Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

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.