The Devil's Staircase (17 page)

The record jumped. She screamed, but the song had started again, and it was drowning her out. She crawled back to the hall, leaving a trail of thick blood in her wake, opened the door to the stinking room, reached up inside with closed eyes, and pulled the switch on the fuse box.

Everything went quiet.

Celia slumped into her puddle of blood and mustered one last shred of energy from her crumbling body . . .

‘HELP ME! HELP ME! PLEASE, HELP ME!’

I threw on my netball skirt and polo shirt and raced madly around the ground floor of the house looking for a trapdoor, or some way into the basement. I ran out into the garden and noticed an open grate, and when I knelt down to look inside I nearly threw up. It was a room, covered in excrement, with a chair and broken bits of stuff scattered around. I couldn’t see the woman, but there was an open doorway from the room and I could see the foot of a staircase. I ran back inside and opened the hall cupboard. Hurling cans of paint and rolls of wallpaper out into the hallway, I yelled: ‘We’re coming! We’re coming! Hold on!’

Maybe there was an opening underneath the junk, I thought. Hamish and Francesco came out of the living room to see what was going on, then the others walked down the stairs to join them.

I stopped when the back of the cupboard became visible. Shit, why hadn’t we found it? It was a normal whitewashed door, inexpertly hidden by some easily movable rubbish.

Hamish kicked the locked door, but he was weak and it didn’t budge.

‘Pete, you do it,’ I yelled. ‘Quick!’

He entered the empty cupboard, dressed only in his boxer shorts, took a deep breath, and kicked the door. It fell after one attempt, the hinges bursting from the frame, the door falling and banging down what had to be a staircase.

I went first. The stairs were wooden, banister-less, and sticky. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was walking in blood, my steps leaving red footprints behind me. I got to the bottom of the stairs, stepped over the fallen door, and saw her. A lump on the floor of the concreted, rank hallway. Her eyes were open, staring up at me, but only just, because her bony frame was spewing blood.

‘Who was it? I asked. ‘Who did this to you?’

She couldn’t answer me.

I held her. I could hear Hamish, Pete and Francesco behind me, talking, vomiting at the smell. I closed her wounds with my hands as best I could and yelled at the others to get themselves together, to call the ambulance, fast.

‘Who did this?’ I repeated.

‘Big eyes,’ she muttered, over and over as I stroked her sticky hair. ‘Big eyes.’

Celia’s eyes had widened with hope when she heard the door at the top of the staircase being kicked in. At last. Could it be true? Had she beaten him?

But her eyes had closed a little by the time feet descended the stairs. Some people were standing over her. She could hear a gasp and a scream and she could see the faces for a while – three men, and a young woman. They whirled into one vision, as unreal as the world she’d occupied for the last month or so. Faces and clothing and pieces of skin, all blurry and unfamiliar. As she looked up at them, she tried to speak, or at least point, but she was fading, dying probably, and wouldn’t that be a shit, after all she’d been through, to not make it after all, to not hear the squeals of her family as they raced to find her, to not even have the strength to point at one of the men looking down at her and say ‘
Is that him? Is that his voice? There’s something in the way he stands.’

Celia only managed two words – ‘Big eyes.’ She wanted so badly to manage more than that, to get the monster who’d probably killed her. A wave of frustration swept over her as she heard herself try to speak – she was making rasping noises, nothing else, and the effort hurt so much that in the end she was glad to retreat into darkness.

A naked woman was dying in my arms. She looked nothing like the woman I’d seen in Greg’s newspaper clippings. Her face was blistered, her finger bone was protruding, her mouth was swollen and cut, her legs ripped to shreds, her tiny frame weak and bony. I looked into her eyes and talked: ‘Keep looking at me . . .Your boys are missing you . . .I’m going to get them, Sam and Johnny and Greg, in a minute . . . You’re going to get through this . . . You’re going to be with them again, be a Mummy and a wife . . . Everything will be fine, just fine . . . Look at me, okay?’

She opened her mouth and tried to say something. She gasped, her tongue huge and bleeding. I could see the frustration in her eyes as she pleaded with me to understand what it was she was trying to say, but after managing the words ‘Big eyes’, nothing more came.

She closed her eyes as the two paramedics arrived. I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to hold her, to be with her, to will her to live. I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt as I stepped away from her to let the paramedics take over. She’d been underneath my room all that time and I’d been too stoned and too stupid to save her.

I ran up the blood-carpeted staircase, over the floorboards of the hallway, outside, over the street, and banged on Greg’s door screaming: ‘GREG! GREG! SHE’S ALIVE!’

He opened the door a moment later. He was in his pyjamas. The boys were in their pyjamas behind him.

‘She’s alive! We’ve found her! In the basement of my house.’ ‘What?’ Greg said, disbelieving.

‘Celia. She’s in my house. Alive.’

I would have taken his hand and led him to her, but he was too fast, as was Sam. They were running across the road and into the squat.

‘Stop!’ I yelled, running after him, holding Johnny in my arms. ‘Leave Sam with me! GREG!’

Greg stopped and looked at me, understanding that this meant it wasn’t good. He turned to Sam. ‘Stay with Bronny,’ he said, ‘Stay there while I get Mummy. I’ll be back out in a minute.’

I held Johnny and Sam on the step of their flat and we looked over the road, just as they had when they’d waited for their cat to come home.

‘She must have got my emails,’ Sam said. ‘I told her if she didn’t come back I’d steal Johnny’s Tardis.’

I kissed Sam on the forehead. His eyes were different all of a sudden. They were the eyes of a seven-year-old.

Eventually, Greg walked out beside the stretcher and then ran to us while they loaded the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

‘Mummy’s going to hospital. Stay with the paramedic till your Gran gets here.’

Greg looked at me for a moment, his eyes squinting a little. He was wondering who I was, who I
realy
was. He grabbed Johnny from my lap and handed him to the paramedic. He then steered Sam over to join his little brother. Sam turned his head and smiled kindly at me.

As Greg raced back across the road, I realised I was no longer his friend. I was no longer anyone’s friend. I was a squatter from nowhere who had possibly harboured and tortured an innocent woman in the basement.

I ran into the squat. ‘Pete!’ I yelled. ‘Pete! Where are you?’ I needed to hold him so badly.

‘Down here,’ he said.

Reluctantly, I walked down into the basement. Fliss, Cheryl-Anne, Pete, Zach and Hamish were there, staring at something in one of the two rooms. I walked towards them and looked inside the one with the door. It was light now, and I could hear the police cars arriving and I could see what they could see: pieces of paper pinned to the right hand side of the wall, rucksacks and sleeping bags lined up against the left, and two women propped upright in front of me, wrapped like mummies in cling film, their dead eyes staring at us through the plastic.

I fainted.

When I woke, a police officer was standing over me.

All seven of them were handcuffed – Bronny, Cheryl-Anne, Fliss, Zach, Hamish, Pete and Francesco – because they were all suspects. They’d been sugar-coated in rucksacks and passport stamps, but now they were to be unpeeled. Two girls had been killed in their drug-littered house. Perhaps a third. And for now, these debauched, homeless, family-less travellers were the only obvious candidates.

Seven . . .

Zach had been handcuffed while still staring at the cling film girls. He was statue-like, frozen. They’d had to drag him from the basement kicking and screaming because one of the girls was his sister. Last time he’d seen her was six months ago at Tullamarine Airport. He’d caught some early waves in Torquay, then jumped in the Land Cruiser. His parents had cried after the picnic had been eaten near Check-in Point 33, and they’d cried even more as their beautiful Jeanie disappeared behind the sliding gates at International Departures. On the way home, Jeanie’s parents phoned her three times. She was still in the passport queue, having a coffee at Gate 11, just boarding, better go, I love you!

They didn’t expect her to ring often, but when she stopped altogether after a few months, they began to worry a little. Friends told them they shouldn’t. Kids doing the whole indefinite trip thing never ring home. She was probably out of range. They took their friends’ advice and relaxed, especially when Zach decided to head off as well. He’d track her down, give her a slap on the wrist, get her to call home for God’s sake.

She’d gone to the Royal, he knew that, and Zach was chuffed when Francesco had said he remembered her.

‘She went off to a kibbutz I think . . . Don’t panic, she’ll get in touch.’

So he didn’t panic. He got into the lifestyle, playing his guitar and smoking pot and taking cocaine and ecstasy and shagging girls and forgetting to phone home. He laughed when he thought back to how worried he’d been. Now he knew the deal – she, like him, had entered the travel zone, an otherworldly black hole where you forget you even have a family because the people you are with are better than family, more interesting and more interested. And you forget you have a home because wherever you are, whatever room you’re sharing with your new family,
is
your home.

But Jeanie wasn’t in Israel. She was in cling film.

Zach’s handcuffs were taken off not long after he arrived at the police station. He was no longer a suspect. He was a victim.

Six . . .

Generally speaking, Vera Oh reasoned, girls don’t kidnap, rape, torture and kill other girls. Cheryl-Anne might have worked with a man Myra Hindley-style, and the police wondered about this for a while, especially considering her angry racist ideas and the fact that she’d left her three-year-old child in another country just so she could have some fun.

‘What sort of woman is she?’ Vera Oh had said to her colleague after interviewing Cheryl-Anne McDonald from Wagga Wagga. ‘Kind of man-like, y’know?’

But Cheryl-Anne was also the kind of woman who kept a diary, who wrote her comings and goings in elaborate detail, gluing receipts and tickets to the pages, and she had come and gone at all the wrong times to have been involved Myra Hindley-style in any of the crimes.

Cheryl-Anne’s handcuffs were unlocked soon after Zach’s. Five . . .

As for Fliss, she’d arrived in London after Celia’s kidnapping, and was a blubbering mess, afraid of the dark, never mind blood.

Four . . .

Hamish had been in Ballarat, Australia, around the time of Celia’s disappearance.

Three . . . Two . . . One . . .

And then it was Pete’s turn, and when they’d finished running his name through the computer they didn’t even bother checking Francesco and Bronwyn because Francesco hadn’t spent most of his adult life in prison and Bronwyn hadn’t hidden a gimp mask under the mattress.

Pete had.

As I waited to be released from the station, I thought back to that night at the Polish club. I’d been out of my box on ecstasy, and was rambling on about my new friends – how Cheryl-Anne ate peanut shells; how Fliss wore no underpants even with skirts. I remembered loving them undyingly.

As a kind Asian police officer questioned me about the other suspects, she told me things I’d never known.

Cheryl-Anne had refused to talk to her parents for three years. They wanted her to come home and see her beautiful daughter, but she just didn’t feel like it.

I didn’t know Fliss’s fiancé had chucked her the day before their wedding, that she had come to London, devastated and angry, hoping to make it big as a model so she could return home triumphant, saying: ‘Look at me, you bastard, I am a supermodel and even if you beg I will never forgive you!’ I didn’t know how hard she’d tried to make it, that after hundreds of go-sees and auditions she’d turned to prostitution to get a good set of photographs together, and to keep the diet-amphetamines coming. She’d made quite a name for herself in the area, the police woman said, and was on the brink of being sacked from the Slug and Lettuce for using the storeroom as her boudoir.

I didn’t know Zach had enough cocaine in his room to supply a small country.

That Hamish had dropped out of university.

That Pete was a serial killer.

And they’d known nothing about me. Not one of them knew that I had worn death for years; that I had been running away from it and was starting to tire. None of them knew that I’d spent much of my youth watching an old man tend his horses in a disused railway, that when I visited my mother’s grave I felt nothing but anger. No one knew that I prayed for the pigs as they shuffled into the bacon factory. No one knew that I had fallen in love. Hopelessly.