Thirteen Steps Down

'I found it in the bottom of my copper, in my washhouse. Is it yours and what is it?'

' Well, Gwen, you've never been married and I knew you were innocent about a lot of things, but I didn't know it went that far.' So Olive took her revenge for years of rudeness andingratitude. 'Even a child would know what that is.'

'Thank you. You've said quite enough. Now perhaps you'll tell me what it is.'

This caused Olive some embarrassment, which she triednot to show. 'Well, it's a-it's a kind of pair of-well, knickers. Girls wear them. Once I'd have said 'only that sort of girl,' but things have changed, haven't they? Now even nice girls, I mean, not actresses or-well, stripteasers, if you know what I mean.'

'Oh, I know what you mean. In spite of my profound naivete and resemblance to a retarded child… '

'I didn't say that, Gwen.' Though not a slave to political correctness, Olive shuddered at some of the things that snapped off Gwendolen's tongue.

“No? I think you did. In spite of all my cerebral deficiencies, I do just about know what you mean. Don't, please don't, tell me it’s yours. '

Olive was really incensed by now. 'Of course it isn't mine. Do you suppose that would go around my hips even if I was so-so… '

'Meretricious? Licentious? Concupiscent? Vain?'

'Oh, I've no patience. If you weren't unwell and didn'tknow what you're saying I'd be really cross.'

At last Gwendolen saw that she had gone too far. Sustaining this kind of altercation took more energy than she was capable of today. She drank her coffee, which she had to admit (though not aloud) was very good. 'Do you suppose it could be Queenie's?'

'Of course not. This has been worn by some young woman. A girl of twenty.'

Nerissa immediately came into Gwendolen's mind and along with her, the lodger, Cellini. The minute she arrived home, he had been coming out of her kitchen. Why? He had a kitchen of his own. 'Did you or Queenie put my bag of old clothes on top of the copper?'

'Certainly not. I found a bag of clothes in the washhouse and I left them there. Very musty and smelly they were, but there-it's not my business.'

'No, indeed.' After that, Gwendolen decided to be gracious. 'It was very kind of you to buy me the chocolate and those other things. What do I owe you?'

'Nothing, Gwen. Don't be absurd. If you want my opinion and I dare say you don't, that Mr. Cellini had a girl here while you were in hospital and they were larking about where they shouldn't have been. People these days- well, I don't like talking about these things-but they do-well, have baths together,and it's just possible… You see, you could stand up in a copper which you can't in an ordinary bath.'

'I've no idea what you mean,' said Gwendolen. 'I needs omething lighter than Darwin to read. Before you go, would you see if you can find The Golden Bowl? Henry James,you know.'

He watched Ma Fordyce leave and once he had seen her disappeararound the corner, he went downstairs, careful to tread softly. The drawing room door was open and on the sofa he saw old Chawcer lying on her back, asleep with her mouth open. Always one to notice domestic order and its reverse, he observed that the kitchen was fast reverting to its normalc haos. The old girl had only been home twenty-four hours.

Confident he would find the thong where he had left it, he tiptoed into the washhouse and lifted the lid of the copper. Of course it was impossible to see down to the bottom of it. How did women ever get the water out of there? Perhaps they didn't. Perhaps there was always some lingering, stagnant and smelly, in the depths. There must be a flashlight somewhere. Nearly sure he'd once seen her with a flashlight in her hand, hepadded around the kitchen, looking into cupboards and openingdrawers. No flashlight, but he did find a candle and a box of matches. Afraid she'd hear the match striking, he waited and listened, holding the lit candle in his hand. Once he was sure he wasn't dragging herself off the sofa to come and find him, he put the hand holding the candle as far as he could down the deep well of the copper. The light was quite adequate to show him walls and a base apparently made of some sort of bluish pottery-and nothing else. Nothing. No thong. The copper was empty.

Still he held the candle there as if continuing to light the hollow space would ultimately reveal that it wasn't as empty as he'd thought at iirst. He stared down, closing his eyes and opening them again until a drop of boiling wax fell on his thumb, making him jump back and very nearly cry out. Instead he cursed under his breath, pinched out the flame and put candle and matches back where he had found them. He walked back slowly, passing the drawing room door. Old Chawcer was still asleep. Had she found the thong? Or was it one of the other two? It seemed to him that they must immediately have known it had belonged to the missing girl whose picture appearedalmost daily in the papers. Only today there had been a bold headline: HAVE YOU SEEN DANILA?

Upstairs in his own flat, he asked himself if he should doanything. Ask old Chawcer or ask one of the others? But he was very alive to the awkwardness of it. How to explain what he was doing in the washhouse, why he was even touching thecopper? They would want to know who the thong belonged to.He couldn't think of any explanation except the true one for how the thong got where it was. Perhaps they wouldn't ask. Mix had very little idea of how other people might react to his own activities or whether they might think things he regarded as normal and ordinary as quite different from that. But he had some small inkling through remarks made by the three elderly women that an older, a much older, generation than his own might be embarrassed by a garment so blatantly sexual as a G-string. If only they were, they might not mention it, they might prefer to pretend they had never found it, might throw it away in disgust or shock. You wish, he said to himself, but he began to think there was a possibility of this.

While she was still asleep, he went into her bedroom and examined the bottles and packets she had brought back from the hospital and left on her bedside table. Among them was a jar with a label on its side that said: Two to be taken at night to promotesleep. Certain she wouldn't have counted them, he helped himself to eight. If he needed more after four nights he could always come back. Instead of two, he took three and slept hea-ily for three hours. After that he was wide awake and passed the rest of the night uneasily.

He kept thinking of arguments against his optimistic theory of the three (or one or two) of the old women disposing of the thong. Suppose Ma Fordyce, say, had read all that stuff about Danila working in what the papers called a 'beauty salon and gym,' suppose she knew very well what the thong was and decided a girl from a place like that would be more than likely to wear a thong-suppose all that and then would she go to the police? Easy to say, as he had in the bright light of afternoon,that this was a crazy farfetched idea. In the small hours itseemed reasonable.

He had to see the Holland Park woman at nine-thirty and he was twenty minutes late. She was too pleased he had come at all to reproach him for failing to be there on time. On his way down to Chelsea he checked his calls and was quite surprised to see a message from Mr. Pearson's assistant. Would he call to arrange an urgent meeting with the chief executive? This gave Mix a cold feeling but one quite unlike the tremor that had lurched through him when he remembered the missing thong. Surely Pearson wasn't all that concerned about a few missed appointments. He was very polite to the man in Chelsea and showed him how to adjust the belt on his treadmill himself, providing the weakling was strong enough to wield a spanner. For all his working out, he still had the muscle development of an anorexic girl. Since his exploits with pick and spade, Mix had begun to pride himself on his physical strength.

Not anxious to appear in too much of a hurry, he fitted a new belt to a machine in Primrose Hill before phoning Mr.Pearson's assistant. She was a chilly young woman with an inflated idea of her own importance.

'You took your time,' she said. 'There's not much point in leaving you people messages if you never check them.'

'What time does he want to see me?'

'Immediately. Like twelve-thirty.'

'For God's sake, it's a quarter-past now.'

'Then you'd better get on your bike, hadn't you?' She suddenly became almost human, if in a nasty way. 'He's livid, incandescent. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes.'

Mix got on his bike, or rather, drove as fast as the traffic alloweddown the Outer Circle and Baker Street. It was still nearly twelve forty-five when the assistant showed him into Mr. Pearson's office. Pearson was the only person