thought, and he wondered if Fuerst had looked like this, skinny and dark and sharp-featured. He tried to recall if he'd ever seen photographs of her. They walked up to Ladbroke Grove and the Kensington Park Hotel.
He loved KPH, not because there was anything special about it but because all those years ago Reggie had used it. It was historic. They ought to have a sign up telling the clientele thatit had once been the local of west London's most infamous killer. But when you had people ignorant enough to pull down Rillington Place and destroy all signs of that celebrated site,what could you expect?
'You're very quiet,' said Danila, a vodka and blackcurrant in front of her. 'Kayleigh'd want to know if the cat had gotyour tongue.'
It was an unpleasant reminder of Otto. 'Who's Kayleigh?'
'The girl who does the evening shift at the spa. She's my friend.' When Mix made no reply, she said eagerly-or desperately?-' I had my fortune told today.'
Mix was going to say he'd no time for that and it was a load of rubbish when he remembered reading how Nerissa patronized faith healers, fortune-tellers, and had some guru. Besides, he half believed in ghosts now, didn't he? 'I reckon there maybe something in it. There's lots of things we don't know, aren't there? I mean, some of them'll turn out to be scientific all along.'
'That's exactly what I say. Madam Shoshana at the spa does mine. She's the boss but she's a soothsayer too, got all sorts of qualifications, letters after her name and all.'
'What did she say?'
'You mustn't laugh. My fate's bound up with a man whose name starts with a C. And I thought, I wonder if it's achap who does the pedicures at the spa. He's called Charlie, Charlie Owen.'
Mix laughed. 'It might be me.'
'Your name begins with an M.'
'Not my surname.'
'Yeah, but that's an S.'
'No, it's not. I ought to know. It's C, E, double L, I, N, I.'
She stared into his face. 'You're kidding.'
'D'you want another drink?' he said.
On the way back to Oxford Gardens he bought two bottles ofCalifornia white, cheap-offer bin ends, in the wine shop. They drank it on her bed and afterward Mix didn't think he acquitted himself very well. But what did it matter? They were both drunk and she wasn't the sort of girl for whom you felt you had to put up a good performance. Outside her door, the floor and the ceiling rocked like the waves of the sea, rising and sinking and quivering. Heading for the stairs, clutching the banisters,he stumbled and nearly came to his knees, his jacket falling forward over his head. Adjusting it as best he could and starting down, he passed a man coming up who stood back, unmistakably flinching at a blast from his breath. Another tenant, his fuddled mind conjectured, Middle Eastern chap, sallow face, black mustache, they all looked the same. He didn't look back to see the Middle Eastern chap pick up a small white card from the landing outside Danila's room.
Mix shambled home through the close humid night. Colder air might have sobered him up a bit but this was like a lukewarm bath. Otto was on the stairs again, washing his face as if he'd just been eating something. To Mix there was something odd and perhaps not pleasant about the cat being up here on the stairs so much. It never happened when he first came. Their dislike was mutual, so he wasn't the attraction. What was?
Chapter 8
Nerissa was having a party. None of her own friends was invited,not Rodney Devereux or Colette Gilbert- Bamber or the model whose ankle had ended up thicker than the other one, but only her own family and all its extensions. The onlyoutsiders she asked were the Joneses from next door to her parents. She sent one of her beautiful purple cards, lettered in gold, to Mr. and Mrs. Bill Jones and Mr. Darel Jones, and at the foot she wrote in white ink:
A nice enough, but rather cold, letter came back from Sheila Jones. It said they couldn't come and that she was sorry, but not why they couldn't. Nerissa had no very high opinion of her own intelligence but even she could read between the lines that Mrs. J ones thought the party would be too grand for them with too many smart people attending, too much fashion on show and too much talk about things they wouldn't understand. Nerissa was disappointed and not just because the refusal included Darel. The senior joneses were the sort of people she liked, straightforward, unassuming, and down-to-earth.
If only they understood the sort of party it really was, given for her dad's birthday (which she'd said on the invitation) and that his brothers would be there with their wives, the seven children they had between them, his cousin who was a leadinglight in the Transport and General Workers' Union, her mum's younger sister, elected last year to Tower Hamlets Council, her mum's elder sister who met and married the sweetheart she hadn't seen for a lifetime, her mum's auntie from Notting Hill, her three baby nieces and her three-year-old nephew, and her grandma, the matriarch born just ninety-two years ago inAfrica.
It was the Joneses' loss, Nerissa said defiantly to herself as she and Lynette handed round cups of tea to those who didn't want champagne cocktails. But she admitted silently that it was her loss too, and when Lynette and the TGWU cousin had moved some of the furniture back and dancing began, she imagined the happiness she might have had in Darel's arms, drifting gently round the floor. To make things worse, just as her grandma was telling her an enthralling tale about her own mother and a witch doctor, the phone rang. It was Rodney. Nerissa took the phone into the study and listened impatiently while he asked her why he hadn't been asked to the party and was she mad, entertaining all those relations?
'It's a well-known fact that everyone hates their parents,' said Rodney. 'You know what what's-his-name said. 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad.' '
'Mine didn't. And whoever it was said it, they were sick.'
'For God's sake, leave them to it, and I'll pick you up in five minutes.'
'I can't, Rod,' said Nerissa. 'My dad's just going to cut the cake.'
She went back to the party and fed the little ones chocolate biscuits and ice cream because none of them liked fruitcake.
'You'll have one like that yourself in a couple of years,' said her Tower Hamlets auntie.
'I wish.' Nerissa thought of Darel, out somewhere with his girlfriend, no doubt. Maybe even getting engaged to her now, while she spoke. 'I'll have to get married first.'
'Most of them don't bother anymore,' said her auntie from Notting Hill-well, great-auntie really.
'I would,' said Nerissa, wiping a small mouth, open, birdlike,for more.
She put on Johnny Cash singing 'I Walk the Line,' turned up the CD player, and went to dance with her dad.
Gwendolen would have been horrified and deeply shocked had she known the fantasies her tenant created about her past life. But she had forgotten the brief conversation they had had in the hall on the subject of her visit to 10 Rillington Place. That Mix Cellini had come to believe she had known Christie as well as Ruth Fuerst or Muriel Eady had known him, that she had been a frequent visitor to his house and that he had come here because she needed an abortion, would have humiliated her beyond words. He had gone further, concluding that because she was still alive, she must ultimately have refusedChristie's offer of an illegal operation because she couldn't afford to pay for it, and therefore given birth to a child. A middle-aged man or woman by now-did he or she ever come here, had he, Mix, ever seen this mysterious person? But Gwendolen, mercifully for her, knew nothing of these feverish workings of his mind.
She had been humiliated enough by her visit to the Internet cafe, where for a time she received no help from anyone. And she was utterly in the dark. Whether other people, all of them very young, expertly using the machines, found her bafflement absurd, she couldn't tell, but she felt they did, interpreting the half-smile on a face and the turning away of a head as signs of amused contempt. Although she had paid and she hated wasting money, she would have got up and left, abandoning foreverthese means of finding Stephen Reeves. But just as she pushed back
