Thirteen Steps Down (44 page)

ghost had been the last straw. Compared to that, all these people coming

and going didn't amount to much, but it was a nuisance, and worrying

too. Whohad that man been and what was he doing here?

His backache had returned. Not severely, nothing like on that terrible

night after his grave-digging, but bad enough. He took two ibuprofen and

started to pack. He probably wouldn't stay with Shannon for more than

one night. The idea of sharing a room with her two unruly boys, one of

them fourteenshe'd had both by the time she was nineteen--didn't

appeal. He put in a spare pair of jeans and three shirts. His leatherjacket

he'd wear. Now to get out of the house before meeting either of those two

old witches.

The police needed no reminder once the information given them first by

Abbas Reza and then by Olive and Queenie had been compared. A

detective sergeant was out in the gardenw ith Tom Akwaa when Olive

saw Mix Cellini coming down the stairs. She waited for him in the

hallway, though she had no intention of telling him of the policeman's

arrival.

"Where are you going?" she said in her best highhandedtone.

He had his backpack over one shoulder. "No business of yours but

since you ask, I'm off to see my sister in Essex."

"I haven't seen your car about lately."

"No, you haven't, Nosy Parker, because it hasn't been here.I've sold it."

He opened the front door and slammed it hard behind him.Olive

abandoned her cleaning and began searching through the cluttered

drawers in the drawing room furniture to see if Gwendolen had a key to

his flat. It took her a long while but bythe time Queenie arrived she had

found eighteen keys of variousshapes and sizes.

"It's not any of those," Queenie said. "She told me once, she kept--1

mean 'keeps'--important keys in the tumble-drier."

Olive was distracted from her task by this fascinating sidelighton

Gwendolen's peculiarities. "What happened when she used it? The drier,

I mean."

"She never did use it, dear. Not for the purpose it was designed for,

anyway."

They went into the kitchen. The natural place for a tumbledrierwould

have been the washhouse, but Gwendolen had kept hers between the

oven and the fridge. From the window they could see the policean, who

had been joined by a secondone, poking a long thin stick into a weedgrown mound in what had long ago been a herbaceous border. Queenie

opened the port-hole on the tumble-drier and brought out a nettingbag,

which had probably once held onions or potatoes but now contained a

dozen keys.

"It'll be that one," Olive said, picking out the newest key, a shiny brass

Yale.

The two policemen with Tom Akwaa came in through the washhouse.

"There'll be some chaps coming to dig up the garden," saidthe detective

sergeant.

"Dig up the garden!"

The detective sergeant looked as if he might explain whyand then

thought better of it. He and the other man began climbing the stairs,

Tom following, and behind him Olive and Queenie taking the flights

slowly. At the top Queenie could hardly speak, but Olive rallied when one

of the policemen started ringing Mix's doorbell.

"He's just gone out." She decided to lie and hoped Queenie would have

the sense not to blurt out a denial. "Here's his key. He left it with me in

case you wanted to look round."

"Really?" The detective sergeant was only twenty-eight and he hadn't

known many murderers, but he would hardly have expected a killer to

invite the police in to search his premises inhis absence. Still, never look

a gift horse in the mouth was his philosophy, so he took the key,

unlocked Mix's front door and they went in. That is, the police did.

Because it had been made plain they wouldn't be wanted, Tom with Olive

and Queenie went into the bedroom next door. It was unsufferably stuffy

and dusty. Tom, who had an unusually acute nose, sniffed andlooked

suspicious, sniffed again.

"What's that nasty smell?"

"I can't smell anything, Tom."

"Nor can 1."

A kindly soul, Tom Akwaa wouldn't have dreamt of tellingthem that

their faculties might have declined with age, so all he said was, "Well, I

can."

The policemen joined them, the younger one with an armfulof books on

John Reginald Halliday Christie. Olive, a reader,looked curiously at their

spines, several of them adorned with a photograph of Christie's gaunt

face.

"Can you smell anything funny in here?" Tom asked.

The bearer of Mix's library, a very tall young man, laid thebooks on the

dressing table and bent almost double so that hisnose was nearly

touching the floor. "God, yes," he said as hestraightened up.

When they had all gone but Queenie, who was making coffee in the

kitchen, Olive set about taking the sheets and pillowcases off the beds

she and Tom had used the night before. She was glad of something to do,

for she felt very unsettled andshaky. After all, as people constantly told

her, she was not so young as she had once been. The sight of that young

man poking a stick into that grave-shaped mound had begun it. Then

the smell, though she couldn't smell it. Strangely, those Christie books

had been the last straw, the books, that man's face on their covers, and

the implication of them. She was afraid of bursting into tears, but she

had managed to control herself. Her hands, trying to pull the top and

bottom sheets off Tom's bed, shook like thin papery leaves in the wind.

Gwendolen was dead, she had no doubt of it now. Although she hadn't

much liked the woman she called her friend, she felt the enormity of it,

the threatening awfulness of violent death. A tear started in each eye and

rolled down her cheeks. She wiped them on one of the sheets and

bundled it into a pillowcase to take home and wash.

Outside the door she heard a footstep above her. Had Cellini come

back? She set the pillowcase laundry bag downand listened, hoping that

her hearing wasn't going the way ofher sense of smell. Another footfall.

Olive's instinct was to flee,to get down those stairs to Queenie as fast as

she could. But she stood her ground. Cellini couldn't have come back,

not comei nto the house and got up the stairs and into his flat without

one of them seeing and hearing him. The police had only been gone ten

minutes and Tom less than that. Olive set her foot on the bottom step of

the tiled flight and began to climb. It wasthe bravest thing she had ever

done.

She would have crawled up the last five stairs if she hadn'tbeen afraid

Queenie would come up with the coffee and see her. As it was, she

stopped at the top, hung on to the newel postand looked for the source of

the sounds. To the right, then tot he left. Olive screamed.

What is it? What's happened?"

She ignored Queenie's voice but she didn't scream again.The sound

refused to come. Trembling, she stared at the man with Christie's face. It

was quite a lot like the photograph onthe spines of those books. He was

coming toward her, holdingout both hands. She would die, she would

have a heart attack and die.

"Please, do not fear."

He spoke with a strong foreign accent. Not a bit like Christie would

have, thought Olive. She closed her eyes, opened them again and said in

a whisper, "Who are you?" She cleared herthroat and her voice came out

more loudly and clearly. "Who are you?"

"I am called Omar. Omar Ahmed. I am from Iraq."

"The war's over," said Olive. "Were you in the war?"

He shook his head. She noticed now that his eyes were of a velvety

blackness never seen in Anglo-Saxons and his hairblack, though

peppered with gray. Don't they all have mustaches?she asked herself,

and coincidentally he said, "I shaved my beard so not to look like Middle

Eastern man."

"Are you an asylum seeker?"

He nodded, then shook his head. "I like to be when I come, but I do it

wrong, I do no register, so now I am illegal immigrant.I want to go home

now, now 1 can and will be safe, I goback to Basra."

I don't know about "safe," she thought. "Have you been living here?"

She didn't wait for an answer but said, "Come down and have some

coffee with my friend and me."

She ignored Queenie's voice but she didn't scream again. The sound

refused to come. Trembling, she stared at the man Queenie was shocked

when she was first told, and feared he might be dangerous. But she

listened to his story. He had come into England clinging on to one of the

carriages of the Eurostar, jumping off it at Folkestone. From the first he

was certain that everything he was doing was illegal. That was why he

had failed to register as an asylum seeker until the time for so doing was

up and it was too late. He hitched a lift to London on a lorry from Prague

driven by a Czech. These two were almost unable to communicate, the

Czech man having no English and of course no Arabic and Omar having

no other languages but his own and a certain amount of English.

In London he slept on the street and begged by day. He watched

houses, seeking those that were empty or those with just one solitary

owner-occupier, preferably someone old oro ut a lot. He found St. Blaise

House and Gwendolen and when the weather grew so cold that he

thought he must die if he spent another night on the street, he looked for

a way in.

Here Queenie asked why he had come, why he hadn't stayed at home.

"When he said the name Saddam Hussein and spoke of his wife and

children who had disappeared, she nodded, put out her hand to touch

his, and asked no more.

"I climb across the roofs," he said. "It was easy.I get through a window

and that too is easy."

"When was this?"

"Oh, a long time. February, March, maybe. It was cold."

He had begged by day for money to buy food. Once, in Notting Hill Gate,

he saw "the man who live here" and thought it was all up with him but

the man had seemed more frightened than he was. He was always afraid

of him on the occasions they inevitably met, Omar didn't know why. He

would have told him everything and asked for help, only the man was so

frightened of him. The only living creature he had ever had much contact

with since coming to London from Folkestone was a cat who lived in the

house and who took a fancy to him and slept on his bed, probably

because of the fish and meat leftovers he gave it. In the cellar he found

an old record player and some records. These he had played softly

because without music he felt he couldn't exist.

One night, not long ago, he had heard a bumping sound and when he

came out had seen the man dragging something wrapped in a sheet up

the stairs. If it had been in Basra he would have thought it a dead body

but not here, not in England.

Queenie gave a little scream but Olive said, "You must tell the police

what you heard and saw. You must tell them when we all go to them and

you ask them how you can go home to Iraq." "When Omar looked

nervous, she said, "They'll be glad to get you home. Once it's safe they'll

help you to get home. I promise." I hope you like it when you get there,

she said under her breath.

Chapter 29

The train for Norwich, calling at Witham, Colchester, and Ipswich ,was

scheduled to depart from platform thirteen. For amoment he thought of

giving up the whole trip or leaving thestation and trying to go by coach

instead. No, he'd bought his ticket and a terrible price it was. The last

time he had traveled by rail he had sat in first class, but things were

different now. He had to be careful. It was coming up to lunchtime. He

walked down to the buffet car, bought a burger and chips and acan of

Coke. Then-thinking, what the hell?-had a miniature of gin to put in his

drink.

It was going to be grim at Shannon's. I hate children, he thought, and

felt nauseous at the idea of sharing a bedroom with those kids of hers.

The younger one, he remembered, had a perpetual cold and was always

sniffing. They never washed, either of them, and Shannon was too

overworked and too tired to check up on them. Suddenly it came back to

him, the day he had tried to kill her. But had he? Had he really? Was

that wha the really meant, to beat her to death with that bottle? He

hadn't actually touched her, Javy had got there first.

When he came to think of it, all his troubles had started with Javy's

flogging him for that. Then his hitting his mother so that he had to leave

and fend for himself. That was two things. After that, what? Working for

Fiterama in Birmingham had been okay, but he should never have

accepted promotion and moved south. He hadn't much cared much

about Crippen, but still it was a disappointment to find his house gone,

though nothing to the shock of Rillington Place. Moving to Notting Hill

was a mistake and doing up that flat another. Self-pity washed over him

until he felt a stinging behind his eyes.

His whole life had been dogged by ill-luck. He'd gone to Shoshana's Spa

and his fate had made him meet Danila, and she'd incriminated him by