had some left from Tufnell Park days. His tastes had changed from when he was buying red sheets! Still, red was good for this purpose, it wouldn't show blood. Keeping his eyes averted as best hecould, he rolled the body up in the sheet. She felt very lightand fragile and he wondered if she'd been anorexic. Maybe. He knew very little about her, he hadn't been interested. When he'd dragged the bundle out into his narrow hall, hefetched a bucket and detergent and cloths from the kitchen and set about cleaning up. He began with the portrait and when it was spotless and gleaming once again, he felt enormously better. His fear had been that some of the blood-there had beenso much-might have got inside the glass and the frame onto Nerissa's photograph, but not a drop had. It occurred to him that the Psyche looked a lot like Nerissa, she might have been the model for it. He washed the figurine in the kitchen sink, under the running tap, first hot water, then cold, the bloodsliding off its head and breasts, red water, then pink, then clear.
Just the edge of the carpet was stained. He scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed and dried and he thought it was all out. Getting it off the polished boards wasn't a problem, they wereheavily lacquered and stains slid off. If only the wall behind hadbeen one of the dark green ones. He'd probably have to repaint it; he'd still got a two-liter tin of the shade called Cumulus and he'd do it on Sunday.
By the time he'd finished, the fourth bucketful of reddened water down the sink and the cloths in the washing machine, he sat down with a stiff Bombay gin. It tasted wonderful, as if he hadn't had a drink for months. One thing was for sure: the body couldn't stay here. And if he tried to put it in Holland Park, for instance, he couldn't do it without someone seeing. The trouble was, the first and only time he and she went outtogether they might have been seen by any number of people in KPH. She said she'd told no one but how could he believe her? She'd admitted telling Madam Shoshana she had a boyfriend even if she hadn't said his name. Then there was the barmaid at KPH. She might remember. Miss Chawcer might not have answered the doorbell that evening, but she'd remember it had rung if anyone asked. She might even have seen Danila through the window. No, he couldn't just dump the body.
His eye fell on
Mix came upon a photograph of the garden in the next pages of illustrations. A white ring marked the spot where the leg bone had been found, and a cross marked Muriel Eady's grave. If the marks hadn't been made there was nothing to show where the burial had been. Before interment, all the bodies of the women he had killed had been temporarily stowed under the floorboards or in the washhouse. Mix wondered if either would be available to him-was there a washhouse here? Certainly there was a cellar-but it might be possible, though difficult, to get into the garden. However he lived in a house immeasurably larger than Reggie's half-house; well, half of a small terraced cottage, really.
He closed the book, put his keys into his pocket, and let himself out of his front door, noticing on his way out that itwas eleven-thirty. The old bat had amazing hearing for her age, but she would be asleep two floors below. Mix stood on the top landing, listening.
He turned left and set off along the passage. Of course there was a possibility he would see the ghost but he was making resolute efforts not to accept that there was a ghost. He had imagined it. The cat had opened that door itself. To be on the safeside, he closed his hand over the cross in his jeans pocket. Thelight he had switched on quickly went out as it always did, but he had brought a flashlight with him. In the dark, he opened the first door on his left and found himself inside a room that must have been adjacent to his own living room. The gleam from the flashlight was rather feeble but because the window in here was uncurtained, it wasn't dark but dimly lit from stilllighted backs of houses and by the faint moonlight.
Just the same, he would have liked more. He couldn't see a switch on any of the walls and when he looked where the hanging cable and lamp-holder should have been, there hung only a strange object with two metal strings suspended from it. If anything could have distracted him from the matter in hand, this did. He directed the torch beam upward. It took him a few momentsto realize that what he was looking at was a gas mantle. He had once seen a television program about the electrification of London replacing gas in the twenties and thirties.There were houses in Portland Road, not far from here, still lit by gas in the sixties.
The room contained a bedstead and a tall chest of drawers with a mirror on top. Anyone wanting to look in that mirrorwould have had to be nearly seven feet tall to reach it, Mix calculated. A stack of bookshelves, sagging under the weight of heavy tomes stuffed beside and on top of each other, nearly filled one wall. He went back into the passage and into theroom opposite where the yellow light from St. Blaise Avenue flowed in brightly, showing him that here too the system had never been replaced by electricity.
It made him feel as if he had strayed back in time, back beyond Reggie and all his works, back behind modern technologyand everything that made life easy. He shuddered. Supposehe really had gone back in time and found it impossible to return? Suppose it was a dream, all of it was a dream, the killing, the blood, the gas, and the darkness? But he had been through that one before and he knew it wasn't.
The air felt close. It had been another hot day. On this whole top floor only the windows in his own flat were everopened. The closeness was dusty and although no fresh aircame in, flies lived up here in swarms, crawling on the windowglass in the dark. He turned around, passed his own front door,and set off along the right-hand passage. Electric light was available in the first room on the ight but there was no bulb inthe fitment, Here the gleam of street lamps outside had curtainsto penetrate. He pulled them back, too roughly, for fragmentsof cloth and dust fell off onto the sill. This room was partly furnished with an iron bedstead, a deckchair with no seat, a dressing table and an upright chair with a broken leg propped up on a jamjar. The deckchair again reminded him of Reggie. At least one of his later victims, Kathleen Maloney, he had put in a deckchair with a makeshift seat of woven string, in order to administer gas to her in his kitchen.
A folded newspaper lay on the floor. This copy of the Sunwould be ages old, Mix thought, dropped there in the fifties probably. But when he picked it up and, in the yellow light, made out the date on it, he saw it was only from the previousOctober. More upsetting was the date, the thirteenth. The old bat must have been up here and left her paper behind. Who would have thought she'd read the Sun? She'd left this one with that date on it behind to frighten him, he thought. Thatmust be it.
The room opposite, on the other side of the wall where Nerissa's picture hung and Danila had died, also had electricity, also lacked a lightbulb and was just as stuffy. It was empty but for a bedstead without a mattress. He pulled back the thin curtains. Outside, he could just make out what he could only glimpse from his own windows, gables and annex roofs of nextdoor, the pointed trees and squat bushes in pots the old mankept on the roof of a carport, a great chimney with a dozen flues spanning an expanse of tiles, the broken glass top of a derelict conservatory. All this would make access to the nextroom along easy, he thought. Anyone could climb up and getin. But when he tried the door, it was locked and no key was visible as he squatted down and tried to look through the keyhole. At least Chawcer had locked the door. She had taken that much precaution against burglars, though a flimsy one. A wonder the atmosphere didn't choke her.
One last room remained. It was quite empty, even to the extent of being stripped of what it might once have contained. There was a curtain rail but no curtains. Some sort of carpet there had been nailed, and in places glued, to the floor but it had been torn up, leaving nail holes and sticky-lookingpatches. She came up here sometimes, he could tell that, but not into the gas-lit rooms. The first one he had gone into, the room which had surprised him because of the means by which it had been lit, that would be Danila's resting place.
Christie had put Ruth Fuerst's body under the floorboards. Mix remembered how, years ago, when he was in his teens, one of the water pipes had frozen in the house where he lived with his mother in Coventry. She said she had a bad back and couldn't do anything, it was one of the times Javy had left her-he always came back again till the last time-so he went up into the icy-cold bathroom and, with her telling him how to do it, tookup three of the floorboards. He'd had to prise up the tiles first. This would be much easier, nothing but the boards and these very old, to lift.
The only tools he had now were those he used in the maintenance of exercise machines. He let himself into his own flat, almost stumbling over the body he had laid in the little hallway,and searched through the bag that held his
