He smiled.
‘How old are you?’ I said.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘There you are. You’ve a long way to go, but it depends on your temperament. What’s your star sign?’
‘Aries,’ he said.
Aries.March-April.Twenty-four. He could be Boy.‘Good temperaments, Aries.’
‘I thought Aries was sensitive and jumpy,’ he said. ‘Not that I’m a great believer in astrology.’
‘No, men tend not to be. Women, now I bet if you had a sister, she’d read her stars in the paper every day.’
He smiled again.
‘Do you have a sister? I’ve always wanted a sibling, but I’m an only child.’
He shook his head. ‘No sister. I’m an only child too.’
I relaxed. He wasn’t it, I banished the tendrils of anxiety that had been distorting my normal perceptions, took a notebook from my bag, sat as upright as I could, and said briskly, ‘I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to introduce myself, so that if you see me snooping about taking photographs or using a noise meter, you’ll know what I’m doing.’
‘I’m only a tenant you know,’ he said. ‘It’s Richard Fairfax you need to meet, really.’ He grinned. ‘And you can talk to him about sisters, if you like. He’s got one.’
‘Richard Fairfax?’ I made a note. ‘Does he live here, too?’
‘Yes, the ground-floor flat. He’s out tonight. So’s Russell. Russell Jacobs, he’s the flat in the middle. They’re out together.’
There was an odd note in his voice. Jealousy? Relief?
‘Are you and Russell Richard’s friends? Is that why you’ve got the flats?
‘There won’t be any trouble getting us out, if that’s what you’re worried about. We haven’t got leases, or anything.’
‘Very good friends, then,’ I said
‘Yes. Old friends, anyway. I was at school with Rich.’
‘Where was that?’
‘St Botolph’s.’
I looked a question.
‘Minor public school,’ he said. ‘In Surrey.’
‘Were you a boarder?’
‘We both were.’
‘Is he older than you? Looked after you, did he?’
Clumsy as it was, he didn’t balk at this. ‘Rick is two months older than me. Not enough to make a difference,’ he said. ‘We were just friends.’
‘And was Russell at St Botolph’s as well?’
‘Not Russell. He met Rich at Aberdeen.’
‘University?’
‘Yes.’
‘I never went to university – often wondered if I’d missed anything.’
‘Depends what you’re interested in. I went to art school instead.’
He showed no sign of finding my questions odd; he just sat, blinking at me, unsmiling, not hostile, not anything except perhaps awkward. Awkward because he lacked social skills, or awkward because he found women difficult, or awkward because he was hiding something? Impossible to tell, but I’d make the most of my chance to pry.
I looked at my notes. So far Richard Fairfax, the owner, remained a possibility for Boy. ‘Your mate Richard owns the freehold, does he? Of the flats and the workshops?’
‘Yes.’
‘Lucky man.’
‘He’s got plenty of property. Mostly industrial and commercial.’
‘Must be worth a bit. Wealthy family?’
This was too much, possibly because it was about money, the great English taboo. ‘You’ll have to ask him about that,’ he said.
‘Sure. I’ll try and see him tomorrow. He won’t be working on Saturday will he?’
‘He won’t be at work, no, but I don’t know what other plans he’s made.’
‘I’ll arrange it through the estate agent,’ I said.
Now I needed to get into the Christie murders, which Boy had apparently been so morbidly interested in. I sipped at the lager without swallowing much – I’d really gone off alcohol – and said, ‘Rillington Place used to be somewhere round here, didn’t it?’
He hesitated, maybe calculating whether he’d mess up his friend’s sale of the property but deciding that if I’d already guessed, the site would be easy enough to establish independently.
‘Yes. These flats are in what used to be Rillington Place.’
‘So, where would number 10 have been, then?’
‘Follow me,’ he said, and moved quickly and silently towards the door I put my drink down, stuffed the notebook back in my bag and followed him, almost running to catch up.
He went down into the hall, opened a door in the far end, and went outside.
The yard was bounded on one side by the flats and on the other by the workshops/garages. Behind and above the garages was the railway line, beginning to vibrate with the rumble of an approaching train.
‘Wait for the train,’ he said loudly, seconds before we were swamped by the sound. The carriages were blurred by the fog and I could just make out, through the fuzzy light of the windows, the backs of heads and the curious, distorted face of a child pressed to the glass.
Chapter Seventeen
It was cold: I shivered, huddled into my leather jacket and waited for the great wash of sound to recede. As soon as it did, James started to speak.
‘We’re standing in what was Christie’s front room. Where he buried his wife, finally, and where he hid his first victim, Ruth Fuerst, for a night when his wife came back unexpectedly. Next day he dug her up and buried her in the garden, over there, where the workshops are now.’
‘Ruth Fuerst?’ I said, not because I wanted to know more but because I wanted to know if he could tell me more.
‘Austrian girl, lived in Oxford Gardens, twenty-one when she died. Started as a nurse but was probably a part-time prostitute when Christie met her He says he strangled her while they were having intercourse, but actually he probably killed her first, then afterwards he wrapped her in her leopardskin coat and hid her under the floorboards in the front room, with the rest of her clothes –’
I was chilled, by the cold, or the bleak cruelty of the event, or the lack of sympathy in his voice. ‘So this was the front room,’ I said, ‘and that was the garden. It must have been a very small house.’
He nodded. ‘They were. The Christies had the ground floor – front room, back room, kitchen, outside lavatory and wash-house. All the tenants shared the lavatory and wash-house, which was mostly used for emptying chamberpots. The first floor also had front room, back room, kitchen; the top floor only had bed-sitting room, kitchen.’
I could imagine it. Typical of the houses in the meaner streets of North Kensington. I’d been round several of them ten years ago when I was looking to buy, so proud, now I’d got a regular salaried job, that I could. What I remembered most clearly was the smell: old vegetable water, dry rot, mildew and urine. It seemed to seep from the dank flimsy brick walls. The area must have been full of them in the forties and fifties, when landladies still put notices up in the front window: NO DOGS NO BLACKS NO IRISH NO CHILDREN. Now most of them had been gentrified. Job-driven media types had gutted them, made an open living space on the ground floor with a little conservatory tacked on the back full of plants maintained by a garden service, torn up the sodden floorboards and replaced them with polished wood.
But back with Christie – ‘Where did the Evanses live?’
‘Top floor. One room and kitchen.’
‘So to get to the lavatory they’d have gone through Christie’s ground-floor flat?’
‘That’s right.’
I swallowed, thrust my hands deeper into my jacket pockets, waited for the next train to go by. When I could speak and be heard again, I said, ‘Where did the Evanses live before they came here?’
‘With Timothy Evans’s mother, stepfather and sisters, in St Mark’s Road.’
St Mark’s Road, just a spit away. So near safety. If, of course, the family was safe. ‘Loving family?’
‘Very loving, apparently, but there
wasn’t enough room for them to stay there with a baby on the way.’
I’m not one for generalized guilt: I think it’s a kind of vanity to make yourself miserable, when you have something, by thinking about other people who have much less, unless you’re going to take practical steps on their behalf. So, although I had a vivid picture of my baby’s possible accommodation – his or her father’s six-bedroom, three-bathroom house in Campden Hill for starters – I refused to entertain it. But I did imagine what it must have been like for Mrs Evans.
‘How old was she? Evans’s wife?’
‘Beryl. Beryl was about nineteen when they moved in.’
Nineteen. In one room and a kitchen, with a baby, and an outside lavatory two floors down.
I pulled myself together. I was supposed to be finding out about this man’s attitude to the murders. Get on with it, then. ‘Some of the others were buried in the garden, weren’t they?’
‘Just one. Muriel Eady, the second victim. And this bit here –’ he moved a short distance towards the workshops – ‘was the washroom, where he put Mrs Evans and the child Geraldine.’
‘How old was Geraldine?’
‘Thirteen months, born October 1948, died November 1949.’
Thirteen months. I clutched my belly protectively, and then forced my hands away when I realized what I was doing. Whatever I called my child if she was a girl, it wouldn’t be Geraldine. I began to feel sick and groped for a biscuit to nibble.
‘You all right?’ He stepped closer, and the pungent smell of his hands hit me powerfully.
I moved away. ‘How big was the garden?’ I asked, looking at the area he was describing and forcing myself to concentrate on that.
‘It was a bit smaller than the workshop on the end, the one I use. About fifteen feet by twelve. Plenty of room for two graves, come to think of it. Sure you’re all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Go on. How did the second one—’
‘Muriel Eady,’ he prompted, when I groped for the name.
‘How did she die?’
‘She was a bit different from Ruth Fuerst. Older – early thirties – and respectable, with a steady boyfriend. Worked with Christie in the radio factory at Acton. He was in despatch, she was in assembly. She had chronic catarrh and Christie said he’d cure it. He invited her over, fixed up a contraption so she could inhale Friar’s Balsam –’ he saw my confusion – ‘that stuff you put in a bowl of hot water and then breathe in the steam, with a towel over your head. Never had it? Plague of my childhood, my mother was dead keen on it – anyhow, he also gave her a whopping great dose of gas as well, then moved her to the bed, strangled and raped her.’
‘What was Christie like?’ I said.
‘Pathetic, really. Self-important, bullied by his mother and his sisters, called “Reggie-No-Dick” at school, petty thief, gassed and invalided out of the First War.’
‘So he was quite old?’
‘Middle forties when he started killing people. Sad wanker in a mac, basically, could only get it up with a corpse.’
Another train roared past. I waited, then said, ‘There were other victims, weren’t there?’
‘Three, walled up in the alcove at the back of the kitchen. Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan. He killed those after his wife – you look terrible,’ he said bluntly. ‘Are you squeamish?’
‘Not usually . . . Why did he kill the baby?’
‘To cover his tracks and implicate Evans, once he’d killed Mrs Evans. It wasn’t a sexual thing. Come inside, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
He sounded concerned enough, but I felt sick and didn’t want to throw up in front of him, so I thanked him and bolted.
Halfway home, feeling much better, I could have kicked myself. I hadn’t even seen inside his workshop, and I couldn’t make up my mind about Hobbs. He didn’t have a sister so he couldn’t be the Boy of the letters, could he? And also Boy’s mother had said that he thought the women had got what they deserved, that he’d taken some kind of pleasure in it. I hadn’t got that impression from Hobbs. He certainly didn’t admire Christie – ‘sad wanker in a mac’ was hardly the description of a role model. On the other hand, he’d known all about the case: he’d given me every name and date I’d asked for, and I’d got the impression that he could have gone on talking for hours and not run out of facts.
Just knowing facts could hardly be held against him – it was the nature of the facts he knew, that he’d bothered to acquire. Surely that argued a morbid preoccupation? On the other hand he’d been concerned about me, and not so involved in his description that he hadn’t noticed my reaction.
I was concentrating on my thoughts and so, what with the fog as well, I was nearly going up the steps to my front door before I noticed there was someone standing there, ringing my doorbell.
I recoiled, instinctively expecting it to be Arthur Fishburn. But it wasn’t. It was Janey Protheroe.
Chapter Eighteen
What did Alan’s ex-wife want with me? I greeted her and took her in. In the full light upstairs I saw she looked older – hardly surprising, since I hadn’t seen her for years – and also worn and frazzled. She’d cut her thinnish greying hair short, and it looked limp and straggly. She also had one of those fine white skins that, when they line, collapse into parachute silk. Hers had collapsed. Mind you, she was well on in her fifties.
I sat her down and gave her tea, mostly hoping it would stop her apologizing. It was very aggressive apologizing, though – she was clearly angry, but didn’t know how to express it. A fermenting cocktail of emotions. Not at all the Janey I’d known and hadn’t liked much – she was boring and smug. But she’d been useful: everyone who worked with Alan relied on her to manage him and soothe his fears. Married Alan had been a lot easier to deal with than divorced Alan, with his perpetual pursuit of disappearing girls and his untempered obsessiveness.
But now the usually calm Janey was boiling up inside. She even looked on the unkempt side of casual – she was wearing battered old green synthetic trousers and a not-white-enough shirt under an anorak which one of her sons had probably grown out of some years earlier She didn’t look at all like a woman about to enter into a happy second marriage. And turning up, unheralded – I know plenty of people who would think nothing of appearing for getting on for ten at night without an appointment, but Janey wasn’t one of them.
She’d retained her polite conversation, however. ‘Out with it, Janey,’ I said eventually, when it seemed as if she’d still be talking about the awful fog when Britain joined the EMU.
‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ she said.
‘Just tell me,’ I said, ‘or I’ll have to ask you to leave.’
She looked at me. The sharpness of my tone had cut right through her self-possession. ‘It’s about Alan,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re good for Alan.’
I took this amiss. All I’d done for Alan was listen to his bletherings, feed him and nearly get raped for my pains. ‘What do you think I’ve done?’ I said.
‘Your affair with him.’
‘I’m not having an affair with him. I wouldn’t dream of it,’ I said firmly, almost too firmly to be polite, because she had married the man, after all.
‘Is that true?’
‘Absolutely. I work for him, and I hope he thinks of me as a friend –’ he’d bloody better, I thought crossly, since I’m one of the few under-fifty females in London who’ll waste ten minutes on him – ‘but that’s as far as it goes.’
She sighed. ‘I thought so,’ she said to herself. She didn’t seem relieved: if anything, more worried, but also more purposeful. ‘He told me about it, you see. And I thought he was probably – embroidering the truth, a little, but I had to be sure.’
‘Why?’ I said bluntly. She’d divorced him years ago.
She looked at me with gentle superiority, a look I remembered from back when I’d been a gawky twenty and she’d been a confident solidly married forty. ‘Because
he’s the father of my children,’ she said.
‘I don’t follow,’ I said, unhelpfully. ‘Explain.’
She sighed. ‘Alex, I thought we were friends.’
I knew why she thought that. She’d first known me when I was eighteen, scrambling my way into a life of my own after a childhood of foster parents. I was skilled at seeming grateful for being patronized. Janey had thought me a poor little thing who flowered under her instant affection and interest. She’d welcomed me into her immaculate house in a solidly middle-class-with-pretensions village outside Princes Risborough, and gossiped with me in her welcoming pretty expensive kitchen. She’d been proud of the house, of her children, and thought that she had much to offer me – an older woman’s guidance, a posher woman’s experience, because after all my own single-parent council-flat mother was mentally ill. I’d wanted to offer her a punch in the teeth. I’d been chippy then.
But I needn’t be so chippy now, so I smiled. ‘Sure.’
‘So I can trust you?’
‘To do what?’
‘Not to tell Alan that I came to see you.’
I considered. ‘Yes, unless he asks me directly.’
‘Because I’m really concerned, and I don’t see much of him now, and you’re the only woman I know who sees him all the time. Has he ever – hit you?’
‘No,’ I lied, because Alan was more my friend than she’d ever been. ‘Has he hit you?’
‘Yes. Twice, recently. Both times he’d been drinking. But it isn’t like him, at all. I think he’s desperate. I don’t want him to do anything silly, because . . .’
‘Because of the children?’
‘And because of me. Because of our time together. Because I love him, I suppose. And violence, even minor violence – he didn’t really hurt me – made me wonder, might he do something silly? Because it is so unlike him.’
‘Suicide?’
‘Suicide, of course, and . . . I just don’t know. It’s absolutely absurd, I know it is . . . And I lied to him,’ she said defiantly. ‘I don’t believe in lying, I always taught the children never to lie. But I did lie to him, I said I was getting married again. And I’m not. Absolutely not. I have a friend, but there isn’t any chemistry between us, whereas with Alan . . .’
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