Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

He'd been to the Benefit Office and signed on. They gave him some money and offered a whole lot of jobs he hadn't liked the look of. Time enough for that in a couple of weeks. Not wanting to encounter any of the three women, he picked up the Dig-it and the Wall mail-order catalogs and took them upstairs, though being neither a gardener nor a woman, they weren't much use to him. Twenty-two stairs to the floor where she'd slept, seventeen up to where no one slept and no one ever went, thirteen more to the top. He didn't always count them, not when he was afraid, but he did now, as if he could make them fourteen.

The thong lying in her lap, Hazel Akwaa was asking her aunt and Queenie if they had thought of going through Gwendolen's clothes. They both shook their heads and Oliveshrugged.

"It seems so intrusive, dear," said Queenie, "such an invasionof her privacy. I mean, how would you like it if you went away and your friends started rifling through your clothes? You'd feel violated ."

"Yes, I would if I'd told them where I was going and left the address of where I'd be. But if I'd disappeared and was missing I'd be glad. I'd want to be found."

"On the whole, I think we should," Olive said. They began climbing the stairs. "I hope someone's feeding that cat."

"Food has been put down for him every day but it's not been touched since Sunday. He's gone off somewhere."

"It looks as if he went when Gwendolen went," said Queenie.She told Hazel about the missing sheet.

"Are you quite sure?"

"She has such funny ways. 1 thought she could have just taken off the top sheet and left the bottom one and the blankets but I looked in the washing machine and even inside thatawful old copper-you never know with Gwendolen. She might even have taken it with her."

"What, the cat or the sheet?"

"Well, either. No one, but no one, no matter how eccentric,would take a soiled bedsheet away somewhere to stay with friends. You'd have to be seriously mad to do that. And how could she manage a cat?"

By now they were all in Gwendolen's bedroom and Olive had opened the window because the weather was still fine and the sun shining.

"It doesn't smell very nice," said Hazel.

Her aunt shrugged. "Places don't if you don't clean them."

"Youk now, this carpet is actually blue but it's got such a mat of cat's hair covering it that it looks gray."

Hazel opened the door of the wardrobe and was met bythe powerful reek of camphor. Gwendolen's ancient dresses crowded together on hangers long ago covered in ruched silk and hung with lavender bags. Shoes were jumbled together underneatht hem, not placed in pairs. Olive began to count them.

"Seven," she said. "And that's significant. She told me notlong ago she had seven pairs of shoes."

"She must have bought some more."

"I'm sure she didn't. She would have told me. I'm not saying she made a special confidante of me, only that Gwen couldn't buy anything, let alone a big item like that, without moaning about the cost of it to everyone she spoke to."

"She couldn't have gone awaywithout any shoes," said Hazel.

"Nor without her ruby ring, dear." Queenie had opened the jewel box and was looking inside. She held up a ring with a redstone. "It was her mother's and she never went out without it."

"You are saying I sit at this window all day every day in case this man comes by? You are not serious, Kaylee."

" Yes,I am, Ab. If it's him and he's taken Danila hostage and got her shut up somewhere, handcuffed and tied up and all that, you won't be able to live with yourself if you don't goto the cops. I bet he comes down here a lot. I bet he lives round here."

"Kaylee," said Abbas in the voice of someone to whom a great revelation has been vouchsafed on the road to Damascus.

"Oh, Kaylee… "

"Whatever is it? You've got quite-well, pale, if you see what I mean."

"Kaylee. That night, after I see him on the stairs, I pick up a card from the floor I see him drop. He is drunk, you understand,and it fall from his jacket. I bring it here, into my ownflat and… "

"Where is it now, Ab?"

"Do you think I keep it? A strange man's visiting card?"

"But you read what was on it?"

Abbas sat down and pulled Kayleigh on to his knee. "Sit with me, my flower, and help me to think. I think hard what was on it."

"Yes, you do that, darling. If you let poor Danila down now,what's our baby going to think of you.”

Their baby, as yet a very small fetus in its mother's womb,need know nothing about it, as far as Abbas could see, and would hardly be concerned with its father's memory processes for another fifteen years, if then. But he could understand that if it was in his power to help the police find the author o fDanila's wrongs, whatever they might be, untimely death possibly, though he wasn't going to say that to Kayleigh, who was in a fragile condition and might easily be upset, he was bound to do so. He thought.

"One word I remember from that card," he said. "Not a man's name or address… "

"Oh, Abby… "

"Wait. One word. It is Fiterama. Yes, Fiterama. What it means, I cannot tell. But this is on the card."

Kayleigh jumped off his lap. She was very excited. "I know what it means, Ab. It's the name of the firm the man works for as services the machines at the spa. Madam Shoshana told me. He didn't come back with the parts so she gave them a ring to slag him off."

The secondhand crime bookstore wanted to charge Mix twentyfive pounds for a book on Christie, published forty years before.He had just happened to take it down from the shelf to look at an illustration, when the shop assistant pounced.

"It's daylight robbery," he said. "I hope you don't find a buyer."

"There's no need to be abusive," said the shop assistant.

Walking home from Shepherd's Bush, Mix told himself he would buy no more books on Christie, he would read nothing more about Christie, it was all over. He might even bring the books he had and see if that chap would buy them. But for Christie, Danila would be alive and he, Mix, would never havekilled a dead woman. If he were being strictly honest, he'd say Christie had killed them both himself, bringing his total up to eight.

Before he set up his own business he'd have to get himself work, and he certainly couldn't take any of the clerks' and janitors' and council drivers' jobs on offer. He'd be in Javy's class if he did that. Javy-ever since he'd had that confrontation with Nerissa's bully boy he'd been thinking of Javy, brooding on him, even dreaming of him. It was thirteen years since he'd seen the man but his hatred hadn't diminished. He'd thought it had, that it was in the past, but he'd been wrong. Javy had seemed an obstacle he could never surmount, but now he had dealt with those two women-"dealt with" was a more realisticway of putting it than "killed”-taking revenge on his stepfather presented itself as quite feasible.

Ahead of him, still parked at the curb, he could see the Brunswicks' old Volvo. It would just be trouble, he thought, a car, however reputable, of that age, breaking down on longer journeys, requiring endless maintenance. While he stared at it,noticing that the £300 notice on its windscreen was now hanging lopsidedly, Sue Brunswick came out of her front door, carrying a large sooty-brown cat in her arms. In the events of lastweekend, he had forgotten all about pursuing her.

"Have you thought any more about buying our car?"

"I don't reckon I want it," he said.

The cat he recognized. If he hadn't known him by his color and size he would have by the look of contemptuous hatred Otto turned on him. The eyes of imperial jade lingered coldl yand then, snuggling against Sue Brunswick's full bosom, Otto buried his face lovingly in her neck.