Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

Mix heard her too and wondered what was going on. Probably nothing. It was very likely no more than those two old vultures deciding to help themselves to whatever they could find before old Chawcer came back. That would be typical. She had probably possessed some valuable jewelry, those old girls always did. He congratulated himself. Most guys in his positionwould have been into her things once they'd found her deadand he felt quite smug because he hadn't touched a single one.

He heard the front door open and close, Ma Winthrop's voice calling out some rubbish about lightbulbs, and becauseall these comings and goings were making him nervous hecame out on to the landing. Ma Fordyce was going downstairs. As she reached the bottom the front doorbell rang. This happenedso seldom that it made Mix jump. Of course the light had gone out and tonight it was particularly dark, no moon,not so many lights showing in houses as usual. It was partly the fault of all those tall trees, concealing street lights behind greatdark branches. Someone had opened the front door. He heard a man's voice, rich and fruity, and for one moment he thoughtthe impossible: that this was the police. Then Ma Fordyce said, "Hallo, Tom. It is good of you to do this."

"No problem," said the fruity voice. "My pleasure. I brought a bottle of wine. I thought it wouldn't go down badlya nd when we've wetted our whistles I'll drive Mrs. Winthrop home. Can't let her go out alone on a night like this."

There was silence. They must all have gone into the drawingroom. Mix turned around slowly, took a step toward his front door and looking down the left-hand passage, saw the ghost standing at the end in the deep shadows. He clapped his hand over his mouth to stop himself crying out. The ghost stood still and seemed to be staring at him. Then it moved forward, its hands held out in front of it as if pleading for something, as if begging-or threatening? His front door had been left on the latch; Mix flung it wide open and fell inside the flat, tumbling over the doormat then leaning back, holding thedoor shut against the ghost. But he could feel no pressure against him and at last, still trembling, he got up and bolted thedoor top and bottom, something he had never done before.

Tom Akwaa was the first up in the morning. He always was anddidn't vary his routine just because he had taken the day off. "I'll stay till the police come," he said to Olive when she camedown for her tea. "Youwant me to remind them you're waiting for them?"

"Would you?"

She couldn't resist starting to clean the kitchen while he was on the phone. Olive belonged to a generation that changed the sheets when the doctor was coming and put on their best underwear before they went on a journey in case they were in an accident and had to go to hospital. Now she tidied and scrubbed the kitchen and wiped all the surfaces in case the policemen went in there for a cup of tea.

It was a relief to Mix to be going away. he might never comeback. Not to stay, at any rate. Just to collect his things and get his furniture stored while he found another place. The appearance the previous night of the ghost had been the last straw. Compared to that, all these people coming and going didn't amount to much, but it was a nuisance, and worrying too. Whohad that man been and what was he doing here?

His backache had returned. Not severely, nothing like on that terrible night after his grave-digging, but bad enough. He took two ibuprofen and started to pack. He probably wouldn't stay with Shannon for more than one night. The idea of sharing a room with her two unruly boys, one of them fourteenshe'd had both by the time she was nineteen-didn't appeal. He put in a spare pair of jeans and three shirts. His leatherjacket he'd wear. Now to get out of the house before meeting either of those two old witches.

The police needed no reminder once the information given them first by Abbas Reza and then by Olive and Queenie had been compared. A detective sergeant was out in the gardenw ith Tom Akwaa when Olive saw Mix Cellini coming down the stairs. She waited for him in the hallway, though she had no intention of telling him of the policeman's arrival.

"Where are you going?" she said in her best highhandedtone.

He had his backpack over one shoulder. "No business of yours but since you ask, I'm off to see my sister in Essex."

"I haven't seen your car about lately."

"No, you haven't, Nosy Parker, because it hasn't been here.I've sold it."

He opened the front door and slammed it hard behind him.Olive abandoned her cleaning and began searching through the cluttered drawers in the drawing room furniture to see if Gwendolen had a key to his flat. It took her a long while but bythe time Queenie arrived she had found eighteen keys of variousshapes and sizes.

"It's not any of those," Queenie said. "She told me once, she kept-1 mean 'keeps'-important keys in the tumble-drier."

Olive was distracted from her task by this fascinating sidelighton Gwendolen's peculiarities. "What happened when she used it? The drier, I mean."

"She never did use it, dear. Not for the purpose it was designed for, anyway."

They went into the kitchen. The natural place for a tumbledrierwould have been the washhouse, but Gwendolen had kept hers between the oven and the fridge. From the window they could see the policean, who had been joined by a secondone, poking a long thin stick into a weed-grown mound in what had long ago been a herbaceous border. Queenie opened the port-hole on the tumble-drier and brought out a nettingbag, which had probably once held onions or potatoes but now contained a dozen keys.

"It'll be that one," Olive said, picking out the newest key, a shiny brass Yale.

The two policemen with Tom Akwaa came in through the washhouse.

"There'll be some chaps coming to dig up the garden," saidthe detective sergeant.

"Dig up the garden!"

The detective sergeant looked as if he might explain whyand then thought better of it. He and the other man began climbing the stairs, Tom following, and behind him Olive and Queenie taking the flights slowly. At the top Queenie could hardly speak, but Olive rallied when one of the policemen started ringing Mix's doorbell.

"He's just gone out." She decided to lie and hoped Queenie would have the sense not to blurt out a denial. "Here's his key. He left it with me in case you wanted to look round."

"Really?" The detective sergeant was only twenty-eight and he hadn't known many murderers, but he would hardly have expected a killer to invite the police in to search his premises inhis absence. Still, never look a gift horse in the mouth was his philosophy, so he took the key, unlocked Mix's front door and they went in. That is, the police did. Because it had been made plain they wouldn't be wanted, Tom with Olive and Queenie went into the bedroom next door. It was unsufferably stuffy and dusty. Tom, who had an unusually acute nose, sniffed andlooked suspicious, sniffed again.

"What's that nasty smell?"

"I can't smell anything, Tom."

"Nor can 1."

A kindly soul, Tom Akwaa wouldn't have dreamt of tellingthem that their faculties might have declined with age, so all he said was, "Well, I can."

The policemen joined them, the younger one with an armfulof books on John Reginald Halliday Christie. Olive, a reader,looked curiously at their spines, several of them adorned with a photograph of Christie's gaunt face.

"Can you smell anything funny in here?" Tom asked.

The bearer of Mix's library, a very tall young man, laid thebooks on the dressing table and bent almost double so that hisnose was nearly touching the floor. "God, yes," he said as hestraightened up.

When they had all gone but Queenie, who was making coffee in the kitchen, Olive set about taking the sheets and pillowcases off the beds she and Tom had used the night before. She was glad of something to do, for she felt very unsettled andshaky. After all, as people constantly told her, she was not so young as she had once been. The sight of that young man poking a stick into that grave-shaped mound had begun it. Then the smell, though she couldn't smell it. Strangely, those Christie books had been the last straw, the books, that man's face on their covers, and the implication of them. She was afraid of bursting into tears, but she had managed to control herself. Her hands, trying to pull the top and bottom sheets off Tom's bed, shook like thin papery leaves in the wind.