feet high with a wooden lid at the top. Lifting the lid disclosed an earthen ware tub, quite dry and evidently unused for years. He lifted the body, puffing and gasping, and placing his hand on his lower back felt a bulge in his pocket. It was the thong. Before closing the lid he dropped it inside. He'd retrieve it later and bury it with the body. No one, certainly notone of those nosy old women, would have reason to look inside the copper. Old Chawcer had a usable if antiquated washing machine, an advance, in spite of its shortcomings, on this antique.
Going into the garden felt restful, almost restorative. The heat of the day had given place to a mild still evening. The unmowngrass was the color of blond hair and dry as a hayfield. Inthe garden beyond the rear wall the Indian man was trying tocut his lawn with an old hand mower and making little impressionon it. The guinea fowl padded about and clucked.
There wasn't a bare piece of ground where digging would be easy. Every inch was overgrown with grass and weeds. Mix had never in his whole life dug into soil of any kind and this, what he could see of it between sturdy thrusting thistles and aggressive things he didn't know the name of, looked as heavy as concrete but a muddy yellow color. Inside the semiderelict shed he found rusty tools: a spade, a fork, a pick. Tomorrow he'd do it and that would be the end.
Tell yourself that, he whispered, tell yourself that by the time it's done all the worry will be over. He went into the houseand drew back the bolts, top and bottom. Old Chawcer made no noise when she was at home. Reading is a silent occupation. Yet the house seemed quieter without her. An oppressive silence filled its spaces. His shoes were dusty from his explorationof the garden. Unwilling to leave behind any evidence ofhis visit to a place where he shouldn't have been, he took them off and carried them up the stairs, thinking of the task awaiting him on the next day. Perhaps he should.have tried the soil to see how hard it was and how heavy. But what would be the useof that? He would have to do it, however difficult the job. Afinal visit should be paid to the bedroom where she had lain. Itwould cheer him up if the smell was fading ad everything in there returned to normal.
He reached the top and opened the door. 'Whether the smell had gone he never knew, he was in there too short a time to tell. The ghost stood in the middle of the room under the gas lamp, gazing down at the floorboards below which had been Danila's resting place. Mix fled. He scrabbled at his frontdoor, his hand shaking and rattling the key against the woodwork. Gibbering sobs rose in his throat. He wanted somewhere safe to hide and there was nowhere if he couldn't get inside. The key shook in the lock, stuck, came out. He managed to push it in again and the door opened. He fell onto the floor and kicked the door shut behind him, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands drumming on the carpet. Shoshana had been right. After a moment or two he had recovered enough to feel for the cross in his pocket, but by then it was too late to use it.
Chapter 18
'She was only a kid,' said Frank McQuaid.
He had heard this phrase many times in detective series on television and always hoped for the chance to use it. The policeman interviewing him said, 'Yes? And you saw her walking along Oxford Gardens with a man. Can you describe him?'
''Just ordinary,' said Frank who might have been readingf rom a script. Sitting opposite the detective sergeant in a room behind the bar, he assumed a grave and thoughtful expression as if millions were watching him. 'Nondescript-know what Imean? Brownish hair, brownish eyes, I reckon. It was dark.'
'It's never dark in London.'
Frank considered this statement. It had an originality about it that made him suspicious. He decided to ignore it. 'Middleheight or a bit less-know what I mean?'
'I suppose you mean a bit below middle height, Mr.McQuaid.'
'Thats what I said. She was just a kid.' Frank looked mournfully at an invisible camera. 'Came from some foreign place. Albania? Maybe she was an asylum seeker.'
'Yes, thank you, Mr. McQuaid. You've been' the policeman lied, 'very helpful.'
That night there was a storm at sea. That was what it soundedlike, the waves pounding on the shore. Why the Westwayshould have been so much louder than usual Mix didn't know. Perhaps the wind was coming from a different direction. He should have asked that doctor for sleeping pills. As it was, hehad no sleep until about four when he fell into a troubled doze. The brightness of the morning did something to reduce his terror to simple fear when he awoke at eight. His first thought was that he must move out, get away from this haunted house, his second that moving was impossible while that body remained downstairs in the washhouse. What he had seen the evening before so concentrated his mind that hebarely reacted when he went downstairs and picked up from the doormat the letter from the blood-testing lab via the company'sdoctor and saw that his cholesterol level at 8.8 was alarmingly high. So what? He could get pills for it, statins or something. How would he dare go upstairs when he came home from work?
Mix knew he couldn't miss any more calls or leave one other message unanswered. Colette Gilbert-Bamber was lost, but he had no regrets about her. Reluctant as he was to go near the place, he drove over to Westbourne Grove and Shoshana's Spa. It was ten o'clock in the morning.
He rang the bell and an unknown voice answered in an affected drawl of the kind he called 'Sloaney.' 'Mix Cellini torepair the equipment,' he said.
No reply but the door growled ajar. He walked in, lifted his head and came face to face with Nerissa descending the stairs. For a moment he thought he must be hallucinating, he couldn'tbelieve his luck. It was as if fate was compensating him for his terrible experience of last evening. He found a voice that cameout rather shrilly.
'Good morning, Miss Nash.'
She looked at him without smiling. 'Hi,' she said and she sounded frightened.
'Please don't be nervous,' he said. 'It's just-just that I'm always happy to see you.'
She looked very beautiful-she couldn't help that-in jeans and a cotton top with a red poncho over it. Halfway down thestairs, she had stopped and stood there, as if a bit scared to pass him. 'Did you follow me here?'
'Oh, no,' he said in a tone intended to reassure. 'No, no,no. I work here, servicing the equipment.' He walked away from the foot of the stairs and waited by the lift. 'Please comedown. I won't harm you.'
That old bitch of a mother of hers and the great-aunt toomust have been working on her, turning her against him. He'd like to kill that old Fordyce woman. Nerissa came slowly downthe stairs, hesitated at the foot before saying, 'Well, good-bye. Please don't… ' She had slipped out of the door before ending her sentence.
She was going to say, please don't think me rude, I didn't understand, Mix thought. Or, please don't think I meant you'd harm me. Something like that. She was as nice as she was beautiful, kind and sweet. It would be her nasty old mother who'd taught her to ask him if he was following her, not the kind of thing she'd say naturally. Mothers could be their children's enemies. Look at his own, marrying Javy and, after he'd gone,bringing all those men back when she'd got three growing kids at home, learning her loose behavior. Nerissa's mum ought to be thankful her daughter had someone to adore her and, more than that, respect her in an old-fashioned way.
By this time the lift had taken him up to the spa floor. Where Danila had presided the first time he came there stood a woman almost as gorgeous as Nerissa, though an arctic blonde where she was dark, snow-white skin, a glacier-pale torrentof hair, long fingers tipped in silver. She must be the onewho had answered his ring. 'I'll just let Madam Shoshana know you're here,' she said in a debutante's voice.
Mix would very much rather she didn't. The chances weret he crazy old soothsayer wouldn't remember him from the sessioni n that upstairs room, but she might. And if she did, would she think it funny him also being the one she had a service contractwith? Did that matter? Mix would prefer no one to findanything funny about his behavior. He didn't want attentiondrawn to himself. Anyway, she wouldn't come up herself, she'dsend a message by this amazing-looking girl. Once more he gazed at her.
In the tones of Eliza Doolittle after her transformation, she said, 'Whom do you think you're looking at?'
Mix walked a few paces away. 'Which machines want seeing to?'
'Madam will show you. I'm new here.'
Before he could answer, Shoshana came out of the lift, draped in black robes, hung with ropes of jet and
