of any age. Her friend Olive Fordyce said she was sure Gwendolen could hear a bat squeak. She listened now. He was corming down the stairs. No doubt he thought she didn't know he took his shoes off in an attempt to corme and go secretly. She was not so easily deceived. The lowest flight creaked. Nothing he could do would put a stop to that, she thought triumphantly. She heard him padding across the hall but when he closed the front door it was with a slam that shook the house and caused a whitish flake to drop off the ceiling onto her left foot.
She went to one of the front windows and saw him getting into his car. It was a small blue car and, in her opinion, he kept it absurdly clean. When he had gone she went out to the kitchen, opened the door on an ancient and never-used spindryer to take out a netting bag which had once held potatoes. The bag was full of keys. No labels were attached to them but she knew very well the shape and color of the one she wanted. The key in the pocket of her cardigan, she began to mount the stairs.
It was a long way up but she was used to it. She might be over eighty but she was thin and strong. Never in her life had she had a day's illness. Of course she couldn't climb those stairs as fast as she could fifty years ago but that was only to be expected. Otto was sitting halfway up the top flight, dismembering and eating some small mammal. She took no notice of him nor he of her. The evening sun blazed through the Isabella window and since there was no wind to blow on the glass, an nearly perfect colored picture of the girl and the pot of basil appeared reflected on the floor, a circular mosaic of reds and blues and purples and greens. Gwendolen stopped to admire it. Rarely indeed was this facsimile so clear and still.
She lingered for only a minute or two before inserting her key in the lock and letting herself into Cellini's flat.
All this white paint was unwise, she thought. It showed every mark. And gray was a bad furnishing color, cold and stark. She walked into his bedroom, wondering why he bothered to make his bed when he would only have to unmake it at night. Everything was depressingly tidy. Very likely he suffered from that affliction she had read about in a newspaper, obsessivecompulsive disorder. The kitchen was just as bad. It looked like one of those on show at the Ideal Home Exhibition, to which Olive had insisted on taking her sometime in the eighties. A place for everything and everything in its place, not a packet or tin left on the counter, nothing in the sink. How could anyone live like that?
She opened the door of the fridge. There was very little food to be seen but in the door rack were two bottles of wine and, in the very front of the middle shelf, a nearly full glass of something that looked like faintly colored water. Gwendolen sniffed it. Not water, certainly not. So he drank, did he? Shecouldn't say she was surprised. Making her way back into theliving room, she stopped at the bookshelves. Any books, nomatter of what kind, always drew her attention. These were not the sort she would read, perhaps that anyone should read. All of them, except for one called
As for Cellini, this would be another of his obsessions. The more I know people, said Gwendolen, quoting her father, the more I like books. She went downstairs and into the kitchen.There she fetched herself a cheese and pickle sandwich, ready made from the corner shop, and taking it and a glass of orange juice back to the dragon sofa, she returned to
Chapter 2
It was a funny part of the world altogether. Mix hadn't got used to it yet, the Westway to the north and Wormwood Scrubs and its prison not far away, a tangle of little winding streets, big houses, purpose-built blocks, ugly Victorian terraces, Gothic places more like churches than homes, cottages cunningly designed on different levels to look as if they had been there for two hundred years, corner shops, MOT testing centers, garages, meeting halls, real churches for Holy Catholic Apostolics or Latter Day Saints and convents for Oblates and Carmelites. The whole place populated by people whose families had always been there and people whose families came from Freetown and Goa and Vilnius and Beirut and Aleppo.
The Gilbert-Bambers also lived in West Eleven but the upmarket fashionable part. Their house was in Lansdowne Walk, not as big as Miss Chawcer's but more imposing, with Corinthian columns all along the front and urns with bushes in them on the balconies. It took Mix no more than five minutes to drive there and another five to park his car on a meter, costing him nothing after six-thirty. Colette gave him one of her sexy looks as she opened the door, a look that wasn't in the least necessary as both knew why she had sent for him and what he had come for. For his part, he put up a show of formality, smiling as he marched in with his case of tools and saying it was upstairs if he remembered rightly.
'Of course you remember rightly,' Colette said, giggling.
More stairs, but these were wide and shallow and anywaythere was only one flight to go up. 'How's Miss Nash these days?'
He'd known she wouldn't like that and she didn't. 'I'm sure she's fine. I haven't seen her for a couple of weeks.'
It was at the Gilbert-Bambers' that he had first met Nerissa Nash. 'Encountered' might be the better word. Until he saw her he had thought Colette beautiful, her slenderness and her long blond hair and her full lips, even though she'd told him about the collagen implants. The difference between them, he had thought, was that between the Hollywood star and the prettiest girl in the office.
Colette preceded him into the bedroom. 'What she called her gym was really a dressing room that opened out of it next to the bathroom, and had been originally designed for the master of the house.
'He'd knock on her door when he wanted a bonk,' Colette had explained. 'They were all bonkers in those days. Isn't that funny it's the same word?'
The room was now furnished with a treadmill, a step machine, a stationary bicycle, and an elliptical cross- trainer. There was a rack of weights, a rolled-up yoga mat, a turquoise colored inflatable ball, and a fridge that had never seen the like of Boot Camp but held only sparkling spring water. Mix could see at once why the treadmill wouldn't start. Colette was no fool and was probably well aware of the reason herself.
The machine had a safety device in the form of a key that slotted into a keyhole and a string attached to it with a clip on the other end. You were supposed to fasten it to your clothes while you used it so that if you fell over the key would be pulled out and the motor stop running. Mix held up the key.
'You didn't put it in.'
'As the actress said to the bishop.'
He thought this rejoinder extremely old hat. He'd heard his stepfather say it a good twenty years ago. 'It won't start unless the key's in,' he said in a toneless voice, intended to show her he didn't think her witty. Still, he should complain. He'd get his fifty-pound call-out fee for just coming here.
He inserted the key, started the machine, ran it up, and to delay things a little-why should she have it all her own way?-applied some oil underneath the pedals. Colette switched it off herself and led him back into the bedroom. He sometimes wondered what would happen if the Honourable Hugo Gilbert-Bamber came back unexpectedly, but he could always nip back into his clothes and crouch down among the machines with screwdriver and oi1 can.
Mix intended to be famous. The only possible life anyone could wish for these days, it seemed to him, was a celebrity's. To be stopped in the street and asked for your autograph, to be forced to travel incognito, to see your picture in the papers, to be in demand by journalists for interviews, to have fans speculateabout your sex life, to be quoted in gossip columns. To wear shades when you didn't want to be recognized, to betransported in a limo with tinted windows. To have your own PR person and maybe get Max Clifford to represent you.
It would be best to be famous for something you did that people liked or because they admired you, like he did Nerissa Nash, But fame deriving from some great crime was enviable in a way. 'What would it feel like to be the man the polices muggle out of a courthouse with a coat over his head because if they saw him the crowd would tear him to pieces? Assassination secured your fame forever. Only think of the killer of John Lennon, or of President Kennedy, or Princip, who shot the Austrian Archduke and started the First World War. But being Nerissa Nash's escort would be better and a lot safer. Soon it would lead to celebrity status, he would be invited on TV chat shows,
