded garments and dropping them intothe linen bin. She even pulled back the quilt to air sheet and mattress before Lynette came to make the bed. Downstairs everywhere was already tidy. It was a dreadful chore and it wore her out but as she took dirty glasses into the kitchen, she thought how approving Darel would be when at last he camehere, that he'd think how suited she was to be his girlfriend and even what a wonderful wife she'd make.

Johnny Cash and the girl who loved the boy next door who worked at the candy store had been put away. The CD, currently on the player was Dvorak. Two new books from Hatchard's, one on European politics in the post‑ Cold War period and the other called The Case Against the Occult, lay on the coffee table, from which everything else had been cleared away. If only he would come and see the civilized, even intellectual, milieu in which she lived!

Fear of again meeting Mix Cellini on the stairs at the spa troubled her during her drive to Westbourne Grove. She hadput on baggy jeans and a gray sweatshirt because she knewthese clothes did nothing to flatter her, and she hadn't made upher face. Still, it hadn't escaped her notice that makeup does very little for a black woman who is already beautiful. Her dad even said‑ of course he would‑ that she looked better without it. She just had to hope it wouldn't be Cellini's day for doing whatever he did to the spa's machines. If she had to see him she wanted it to be in Campden Hill Square, where she'd at least have a reason for phoning Darel. In the event she got up those stairs without an encounter of any kind. She knocked on the door and the unprecedented happened. Shoshana asked her to wait one minute. Take a seat and wait just a minute. She noticed from her watch that she was two minutes early. Learning to be punctual was also part ofthe Darel‑ pleasing drive. Unless she had sat on the floor there was nothing on that tiny landing to sit on, so Nerissa stood, thinking about Darel Jones and her new Face of 2004 job and a photo shoot for Vogue and Darel Jones and the books shemeant to read to please him. Then Madam Shoshana called, " Come, " in her low, thrilling voice.

She had asked Nerissa to wait because the girl was early for once, and when she knocked on the door Shoshana had been busy with Hecate's spine‑ crippling spell. She had renewed it once and now decided it was time to call a halt. Not because she had any pity for Mix Cellini, but due to her own frugality. The spell could be re‑ used four times; she had only done the business twice and who knew when someone else would come along that Shoshana would think desereved a bad back? Afterall, she was going to have to pay for it. Just because no account had yet come in from Hecate, this didn't mean the witch wasn't going to charge her. Hecate was like those very upmarket doctorsor dentists who send in their accounts and give you a nastyshock months after their treatment has ended and you've forgotten all about it.

The table was still littered with the paraphernalia requiredby the spell. Not exactly eye of newt and toe of frog but severalvessels of distilled water, a phial of sulphuric acid, and one ofpregnant woman's urine‑ sometimes difficult to get, that one, but Kayleigh, who was living with Abbas Reza and expecting his child, had happily produced it‑ a jar of bicarbonate of sodaa nd a bottle of green ink. Not that she was going to use any of it, he had had his two weeks of pain, but she had to throw the urine away, restore the bicarb to the cupboard where it belonged, and put the sulphuric acid back in its ribbed green bottle. All this must be put away before Nerissa came in and the gemstones were laid out instead.

Nerissa had always been in awe of Madam Shoshana. She was more than a little afraid of her and she disliked the wizard and the owl, the dirt (though not the untidiness) repelled her, and Shoshana herself was possessed of an ugliness that made her shrink. Today the soothsayer had got herself up in a feather‑ trimmed robe, grayish and bluish, and she wore a crestof black feathers on her head so that, to Nerissa, she looked like some evil bird of prey. Her clawlike hands played mysteriously above the ring of stones.

" When we've done that, " Nerissa said tentatively, putting her hands inside the circle, " may I ask you something? "

" Why not ask the stones? Which ones do you feel drawing toward your fingers? "

Knowing very well that whichever she said she felt moving toward her, Shoshana would say she had picked the wrong ones, Nerissa said the first colors that came into her head.

" The yellow one and the mauve one. "

" Really? I don't believe you are concentrating. Plainly, it'sthe blood‑ red carnelian and the pallid rose quartz that aredrawn to you today. Make your request to the carnelian. "

" All right. " The guests at Darel's party might have been gratified if they could have seen what a fool Nerissa thought she was, asking a piece of rock its opinion. But, blushing, she asked it. " There's a man, " she began and faltered. She clearedher throat. " There's a man that I want to know, I want to getsome idea if he'll‑ well, if he'll ever love me. "

Not surprisingly, the dark red crystal remained silent. Nerissa, feeling better now the words were out, almost giggled at the idea of its finding a voice. I wouldn't feel like laughing if it did though, she thought. Shoshana appointed herself its interpreter and Nerissa felt very unlike laughing at what she said.

" You will have to summon him. Call him and he will come. And then, when he comes, all will depend on how you speak to him. What you say then will determine your fate‑ for the restof your life. " Shoshana looked up and met Nerissa's eyes.

" That is all. The carnelian has spoken. "

The fifty pounds paid, for Madam Shoshana had put up her fee, Nerissa went back down the stairs, half afraid of encountering Mix Cellini. The only person she saw, waiting downstairs, the stairs being too narrow for two people to pass, was a woman and Madam Shoshana's next client.

The backache was still there when Mix woke up, but it had become subdued and dull, and the scratches on his ankle wer ehealing. He had slept well but for one bad dream. He showered, washed his hair under the shower, and dressed carefully, feeling much better, though unable to forget the dream. It had concerned his stepfather and his, Mix's, journey up to Norfolkto find Javy and kill him. This was something he had often fantasizedabout while still a child and hadn’t thought of for years. Javy had walked out on Mix's mother when Mix was fourteen and gone to live with another woman in King's Lynn or near it. But the desire to kill him in a painful way and watch him die in agony came back in the dream and when wide awake, as he now was, Mix saw nothing irrational or impractical in it. After all, he had killed two people (or thought he had) and got awaywith it, so there was no reason why he shouldn't kill a third.

Christie would have thought nothing of it, it would have been all in the day's work to him. javy had done more to deserve being his victim than either of those women, the young or the old.

There was little point in his going to Campden Hill Square before ten. The morning was fine, the sky clear and blue, and breakfast television told him it was going to be a warm and sunny day with the slight chance of a shower. The walk ahea'd of him seemed a pleasant prospect and what came at the end of it… He had a plan for getting into her house and to this endarmed himself with an orange cardboard folder left over fromhis job with the firm, a couple of election pamphlets he'd keptfor some forgotten reason, and two ballpoint pens. At twenty past nine he was ready to leave when he heard the front dooropen and close and someone enter the hallway below.

Of course it was Ma Winthrop. It was bound to be oneof them. They were like buses, another would be along in a minute. He should have got that key from them, by force if necessary. Imagine the fuss there'd have been as a result! Atfirst he felt at her arrival that tautening of the muscles which isone of the signs of fear, and then he reminded himself thathe had nothing to be afraid of. Old Chawcer was as hidden andinvisible as if she really was in Cambridge; more securely hidden, for no one could run her to earth where she was. So he said, " Morning, " to Ma Winthrop as he passed her in thehallway, and " Lovely day, " as he opened the front door. MaFordyce was turning in at the gate.

" Another meeting of the Women's Institute? " said Mix rudely. " Must be great to have so much time on your hands. "

Olive walked past him with her nose in the air.

She and Queenie spent a while indignantly discussing his behaviorand tearing his character to bits. Then, with two milky coffees with grated chocolate on top, in cups that Queenie had brought with her, and a Danish pastry each, they sat by the open French windows in the drawing room, holding a council as to what should be done about Gwendolen. Opening thosewindows had not been easy. The bolts were stuck until Olive oiled them. Finally she managed to wrench the two glass doors apart. About fifty dead spiders and their accumulated webs of aquarter of a century fell down onto the floor and somethingthat looked like a very old and long‑ deserted swallow's nestcollapsed on the steps, scattering mud and sticks and shatteredeggshells everywhere.

" How anyone can live like this! " exclaimed Olive, not forthe first time.

Queenie gave an exaggerated shudder. " It's quite awful. But you know, dear, we have to think what we're going to do about Gwen. If that man is to be believed she went to catch a train forCambridge on Monday morning, two days ago. Suppose he made Cambridge and the train up? Suppose she was just going for a little walk and while she was out she collapsed and nows he's in hospital somewhere? Who would know? Who would they tell? "

" Yes, but why would he? "

" Who knows what goes on in the mind of a man like that? He might be planning to get her out of this house so he can take it over. I've heard of unscrupulous tenants doing that to old people who are their landlords and he's exactly the type. "

The more practical Olive said they could try phoning hospitals.

" Yes, dear, but which hospitals? There must be hundreds inLondon. Well, dozens. Where do we start? "

" Around here. If she went for a little walk, like you saidt hough it seems very unlike Gwen to me‑ she wouldn't have got far before she collapsed. So it's going to be St. Charles around the corner here or St. Mary's Paddington, isn't it? I'll phone St. Charles the minute I've finished my coffee. Oh, Queenie, look what I've found down the side of this chair! It's that thong thing poor Gwen went on and on about. "

" How very peculiar. I'm going to shut those doors, dear, or more flies will come in. "

Before leaving home, he had fortified himself with two strongv odkas. No tonic, just a couple of ice cubes. Not Dutch but Russian courage. He set off to walk along Oxford Gardens toward Ladbroke Grove. His backache had gone but for the occasional faint twinge to remind of what had been, and he feltc harged with confidence. Passing the house where Danila had lived, he told himself how silly he'd been to worry about her. Nothing had come of it. Most of the things you have worried about have never happened. He had read that somewhere andi t was true.

Above his head, Kayleigh was at one of the windows of the first‑ floor flat she now shared with Abbas Reza, looking down into the street. Trees, still in full leaf, grew on both sides alongit, but outside this house one had been cut down and removedso it was possible to get a clear view. They were going out for lunch, which they planned to have in a pub on the river. Kayleigh wasn't due for work at the spa before four, and she wass tudying the pavements for evidence of raindrops. She neverbothered with macs or umbrellas herself but Abbas, being older, took a serious view of these things.

She called to him, " I don't know what those splashes on the window was, Abby, but it wasn't rain. Come and see. "

Abbas came over, put his arm around her waist, and lookeddown. A man in the kind of clothes called " smart casual" waswalking past in the direction of Ladbroke Grove.

" It is he! "

Any student of such matters would have known Abbas was an incomer to the United Kingdom by the grammatical correctnessof his English. Kayleigh set him right.

" What's him, Abby? "

" The person who has just passed by, it is he I passed on the stairs when he has been visiting Miss Kovic. "

" You're kidding. "

" Oh, no, I kid you not, Kayleigh. He is the boyfriend all search for. "

" Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure? 'Cos if you are, you'll have to tell the police. So are you positive? "

Now you put it like this, no, I am not sure that I could swear in a court, this is he. I must think. If only it is possible for me to see him close. If I go after him, if I go now… "

" No, you don't, Abby. We're going out‑ remember? And if you get up close and personal it'll be you they're arresting, not him. "

No bus came so Mix walked all the way down Ladbroke Grove and crossed Holland Park Avenue to make his way up to Nerissa's house. Her car wasn't on the forecourt. Did that mean she had put it away in the garage or could she be out? Please don't let her be out, he prayed to a deity whom he didn't believe in and who he dimly knew wouldn't support him in escapingretribution but just might help him to become Nerissa'slover. The deity, or guardian angel, did. As he was walking upthe path of a house next door but two, rather ostentatiouslybrandishing the orange folder, the Jaguar swept up the hill andswung into her driveway. She couldn't have seen him, he wasconcealed from view by a large bush coveered in red berries. Mix rang the bell and when it was answered by a woman in large black‑ rimmed glasses and a pin‑ striped suit began earnestly outlining to her his own assessment of the virtues of Proportional Representation.

As always, Nerissa had scanned the street as she drove up itfor the blue Honda. Once more it wasn't there. It hadn't beenthere for‑ well, it must be two weeks by now. He's given up, she thought, and this, though what she longed for, would leaveher with no excuse for phoning Darel Jones.

Even though she had had a shower before she went out, she always felt soiled after she had been in Madam Shoshana's well, " den" was the word she always used for it. Anyway, she was going out to lunch with the Vogue woman and she might aswell get ready now. So when Mix rang her doorbell half anhour later, she was dressed in a pale yellow suit, her hair up ina chignon, and her legs encased in primrose yellow suede boots.

The woman in the severe suit and the glasses had given Mix a hard time. She told him she was a Member of Parliament, until recently a lecturer at the London School of Economics. What she didn't know about Proportional Representation, and indeed all psephological systems, plainly wasn't worth knowing, while he knew nothing but what he had read in a tabloidnewspaper. He left, feeling unfairly punished for simply trying to find out if people really like voting for an individual insteadof a political party. The man who answered the door at the nexthouse wasn't interested and became plainly exasperated when Mix, in rather a muddled way, tried passing on to him some of the explanations put forward by the MP. No one was at home next door to Nerissa. He drew a deep breath, told himself not to be shy, she was just a woman like any other, and went to the door.

She was aghast to see him but where another woman in herposition might have slammed the door in his face without waitingto hear what he had to say, she stood, holding it open. She had been brought up to be well‑ mannered.

Mix had rehearsed what he would say. " Well, good morning, Miss Nash. We're not exactly strangers to each other, arewe? If I remember rightly, the first time was at my friend Colette'shome. "

" We've met before, yes, " she said.

She looked so beautiful he could hardly keep the yearning out of his eyes or the hope from his expression. Like a yellowrose, he thought, unaccustomed to lyrical comparison, like anAfrican queen. " I don't expect you knew, " he said, using the rehearsed words, " that I do market research in my leisure time. "

" No, " she said. " No, I didn't. "

" I'd like to talk to you today about elections. I expect you know what Proportional Representation is, don't you? "

She said nothing, her face puzzled and, in some way he recognized but couldn't have explained, helpless.

" May I come in? "

It was the last thing she wanted. If he had been a total stranger she would have been able to refuse him but they had spoken before, three times before. " I'm going out. " She wasn't for an hour. " Just for a minute, then. "

As soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew she shouldn't have uttered them. She should have been firm, strong, said what she'd have said and often had, to Jehovah's Witnesses and kitchen equipment salesmen, thank you very much but she just wasn't interested. Before she had thought this he was in the house, walking slowly through the hallway looking admiringly from side to side, nodding and smiling in aI way that plainly indicated admiration of everything.

She would have kept him in the hall and as near to the frontdoor as possible but he didn't give her the chance. He was in the living room before she could attempt to stop him. Today was the day the flowers came. Lynette had taken them in whileshe was at Madam Shoshana's and arranged them in the bigcream pottery and etched glass bowls. For a moment she saw itwith another's eyes, the eyes of someone not used to opulencegarnished with lilac and lilies and gerberas, and she understoodwhy he was so impressed.

" This is a very lovely home you have. "

" Thank you, " she said in rather a small voice.

" May I sit down, Miss Nash? And I have a second request.

“May I call you Nerissa? "

She didn't know how to say no to either. To refuse seemedc hurlish and somehow setting herself up as superior, and ever since she began to be known and sought after she had resolved never to think herself better than anyone else and certainly not to show it. Helplessly, she watched him settle himself on one of the sofas, open the orange cardboard folder he was carrying, and look up to give her a hugely wide and toothy grin.

Mix had had plenty of practice, if not quite at this sort of thing, at least in selling himself and his various products, being pleasant and mildly flirtatious with women. Any diffidence he might have had in other circumstances faded when he was talking to a woman and putting across a point. Besides, the vodkahad begun to do its work before he rang the MP's bell.

He no longer saw any reason to beat about the bush and he said, " I'm going to come out with the truth frankly, Nerissa, and tell you I'm not here to talk about politics or elections or boring stuff like that. I don't know much about it anyway asyour smartass neighbor was kind enough to tell me to my face. No, I'm here to see you because what I said when we met in old Chawcer's house was all true, every single word of it. And I'd like to tell you again, choose my words a bit more carefully this time, but do you think you could rustle us up a coffee first, my love? "

Whether it was that " my love" that did it or his calling her great‑ aunt's friend " old Chawcer" or just his tone and look, she couldn't have said, but as for the coffee, she was glad of a chance to get out of the room and to her mobile. Not that she was going to call Darel jones, much as she would have loved tosee him. But she knew she couldn't summon him. It would be unfair on him to fetch him away from work and a nasty underhandtrick to play on this awful man. All these weeks she had been longing for the chance to call him, even thinking of encouraging this man in order to have an excuse, but now shecouldn't do it. It was her father she was going to phone. She put the coffee and the boiling water in the cafetiere first. Then she dialed her dad at his office and when he answered, just said,

" Dad, he's here, in the house, that stalker I told you about. "

" Right, " he said. " I'll handle it. "

Nerissa's agent and, come to that, her mother and father and her brothers and Rodney Devereux, would all have said if asked that Nerissa must be quite accustomed to dealing with men making unwelcome overtures to her, but in fact very few had done so. There was something about her, something icemaidenish yet warm and innocent, that put off any man even marginally more sensitive than Mix Cellini. Those whose approaches were welcome had been few and all of them knew where they stood before the initial overture was made. Mix, onthe other hand, was unable to tell the difference between a woman who agreed to give him coffee and a seat because she loathed the idea of being rude and one who did so becauseshe shortly hoped to be in bed with him. He took the cup shehanded him with a slight smile and a sexy look and said, " Come and sit here by me. "

" I'll stay here if you don't mind. "

" Well, I do mind, I mind a lot. " Mix distorted his face into an ingratiating smile. " But we'll let it pass for the time being.

Now tell me, where did you get your lovely name, Nerissa? It really is a most beautiful name and, do you know, I don't think I've ever come across it before. "

" My mum got it out of a Shakespeare pray. "

" Really? I see you come from educated people. I reckon these mixed partnerships are best, don't you? Mixed‑ up genes and all that. My grandad was Italian. I don't mind telling you, though I don't tell everyone, he was an Italian prisoner of war. Romantic, eh? "

She said helplessly, " I don't know. "

" Maybe I'd best get down to the nitty‑ gritty. This is very good coffee, by the way. Very good. What I'm starting to say is, me and you, I guess we've a lot in common, same sort of background, same sort of age, both fitness freaks and both living in good old West Eleven. I don't mind telling you I've been in love with you for yonks and I flatter myself you don't exactly dislike me. So what say we put it to the test? "

She was on her feet now, seriously frightened and more so when he too got up. They stood no more than a yard apart and he took a step toward her.

" How about a little kiss for starters? "

She was preparing to fight him off, use her boot heels as weapons if necessary, but as she backed away the doorbell rang. It disconcerted him. He looked, not bewildered or disappointed, but furiously angry, a pinpoint of red light in each eye, his upper lip curling back.

" Excuse me, " she said, knowing these words were ridiculous in the circumstances. She almost ran to the door to let her father in.

It wasn't her father. It was Darel Jones.