poor. This must be close enough, Sylvia thought. She pulled up, and took the box from the passenger seat. She left the car unlocked; I’ll only be a minute, she thought. Here it is, number 54, number 56. I could leave it outside. But it was wet on the front step, and she could see that the parcel would get ruined. The door was off the latch, so she opened it a fraction more, and peeped in. Her curiosity got the better of her; she intruded her head. “Hello, anybody home?” Some kind of rooming house, she thought, pretty sordid. There must be someone around. “Hello?” I’ve come this far, I may as well deliver it properly. She stepped inside, closing the door to the street.
Inside the hall, on a small table, was another box. Sylvia looked into it; to her amazement it contained a baby, a tiny wrapped-up baby with a pink healthy skin. As she watched it, it yawned and blinked, and waved a hand at her. Sylvia put her parcel down at her feet. She bent over the baby. It looked a well-cared-for mite, happy and plump, but what was it doing in a cardboard box? The waving, plucking fingers were caught in the open weave of its blanket. Gently and expertly, Sylvia began to free them. She straightened up and looked around her. There was not a sound. She grew alarmed, and ventured up the stairs. “Hello!” she called. “Lizzie? Are you there?”
But Lizzie was no longer there at all. On the first landing, she paused, to let Miss Field catch her up. This was Mr. K.’s floor, but apart from his bedroom, these rooms were empty, and kept locked. She had keys, of course; and about her person.
“Where is she?” Isabel asked, reaching the top of the stairs. “You can take me to her. I won’t do anything. I only want to find out where we stand.” Muriel caught a whiff of the whisky on her breath.
She unlocked the door, and they stepped inside. A smell of dampness and decay rushed out. The narrow window, uncurtained, looked out onto a brick wall. The paper was peeling from the walls, a spider’s web hung in the corner. Miss Field turned, her eyes suddenly bright with terror, the only light in the dark room. Muriel reached up and removed her wig. Miss Field screamed.
Sylvia stopped dead.
When the woman had stopped screaming and the house was quiet again, Miss Anaemia left her room and went downstairs. If Mr. K. had done a murder—and she could see things going that way—she would just have to say she knew nothing about it; but she was not, repeat not, going to be in when that woman arrived, wanting to look at the bedsheets again. She pulled her raincoat on as she went through the hall, and wondered if Poor Mrs. Wilmot would mind if she borrowed her telescopic umbrella from the stand by the front door.
What’s this? she said to herself. Another delivery for Mr. K.? As another strange face loomed over her, Gemma began to cry. Miss Anaemia opened her eyes wide, reached into the box, and lifted the baby out. She held the quilted head against her cheek, rocking, making soothing noises in her throat. “Don’t cry, sweetheart,” she said. “What are you doing in a cardboard box then? Have they left you all on your own? Never mind, don’t cry, precious. You and me are off to the housing office.”
She dropped the empty box on the floor, swaddled the baby in her blanket, hitched her onto her shoulder, and set off out of the front door. It was still drizzling, but the wind had dropped a bit. Miss Anaemia felt exalted, defiant; as if she were going to make people eat their words. Patches of scarlet flared in her cheeks. She crossed the road, clucking to the baby, quickening her step; and turned the corner by the post box. At once she spotted the person she was looking for; there she is, she thought, that fat old cow Miss Sidney from the DHSS, Snoopers herself, wielding her black umbrella, and looking in at everyone’s windows as she advances purposefully up the street.
“Hi there!” she called. “Coming to see me, were you? Told you I’d got a baby, didn’t I? Who’s a liar now?” Miss Sidney checked her stride, and stared.
When the cries of the infant subsided, Mr. Kowalski emerged from the kitchen. It was a fake, he had no doubt, a tape recording, a lure to draw him out. It was a cry from the past; the infants mewling in the burned-out ruins, the mothers bleeding in the city streets.
The box was the first thing he saw. He picked it up, put it on the hall table, and read the address: To Lizzie Blank, 2 Buckingham Avenue. The house had long ago run out of his control. Locking doors had no effect; he knew that now. From upstairs he heard voices raised, the voices of strange women. I will do or die for Poor Mrs. Wilmot, he thought; touch not a hair of that old grey head. He rattled the box. Curiosity killed the cat, is an expression. He touched the metal bulge of the Luger in his deep trouser pocket. Death was in the air of the damp old house. He could smell it, and he knew. He was a professional. He had burned his bridges; there was nothing to lose. He tore at the wrapping paper.
Muriel put on her boots; Muriel’s own boots, stout and thick-soled, ready for the mud on Turner’s Fields. She put on her big wool overcoat, and knotted her check scarf on the point of her chin. All over the house—in the empty room where the women were imprisoned, and in the kitchen where Mr. Kowalski was loading his gun—they could hear her feet stamping on the stairs, one two, one two: Terror Comes to Town.
And now for little Diddums. She turned, from the foot of the stairs, and gaped. Sweetie Pie had altered; altered out of all recognition. Displayed on the hall table, neat and sweet and perfectly articulated, was a skeleton; fine and tiny, and set together with a deft and knowing hand. If there were an odd number of fingers, and something animal about the skull, she did not notice it. She had never torn the living apart, to study the bones within. With a forefinger, she probed the empty ribs. She shuddered. Bones can be clothed. It was a miraculous transportation; and an hour saved, of her valuable time. One by one she picked up the little bones and placed them in an orderly fashion back inside the box. Only when she had done this did she notice that it was a different box from the one she had carried Gemma in. A different box, with one of her names on it: TO LIZZIE BLANK, inscribed there by the hand of God.
I’m here first, Colin thought, pulling up in his new drive. Here I am for my ten-year NHBC guarantee; my split- level living area, my open aspect to rear. The small estate was on high ground; a golf course fell away below him, hidden now by the steady rain and a belt of young trees.
They should have taken the motorway, he thought, as he fumbled for the keys and prepared to dash for shelter. They’ll have got snarled up in the traffic going across the bridge; I should have told them about the road works. He looked at his watch. Thirty minutes; not bad. He let himself into the empty house. Well, you’ve dallied and dillied, haven’t you, he would say to the men when they arrived. He wondered if Sylvia would have the sense to use the
