Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

"She has done a moonshine flit," said Abbas Reza, thinkingof his rent. "I have seen it before, many many times. They leave all like this, always it is the same."

"I didn't think she was that sort of person. I'm reallysurprised."

"Ah, you are innocent, Miss-?"

"Call me Kayleigh."

"You are innocent, Miss Kayleigh. At your young youth you have not seen the wicked world as I have. Your purity is unsullied." Mr. Reza had left his wife behind in Iran years before and considered himself free in amative respects. "There is nothingto be done. We cut our losses."

"I haven't exactly got any losses," Kayleigh said as they went down again. "Unless you count losing a friend."

"Of course. Naturally, I count." Mr. Reza was thinking that he could sell Danila's clothes, though they wouldn't be worth much. But while in the room he had spotted a watch that looked like gold and a new CD player. "Come, I make you a cup of coffee."

"Oh, thanks. I will."

An hour had passed before Kayleigh emerged once more into Oxford Gardens, quite high on the strongest and thickest coffee she had ever tasted and a date for the following evening with the man she was already calling Abbas. Danila had gone out of her head but she came back into it now and she found she couldn't altogether agree with her new friend that his tenan thad done a moonlight flit and simply vanished. She's amissing person, Kayleigh said to herself. The words sounded very serious to her. She's a missing person, she said again, and the police ought to know.

It was a cooler and duller morning than of late and Mix was once more sitting in his car at the top of Campden Hill Square. He should have been at Mrs. Plymdale's. She had called him on his mobile to tell him, but very nicely, that the new belt he had fixed to her treadmill had come off the previous evening. Would he come and put things to rights as soon as possible? Mix had said he'd be with her by eleven in the morning but instead he was outside Nerissa's house, desperate for a sight of her. It was as if she were his fix. He had made a call in Chelseaand another in West Kensington but a further shot of the drug was essential before he did any more work. Seeing her th eweek before, speaking to her and she speaking to him, hadn't improved things. It had made them worse. Before, he had wanted to get to know her for the fame being with her couldconfer on him. Now he was in love.

He waited and waited, reading the last chapter of Christie's Victims , but looking up every few seconds in case she appeared.It was half-past midday before she did, dressed in a white skirtsuit, chic and very short, and incongruous white trainers. She was carrying a pair of white sandals with four-inch heels. Those shoes were for putting on, he supposed, when she got to wherevershe was going, and the trainers were for driving. He'd follow her. Having seen her, he couldn't bear her to be out ofhis sight..

She passed him but he wasn't sure if she saw him or not. He followed her car along Notting Hill Gate and down Kensington Church Street. For once, there wasn't much traffic and he kept behind her. From Kensington High Street she went eastwardand he did too. At a red light she turned around and heknew she had spotted him. He waved and she gave a small halfsmile before driving on.

Before she went to the police, Kayleigh called Directory Enquiries and asked them for the number of a Mrs. Kovic living somewhere in Grimsby. They found just one woman of that name. Kayleigh phoned her and discovered she was English, a Yorkshirewoman who had married and divorced a man from Serbia. Danila's mother had been her sister-in-law. She gave, her a phone number and Kayleigh spoke to Danila's stepfather, who seemed scared of being involved.

"If anything's happened to her," he said, "I don't want to know. We didn't get on. It's nothing to do with me."

"She'd no one else," Kayleigh said. "I've been very worried."

"Yes? I don't know what you think I can do. You want to look at it from my point of view. I've lost my wife, I've got two young boys to bring up. Me and Danny didn't never have a good relationship, and when I saw her at the funeral I said I'dgo my way and she'd go hers-right?"

It had begun to seem to Kayleigh that no one had cared very much about Danila. Madam Shoshana had quickly forgotten her existence. This indifference frightened her. It was very unlike the feelings in her own family where her parents took a keen interest in everything their three children did and worried themselves into small frenzies if one of them wasn't immediately available on the phone. Kayleigh went to the police in Ladbroke Grove and filled in a missing person form, saying nothing about the conversation she had had with Danila's stepfather.

Lunch with her agent was Nerissa's reason for going to the restaurant in St. James's, and the request from a glossy magazine of international prestige to feature her on their frontcover and run a four-page article about her, the reason for thelunch. She parked the Jaguar on a meter in St. James's Square and changed her trainers for the stilt-heeled white sandals. The lunch would have to be a short one or she'd get clamped. As she locked the car that man arrived, the one who had spokent o her on Thursday outside the old lady's house. This was the third time she had encountered him and she knew with as lightly sick feeling that he was following her.

He wasn't the first stalker in her life. There had been several, notably one who persistently called at her parents' house when she was very young and still lived at home, but her father, who was very large and very black, a formidable threat in the caller's eyes, had finally intimidated him. Darling Dad made a wonderful bodyguard. The other stalker had been rather like the present one, waiting outside her house and following her. It had been the police who had warned him off. The funny thing was, Nerissa thought, as she walked through into St.James's Street, that they all looked very much alike. All were of middle height, in their early thirties, fair-haired with characterless faces and staring eyes. This one was following her along King Street now, probably fifty yards behind. She was a little early for her lunch and she wondered if she could make some move to shake him off.

The shops in St. James's Street are not the sort a woman can go into and browse about, if necessary concealing herself behind racks of clothes or disappearing into the ladies' powderroom. There was nowhere to hide. If she stopped to look into the hat shop window or crossed the street to linger outside the rather grand wine merchant's, would he make this as a reason to speak to her? The thing she mustn't do was look back. The strap above the high heel of her sandal had slipped down and the shoe flapped. She bent down to adjust it, felt the presenceof someone standing close by her, unwillingly looked up-andinto the face of Darel Jones.

She couldn't have been more delighted if it had been herfather and said, almost involuntarily, "Oh, I'm so pleased to see you!"

He seemed surprised. "Are you?"

"There's a man stalking me. Look. No, he's gone. That's your doing, I'm sure. He saw you, thought you were a friend of mine, and-and disappeared. How marvelous."

If he minded being taken for a friend of hers he didn't show it. "This stalker-that's very serious. You'll have to tell the police."

"I can't keep telling them. He's not the first one, you see. Perhaps he'll give up now. I always hope they will. But what are you doing here?"

"I might say the same for you. I'm a banker." He pointed to a Georgian edifice with a brass plate that said Laski Brothers,International Bankers since 1782 . "I work there."

"Do you?" Nerissa had a very narrow idea of what a banker did. "D'you mean that if I went in there and asked them to cash a check you'd be behind a glass thing and you'd give me a bunch of notes?"