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.
Gwendolen was dead, she had no doubt of it now. Although she hadn't much liked the woman she called her friend, she felt the enormity of it, the threatening awfulness of violent death. A tear started in each eye and rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them on one of the sheets and bundled it into a pillowcase to take home and wash.
Outside the door she heard a footstep above her. Had Cellini come back? She set the pillowcase laundry bag downand listened, hoping that her hearing wasn't going the way ofher sense of smell. Another footfall. Olive's instinct was to flee,to get down those stairs to Queenie as fast as she could. But she stood her ground. Cellini couldn't have come back, not comei nto the house and got up the stairs and into his flat without one of them seeing and hearing him. The police had only been gone ten minutes and Tom less than that. Olive set her foot on the bottom step of the tiled flight and began to climb. It wasthe bravest thing she had ever done.
She would have crawled up the last five stairs if she hadn'tbeen afraid Queenie would come up with the coffee and see her. As it was, she stopped at the top, hung on to the newel postand looked for the source of the sounds. To the right, then tot he left. Olive screamed.
What is it? What's happened?'
She ignored Queenie's voice but she didn't scream again.The sound refused to come. Trembling, she stared at the man with Christie's face. It was quite a lot like the photograph onthe spines of those books. He was coming toward her, holdingout both hands. She would die, she would have a heart attack and die.
'Please, do not fear.'
He spoke with a strong foreign accent. Not a bit like Christie would have, thought Olive. She closed her eyes, opened them again and said in a whisper, 'Who are you?' She cleared herthroat and her voice came out more loudly and clearly. 'Who are you?'
'I am called Omar. Omar Ahmed. I am from Iraq.'
'The war's over,' said Olive. 'Were you in the war?'
He shook his head. She noticed now that his eyes were of a velvety blackness never seen in Anglo-Saxons and his hairblack, though peppered with gray. Don't they all have mustaches?she asked herself, and coincidentally he said, 'I shaved my beard so not to look like Middle Eastern man.'
'Are you an asylum seeker?'
He nodded, then shook his head. 'I like to be when I come, but I do it wrong, I do no register, so now I am illegal immigrant.I want to go home now, now 1 can and will be safe, I goback to Basra.'
I don't know about 'safe,' she thought. 'Have you been living here?' She didn't wait for an answer but said, 'Come down and have some coffee with my friend and me.'
She ignored Queenie's voice but she didn't scream again. The sound refused to come. Trembling, she stared at
