“Any assistance short of actual help,” Pardey murmured.
“Think nothing of it—just make sure they spell my name right on the medal.” Redpath lapsed into silence, unable to decide whether he could warm to Pardey or not. The detective, in his capacity as Leila’s personal friend, had already saved him from what would have been a lengthy and difficult encounter with the police. It would be both ungrateful and unwise, he decided, to continue swapping the sort of banter which might develop into acrimony. He remained quiet until the redbrick canyon of the Woodstock Road had enfolded the car, then gave Pardey the final directions which brought them into Raby Street itself.
“Funny name to give a street,” Pardey commented. “It doesn’t make you think of Raby Castle or anything like that. Sounds too much like a disease.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Redpath picked out the house numbered 131 in the foreshortening perspectives of the terrace on his left and watched it until the car had halted at the gateless gateway. The place looked even bleaker than he had expected, distinguished from the ordinary shabbiness of its neighbours by a dark and yawning quality about the windows which made it seem that light which entered the building was unable to get away again. Furry green caterpillars of moss clung between the old bricks, devouring the mortar with burrowing tendrils. Red-path, his gaze hunting across the dreary fçcade, experienced a sense of foreboding which somehow was unconnected with anything that had gone before.
“Let’s get it over with,” Pardey said, getting out of the car. Redpath joined him and they approached the outer door, the letterbox of which was held partly open by a crumpled advertising broadsheet. Pardey grasped the black-painted cast-iron knocker and beat vigorously on the door, sending thunderous percussions through the house’s interior.
“Open up, madam,” he said to Redpath, grinning. “I’m from Homes And Gardens and we want to feature you in our Christmas issue.”
Redpath nodded and drew his lips into a smile. The house had sounded hollow. He crossed to the bay window, the curtains of which were almost fully drawn, put his face close to the glass and looked into the room where on the previous night he had sat for hours with the four members of his new “family”. The room was completely empty of furniture, stripped to the bare floor boards. He began to feel cold.
“Get off your backside, madam,” Pardey gritted, knocking more loudly than before, so loudly that a window frame vibrated. He locked eyes with Redpath, seemed to read something in his expression, then abruptly crouched and peered through the letterbox. Redpath moved towards him. “Something funny seems to have…”
Pardey straightened up, his face savage. “Shut it, Redpath— just don’t say anything! “
He took what appeared to be a piece of a white plastic ruler from his pocket, glanced around the deserted street, and slid the pliant strip into the door frame near the lock. Swearing impatiently, he made several forceful movements with his wrist and the brown-painted door swung open. The inner half-glazed door had been left ajar, revealing the naked hall floor and stair timbers of an uninhabited house. A breeze fluttered through an accumulation of junk mail and circulars on the tiled floor of the porch.
Redpath placed the back of a hand on his forehead and fought to control the twitching of his lips. “This is where I was last night. I swear to God, that is the…”
“Look at the dust, man!” Pardey stepped into the porch and kicked a heavy envelope onwards into the hall. It slithered a short distance along the boards, making tracks in a thick and otherwise undisturbed layer of dust.
“Nobody has been in here for weeks,” Pardey stated flatly.
Redpath looked about him with uncomprehending eyes and pointed at the leaded glass of the inner door. “There’s the fleur-de-lis I talked about.”
“Every house in the street probably has one of those bastards. Wait here.”
Pardey strode to the staircase and went up it, stamping his feet to create maximum noise, and disappeared into the upper part of the house. His progress from room to room was punctuated by the slamming of doors. Redpath listened to him for a moment, still with his knuckles pressed to his forehead, then without any conscious volition walked towards the kitchen. He pushed open the door and surveyed the long bare room, noting the stained porcelain sink on the left, in the position he had expected. He turned to his right and looked behind the kitchen door. There was another door there, in the corner, and it was painted an incongruous fire-engine red. He raised the farmhouse-type latch and pushed the door open. A maw of blackness widened beyond. Moving like a man trapped in a dream, he advanced to the first of the stone steps and tested the second one with his foot.
“That’s all I need—for you to break your neck in here,“Pardey said from close behind him. “Where’s the light switch?”
There was a click as the detective operated a switch which Redpath had not seen because it was oddly located at the top of the door frame. A yellowish light came on in the cellar, illuminating a clean concrete floor. Pardey brushed past Red-path, clattered his way down the steps and examined the cellar. Redpath followed him almost to the foot of the steps and looked around the smoothly cemented walls.
So clean, he thought bemusedly. Just like the one I dreamed about, the one in the American house. All it needs is a few pigeons that have been sandpapered to death.
“Best part of the house, this,” Pardey commented. “It looks like somebody was building a fall-out shelter.” He turned and walked back up the steps, driving Redpath before him, turned off the light and closed the cellar door. Without speaking any further he shepherded Redpath through the brown dimness of the hall and out into the sunlit street, then pulled the outer door shut, sealing the house like a tomb. The bright, diamond-hard reality of street and sky imploded on Redpath from all directions, a stunning concentric shockwave which seemed to crush his skull.
“What are you doing?” he whimpered, lunging past Pardey to throw his weight against the door. “They can’t do this to me! That’s the house, I tell you—they’re all in there!”
Pardey spun him around with practised roughness. “I’m going to do you one last favour, Monsignor—I’m going to let you walk away from here and get lost, and I’m going to pretend I never saw you. Also, I’m advising you to go to bed and sleep off whatever it is that’s scrambling your brains.”
“It’s a trick,” Redpath said distantly, scarcely moving his lips. “I tell you I was here last night.”
“Son, you’re not even here now.” Pardey flicked his fingers against Redpath’s chest in contempt, walked to his car and looked back for a Parthian shot. “And you can tell Lady Leila that the next time she wants help she’s to ring the Samaritans.”
He got into the car and drove away, vanishing from sight at the nearest corner in only a few seconds, leaving Redpath alone and stranded at the centre of an alien universe.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Calbridge’s Leicester Road was at the heart of a selfconsciously respectable district where trees, mature hedges and well-tended lawns were a dominant feature, and in which it was quite rare to see a pedestrian who was not exercising a dog. Redpath, even though he was freshly combed and shaved, felt conspicuous as he patrolled the section near the house where Leila lived. He was determined to meet her as she arrived home from work, and—in view of what had happened on his previous visit to the flat—had decided to be as transparent and ingenuous about it as possible. There was to be no lurking in shrubbery, no sudden emergence from shadows, nothing which might elicit a fear response.