by Mark Timlin
‘Course I am. He didn’t recognise me, but it’s the same bloke right enough.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘When?’
‘When you were all hanging around outside Sunset? Or Day’s flat? Or wherever?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s an amateur. I heard he was stringing for some stupid little free sheet. You mix with people like that, you become one. Besides, I never liked the look of him. He was a creep, you know? I’m not surprised it turns out he’s a serial killer. I only heard about what happened this morning. I was off yesterday.’
‘Have you got a name for him?’ I asked.
I held my breath as I waited for him to answer, and squeezed the phone tightly until I was frightened it might fly apart in my hand.
‘Yeah. Steve. Steve Paulus.’
‘Spell that,’ I said.
He did.
‘Unusual,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it? That’s how my girlfriend remembered.’
‘You haven’t got an address.’
‘No. She threw the files away long ago. I suppose someone at the Poly might. But it was only a night school class. No big deal. Anyway, on those types of courses, people come and go. They just sit in sometimes, to get out of the cold.’
‘Who else have you told?’ I interrupted.
‘No one.’
‘Not the police?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t like the police.’
Who does? I thought. ‘So why are you telling me?’
‘Because I don’t want him running round killing more people. I don’t want it on my conscience.’
‘So phone Brixton Police Station. Ask for Inspector Lambert or Sergeant Harper.’
‘I don’t want to do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I thought that if Chas and I…’
‘You want an exclusive, is that it? And maybe comfortable jobs for the pair of you in Wapping or Battersea Bridge?’
‘Something like that. But Chas is off today. At least until later. He’s meeting someone for lunch at his office at one.’
‘Phone him at home.’
‘I’ve tried. His machine’s on, and his bleeper’s turned off or broken or something. And besides, it’s just a name. Nothing else. There’s not a lot we can do with it.’
‘But you thought if you told me, and I told the police, you’d be in on the kill. Me being friendly with Chas and all.’
He didn’t answer.
Nice guy, I thought.
‘OK, Piers, you’ve got a deal,’ I said. ‘You find Chas and put him in the picture and I’ll tell the police. It’ll take time to check that name out on the files. I’ll make sure you get your exclusive.’
‘Great, Nick, thanks,’ said Piers. ‘Can I give you my number?’
I took it, but didn’t bother to write it down, then terminated the call.
I sat on the sofa in yesterday’s clothes and thought about what Piers had said, and everything else I knew about John or Steve or whatever his real name was.
Then I got up and put on the kettle.
The gauze on my forehead was waterlogged, so I gently peeled it off and went into the bathroom. The butterfly plasters were still holding the edges of the cut together, although they were dark with old blood. But at least the damn thing wasn’t bleeding.
I went back and made some tea, then picked up the phone again and dialled.
I got the number I wanted and listened to the ringing tone of the extension I’d asked for at the switchboard.
‘Community Charge,’ said a voice I recognised.
‘Andy?’
‘Speaking.’
‘Nick Sharman.’
‘Oh, no. Not you again. You never sent that cheque you promised.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It slipped my mind.’
‘Oh, did it? You and about fifty thousand others.’
‘Sorry, mate. But I thought that the poll tax was all finished with this year.’
‘This year. The way things are going we’ll still be taking people to court fifty years from now. So what do you want? No, don’t tell me. You want another favour. Right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you can carry on wanting.’
‘Come on, Andy.’
‘No, Nick. I told you before, this stuff is confidential.’
‘This is really important.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘A matter of life and death.’
‘Excuse me if I don’t quite believe that statement.’
‘It’s true, Andy. I swear. I don’t even know if this name will show up. The bloke could live anywhere. It’s just a flyer. A hunch. Try it for me, please, and I’ll come down and pay you my civic taxes in new fivers, and buy you the best dinner of your life.’
If I’m still around, I thought.
He thought for a moment.
‘Come on then,’ he said eventually. ‘What name have you got?’
I told him. Spelling the surname.
There was a short pause and I heard him tapping away at the keyboard of his computer, then he said, ‘Stephen Anthony, with an “H”, Paulus. Is that him?’
Bingo, I thought.
‘Is there just one?’
‘The one and only Stephen Paulus on our records.’
‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘And the address?’
‘I shouldn’t.’
But he did. The address that he gave me, and I copied down on a clean piece of paper, was in Dulwich.
‘Thanks, Andy,’ I said. ‘That’s another one I owe you.’
‘Just pay your debt to society and I’ll be happy.’
Debt to society. That was a good one. I had so many.
‘I promise,’ I said, told him I’d see him soon, and hung up.
I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock. Chas would be in his office at one. I knew he’d insist on Piers contacting the police straight away. He wasn’t about to mess with the forces of law and order, no matter how important the story was.
That gave me a couple of hours’ head start.
It was all the time I needed.
38
I was in the car, last night’s clothes and a stinking hangover and all, within two minutes. As I drove in the direction of Dulwich, my stomach was jumping and I was chewing on the inside of my mouth like a madman.
By the time I found the street I was looking for, then parked the car in a pretty little turning off the next street along, I almost had to prise my fingers off the steering wheel.
I walked to where I was going. John/Steve must know me, and if he knew me, he knew my car. I was more anonymous on foot, even with the plasters and black eyes. And I didn’t want him to see me coming.
It was a big, wide boulevard, lined with old, tall trees, beginning to lose their leaves now but still clinging on to enough foliage to cast dark shadows on the wide pavements. The houses were big, worth a packet in any part of town. Round there, a packet plus. They were almost mansion size, some of them, and set well back behind high, neatly tended hedges and evergreen-filled front gardens.
Perfect for the kind of business that John/Steve was doing. And he had to be worth money to live there. I wondered how he’d spend it where he was going.
When I found the house whose number corresponded to the one that Andy had given me, it wasn’t the biggest in the street, nor the smallest, and if I’d been expecting a horror film set, all cobwebs, shuttered windows, overgrown garden and swaybacked roof, I was disappointed.
The hedge was as neatly clipped as the best of the others I’d passed. The fence and gates were painted a gleaming white. The front lawn, flower beds, and
the two big shiny-leaved trees whose branches stroked the ground in the faint breeze from the west were beautifully tended.
The house itself looked pristine. Paintwork fresh, brickwork clean and neatly pointed. Windows sparkling, and what looked like a new roof gleaming dully in the autumn sunlight.
But most interestingly of all there was no sign of a burglar alarm. Most of the other houses I’d passed sported all sorts of electronic boxes on their fronts, fitted with bells and sirens and flashing lights. And no doubt, in many cases, direct lines to the local police station.
But not this one. I suppose that the last thing John/Steve wanted was the local Old Bill on the scene if a squirrel or any other small rodent set off an alarm.
Behind the gate that led up to the garage was parked a white Bedford panelled truck with the back windows covered in reflective foil. All the better to abduct you with, my dear, I thought. There was no sign of a motor cycle.
I went in by the gate at the end of a path that led to the front door, and walked slowly towards it.
I climbed the three steps that led to the door and rang the bell beside it. I heard its plaintive buzz echo down the hall. There was no one in. No one living anyway. I knew from ringing a thousand doorbells on a thousand doors when the house is deserted.
Just to be sure, I rang again. Then banged on the knocker and finally fisted the glass in the door until it almost shattered under the blows.
But no one in that long, quiet street paid me the slightest bit of attention.
After a minute, I went to the side gate and tried it. It was fastened by a cheap lock and one good shove opened it. I walked down the side passage to the back of the house.
The garden at the rear was long and wide too. And well looked after. It was not overlooked from the sides, and the back fence was hidden by half a dozen more trees as old and large as the ones in the street.
There was a back door that led into the kitchen. The top half was glass. A dozen small, translucent panes puttied neatly into squares of white-painted wood.
I went in like the one bad mouse in the Beatrix Potter stories I used to read to my daughter to get her to sleep.
I was going to the worst place in the world, but I didn’t know it yet.
It was a doddle getting in. Too easy, if anything.
I slipped off the leather jacket I was wearing. Balled it round my fist and punched one of the panes in the back door. The noise of the glass hitting the floor inside seemed as loud as two milk floats in a head-on collision. But still no one cared.
I put my hand through the hole and slipped the catch on the lock. He hadn’t even bolted up. I imagine you get complacent if you get away with too much for too long. I walked in and stood on the black and white vinyl-covered floor, patterned like a chess board and so clean and polished you could eat your lunch off it, and the first thing that hit me was the heat inside. Literally.
It must have been ninety degrees in there. Someone had turned up the central heating. Then some. I felt sweat break out on my face and sting the cuts on my forehead. The boiler was mounted in one corner of the room and I went over to it. The thermostat was turned to the maximum setting. I turned it right down. I might at least be comfortable.
I turned on one heel and slowly looked round the kitchen. There wasn’t a thing out of place. Everything in sight was neatly squared off, like soldiers on a parade ground. Along one wall, carefully graded by size, was a row of knives and cleavers. They were slotted into wooden racks and gleamed faintly in the light. I shuddered at the thought of what they might have been used for. The place gave me the creeps. It was just too tidy, if you know what I mean. There wasn’t a dirty spoon in the dry washing-up bowl in the sink, or a crumb on the draining board. And it smelled weird. Sour and stale. Like the drains were blocked. But then anywhere that hot, with all the windows closed, was going to smell. But not that bad.
I crept across the floor on the rubber soles of my shoes. I knew that the place was empty, but I didn’t want to make any more unnecessary noise. God knows what I’d wake up if I did.
I opened the cabinets on the walls. They were piled with neatly stacked plates, cups, saucers, mugs, all in straight lines again. I had the feeling that the expression ‘anal retentive’ had been coined for the owner of this house.
Then I opened the cupboard under the sink. It took me a second or two to register what I saw, and when I realised what it was, I jumped back as if I’d been stung and smacked my elbow painfully on the cabinet behind me.
The cupboard was seething with cockroaches. Hundreds – no, thousands – of them crawling blindly over each other, or just frozen still, like they’d been there for a thousand years.
I don’t know if I screamed or not but I certainly made some primitive noise in my throat. Half fear, half surprise at what I’d found.
I stood there trembling, then kicked the cupboard door shut. But I was still aware of them behind it, in the darkness.
When I looked more closely round the kitchen, and up at the ceiling, I saw more roaches. They clustered in the shadows at the corner of the room, and there was another nest of them behind the cooker, and a third behind the fridge.
God, but they made my skin crawl, and I knew without a doubt that I was in the right place.
I decided to investigate further.
Although the house was completely silent, I seemed to be able to hear something, like tinnitus inside my head. I imagined it was the dying screams of John/Steve’s victims that had bounced around inside the fabric of the house so strongly that they had been embedded in the very brickwork. Or maybe it was the sound of a million roaches rubbing together behind the walls in their slow dance. At the thought, I shivered, even though the temperature was still stifling.
There were two doors off the kitchen. One led into the hall and was open. The other, which I guessed led down to the basement or cellar, was closed and secured with two Chubb locks. I stood and looked at it and tried to imagine why it needed two locks. I didn’t want to think, and certainly didn’t want to find out. It could be knee-deep in insects down there for all I knew. Knee-deep in anything. And the smell seemed stronger the closer I got to the door.
I shook my head and went into the hall which was empty except for a coat stand sans coats and a small, highly polished table by the front door that contained a telephone placed exactly in the centre. There were three other doors off the hall. Two on the left hand side. One on the right. Also on the right were the stairs leading upwards.
I opened the first door that I came to. It led into the sitting room. Also too neat. Like it had never been lived in. There was a TV set in one corner. A big one. On top, side by side, were the current editions of the TV and Radio Times neatly slotted into plastic folders. There was a three-piece suite, still covered in the protective film that it had come in from the factory, a long sideboard, a set of shelves that held nothing and a low, wooden coffee table next to the armchair of the suite.
There were flies in there too, batting at the windows behind the net curtains. And more roaches. On the walls and hanging from the ceiling. One ran across the floor in front of me, and I kicked at it but missed, and it vanished under the sideboard. When I’d finished looking around I went out into the hall again.
Suddenly there was a clatter from the front door and I froze, fresh sweat breaking out under my armpits and down my back. I saw two letters tumble down to the mat on the carpet in front of the door, and heard footsteps receding down the path outside. I relaxed. It had only been the postman with the lunchtime delivery. I went and picked up the letters. Both were addressed to Stephen Paulus. I propped them next to the phone and went into the second room on the left of the hall. I was still aware of the smell that permeated the house. The room was done up like a small hospital ward. A metal-framed bed with a floor pedal to raise and lower it. A sink plumbed into one wall. A set of medical scales. Bed pans and urin
e bottles lined up neatly behind green plastic curtains that covered one of the alcoves by the fire place. The full Monty. Christ knows who had slept there.
Next I tried the room opposite. It was empty except for a fitted carpet, a black coat and a handbag.
My heart literally sank at the sight of them. Any doubts I might have had about Sophia having been brought here vanished, and the knife stabbed my stomach yet again.
I knelt down by the bag, opened it, and emptied the contents on the floor. It was hers all right. It smelled of her, and I recognised some of the contents. I stood up, leant my arm against the wall and put my head down. I could smell my own sweat, sharp in the warm air. In a sudden fury I kicked at what I’d emptied from the bag. Lipstick, address book, purse, keys scattered and bounced off the walls. I was suddenly terribly sorry that I’d done it and collected the stuff together and put it back where it had come from.
I took the bag with me and left the room. Outside, I put my hand on the newel post at the foot of the stairs and looked up. As I did so, I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise. My instincts told me not to investigate any further. That I wouldn’t like what I’d find.
I shook my head and cleared my throat. The sound echoed down the hall and I put my right foot on the first step and started to climb. There were ten stairs on the first flight. I counted them as I went. At the top was a short passage to the left. It contained two doors. The staircase itself made a quarter turn away from the passage, up a further three steps, then another in a longer flight. At the top of the three stairs were two more doors. One on the left, one facing me.
I entered the passage. The doors faced each other. One was a bathroom, as neat as the other rooms I’d been in. Closed tightly round the bath were shower curtains with a pattern of purple Forget-Me-Nots. I walked over and ripped the curtains off their rings. They dropped to the floor. The bath was empty except for a lone cockroach. I left it. The second door revealed a small toilet. Empty.
I went back down the passage and up the short flight of stairs. I opened the door on my left. The room was small and was completely empty. It didn’t even have a carpet on the floor, just bare floor-boards. I shut the door carefully and opened the one that faced the stairs. It was a bedroom. John/Steve’s I imagined. It was as neat and tidy as a room in an army barracks or a monastery. It contained a single bed, made up, a small chest and a wardrobe. I opened the wardrobe door and looked inside. There was a suit, some shirts, a couple of pairs of trousers on hangers, and what looked like two sets of hospital whites. Whether or not John/Steve worked in one, or they simply went with the room downstairs, I couldn’t begin to guess. I opened the drawers in the chest. Socks, underwear. Nothing else. Like the rest of the house nothing personal anywhere. I left the room as it was.
