Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

The house was always quiet, but this afternoon it seemed unusually silent. He began to climb the stairs. Nerissa wouldr ecognize him another time. She would come out and speak to him, maybe invite him in for a coffee. When that happened it would be his chance to ask her out. He'd take her to that double-barreled Italian place with the funny name that won the Italian Restaurant of the Year award. Luckily, he'd been able to save a bit. He'd wanted it for one of those flat-screen TVs, but Nerissa was far more important.

As he reached the top flight, thoughts of Reggie and his ghost invariably drove out everything else. Even Nerissa hadn't sufficient power over him to displace that. It was early, of course, but already dusk and the passages up here were always dark. Sometimes he thought of shutting his eyes when he got to the top and letting himself blind into his flat, but he feared ahand touching him on the shoulder if he did that or a voice whispering in his ear. Better to face up to it and look. No one was there, nothing was there. Everything was as it ought to be. Or was it? Mix stood still, trying to remember. He was almost positive he had shut the door to the room where Danila lay under the floorboards. He knew he had because he always did. It had never been left ajar like that in all the time he'dbeen here.

Tiptoeing for some reason, he approached the door, thought that flinging it open would be the best way but opened it stealthily just the same. The room was empty and very hot. Sun blazed down on the glass. A smell, not very strong but quite unpleasant, must be coming in through the open window, only the window wasn't open. He crossed to it and triedt o raise the sash but found this impossible, the sashcords werebroken, one of them dangling. Some of the smells you got in London were untraceable and seemed to make their way in through cracks in the fabric of a house. He looked out of the window. The Indian man's guinea fowl were huddled together on the roof of a low shed, watched by Otto on the wall.

Closing the door behind him, Mix put his key into his own lock. Not only a strange smell but strange music too. It must have started up while he was in that room, the sort of music he had never been able to follow or understand, while some people seemed to like it. He suspected they didn't really like it but pretended to because it made them seem clever. A piano, possibly two pianos, tinkled away while someone sawed at a violin. Where was it coming from? No doubt, the old bat's bedroom. He went into the flat, thinking about that girl under the floorboards.

Was he going to leave her there? He hadn't intended that at first. The room next door was just a temporary resting place.,He'd meant to put the body in the boot of his car and disposeof it somewhere. Reggie had never gone so far as that. His victims had all been buried inside the house or in the garden, but Reggie hadn't got a car, few had in those days. Of course his own experience was very different from Reggie's. The necrophile had killed all those women in order to have sex with them as they lay dying or were recently dead while he, Mix, had killed someone in self-defense because she said such dreadful things to him. What he had done was no more than manslaughter.

In Reggie's day, forensics hadn't reached anywhere like thepeak of expertise they had achieved now. Mix knew all about it, as anyone must who watched television. Now, with all the tests they did, they'd be able to tell if he'd carried a girl's body in hiscar, they'd know who she was by DNA testing. Reggie had to conceal those bodies from his wife until she became his victim too. He was forced to bury them. Surely things would be far safer for himself if he left Danila where she was, where no onewould ever have reason to go. But who had been in that room today? Probably old Chawcer, hunting for more rubbish in the drawers of that cabinet.

Suppose it had been Reggie's ghost, fascinated by someone else's concealment of a body? Suppose Reggie, instead of haunting him with intent to frighten, was watching over him? He'd feel better about it when he'd been back to Madam Shoshana and heard what she had to say.

But a ghost was equally frightening, he thought, whether it was threatening you or protecting you. The fact that it was aghost at all made you look at the world in a different way. Heshivered, thinking that perhaps it wasn't too early to mix himselfa Boot Camp.

Abbas Reza noticed Danila's absence only when she failed to pay her rent. He expected his rents to be paid in cash, preferably fifty- and twenty-pound checks, put in an envelope and pushed through the letterbox in his door. No checks and nocredit cards. Ms. Kovic hadn't paid her rent last Saturday and now another week had gone by. He had already banged on her door to ask for it and got no answer, not even at half-past midnight. She had never seemed one of those stop-outs to him, not a night bird at all, but he had been mistaken. Now she'd been in London a few months she was finding her feet, changing her good ways for bad ones, as happened to them all. Such was the corruption and creeping evil of the western world where God was mocked and morals had flown out of the window. Sometimeshe thought with nostalgia of Tehran, but not for long.On the whole it was better here.

The temp, who was still at Shoshana's Spa, was efficient, better-looking than the Bosnian girl, and a good advertisement for the spa with that queenly figure, fine posture, and face likea Nordic goddess. Pity she wasn't staying. Shoshana had had several replies to her ad and was interviewing applicants. Clients were coming thick and fast. That fool who thought he ived in a haunted house had been back and she'd had to stop herself laughing out loud at his face when she'd told him to avoid the number thirteen if he didn't want to see the ghost again. She had almost forgotten Danila's existence.

Kayleigh hadn't. Before she met Mix, Danila would have said Kayleigh was the only friend she had in London, not that they had ever seen much of each other socially.

Danila hadn't a phone in her room in Oxford Gardens, so Kayleigh had made several attempts to call her on her mobile. It rang and rang but always in vain. Kayleigh wasn't worried yet. If anything had happened to Danila, like her being mugged or attacked, it would have been in the papers. She might be ill and not answering her mobile. Still, she wouldn't go on beingill for a fortnight, and now it was over two weeks since Danilahad failed to answer her phone when Shoshana called her.Kayleigh went around to the house in Oxford Gardens.

All the rooms and the two flats had entryphones. Abbas Reza was proud of organizing things properly. Besides, hedidn't want visitors waking him at all hours. Kayleigh rang and rang Danila's bell and when she got no answer, pressed the keyabove, which was written rather mysteriously: Mr. Reza, Head of the House , as if he were a top prefect in a school. A slender, rather handsome man with a small mustache andhair so black and glossy it might have been painted on, answered the door. He looked in his late thirties. "What can I do for you?"

He was polite because Kayleigh was a pretty blonde of twenty-two. "I'm looking for my friend Danila."

"Ah, yes, Ms. Kovic. Where is she? That's what I askmyself."

"I ask myself too," said Kayleigh. "She doesn't answer my calls and now you say she's not here. Could we get into her room, d'you think?"

Mr. Reza liked that "we." He smiled reassuringly. "We try,"he said.

They knocked on her door first. Clearly, no one was inside.The landlord inserted his key, turned it and they were in. As he did so, the thought came to him that she might be lying in there dead. Such things happened, in Tehran as well as London, unfortunately. What a shock for this tender and surely uncorrupted young girl! But no, there was nothing. Nothing but the kind of untidiness they all seemed to live in, discarded clothes everywhere, an empty teacup with very old tea dregs in it and, in the sink, under cold water scummed with floating grease, a plate, a knife, and a fork. The bed had been roughly made. Beside it, on top of a stack of magazines, was a copy of the Shoshana's Spa brochure, glossy turquoise and silver.