Vivisepulture (37 page)

It could have been entirely innocent, but it made my stomach, already unsettled, turn nastily. I put the pipe down.

A handprint. There was a handprint on the wall, where someone's filthy hand had slapped onto the paintwork, and then dragged, smearing grime in a dragging tail. I stood up, feeling abruptly threatened, the room seeming too small, too confining. There was something unpleasant about the direction that the hand had been dragged down, the ragged trail it had left. A man would have had to put his wrist in a weird position to do it.

I heard Ms Levinger stomping back towards the backroom and quickly knelt down beside the tools and tried to look busy. I had hoped I'd be used to the smell, by then, but if anything it was actually getting stronger. Then she and Walther were in the doorway.

"Look at him. He hasn't even started," the woman complained. "Can you at least tell me what the problem is?"

"I'm, er, still looking," I said awkwardly.

"Perhaps you should take your ease, Ms. Levinger," said Walther from beyond the door. "I will look after Mr Stebbins and make sure that the job gets done."

She nodded, glaring at me, and retreated towards the lounge. We heard the sound of a television a moment later.

"Well?" Walther asked me, still in the doorway.

"You come in here and say that," I told him. "This stinks. You've discovered the world's smelliest ghost or something."

He shrugged. "There may be a ghost. It may smell. What you're smelling isn't it, though. All perfectly natural, Michael."

"Nothing that smells that bad can be natural."

"Nonsense. It's quintessentially natural." He risked stepping into the room, wrinkling his nose. "The room next to this is the kitchen. The pipes you see coming in serve all the outlets there - washing machine, kitchen sink... I'll bet Ms Levinger doesn't have anything covering the sink plug, because what happens is kitchen waste, pieces of food, all end up down the drain."

"How do you know all this?" I asked him.

"Alimentary, my dear Michael." 

I looked blank. He laughed. "I knew as soon as I saw the kitchen. Think about it. The pipes here run almost straight. The food settles in the pipes."

"And turns into black sludge?"

"In a way. Bacteria, Michael. Minute, invisible bacteria. What you're smelling is millions of little creatures living and feeding, excreting and dying, whole generations on the hour. That's your sludge. A great seething city of bacteria all the way down the pipes, until eventually it closes altogether and Ms Levinger's washing machine backs up."

"Fine. In that case why the hell are we here? I'm not a plumber. Also, I don't want the police to find me here pretending to be one. Not with my record."

"Easy, Michael." Walther looked about the bathroom. "No, I'm not wrong. When I heard the man last night I had a feeling, and now I'm here it's only growing stronger. Something's not right."

I should remember that his feelings were always right, but at the time I didn’t believe him. About that time there was a knock on the front door. It didn't register until we heard Ms Levinger open it, then both of us made the connection at once.

We were waiting when Ms Levinger stormed in, the pair of us like naughty schoolboys. There was a squat, balding man with a moustache behind her, overalled and with a toolbag printed with "J Stebbins Plumbing & Heating". I recognised him, of course, from the night before.

"What," spat out Ms Levinger, "Is going on?"

"Ms. Levinger," Walther said, placatingly, "Let me-"

"This is Mr Stebbins," she snapped. "He
is
a plumber."

"'Ere, I know you," Stebbins said slowly, squinting at Walther. "You're that poof from the pub."

"There is an entirely rational explanation for everything," said Walther, desperately cheerful.

Ms Levinger regarded him coldly. "Mr Stebbins," she said. "The real Mr Stebbins. Would you care to go about your business while I deal with these… whatever they are?"

Stebbins gave Walther and I a gloating look. He did not realise, I think, that I had been pretending to be him or he would have been more vocal. He was simply enjoying someone else's misfortune.

Ms. Levinger had reappeared with a telephone in her hand and we followed her, Walther and me, into the living room. I had the sense to take my shoes off before getting her carpet mucky, for what it was worth.

"I have dialled the police," she informed us. "One move and I will call. They'll trace the number."

"We do not intend you any harm, Ms Levinger. Possibly quite the reverse," said Walther, smiling in a reassuring manner.

"What the hell is going on?" she demanded. "I should just call the police right now, or throw you out!Who the hell are you and what do you want?!"

She could not get her head round it, how these two people had turned up pretending to be plumbers in the place of one she was expecting. It made no sense to her. It made precious little to me.

"Easily explained, Ms Levinger,” said Walther. “I am of course not Mr Kinlay from the Council and my friend here is not, as you are already aware, J Stebbins Plumbing and Heating. However, we did meet with Mr Stebbins last night, inadvertently, in a public house. He was on the table next to us complaining in a loud voice about having to attend your residence, I am afraid. He indicated that if you had driven off two of his compatriots, men whom he was personally acquainted with, then he would be damned, he said, if he would give you the time of day, and he had a good mind, he continued, to leave you hanging and not actually visit you in any event. That was the tenor of his conversation.”

“So what? You’re trying to tell me you’re just two good Samaritans who turned up to fill in for him?” she asked, but she was interested. She wanted to know what our angle was.

“Not entirely,” Walther admitted. “We are neither of us plumbers. However…” His smile increased, as it usually did when he was being careful. “When we heard Mr Stebbins in full flow, I had a strange feeling. I have learned to trust my feelings, Ms Levinger. In fact I have made a career out of them. Something, my feeling was telling me, was not right. Michael got into conversation with the increasingly inebriate Mr Stebbins, and got your address and name. I thought that if we turned up on the doorstep without introduction, you would not give us the time of day, and so relied on this harmless subterfuge to gain admittance to make our enquiries. Mr Stebbins had already declared, in his cups, that he would not be visiting you. I suppose it is the last time I shall trust the word of a tradesman.”

“Harmless subterfuge?” Ms Levinger said, more stunned than angry now, confronting Walther’s barefacedness. “I’m going to call the police- no, I’m going to call the mental asylum. You’re completely mad.”

“Ms. Levinger,” Walther said, suddenly the great detective, “Can you honestly tell me that you have had no unusual experience in this house?”

For a moment she had her mouth open but was saying nothing, and I realised, with a rush of excitement, that Walther was right, as he always was. Then she glared at him and said, “I’ve had enough of this. If you’re not out of my house in ten seconds I will call the police.”

“My card,” said Walther, producing his real one and dropping it onto a side table.

“Out!” Ms. Levinger shouted, and we made our retreat in double time, virtually stumbling out through her door.

“Well that fell flat,” I said, thinking that I, too, had taken the day off work for this. At least there had been no actual calling of the police, which would have been awkward.

“It may yet stand up again,” Walther said mildly. As usual, he was right.

I got the call from him that Friday.

“Meet me at the Levinger House tomorrow, Michael.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. She may have come round to our way of thinking.”

So I pitched up outside the bungalow that weekend, finding Walther loitering outside waiting for me. Ms Levinger opened the door at our first knock. She looked no more welcoming than the first time around.

“Come in,” she said. It was as if we were exterminators or something – someone that might be needed, but that nobody wanted to see. We followed her through to her living room, of fond memory.

“This,” she had Walther’s card in her hand, “is a joke, right?”

“Quite serious, I assure you,” Walther said. The card announced him to be a paranormal investigator, so I could see her point. “I have a degree in parapsychology from the University of Brent Springs, California, but as it cost me ten dollars to acquire, I would rather convince you by my actual success in assisting you.”

“I need a plumber, Mr Cohen, not the Ghostbusters,” she told him.

“Then why did you call me, Ms Levinger?”

She looked exceptionally stubborn, but she was cracking.

“Mr Stebbins left,” she said.

“The unreliable nature of tradesman does not fall within the bounds of the paranormal, albeit by only a small margin,” Walther said with studied calm. Knowing him, I could see he was on edge, waiting for it.

“I had put the safety chain on,” she said. “In case… you came back. The back door was locked. The safety chain was still on. But he left.”

Walther sat on the arm of her one armchair. “Okay,” he said. “Is there something else?”

I think she went a bit pale at that point. “Something
else
?”

“Yes, something else. I think I told you that I have very good instincts.”

“I thought you were talking about plumbing, then. But this is nothing to do with the plumbing,” she protested.

“Nevertheless.”

She turned away from us. The transition from hostility to confusion had taken moments. “I… sometimes I have this odd dream…” She hated saying it, I could see, but something about Walther had made it clear that the information was non-negotiable, and she had called him, which meant she needed his help. “It’s just, I kind of wake up…,” she said. “And there’s someone in the room. Someone standing by the doorway, or just outside the doorway.”

“Show me.”

“It’s just a dream,” she insisted.

“Ms. Levinger, if you go to the doctor with a pain, you let him make the diagnosis. Show me.”

She did. Her bedroom door and the bathroom door faced each other across the narrow entrance hall.

“Does this figure do anything, say anything?” Walther asked.

“No- but- It just watches me, and then turns away and goes. And I’m always half-asleep, and so I just go back to sleep. But even if I keep the door closed, sometimes, I know it’s there…” There was a moment’s pause before she added, unconvincingly, “But it’s nothing to do with this-“

“You don’t believe that.”

She scowled at Walther. “It’s just that some mornings there’s… a smell. Like in the bathroom.”

“Let us research,” Walther suggested. “Michael and I will do a bit of digging and see what we can find” He grinned at her horrified expression. “Metaphorical digging, Ms Levinger. Actual excavation should not, I hope, be necessary.” His grin did not fade but by some sleight of face it stopped being funny.

It was show, to some extent. We had already done some work, dug a few holes. Walther and I settled down outside the bathroom door to compare notes.

“Ms. Levinger bought this property three years ago from Mrs Ada Platt,” Walther said. He looked over my shoulder as I  accessed the Land Registry website on my laptop. “Mrs Platt lived here for… nine years before that, my goodness. She bought it from…?”

We shuffled through the online records but there was no mention, and so Walther took my mobile to make some calls. In the interim I went, reluctantly, back into the bathroom. It still reeked, and there was even more filth across the floor and walls, Mr Stebbins’ only contribution before he left.

Left how?

An idea struck me, and I went out past Walther and checked the street outside.

I did not like what I discovered.

“Listen to this, Michael!” Walther said excitedly, when I came in again. “This gentleman tells me that Mrs Platt bought this place from the
estate
of Joseph Wentworth. Interesting, no? I’ve got the number of the solicitors who dealt with it. I’ll give them a call. I need you to look up newspaper archives – obituaries – nineteen ninety to ninety-three-“

“Hold on,” I said, and went to find Ms Levinger.

I took her and Walther outside. “This is more serious than you think,” I told them, for once able to be the showman. Walther smiled indulgently at me.

I pointed out three nearby vans. One was unmarked, but the other two were clearly labelled: John Pilling Heating and Plumbing Services, and P. T. Stebbins Plumbing and Heating.

“I don’t understand,” said Ms. Levinger, although she did, really. She just didn’t want to.

“Plumbers have been known to down tools in the past,” Walther said quietly. “But paradoxically it involves taking their tools with them. All of your missing plumbers appear to have walked home, Ms. Levinger, or not left at all.”

We went inside then, and Ms. Levinger told us all about white-haired old Ada Platt who had sold her the property. Did she herself know anything about a Joseph Wentworth? No she didn’t. She had only moved into the area three years ago. Walther and I went back to our digging.

Walther failed to get much out of the solicitors the first time round, complaining that the Data Protection Act had made his life infinitely more difficult. I went through the local papers in the early nineties and found no mention of any Wentworth. Walther went off to the town archives to see if he could do better. His instincts can cut to the nub through thirty years of records if he can be bothered.

I was years off. Joseph Wentworth turned up on the 15
^th
of July nineteen eighty-two, following up the initial story eight months before in eighty-one. Both pieces were mere paragraphs.

“He disappears in December eighty-one,” Walther explained, over my phone’s tinny loudspeaker. “Very sad. Christmas coming and… is it?… Yes, his wife had left him. Much sympathy. July and they reckon it’s suicide. Police close files. Poor Mr Wentworth.”