Chapter One
Mix was standing where the street should have been. Or where he
thought it should have been. By this time shock and disbelief were
past. Bitter disappointment, then rage, filled his body and climbed
into his throat, half choking him. How dared they? How could they,
whoever they were, destroy what should have been a national
monument? The house itself should have been a museum, one of those
blue plaques high up on its wall, the garden, lovingly preserved
just as it was, part of a tour visiting parties could have made. If
they had wanted a curator they need have looked no further than him.
Everything was new, carefully and soullessly designed. ‘Soulless’ – that
was the word and he was proud of himself for thinking it up.
The place was pretty, he thought in disgust, typical yuppie-land
building. The petunias in the flowerbeds particularly enraged him.
Of course he knew that some time back before he was born they had
changed the name from Rillington Place to Ruston Close but now there
wasn’t even a Ruston Close any more. He had brought an old map with
him but it was useless, harder to find the old streets than
searching for the child’s features in the fifty-year-old face. Fifty
years was right. It would be half a century since Reggie was caught
and hanged. If they had to rename the streets, surely they could
have put up a sign somewhere which said, Formerly Rillington Place.
Or something to tell visitors they were in Reggie country. Hundreds
must come here, some of them expectant and deeply disappointed,
others knowing nothing of the place’s history, all of them
encountering this smart little enclave of red brick and raised
flowerbeds, geraniums and busy lizzies spilling out of window-boxes,
and trees chosen for their golden and creamy white foliage.
It was midsummer and a fine day, the sky a cloudless blue. The
little grass plots were a bright and lush green, a pink climbing
plant draping a rosy cloak over walls cunningly constructed on
varying levels. Mix turned away, the choking anger making his heart
beat faster and more loudly, thud, thud, thud. If he had known
everything had been eradicated, he would never have considered the
flat in St Blaise House. He had come to this corner of Notting Hill
solely because it had been Reggie’s district. Of course he had known
the house itself was gone and its neighbours too but still he had
been confident the place would be easily recognisable, a street
shunned by the fainthearted, frequented by intelligent enthusiasts
like himself. But the feeble, the squeamish, the politically correct
had had their way and torn it all down. They would have been
laughing at the likes of him, he thought, and triumphant at
replacing history with a tasteless housing estate.
The visit itself he had been saving up as a treat for when he was
settled in. A treat! How often, when he was a child, had a promised
treat turned into a let-down? Too often, he seemed to remember, and
it didn’t stop when one was grown-up and a responsible person.
Still, he wasn’t moving again, not after paying Ed and his mate to
paint the place and refit the kitchen. He turned his back on the
pretty little new houses, the trees and flowerbeds, and walked
slowly up Oxford Gardens and across Ladbroke Grove to view the house
where Reggie’s first victim had had a room. At least that wasn’t
changed. By the look of it, no one had painted it since the woman’s
death in 1943. No one seemed to know which room it had been, there
were no details in any of the books he’d read. He gazed at the
windows, speculating and making guesses, until someone looked out at
him and he thought he’d better move on.
St Blaise Avenue was quite up-market where it crossed Oxford
Gardens, tree-lined with ornamental cherries, but the further he
walked downhill it too went down until it was all sixties local
authority housing, dry cleaners and motorcycle spare parts places
and corner shops. All except for the terrace on the other side,
isolated elegant Victorian, and the big house, the only one like it
in the whole neighbourhood that wasn’t divided into a dozen flats,
St Blaise House. Pity they hadn’t pulled that lot down, Mix thought,
and left Rillington Place alone.
No cherries here but great dusty plane trees with huge leaves and
bark peeling off their trunks. They were partly responsible for
making the place so dark. He paused to look at the house, marvelling
at its size, as he always did, and wondering why on earth the old
woman hadn’t sold it to a developer years ago. Three floors high, it
was of once-white, now grey, stucco, with steps up to a great front
door that was half hidden in the depths of a pillared portico.
Above, almost under the eaves, was a circular window quite different
from the other oblong windows, being of stained glass, clouded by
the accumulation of grime built up over the years since it had last
been cleaned.
Mix let himself in. The hallway alone, he had thought when he first
saw the place, was big enough for a normal-size flat to fit inside,
big, square and dark like everything in there. Big dark chairs with
carved backs stood uselessly against the walls, one of them under a
huge mirror in a carved wooden frame, its glass all spotted with
greenish blots like islands on a map of the sea. Stairs went down to
a basement but he had never been in it and as far as he knew no one
else had for years and years.
When he came in he always hoped she wouldn’t be anywhere about and
usually she wasn’t, but today he was out of luck. Dressed in her
usual garments, long droopy cardigan and skirt with a dipping
hemline, she was standing beside a huge carved table which must have
weighed a ton, holding up a coloured flyer advertising a Tibetan
restaurant. When she saw him she said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Cellini,’
in her upper-class drawl, putting, he thought, a lot of scorn into
her voice.
When he spoke to Gwendolen Chawcer, when addressing her was
unavoidable, he did his best to shock her – so far without marked
success.
‘You’ll never guess where I’ve been.’
‘That is almost a certainty,’ she said. ‘So it seems pointless to
attempt it.’
Sarcastic old bitch. ‘Rillington Place,’ he said, ‘or where it used
to be. I wanted to see where Christie buried all those women he
killed in his garden but there’s not a trace of it left.’
She put the flyer back on the table. No doubt, it would lie there
for months. Then she surprised him. ‘I went to his house once,’ she
said, ‘when I was young.’
‘You did? Why was that?’
He knew she wouldn’t be forthcoming and she wasn’t. ‘I had a reason
to go there. The visit lasted no more than half an hour. He was an
unpleasant man.’
He couldn’t control his excitement. ‘What sort of an impression did
he make on you? Did you feel you were in the presence of a murderer?
Was his wife there?’
She laughed her cold laugh. ‘Goodness, Mr Cellini, I’ve no time to
answer all these questions. I have to get on.’
With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She
must have read thousands of books, she was always at it. He felt
frustrated after her unsatisfactory but provocative response. She
might be a mine of information about Reggie but she was too
stand-offish to talk about it.
He began to mount the stairs, hating them with a fierce hatred,
though they were not narrow or precarious or winding. There were
fifty-two and one of the things he disliked about them was that they
were composed of three flights, twenty-two in this stretch,
seventeen in the next, but thirteen in the top flight. If there was
anything which upset Mix more than unpleasant surprises and rude old
women, it was the number thirteen. St Blaise House, fortunately, was
number 54 St Blaise Avenue.
One day when old Chawcer was out he had counted the bedrooms, not
including his own, and found there were nine. Some were furnished,
if you could call it furniture, some were not. The whole place was
filthy. In his opinion, no one had done any housework in it for
years, though he had seen her flicking about with a feather duster.
All that woodwork, carved with shields and swords and helmets, faces
and flowers, leaves and garlands and ribbons, lay under an ancient
accumulation of dust. Banister was linked to banister and cornice to
picture rail by ropes of cobwebs. She had lived here all her long
life, first with her parents, then with her dad, then alone. Apart
from that he knew nothing about her. He didn’t even know how she
happened to have three bedrooms on the top floor already converted
into a flat.
The stairs grew narrower after the first landing and the last
flight, the top one, was tiled, not carpeted. Mix had never seen a
staircase of shiny black tiles before but there were many things in
Miss Chawcer’s house he had never seen before. No matter what kind
of shoes he wore, those tiles made a terrible noise, a
thump-thumping or a clack-clacking, and his belief was that she had
tiled the stairs so that she would be able to tell what time her
tenant came in. He had already got into the habit of removing his
shoes and continuing in his socks alone. It wasn’t that he ever did
anything wrong but he didn’t want her knowing his business.
The stained glass window speckled the top landing with spots of
coloured light. It was a picture of a girl looking into a pot with
some sort of plant in it. When old Chawcer brought him up here for
the first time she had called it the Isabella window and the
picture, Isabella and the Pot of Basil, made very little sense to
Mix. As far as he was concerned, basil was something growing in a
bag you bought at Tesco. The girl looked ill, her face was the only
bit of the glass that was white, and Mix resented having to see her
each time he went into or came out of, his flat.
He called his home an apartment but Gwendolen Chawcer called it
‘rooms’. She lived in the past, in his opinion, and not thirty or
forty years ago like most old people but a hundred years. He had put
in the bathroom himself with Ed and his mate’s help and fitted the
kitchen. He paid for it, so Miss Chawcer couldn’t really complain.
She ought to have been pleased; it would still be there for the next
tenant when he was famous and had moved out. The fact was that she
had never been able to see the need for a bathroom. When she was
young, she told him, you had a chamber pot in your bedroom and a
basin on the washstand and the maid brought you up a jug of hot
water.
Mix had a bedroom as well and a large living room, dominated by a
huge poster photograph of Nerissa Nash, taken when a newspaper
started naming the models as well as the clothes designers. That was
in the days when they called her the poor man’s Naomi Campbell. They
did so no longer. Mix stood in front of the poster, as he often did
when he first came in, like a religious contemplating a holy
picture, his lips murmuring, ‘I love you, I adore you,’ instead of
prayers.
* * *
He was earning good money at Fiterama and he had spent freely on
this flat. The chrome-encased television, video and DVD player were
on the hire purchase as was most of the kitchen equipment but that,
to use one of Ed’s favourite expressions, was par for the course,
everyone did it. He had paid for the white carpet and grey tweed
suite with ready cash, buying the black marble statue of the nude
girl on an impulse but not for a moment regretting his purchase. The
poster of Nerissa he had had framed in the same chrome finish as the
TV. In the black ash shelving he kept his collection of Reggie
books: 10 Rillington Place, John Reginald Halliday Christie, The
Christie Legend, Murder in Rillington Place and Christie’s Victims
among many others. Richard Attenborough’s film of 10 Rillington
Place he had on video and DVD. It was outrageous, he thought, that
one Hollywood movie after another was re-made while you never heard
a thing about a re-make of that. The one he possessed he often
played and the digital version was even better, clearer and
brighter. Richard Attenborough was wonderful, he wasn’t arguing
about that, but he didn’t look much like Reggie. A taller actor was
needed with sharper features and burning eyes.
Mix was inclined to day-dream and sometimes he speculated as to
whether he would be famous through knowing Nerissa or through his
expert knowledge of Reggie. There was probably no one alive today,
not even Ludovic Kennedy who had written the book, who knew more. It
might be his mission in life to reawaken interest in Rillington
Place and its most famous occupant, though how this was to come
about after what he had seen that afternoon, was as yet a mystery.
He would solve it, of course. Perhaps he would write a book about
Reggie himself, and not one full of feeble comments on the man’s
wickedness and depravity. His book would draw attention to the
murderer as artist.
It was getting on for six. Mix poured himself his favourite drink.
He had invented it himself and called it Boot Camp because it had
such a savage kick. It mystified him that no one he had offered it
to seemed to share his taste for a double measure of vodka, a glass
of Sauvignon and a tablespoonful of Cointreau poured over crushed
ice. His fridge was the kind which spewed out the crushed ice all
prepared. He was just savouring the first sip when his mobile rang.
It was Colette Gilbert-Bamber to tell him she was desperate to get
her treadmill repaired. It might be no more than the electric plug
or it might be something bigger. Her husband had gone out but she
had had to stay at home because she was expecting an important phone
call. Mix knew what all that meant. Being in love with his distant
star, his queen and lady, didn’t mean he was never to treat himself
to a bit of fun. Once he and Nerissa were together, a recognised
item, it would be a different thing.
Regretfully but getting his priorities right, Mix put his Boot Camp
into the fridge. He cleaned his teeth, gargled with a mouthwash
which tasted not unlike his cocktail without the stimulus, and made
his way down the stairs. In the midst of the house you wouldn’t have
guessed how fine the day was and bright and hot the sunshine. Here
it was always cold and strangely silent too, it always was. You
couldn’t hear the Hammersmith and City Line running above ground
from Latimer Road to Shepherd’s Bush, or the traffic in Ladbroke
Grove. The only noise came from the Westway but if you didn’t know
you wouldn’t have imagined you were listening to traffic. It sounded
like the sea, like waves breaking on the shore, or what you hear
when you hold a big seashell up to your ear, a soft unceasing roar.
* * *
These days Gwendolen sometimes needed the help of a magnifying glass
to read small print. And, unfortunately, most of the books she
wanted to read were printed in what she understood to be called
10-point. Her ordinary glasses couldn’t cope with Papa’s edition of
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for instance, or what she
was reading now, a very old copy of Middlemarch, published in the
nineteenth century.
Like her bedroom above it, the drawing room encompassed the whole
depth of the house, a pair of large sash windows overlooking the
street, french windows at the back giving on the garden. When she
was reading Gwendolen reclined on a sofa upholstered in dark brown
corduroy, its back surmounted with a carved mahogany dragon. The
dragon’s tail curved round to meet one of the sofa arms, while its
head reared up as it snarled at the black marble fireplace. Most of
the furniture was rather like that, carved and thickly padded and
covered in velvet which was brown or dull green or the dark red of
claret, but some was made of dark veined marble with gilt legs.
There was a very large mirror on one wall, framed in gilt leaves and
fruit and curlicues, which had grown dull with time and lack of
care.
Beyond the french windows, open now to the warm evening light, lay
the garden. Gwendolen still saw it as it used to be, the lawn
closely mown to the smoothness of emerald velvet, the herbaceous
border alight with flowers, the trees pruned to make the best of
their luxuriant foliage. Or, rather, she saw that it could be like
that with a little attention, nothing that couldn’t be achieved by a
day’s work. That the grass was knee high, the flowerbeds a mass of
weeds and the trees ruined by dead branches, escaped her notice. The
printed word was more real to her than a comfortable interior and
pleasing exterior.
Her mind and her memories too were occasionally stronger than the
book; then she laid it down to stare at the brownish cobweb-hung
ceiling and the dusty prisms on the chandelier, to think and to
remember.
(Continues…)
Crown
Copyright © 2004
Ruth Rendell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-9842-4
Excerpted from Thirteen Steps Down
by Ruth Rendell
Copyright © 2004 by Ruth Rendell.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
