‘In that case she would have side-tracked the excavated street and gone the longer way — as it is until they get the road mended. Especially in that fog.’
‘Thank you, Miss Handle. You may, and will, call me the damnedest old fool in the world. But I tell you, I’ll hang someone for this if it’s the last thing I do.’
Miss Handle said, with an intonation of sarcasm: ‘I wish you luck, I am sure.’
‘Thank you for your good wishes. I an-s much obliged to you. And I can assure you that I generally achieve what I set out to do.’
‘I haven’t the slightest doubt of it, Miss Thundersley.’
‘Thank you, Miss Handle.’
‘Good morning, Miss Thundersley.’
17
Asta went out, cutting little crescents into the floorboards with her angry, stamping heels. The fact was that she had not the beginning of an idea of what she proposed to do. First of all, she decided, it was necessary to look at the scene of the crime. She had no difficulty in finding the place: as soon as she asked the way a dozen men, women and children seemed to spring out of the earth. They all shouted directions. One girl asked her if she was on a newspaper. Asta said no. The girl did not believe her, and followed her, walking about eighteen inches behind her and keeping up a running commentary full of geographical information:
‘This is the street. All these houses are going to be pulled down. They’re condemned. Unfit frooman ‘abitation. That’s Mrs Switch’s house they’ve begun to pull down there. It was full of bugs. My mum says they pigged it, they didn’t live in it, they just pigged it. You wouldn’t keep a selfrespecting pig in such a house. They used to let rooms. They made ever such a lot of money. My mum says anybody can make money that way. My mum says they lived twelve in one bedroom so as to let rooms. See where that grease mark is on the wall? They had a gas stove in the bedroom. You ask my mum.’
‘Why aren’t you at school?’ asked Asta.
‘I’ve got ring-worm.’
At the far end of the street a policeman stood, contemplating a pillar-box. In the remote distance someone was playing a barrel-organ. Asta, looking at the front of the house, was overwhelmed by a sort of sickness of heart. It was not merely that the house was derelict: not that it was unoccupied, unused, unusable, and for ever abandoned — it was that she could somehow perceive in the aspect of the place exactly what they meant when they said that it was Condemned. It was finished. It was better torn down and wiped off the face of the earth. She could see how, for the past fifteen years or so, no tenant of the house had been able to bring himself to spend as much as it cost to paint the railings or the window-frames. The place was condemned property: nothing was worth while. The house which, as the little girl had said, had been full of bugs, and was now half torn down, gaped at the rainy sky. Asta could see the greasy pink paper of the bedroom. It had been worth nobody’s while to hang paper there. There must indeed have been a gas stove in that bedroom: she could see the greasy black outline of it. Above this outline there was nailed an oblong of painted green tin, curling away from the wall at one corner. The demolition men had not yet started to break up the house in which Sonia Sabbatani had been murdered. It was exactly like every other house in that street: four storeys high, built of a muddy-mustard-coloured brick and sinking, as it seemed, into a squalid basement bristling with spear-headed rusting railings.
Little boys had smashed the windows with stones. Every frame enclosed a shivered frieze of dust-encrusted grey glass. Through a splintery star of dark space in the ground-floor window she could see an empty, desolate room, and, on the only visible wall, an oblong of patterned paper, lighter than the rest, where a framed picture must have hung. The brass-headed nail was still protruding from the wall above it. Asta would have sworn that the picture which had hung framed in this space was of a little girl and a mastiff, with the caption: Love Me, Love My Dog.
Now, standing in front of this empty house, Asta was almost afraid. She wanted to go home. She remembered certain bad dreams of ruins in wildernesses. So she became angry; stamped up the three dirty steps to the front door, and wrenched at the door-knob. She had expected to feel the resistance of a turned lock — indeed, she hoped to find the door immovably shut.
But it opened.
She found herself standing in a short, narrow passage leading to a steep, narrow staircase. There was a smell of dereliction, of damp, and, as it were, of darkness. On the left, beyond the door, she could see a heart-shaped mark where an umbrella-stand had stood. Beyond it a gas-bracket protruded. She went in. Her footsteps reverberated. This house enclosed something of the misery, the loneliness and the hollow silence of the outer dark. The street door slammed behind her with the noise of a gunshot. A foul wind was blowing through the passage. The house was evil. It was rotten; full of a dirty twilight and the stale stinks of a hundred and fifty dreary years. A flake of wet plaster caine fluttering down past Asta’s face, startling her so that for the first time in thirty-odd years she uttered a cry of terror. Then, ashamed of herself and (because she was still afraid) even angrier than she had been before, she went forward.
18
She had a shadowy, wrong-headed idea that she would find a clue, some shred of evidence — button, hair, or rag — which the police might have overlooked.
First she went upstairs. In the attic there was nothing but mildew. The second floor back contained only some decomposing shreds of torn ticking stuck to bits of broken wood; this had been a mattress which someone had gutted for the sake of its horsehair, for which he might have got threepence or fourpence a pound. The next room must have been a bedroom also. There was a gaping cupboard containing a broken clothes-hanger and in a vile newspaper parcel unspeakable evidence that the last occupant of that sordid room had been a woman, not too particular in her personal habits. ‘Slut!’ said Asta; and the sodden, echoing house called her a slut in her turn. Slut said the passage; slut said the staircase; slut muttered the cupboard. On the next landing there was a bathroom. Asta shuddered at the rusty iron bath-tub on high, ornate, cast-iron legs, and the water closet which, it seemed, was worked by means of a handle, like those electrical generators used for firing off charges of high explosive. It was stuffed with used newsprint like the head of a plagiarist. Asta went down to the first floor. She walked warily because wet rot, dry rot, the wear and tear of countless feet, and sheer weary decrepitude had made the stairs dangerous. A picture, about as big as this open book, hung on the walclass="underline" she noticed it as she passed. It had not been worth taking away — it was a vulgar little print, cut out of a cheap magazine. Somebody had loved this picture well enough to put it in a sixpenny frame and nail it up. It depicted a scarecrow of a woman with a black bonnet all askew, horribly drunk between two sturdy policemen, shrieking at the top of her voice. The caption read: Hark, Hark the Lark at Heaven’s Gate Sings. The front room on the first floor must have been the most important bedroom of the house. There Asta saw a broken glass vase and a wonderfully designed red, blue, purple, and gold lustre chamber-pot of remarkable capacity; minus the handle, which lay, badly broken, inside it. Asta could see as clearly as if she had been present at the time how the lady of the house, in the excitement of packing, had broken this thing, which was part of a wedding present: she had picked up the fragments of the handle, fitted them together, wondered tearfully whether they might be seccotined or riveted together, but had given it up, putting the fragments neatly all in one place in case some poor devil might find a use for them. The floor was littered with bits of paper and studded with tintacks that had held down linoleum. In one place the floor had given way and a hole patched with the lid of a biscuit tin, hammered flat and fastened with nails. Stamped on the surface of this piece of corroded metal, still perfectly legible, was the name PEEK FREAN. There was also a common kitchen chair, broken and glued, broken and screwed, broken and nailed and finally irreparably broken and abandoned. As Asta touched it with her foot two or three fat slate-grey insects with more legs than she cared to think of darted out at dazzling speed and ran into a crack. She lit a cigarette, beginning to wish that she had not been such a fool as to stick her nose into this putrescent corpse of a house.