Anne Billson - Stiff Lips

I'd finally managed to corner Walter Cheeseman and remind him of his promise to show me some of his films. He'd invited me down the very next day. 'Is that an alarm or a biscuit tin?' I asked as he opened the door, pointing to a discreet black box attached to the outside wall.

Walter said it was an alarm.

'So if someone tries to break in when you're not there, the police turn up?'

'Not exactly,' said Walter. 'Not the police.'

I never did get round to asking him who turned up if it wasn't the police. He'd made the place as impregnable as Fort Knox, and as soon as he let me in, I saw why. It had nothing to do with the decor and furnishings, which screamed expensive, though the effect wasn't one of which Sophie would have approved; there were glass-topped tables, and a three-piece suite in cream-coloured leather, and fluffy white rugs strewn across the shiny parquet like cotton-wool clouds.

But it was the walls that grabbed the attention. Or, to be precise, what was on the walls, because they themselves were hidden from view. Every last inch had been fitted with adjustable shelving. And the shelving was stacked with modern technology: video recorders in half a dozen different formats, screens of all shapes and sizes, loudspeakers and computers and keyboards and editing equipment and earphones, and little lights that winked on and off, and hundreds of metal film canisters and laser discs and video cassettes, each with its neatly typed label giving title, director, year of release and running-time of the contents.

The labels and their neatly typed, perfectly spaced print made me wonder whether perhaps Walter wasn't a little too anally retentive for comfort.

While my host disappeared into the kitchen to make coffee, I examined the labels on the nearest stack of cassettes. The director was Walter Cheeseman, and the titles — Edward Scissordick, Big Dick Tracy, RoboDick and Muff-Diving Miss Daisy — spoke eloquently of their subject matter. Walter said most of his work had gone 'straight to video', but even in video form, I gathered, it had never been released on my side of the Atlantic. Walter blamed the distribution system, which he said was 'loaded against the independent operator.'

'I didn't realise you made porno movies,' I said, trying to hide my disillusionment as he came back from the kitchen carrying a pot of coffee, two mugs, and a large bowl of buttered popcorn.

'That's just my day job,' he said. 'It helps finance the real stuff. Here, I'll show you.'

He bade me sit down on the sofa, slotted a cassette into one of the machines, and we began to watch something called The Pig and the Pendulum . It was set around the turn of the century and opened like an episode of Upstairs, Downstairs before veering off into darker territory when a stuffy accountant became possessed by the evil spirits lurking in the basement of the house where he lived with his wife and daughters. To begin with, he confined himself to drinking and gambling and wenching, but one night, during an unexpected blizzard, the evil spirits took over completely and made him hack his family to pieces with an axe. As an afterthought, he hacked the servants to pieces as well.

'Recognize that location?' asked Walter.

I suddenly realised why the setting had looked so familiar; the establishing shots had been filmed outside number nine. I hadn't recognized it immediately because Hampshire Place had been emptied of cars, and the lighting made it look so much more sinister than it really was.

'The special effects are really good,' I said to Walter, as the axe-blade whistled through the air for the umpteenth time and bit deep into the skull of Mr Wisley's maidservant, a sprightly minx who up till then had been displaying lots of cleavage as well as a cheeky line in Marxist ideology. In fact the special effects were awful, but they were a lot better than the acting and the script, and I was trying hard to say something complimentary.

'Aren't they just,' Walter enthused. 'Amazing what you can achieve these days. You know how the Soviets used to doctor their photographs so that politicians who fell out of favour ceased to exist? Well, now you can do the opposite. You can bring dead people back to life.'

'Really,' I said.

'Yes you can,' said Walter, failing to register my lack of interest. 'If you can only get someone on film, it's as good as having a piece of their DNA. You can make them walk and talk. One of these days, Hollywood will be able to do away with live actors altogether; they'll be able to dial up Greta Garbo and Humphrey Bogart — the greats — and programme entire new performances from them.'

The layout of the basement flat was different to those of the flats upstairs. There was no logic to it. The interior had evidently been demolished and the walls rebuilt from scratch. The route to the bathroom took me through Walter's bedroom, so I naturally took a good squint around. He was fanatically tidy. The only item of clothing not tucked away into one of the drawers or fitted wardrobes was a Ralph Lauren sweatshirt draped over the handlebars of a fearsome-looking home fitness machine. Like the video room, it was all very elegant, if a trifle anonymous. It was as though Walter had bought his furniture from a mail-order catalogue for harassed executives too busy to care.

I paused to look out of the bedroom window. This was the first time I'd seen the garden from this level, but it looked almost exactly the same as it did from three storeys up — hopelessly choked with weeds and overshadowed by the surrounding buildings, although I could just about make out a heavily weathered statue which might once have been a lion.

It was in the bathroom, as I washed my hands, that I heard a familiar sound.

Tap tap tap — the sound of distant typing.

I froze. The water continued to gush out over my hands, but the surroundings were so shiny white and brilliantly lit it was impossible to feel as uneasy as I normally did when I heard noises in my own dingy bathroom. I turned off the tap and the typing stopped. I turned it on again and the typing restarted.

It wasn't a typewriter at all — it was the pipes.

You don't know how relieved this makes me feel , I said to myself in the mirror. There is nothing to worry about. There never was anything to worry about.

Oh, these old houses.

It had been the plumbing all along.

One of the most perplexing mysteries of my life had just been solved, but that didn't mean I was prepared to forego my customary investigation of the bathroom cabinet. Walter's was stocked with various Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein aftershaves, American pharmaceuticals, and bottles of vitamins with names like Buzz-B, Soar-C and High-D-High. I spotted one small brown bottle without a label; thinking it might be a brand of aftershave or vitamin pill so exclusive it didn't even have a name, I unscrewed the cap and sniffed. The smell of old socks was so powerful that for a moment or two I felt quite dizzy and had to clutch the edge of the washbasin to steady myself.

Definitely not aftershave, I thought.

By the time I got back to Walter, he was fast-forwarding through yet another video.

'Thought you'd got lost,' he said offhandedly.

'What's this one?' I asked, trying to sound keen, though I was thankful The Pig and the Pendulum had ground to its grisly conclusion. The novelty of Walter's film director status had worn off. Now I was trying desperately to think of a way of getting out of there which wouldn't offend him or squelch any potential amorous activity between the two of us. Not that there had been anything in Walter's attitude or behaviour to suggest I might be in with a chance, but I wasn't going to burn my bridges before I'd even spotted their symbols on the map.