Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

No reply but the door growled ajar. He walked in, lifted his head and came face to face with Nerissa descending the stairs. For a moment he thought he must be hallucinating, he couldn'tbelieve his luck. It was as if fate was compensating him for his terrible experience of last evening. He found a voice that cameout rather shrilly.

"Good morning, Miss Nash."

She looked at him without smiling. "Hi," she said and she sounded frightened.

"Please don't be nervous," he said. "It's just-just that I'm always happy to see you."

She looked very beautiful-she couldn't help that-in jeans and a cotton top with a red poncho over it. Halfway down thestairs, she had stopped and stood there, as if a bit scared to pass him. "Did you follow me here?"

"Oh, no," he said in a tone intended to reassure. "No, no,no. I work here, servicing the equipment." He walked away from the foot of the stairs and waited by the lift. "Please comedown. I won't harm you."

That old bitch of a mother of hers and the great-aunt toomust have been working on her, turning her against him. He'd like to kill that old Fordyce woman. Nerissa came slowly downthe stairs, hesitated at the foot before saying, "Well, good-bye. Please don't… " She had slipped out of the door before ending her sentence.

She was going to say, please don't think me rude, I didn't understand, Mix thought. Or, please don't think I meant you'd harm me. Something like that. She was as nice as she was beautiful, kind and sweet. It would be her nasty old mother who'd taught her to ask him if he was following her, not the kind of thing she'd say naturally. Mothers could be their children's enemies. Look at his own, marrying Javy and, after he'd gone,bringing all those men back when she'd got three growing kids at home, learning her loose behavior. Nerissa's mum ought to be thankful her daughter had someone to adore her and, more than that, respect her in an old-fashioned way.

By this time the lift had taken him up to the spa floor. Where Danila had presided the first time he came there stood a woman almost as gorgeous as Nerissa, though an arctic blonde where she was dark, snow-white skin, a glacier-pale torrentof hair, long fingers tipped in silver. She must be the onewho had answered his ring. "I'll just let Madam Shoshana know you're here," she said in a debutante's voice.

Mix would very much rather she didn't. The chances weret he crazy old soothsayer wouldn't remember him from the sessioni n that upstairs room, but she might. And if she did, would she think it funny him also being the one she had a service contractwith? Did that matter? Mix would prefer no one to findanything funny about his behavior. He didn't want attentiondrawn to himself. Anyway, she wouldn't come up herself, she'dsend a message by this amazing-looking girl. Once more he gazed at her.

In the tones of Eliza Doolittle after her transformation, she said, "Whom do you think you're looking at?"

Mix walked a few paces away. "Which machines want seeing to?"

"Madam will show you. I'm new here."

Before he could answer, Shoshana came out of the lift, draped in black robes, hung with ropes of jet and looking like a female druid in mourning. Mix knew by her eyes that she recognized him before she spoke and when she did it was in acompletely different voice from the one he had heard predictinghis future, a shrill, sharp north London tone. "You've taken your time about coming. If reading the cards means more toyou than work, you're not going to get very far. The ones you've got to mend are two bikes, four and seven. Right?"

"Right," said Mix through gritted teeth.

He had to stop his mouth falling open when she said, "You fancied that girl who worked here. The skinny little one that left without a word. Didn't run off with you, did she?"

Mix managed a derisive smile. It was one of the hardest things he'd ever achieved. "What, me? I hardly knew her."

"That's what you men always say. I don't like men. Now you'd better get on with what you've come about."

What an old horror! He'd never come across a female of her age quite so horrible. She put Chawcer, Fordyce, and "Winthrop in the shade. He shuddered and turned his attention to the two stationary bicycles. Both needed a new part but different parts in each case. He didn't carry spares with him and, since he wasw orking freelance at Shoshana's, if he was to get them he'dhave to pinch them from the warehouse. Nothing to be done now. He told the icy beauty he'd order the necessary parts andcome back when he'd got them.

"When will that be?"

"A few days? Not more than a week."

"It had better not be. Madam will do her nut if you keep her waiting any longer."

He had more calls to make. One was a new customer who had never sent for him before and wanted to order a skier. Shelived in a place called St. Catherine's Mews on the border of Knightsbridge and Chelsea, but though he drove twice up and down Milner Street he couldn't find it. Leave it, he said tohimself, call her and ask her for directions. One of the few men who kept exercise equipment in his home had sent for him to Lady Somerset Road in Kentish Town but when he got there, perilously parked and afraid of being clamped, Mr. Holland-Bridgeman wasn't at home. Mix decided to go back briefly to St. Blaise House and check on that copper in the washhouse.

Approaching from Oxford Gardens, he wondered what he'd do if police cars were outside and policemen pacing about and blue and white crime tape stretched across the front garden. Turn around and hide somewhere, he thought, maybe go up north and home but not to his mother, who'd either have some new lover living with her or be back in the bin. His brother? They'd never got on well. Shannon was the only one in the family he'd had any sort of relationship with… St. Blaise Avenue was empty of people, relatively silent, the usual cars parked nose to tail along both sides. One space was left for Mix. He let himself into the house and stood listening, preparedfor Ma Fordyce or Ma "Winthrop to appear from thekitchen regions, waving a duster.

Unconvinced one or other of them wasn't in the house, he walked carefully through the breakfast room to the kitchen, a transformed place since cleaning operations conducted by those two, and in the washhouse. He sniffed, waited, sniffed again. No smell. His wrapping had been effective. Maybe Christie had also dealt with that particular problem in the same way-did they have plastic all that time ago? He found himself reluctant to lift the lid off the copper but he did it. There was no point in coming home at all at this hour and not doing that. The well-sealed, well-wrapped package she and the bag made was just as he had left it and, even with the lid up, he could smell nothing at all.

Then Mix made another discovery. If you didn't know what the package in the copper was you'd think it was just a big plastic sack full of old clothes someone had stuffed in there for aplace to put it. You wouldn't investigate any further. If it didn't smell and looked like the kind of bag people took to a launderette, wasn't it perfectly safe where it was? The situation was quite different for that man Beresford Brown, who began puttingup brackets for a radio, and behind a partition in RillingtonPlace found a woman's naked body. There was no smell because it was midwinter and cold. In his own case there'd be no smell because of the way he'd wrapped it. Why shouldn't itstay where it was? The idea seemed too daring and bold to be feasible, but why not? Wouldn't he worry about it all the time it was there?

Old Chawcer was no careful housewife. You could see thatfrom the way Fordyce and Winthrop had had to work to getthe place straight. She'd never go near that copper, she had awashing machine, and though it was old-fashioned it was stillusable. In the unlikely event of her looking inside the copper,all she'd see was old clothes in a plastic bag. So why not leave itthere? Mix closed the lid, wandered slowly back into thekitchen, thinking of this new and simpler plan, and came faceto face with Olive Fordyce. Because of his stealthy entry he hadthe satisfaction of making her jump, as the ghost had madehim, though he had been as alarmed as she and with morecause. She had a small white dog with her, about half the sizeof Otto.