Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

“How could it be at the flat when my car’s outside?” he snapped before realising that she must have been joking.

“It’s a pity you don’t have a spare key,” she said.

“It’s a pity your car’s in the garage,” he retorted, “about to be declared uneconomical to repair. Look, Christine, it’s very late. I can’t find it and I certainly won’t find it with you hovering, getting all wound up, so I suggest you get a cab and I’ll follow.”

“But what if you don’t find it?’

“I’ll find it. I’ll be there, just a little late, that’s all. You go. You’ll easily pick up a black cab on the Green. You’re only going to Ladbroke Grove.”

Sweating, he listened as the front door was opened and shut – slammed. Gate clanged. Fading echo of footsteps receding. He felt the tension flow out of him and collapsed on to the nearest chair. He loosened his tie and reached for a glass.

In their bedroom he pressed the power button on his laptop. While waiting, he stared blankly at the framed poster on the wall. A production he’d been in more than twenty years ago. Colossus . Clive Barker’s play about Goya. He allowed the faces of cast members to run through his mind, particularly those who’d gone on to other things. Lennie James – you saw him on television all the time now. A part in Cold Feet. A one-off drama, something he’d written himself. That prison series. Buried . Right. Buried in the schedules.

Aslie Pitter, the most naturally talented actor in the cast. He’d done one or two things – a Channel Four sitcom, guest appearance in The Bill – then disappeared. Maddox had last seen him working for a high-street chain. Security, demonstrating product – he couldn’t remember which.

Elinore Vickery had turned up in something at the Waterman’s. Maddox had liked her, tried to keep in touch, but there was an invisible barrier, as if she’d known him better than he knew himself.

Missing out on a couple of good parts because of his size (five foot five in stocking feet, eight stone dead), Maddox had quit the theatre and concentrated on writing. Barker had helped with one or two contacts and Maddox sold a couple of horror stories. Over the years he’d moved away from fiction into journalism and book-length non-fiction. The current project, New Maps of Hell , hadn’t found a home. The publishers he’d offered it to hadn’t been able to reject it quickly enough. They didn’t want it on their desks. It made them uncomfortable. That was fine by Maddox. He’d worry if it didn’t. They’d want it on their lists, though, when it was too late. He’d finish it first, then pick one editor and let the others write their letters of resignation.

He read through the afternoon’s work, then closed the laptop. He opened his bedside drawer and there was his car key. He looked at it. Had it been there before? Of course it had. How could it not have been? But he’d not seen it, so it might as well not have been. It had effectively disappeared. Hysterical blindness? Negative hallucination?

He pocketed the key and went downstairs. The door closed behind him and the car started first time. He sneaked past White City – the exhibition halls were gone, torn down for a future shopping centre – and slipped on to the Westway. He didn’t think of Christine as he approached Ladbroke Grove, but of Christie, John Reginald Halli-day. The former relief projectionist at the Electric, who had murdered at least six women, had lived at 10 Rillington Place, later renamed Ruston Close before being demolished to make way for the elevated motorway on which Maddox was now driving. The film, starring Dickie Attenborough as the killer and John Hurt as his poor dupe of an upstairs neighbour, who swung for at least one of Christie’s crimes, had been filmed in Rillington Place itself. Maddox understood, from comments posted on ghoulish message boards on the internet, that the interiors had been shot in No.8 and the exteriors outside No.10. But when the police, acting on a tip-off from Timothy Evans, yanked open a manhole cover outside No.10, Attenborough could be seen peering out through the ground-floor window of the end house in the terrace, No.10, where three of Christie’s victims had been walled up in the pantry, his wife Ethel being found under the floorboards in the front room. For Maddox it was the key shot in the film, the only clear evidence that they’d gained access to the charnel house itself. The only other explanation being that they’d mocked up the entire street in the studio, which he didn’t buy.

The case accounted for five pages in Maddox’s book. He concentrated mainly on the interweaving of fact and fiction, the merging of film and reality. Attenborough as Christie. No.8 standing in for No.10, if indeed it did. The internet also yielded a piece of Pathe film footage of the demolition of Ruston Close. Two men with pickaxes. A third man speaking to camera. A burning house. Shots of the house at the end of the street with the white (replacement) door. Clearly the same house as that in the film. But there was no sound, the reporter mouthing inaudible commentary. Maddox lured a lip-reader to the flat, a junior editor from one of the publishers that had turned down his book. She reminded him of Linzi with her green eyes and shoulder-length streaked hair. Even in heels she didn’t reach Mad-dox’s height, but she had a confident, relaxed smile, She held his gaze when he spoke to her and appeared to be looking into his eyes, but must have been watching his lips, as she relied heavily on lip-reading. Maddox was careful to make sure she was looking in his direction before speaking to her, probably over-careful. She must have spent a lifetime compensating for situations in which people wouldn’t have made such allowances. Working backwards from the first words she managed to lip-read and then having to catch up. So much information assumed rather than known for certain, but Maddox could relate to that. In some areas of life he, too, knew nothing for certain. The deaf woman’s name was Karen. He assumed the proposal for his book had been rejected by someone senior who had given Karen the unpleasant job of telling the author, but he didn’t know that for certain. Possibly she’d read it and rejected it herself and only agreed to provide lip-reading services because she felt bad about it.

When she entered the flat, Maddox felt at ease. In control. He apologised for the loud, bass-heavy music coming from the downstairs flat, but she said she couldn’t hear it.

“I thought you might be able to feel it,” he said.

“It’s a new building,” she said. “Concrete floors. Otherwise . . .”

He showed her the footage. She said it wasn’t straightforward. The quality was poor and the picture kept pixellating, plus the reporter unhelpfully turned his head to the side on several occasions.

Maddox asked her if she would come back and have another go if he was able to tidy the picture up a bit.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to get much off it for you,” she said.

“If you wouldn’t mind just trying one more time, perhaps when you’re less tired,” he said. “It’s very important to me, for my book, you know.”

Maddox pulled into one of the reserved spaces outside a block of purpose-built flats in the depressed residential trapezium bordered by Green Lanes and the roads of West Green, Seven Sisters and St Ann’s. He listened to the ticking of the cooling engine for a few moments as he watched the darkened windows of the second-floor flat. The top flat.

The street door had been left open by one of his neighbours. He walked up.

Inside the flat, he left the light switched off, poured himself a drink and sat in the single armchair. He pulled out his phone and sent a short text message. Orange street-lighting cast a deathly glow over the cheap bookshelves stacked with pulp novels, true crime, horror anthologies and dystopian science fiction. His phone chimed. He opened it, read the return message and replied to it. When he’d lived here, the room had been dominated by a double bed. Moving into Christine’s house had allowed him to turn the tiny flat into the dedicated office he’d always wanted by burning the bed on the waste ground out the back. He’d considered giving it away, since selling it had struck him as tiresome: placing an ad, answering calls, opening the door to strangers. Easier to burn the damn thing and all the memories associated with it. So then he’d moved his desk from the east end of the room, under the Velux window, to the west-facing windows overlooking the street.