indeed everyone from a 'lower class.' But her shyness and her fear of the different and of things she hadn't experienced wasn't absolute. Curiosity was a novelty for her but she felt it worm its way into her mind and wait there, trembling. She might see a little more of this new country which had unprecedently opened its borders to her. Instead of replying to Bertha with a sharp, 'Do you know whom you're speaking to?' she said, quite meekly but with an increased beating of the heart, 'Yes, if you like.'
The street was squalid, with the old chimney of an iron foundry at the far end of it, the Metropolitan Railway from Ladbroke Grove to Latimer Road running nearby and above ground. The man they had come to see lived at number 10. It smelled and it was dirty. The kitchen was furnished with two deckchairs. Christie might have been in his forties or past fifty,it was hard to tell. He was a tallish but slight man with a beakyface and thick glasses and he seemed dismayed to see Gwendolen. Later on she understood why. Of course she did. He wanted no one else to know Bertha had been there. She refused to sit down. Bertha took one of the chairs and Christie the other. Perhaps she had antagonized him or perhaps he onlyever dealt with his clients tete-a-tete, but he immediately said he would want to see Bertha alone. For chaperonage, his wife would be present. Gwendolen never saw the wife nor heard anything of her. All they would do now, Christie said, was make an appointment for the examination and the 'treatment,'but Miss Chawcer must go. Everything that passed between himself and his patient must be confidential.
'I won't be long, miss,' Bertha said. 'If you'd wait for me at the end of the street, I won't be a minute.'
Another impertinence, but Gwendolen did wait. Various passersby stared at her with her carefully made-up face, hair permed into sausage curls and her full-skirted, tight-fitting blue dress. One man whistled at her and Gwendolen's discomfort showed in her darkly flushed cheeks. Eventually Bertha came. 'I won't be a minute' was true. She had been at least ten. The appointment was for Bertha's next day off, a week ahead.
'I'm not to tell anyone, miss, and you mustn't.'
But Christie had frightened her. Although Mrs. Christie wasn't there, he had done some strange intimate things, asked her to open her mouth so that he could look down her throat with a mirror on the end of a rod, and asked her to lift her skirt up to mid-thigh level.
'I've got to go back, miss, haven't I? I can't have a baby, not unless I'm married.'
Gwendolen felt she ought to have asked about the father of the child, who he was and where he was, did he know about the baby and was there a chance of his marrying Bertha if he did. Itwas too embarrassing, it was too sordid. At home, in the quiet and civilized atmosphere of St. Blaise House, seated comfortably among cushions on the sofa, she was reading Proust, and had reached Volume 7. No one in Proust ever had babies. She retired into her cocooned world.
Bertha never went back to Christie. She was too frightened. By the time Gwendolen read about his murders in the papers, the young women who came to his house for abortions or cures for catarrh, his wife, perhaps too the woman and baby upstairs, it was 1953 and Bertha long gone. She left before the child was born, and someone married her, though whether itwas the father Gwendolen never knew. The whole thing washorribly sordid. But she never forgot her visit to RillingtonPlace and how Bertha too might so easily have been one of those women immured in cupboards or buried in the garden.
Bertha-she hadn't thought of her for years. The visit to Christie's house must have been three or four years before his trial and execution. It wasn't worth wasting time looking for the 1949 calendar but what else had she to do with her time? Read, of course. She had long finished
The British Fungi calendar for 1949-what a ridiculous subject!-she found after searching for an hour, in a room on the top floor, next door to Mr. Cellini's flat. In the night gone by, more the hour or so before dawn, she had been awakenedby a scream and a thud she thought came from there but shewas probably mistaken. This was one of the rooms which the professor had insisted it wasn't necessary to have wired for electricity. Gwendolen had been a child at the time but she remembered quite clearly the wiring of the lower floors, the men taking up floorboards and making great caves in the plaster of walls. This morning was bright and hot, light flooding in from the window on which the curtains had fallen into rags sometime in the thirties and never been replaced. It was several years since she had been up here, she couldn't remember when had been the last time.
The bookcase, a store place for ancient, never very readable books there was no room for downstairs, novels by Sabine Baring-Gould and R. D. Blackmore among bound numbers of Victorian journals
Bending over as best she could, she peered at the floor. He rreading glasses were in one pocket of her cardigan and the magnifying glass in the other. She made use of them. The boards appeared not to be nailed down but they must be and the glasses weren't strong enough for her to see. How odd. Perhaps it was the damp making one of them protrude. There was a lot of it in this old house, rising damp and whatever the other kind was. With some difficulty, she got down on her knees, her joints cracking, and felt the surface of the protrudingboard. Quite dry. Odd, she thought. And all those littleholes were odd too, dozens of them peppering the woodwork. But perhaps it was always like that and she had never noticed.On her feet again, she began to examine the chest. The fungicalendar came to light in the second drawer she looked through, and with it was one of those letters from a property developer, offering her huge sums to sell her house, this one dated 1998. 'Why on earth had she put it there five years before? She couldn't remember but she was sure the floorboard hadn't been that way then.
The calendar she took over to the window, the better to read her own handwriting. There it was, for 16June, a Thursday.'Accompanied B. to house in Rillington Place.' She recalled writing that but not the entry for the following day, 'Think I may have flu but new doctor says no, only a cold.' The rapid beating of her heart began again and she felt th eneed to put her hand over her ribs as if to hold it still. That wast he first time she had met him. She had gone to the Ladbroke Grove surgery, waited in the waiting room for old Dr. Smyth, but the man who opened the door and smiled, ushering her in, was Stephen Reeves.
Gwendolen let the hand holding the calendar fall down t oher side, and going back in time to her first sight of him in her youth and his, gazed almost unseeing out of the window. Otto lay sleeping on the wall, the crinolined birds pottered about in their wilderness as their owner in a white turban came down the path with corn to feed them. She saw Stephen, his bright smiling eyes, his dark hair, heard him say, 'Not many folks waiting this morning. And what can I do for you?'
The weekend would have passed with Danila's disappearance going unnoticed but for Kayleigh Rivers waking up with a bad cold. Danila had worked at Shoshana's Spa every weekday from 8 A.M. till 4 P.M. and Kayleigh worked there on Saturdays and Sunday mornings and every evening from four till eight. Kayleigh tried calling Danila on her mobile to ask her if she'ddo her weekend and when she got no reply, called Madam
Shoshana.
'She's still asleep, isn't she?' Shoshana said. 'Like I was. She's got her mobile switched off. Look at the time.'
She waited till eight. The spa didn't open till nine on Saturdays.'When she rang Danila's mobile all she got was dead silence. It might be early, but it was too late to get a temp. She paid her girls-illegally-ten pounds a week below the minimum wage but Kayleigh needn't think she was paying her for pretending to be ill. As for Danila… Shoshana understood she was going to have to do it herself and she heaved herself unwillingly out of bed. In spite of owning and running a fashionable gym and beauty clinic with manicurist and pedicurist, waxing and electrolysis studio, aromatherapist and salt baths unit, Shoshana paid no personal attention to herself or any of these things and didn't wash much. 'When you got older youdidn't need more than a once-weekly bath and an occasional dip for hands, face, and feet. Patchouli, cedarwood, cardamom,and nutmeg covered up any possible odors.
She visited the spa itself as little as possible. It interested he ronly insofar as it made money. Exercise and beauty treatments, keeping fit and retaining youth, bored her and when she satdownstairs at the receipt of custom,
