The machine had a safety device in the form of a key that slotted into a keyhole and a string attached to it with a clip on the other end. You were supposed to fasten it to your clothes while you used it so that if you fell over the key would be pulled out and the motor stop running. Mix held up the key.
"You didn't put it in."
"As the actress said to the bishop."
He thought this rejoinder extremely old hat. He'd heard his stepfather say it a good twenty years ago. "It won't start unless the key's in," he said in a toneless voice, intended to show her he didn't think her witty. Still, he should complain. He'd get his fifty-pound call-out fee for just coming here.
He inserted the key, started the machine, ran it up, and to delay things a little-why should she have it all her own way?-applied some oil underneath the pedals. Colette switched it off herself and led him back into the bedroom. He sometimes wondered what would happen if the Honourable Hugo Gilbert-Bamber came back unexpectedly, but he could always nip back into his clothes and crouch down among the machines with screwdriver and oi1 can.
Mix intended to be famous. The only possible life anyone could wish for these days, it seemed to him, was a celebrity's. To be stopped in the street and asked for your autograph, to be forced to travel incognito, to see your picture in the papers, to be in demand by journalists for interviews, to have fans speculateabout your sex life, to be quoted in gossip columns. To wear shades when you didn't want to be recognized, to betransported in a limo with tinted windows. To have your own PR person and maybe get Max Clifford to represent you.
It would be best to be famous for something you did that people liked or because they admired you, like he did Nerissa Nash, But fame deriving from some great crime was enviable in a way. "What would it feel like to be the man the polices muggle out of a courthouse with a coat over his head because if they saw him the crowd would tear him to pieces? Assassination secured your fame forever. Only think of the killer of John Lennon, or of President Kennedy, or Princip, who shot the Austrian Archduke and started the First World War. But being Nerissa Nash's escort would be better and a lot safer. Soon it would lead to celebrity status, he would be invited on TV chat shows, asked to parties by the Beckhams and Madonna.
Colette had been a model herself, though in a minor league, and marriage to a stockbroker ended her career. But she and Nerissa remained firm friends. Mix had been in the gym/dressing room, fitting a new running belt to the treadmill, on this occasion a legitimate task. There couldn't be any of the other because a hired cook was in the house getting lunch for Nerissa and Colette. The two women came into the bedroom for Colette to show her friend some new creation she had bought for an astronomical sum in a Notting Hill boutique. Whispering and giggling reached Mix's ears. He couldn't be sure but he thought he heard Nerissa warn Colette to be careful about undressing because "the man" was next door in the gym.
Mix was familiar enough with Colette's ways and tastes to know she wouldn't care if fifty men were in the gym, all gaping at her through the glass door, she'd like it, but he admired Nerissa's modest attitude. You didn't come across much of that these days. Up until then he had never seen her beyond glancing at her photograph in the tabloids. Her voice was so pretty and her laugh so silvery that he was determined to see her. He used a technique he always employed when needing to speak to the lady of the house and, clearing his throat rather loudly, called out, "Are you there, Mrs. Gilbert-Bamber?"
A giggle from Colette answered him, so he wasted no more time and walked into the bedroom. Colette was in scarlet bra and thong but he had seen more of her than that. In his own words, he wasn't bothered. Besides, Colette's friend commanded all his attention. To say she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was an understatement. Immediatelyhe felt that all women, to be good to look at, should have longblack hair, huge golden eyes, and skin the color of a cappuccino. Apart from all this and her shape, her height, and her graceful way of standing, instead of the hauteur he would have expected in her face, he saw a warm sweetness, and when she smiled and said, "Hi," he was a lost man.
After that he collected in his scrapbooks every picture of her he saw. He even found her portrait on postcards in a tourist shop in Shepherd's Bush. When there was a film premiere he waited, sometimes for hours, on the pavement outside the cinema for a glimpse of her alighting from a car. Once he was amply rewarded, having secured a position at the front of the fans. Helped out of the car, she drew her white fur stole round the diaphanous yellow shift she wore and seeing him-recognizing him?-bestowed on him a radiant smile.
In one of his fantasies he and she sat in a club, alone at their table, gazing into each other's eyes. A cameraman approached them, then another. Nerissa smiled at the photographers, then at him. She whispered, "Kiss me," and he did. It was the most wonderful clinch he had ever had, made even better by the flashes round them and the encouragement of the cameramen. Their kiss was in all the papers next day and the headline she imagined thrilled him. "Nerissa and Her New Man" and"Nerissa Seals New Love with a Kiss." They'd call him "Michael Cellini, the distinguished criminologist."
Meanwhile he never saw her in the flesh, that golden flesh so delicately laid on long bones, though he had several times waited outside her house on Campden Hill Square, waiting for a glimpse of her at a window. Colette had told him where she lived, though she had done so reluctantly, and he had asked her if Nerissa had any exercise equipment in her home.
"She goes to the gym."
"Which gym?" he asked, gently biting her neck the way she liked.
"The nearest, I suppose. What do you want to know for?"
“Just curioius,” he said.
He must follow her, he knew that, though it savored of stalking, which he didn't want to think of in connection with Nerissa. Just once he'd follow her and when he found the gym he'd join. He wasn't as fit as he should be in his job, and why not her gym as well as another?
He had been with Fiterama for nine years, the first eight and a bit at their Birmingham branch. When he came to London and started looking for a place to live, he rented for a while a room in Tufuell Park. Hilldrop Crescent, just round the corner, was another location that fascinated him. They hadn't changed its name, though Dr. Crippen, who killed his wife and put bits of her under the floor, had lived there. He'd never read anything about Crippen; his crime was so long ago, before the First World War and practically ancient history. Then he saw a television program about catching criminals by wireless and from that he learned that Crippen was the first to be caught by this means. He learned too where he had lived. Something which might be distasteful to another man, or simply of no interest, excited Mix and he went out to take a look. The disappointment he felt when he found the house gone and newer buildings on the site was a precursor of his much deeper bitterness at the destruction of Rillington Place.
It was seeing the film that started him off. He was still living at home then and he watched it on his mother's old black-and-white television. Never much for reading, he had found the book of the film, as he thought of it, on a stall outside a junkshop. It came as a surprise when he looked at the photographs and saw that John Reginald Halliday Christie looked, not like Attenborough, but far more like himself. Of course he was a lot younger and he didn't wear glasses. He forced himself to look in the mirror long enough to be sure of the resemblance. In a funny way it seemed to bring him and the mass murderer closer together, and it was from that trifle that he began referring to him in his mind as Reggie rather than Christie. After all, what had he done that was so terrible? Rid the world of a bunch of useless women, hookers and streetwalkers, most of them.