David Mitchell - Slade House

‘Innocuous’ means ‘harmless,’ if I’m not wrong. If they’re not ghosts, what are they?”

“They’re children, living in their own time, doing their thing, who I overhear. Like the telephone lines of our times have crossed. The wall between our ‘now’ and their ‘now’ is thin. That’s all.”

The big window shows a reflected kitchen with a ghostly Chloe and me superimposed onto a dark garden. “If I hadn’t heard them myself,” I say, “I’d be thinking you’d watched too many episodes of Tales of the Unexpected or something. But … I did hear them. Have you thought of finding out who used to live in Slade House? Maybe you’d find a pair of twins called Jonah and Norah.”

She rolls up her napkin. “I’ve thought about it, but since Stuart died, I just haven’t had the get-up-and-go.” Chloe makes an apologetic face. I realize I want to kiss it.

Bergerac nestles into my crotch. May his claws stay retracted. “The property records at the town archives go back to the 1860s,” I tell Chloe. “We — CID, I mean — consult them now and then. I’ve got a tame archivist called Leon who looks into certain matters for me, without asking the whys and wherefores. A big old house like this leaves footprints, I’m sure. Shall I have a quiet word?”

“First a door-fixer, now an archivist.” Chloe looks impressed. “You’re a one-man Yellow Pages . Yes please. I’d be jolly grateful.”

“Leave it with me.” I stroke Bergerac. He purrs.

My host reties her hair. “Honestly, Gordon. Most men would be dashing for the door by now.”

I breathe out a cloud of smoke. “I’m not most men.”

Me and Chloe look at each other longer than you’re normally allowed to. She reaches over and puts my dessert plate onto hers. “I knew that telephoning you earlier was a smart move.”

I wish I had a snappier line than, “More coffee?”

“Golly, no. I shan’t be able to sleep for hours .”

Exactly, I think. “Then let me do the washing-up.”

“That’s why God made dishwashers, my friend.”

I notice her wedding ring is off. “Then I’m jobless.”

Blue eyes. Gray eyes. “Not necessarily.”

Rasping and gasping for breath, soaked, salty and sticky, I collapse onto her pillow. I’m fed, I’m fed, I’m fed, and the finest thing to be in God’s Creation is a youngish fed male. We just lie there for a while until our breathing and heart rates slow down a little. I say, “If you let me have a re-run, I’ll pace myself a bit better.” Chloe tells me, “Make an appointment, I’ll see if I can squeeze you in,” which makes me laugh so my deflating truncheon slips out. She gives me a fistful of tissues and rolls onto her side, dabbing her own loins and wrapping herself in the gluey sheet. She didn’t tell me to use a condom, so I didn’t: a bit of a risk, but it’s her risk, not mine and any successful businessman’ll tell you, risk transfer is the name of the game. The four-poster bed is hung with maroon curtains so everything’s warm and dark and smothered. I tell her, “Well. Your triple mortice lock most definitely meets industry standards.”

She biffs me gently with the back of her hand.

“Serious crime, that — assaulting a police officer.”

“Ooh. Will you get out your handcuffs?”

“Only in my smuttiest dreams.”

Chloe kisses my nipple. “Then sleep.”

“Fat chance of that, lying next to a naked goddess.”

She kisses my eyelids. “Sweet dreams, Detective.”

I yawn, enormously. “I’m honestly not sleepy …”

Next time I wake, she’s gone. My meat and two veg are simmering nicely. In the walls, ancient plumbing’s groaning and water’s slapping the floor of a nearby shower. I find my watch under a pillow: 1:30. The wee small hours. No problem, it’s Sunday. I’m not due in to the office ‘til Tuesday. Bugger Tuesday. Bugger work. Bugger the Malik Enquiry. Bugger Trevor Doolan. Bugger the Great British Public. Me and Chloe should stay in and do this all Sunday, all week, all month … Only something’s niggling me. What? A thought. This one: why is this classy, clever, sexy-as-hell female falling into bed with a guy she hardly knows? This happens in Pornland or in men’s bullshittery, but here in the real world, women like Chloe simply don’t shag men on a second encounter. Do they?

Hang on, Gordon Edmonds, hang on. “Second encounter”? This is your fifth visit to Slade House, you plonker. Count the meals: on the first Saturday, Chloe cooked steak; second Saturday, cod on shredded potatoes; venison and Guinness pie on the third; last week was pheasant; and tonight, roast beef. There. See? Five dinners, five Saturdays, five bottles of wine, and five long talks for hours about big stuff and small stuff and stuff in between: childhoods, attitudes, politics; her deceased husband and my ex-wife; John Ruskin, the Victorian scholar of art. You’ve been phoning each other every night just to say “Goodnight” and “Sweet dreams” and “Can’t wait ’til Saturday.” It’s not been a long courtship, but it’s been intense, sincere and not remotely slutty or porny. You’re a good-looking cop and you’re amazing in bed. What’s the problem? Chloe Albertina Chetwynd loves you.

I don’t love her, not yet, but love grows out of sex, in my experience. The more you get into a woman, the more you get into her. Who knows? We could end up getting married. Imagine owning Slade House, or half owning it. Who cares about three little spooks? The fact that I hear them makes me special in Chloe’s eyes. Slade House is way bigger than Trevor Doolan’s executive home up on his hill with his well-paid Conservative Club neighbors. If the Malik Enquiry throws me to the wolves, Slade House’d be my lifeboat, my Fuck Off money. £100,000? £120,000? Fortunes change hands every day, all the time, via business, via the football pools, via crime or yes, via marriage. I’ll give Chloe security and fill the man-shaped hole in her life: she’ll offer me financial security. Seems like a fair deal. “ Goooooorrrrrrr -donnn!” Her voice finds me from a nearby room. “Are you awake?”

I shout back to her, ‘I am now — where are you?”

“ Dans la douche, and I can’t un screw this shampoo …”

You cheeky little minx. “Oh, can’t you indeed?”

“I’m a damsel in distress, Gordon. Up the stairs.”

There’s a man’s furry brown dressing gown on the bed. Probably Stuart’s, but hey, now I’ve had his wife, why should he care if I have his dressing gown as well? I put it on, slide off the bed and slip through the thick red drapes, cross the odd round room and find myself on a square landing. To my left’s a grandfather clock, to my right, stairs lead down to the hallway, and up ahead, more stairs climb past some pictures to a pale door at the top of the house where a soapy Chloe Chetwynd awaits her Knight in Shining Armor. “Are you coming, Gordon?” Oh, I will be, I will be. Up I climb, two steps at a time, past a portrait of a teenager in a beaten-up leather jacket, with dark oily hair and narrow eyes like he’s half Chinese. The next picture is of a young woman dolled up to the nines and with a honey-blonde hairdo like a backing singer from a sixties girl band. She’s got a dreamy smile that reminds me of Julie when she wasn’t being a neurotic bitch so I stop and brush her lips with mine, just ’cause I can. The third portrait up from the landing’s of a boy of about thirteen. Sandy hair, big nose, sulky, not at ease in his skin, or that tweed jacket and bow-tie that you suspect his pushy mother made him—

It’s Nathan Bishop. It can’t be. It is. My heart’s juddering and I feel sick and a bit weightless. Nathan Bishop, as seen by Fred Pink in Slade Alley in 1979. Nathan Bishop, whose photo Fred Pink cut out of the newspaper. Trevor Doolan got Debs to photocopy it and pin it above our desks, so Famous Fred Pink could see how seriously the Thames Valley Force was taking his lead. She’s lying, says a sulky voice in my ear canal, clear as anything. I jump; nearly fall; crouch; look around. Nobody. She’ll take your life, and more …