Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

Lying there on her back, she pulled the quilt over her withher sound right hand. What was wrong with her she guessed,and had done so for the past hour, but only now could she put it into silent words. She had had a stroke.

Mix had come out onto the landing because she made such anoise getting out of bed. What was wrong with her? Perhaps she always made that much noise about going to bed. He wouldn't know. He never remembered noticing her bedtime before.

He asked himself if he'd be able to kill her in cold blood. Danila had been different. Danila had driven him into an uncontrollablerage with her insults and her unprovoked attackon Nerissa. The light on the landing went out and the Isabellal ights had disappeared while the street lamp was out of order. Once I'm alone here, he thought, I'm going to get all the lights in the place changed so that they stay on longer and I'm going to buy normal-size bulbs for them, hundreds or hundred and fifties, not this rubbish. It won't be for long, I'll soon be gone.

He looked across to the thin shaft of light coming from hiss lightly open front door, then, his eyes becoming used to thedark, along the left-hand passage. A figure was walking silently away with his back to Mix, as if he had come out of the neares troom. He turned as he reached the farthest door, saw him and grew still. Mix saw the gleam on the glasses on his beaky nose.Then the ghost lifted his shoulders in a small shrug. He put out his hands in the sort of gesture that indicates doubt or despair,and his lips parted. No sound came from them. Mix shut his eyes and when he opened them the ghost was gone.

The fear he usually felt seemed to have been partly banished by the greater terror of the police. He remained where he was, staring at the place where the ghost had been. The shrug had meant something. The ghost had been trying to tell him something. Perhaps it had been advising him to do what he had almost decided on. He, Reggie, had killed six women and been not much fazed by it. No one knew why he'd killed his own wife, but opinion was that she had found out about his murders and not only refused to protect him but threatened to do just what old Chawcer was doing to him. So was that what his ghost had been saying? Kill her. I never thought twice about it. Kill her and do what I did with Ethel.

Thoughts had begun to run out of Gwendolen's head, leaving it almost empty. Stephen Reeves appeared fleetingly before vanishing down a long road where those thoughts ran and where in the distance, on the edge of something indefinable, she could make out misty shapes who might or might not be Papa and Mama. Gradually they too faded and slipped overthat edge where Stephen had gone. She was alone in the worldbut there was nothing unusual in that. She had always been alone. And now, as something rumbled and murmured inside the place where thoughts had been, she knew she was goingout of the world alone. For no reason, with no particular desire, she told her hands and her arms to move, but they no longer obeyed her and she was too tired to tell them again. She breathed very slowly, in and out, in and after a long time out, in again very lightly and out on a long rattling sigh. If there had been watchers they would have waited for the next inhalation and when none came, have risen from their chairs, closed her eyes, and drawn the sheet up over her face.

Bright moonlight poured into the bedroom. When she camet o bed Gwendolen had been too ill and too tired to draw the curtains, and in the four hours that had passed, an almost fullmoon had mounted into the clear sky. Because of the positionof the large double bed and the height and width of the window,the moon between the half-open curtains spread a paleband across the bedclothes, a stripe of whiteness, leaving herface in the dark. Earlier than usual, the lights in Mr. Singh's house had gone out and the fairy light tree was also indarkness.

To his dismay Mix found himself trembling as he came into the bedroom, not from the temperature but from fear. Ye twhat was there to be afraid of? This time the ghost hadn't even made him shiver. All the doors downstairs were locked and, where this was possible, bolted. He and she were alone. The ghost was upstairs of course but Mix had felt and still felt that Reggie approved of what he was about to do. And, mystifyingly, the pain in his back had gone. He had taken no more ibuprofen, yet it was gone. He'd be all right now.

As he approached the bed a black shape uncurled itself andreared up, arching its back. The green eyes seemed larger andbrighter than usual.

"I'll kill you too," said Mix.

He made a lunge for Otto who eluded his grasp with ease, hissed like a snake, and leapt for the open door and the stairs. The woman on the bed was perfectly still. Do it quickly, hesaid to himself, do it now. Don't look at her. Just do it. Her head was on one pillow and there was another beside her, athird up-ended against the bedhead. He took hold of the upendedpillow in both trembling hands and turning his headaway, pressed it down on her face as hard as he could.

She didn't move. There was to be no struggle. She remained utterly still. He held his hands there and they steadied while hecounted to a hundred, two hundred… At five hundred he let his hands relax and as they did so his fingers touched the skin of her neck. It was icy cold. He had never before touched such an old person-his grandmother had died at seventy-and he wondered if all of them were as cold as that, the heat in theblood, the warm life, cooling gradually with age.

He put the pillow back where he had found it and pulled thebedclothes off her body. It surprised him to see that she wasfully dressed. Maybe she always went to bed like that, nevertook her clothes off. He stripped the top sheet out from under the coverlet and blanket and began to roll the body up in it. By now he had some experience of this soh of thing, he was lessfearful and less clumsy. The trembling that he couldn't accountfor had entirely ceased. He felt very calm and resigned. He hadhad to do it. Before he wound the end of the sheet around herhead and face he made himself look. Her wide-open eyes remindedhim of Danila's. But Danila's had been young and clear, her body warm to touch.These eyes, rheumy, clouded,lay in a nest of wrinkles. And this old woman was ice-cold.

She was much heavier than Danila and it took him a longtime to drag her up the stairs to the top, the body bumping on every step. He expected renewed back pain but there was none.Once the body was inside his flat and he had had a drink, afairly stiff gin, he went back to her bedroom and tidied the bed, making it look as he thought she might have made it, in a rather slovenly way. Her shoes, which she must have kicked off before lying down, he put into the cupboard to join the jumblea lready there. He was going to tell those who inquired that she had decided to go away and convalesce, leaving everything the way she would if she had really gone.

All the time he was dragging her upstairs he was thinking hemight injure his back again, but he was quite free of pain. And somehow he knew he would continue to be unless it came on later, as it had done last time. At the trial of Timothy Evans, Reggie had made the court believe he couldn't have killed Evans's wife because his back was too bad for him to lift her. I won't be going near any court, Mix told himself resolutely. I got rid of her to keep myself out of court.

He went downstairs and drew back the bolts on the front door in case Ma Winthrop or Ma Fordyce decided to come every early in the morning and thought it was funny the door being bolted. He didn't want anyone thinking anything was funny. This house was a dreadful place at night, such a place as shouldn't be allowed to exist, he thought. Living here for long would drive you mad. You'd feel it was moldering away and slowly rotting around you, the wood and the hangings and the ancient carpets disintegrating hour by hour, minute by minute. If you stood still and listened you could almost hear it, tiny drippings and droppings, moths chewing, flakes falling, splinters, rust, and mildew turning to dust. Why had he ever thoughthe wanted to live here? Why had he spent all that money on making a small part of the house fit to live in?