Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

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where the yellow light from St. Blaise Avenue flowed in brightly, showing him that here too the system had never been replaced by electricity.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.