"You've got too active an imagination, Hazel."
"If I have it's because when I'm round here I always think of the murderer Christie. He only lived a stone's throwaway. I was a baby when it happened but when we were little kids we used to go around to Rillington Place and stare at his house."
"I remember it well," said Olive. "First they renamed it, then they pulled it down. I don't remember that happening anywhere else a murderer lived."
"Like what the Romans did to Carthage. They razed it t othe ground, Tom told me, and plowed over the site. Christie buried several of those women in his garden."
"Well, no one's buried Gwendolen. That earth's been turned like that quite a while ago. Thistles are starting to grow on it. But I do wonder what's become of that cat. Whatever Gwendolen says, I'm sure she's quite fond of it and if it's missing when she gets back from wherever she's got to, no prizes forguessing who gets the blame."
It may have been the effect of the pills or the strong spirit or both, but after Mix had slept for a while he awoke feeling dizzy,the pain still tere but weak like the memory of a past backache or the anticipation of one still to come. When he first lay down and closed his eyes, it was with an uneasy feeling that something had happened earlier that was vitally important but thatfor some reason he hadn't recognized for what it was. It nagged at his mind but drifted away when sleep came. Now, as hisdizziness subsided, his mind seemed to clear. He knew what had happened earlier and understood perfectly what it would have said to him if he had been open to receive it.
Ma Winthrop had touched his arm, his bare arm, with one finger. It was when she was asking him if old Chawcer had confided in him. Her finger had touched him and it had been warm, as warm as the skin it touched. And that should have told him, but told him only now, that old people weren't cold to the touch, their temperature was the same as in young ones. So if old Chawcer was ice-cold it was because she was deadalready.
She had been dead before he entered the room, before he looked at her, before he touched her. That was why her skin felt like ice and why she hadn't struggled when he held the pillow over her face. Sweat broke out across his face and the palms of his hands, yet a great chill passed through him. He had killed a dead woman. It seemed to him an awful thing to have done and a stupid thing. He had killed someone who was already dead.
In a way it was like what Reggie did. No wonder the ghost had seemed sympathetic to him. Of course he hadn't touched her like Reggie did-the horror of that brought him out in a fresh sweat. But there had been points of resemblance. Was h eunder Reggie's influence, then? Had the ghost directed him?
He got up and walked across the room to where the body was. He put his hands on the top of the cocktail cabinet andl eaned on it. Gradually it was coming to him that if he had known, if only he had realized, he could have simply looked ather, touched that cold skin and left her there. She couldn't have said anything to the police. She was dead. Instead, he had held a pillow over her face while counting to five hundred. He hadpulled a sheet from her bed and wrapped up in it a woman who had been dead for hours. It must have been hours for the bodyto be so cold.
In doing so he had incriminated himself, for who would now believe she had died a natural death? He had taken awayher body and hidden it, he had removed a sheet from her bed,perhaps left some of his DNA-he was vague about this adheringt o her skin, told those two old women she had gone away, said he had seen her waiting for a taxi. And now he had her body up here. Would the police be able to find out she died naturally? Would a coroner? It mustn't come to that.
Whatever it might do to his back, even if it crippled him for life, he had to get it into the bag tonight and stowed away under the floorboards. His ankle felt more painful than ever, a pulse throbbing under the stretched purplish skin.
Chapter 26
When he first went into the room it looked pitch dark, dark as the inside of a black box, and he thought he might have to leave his task until it grew light at six-thirty in the morning. But gradually his eyes grew accustomed to this absence of light. The sky outside the window began to seem transparentand luminous and the moon was gone. He switched off the flashlight and still -had enough light to see by. He closed thedoor. As he knelt down and got to work he told himself not to think about the ghost, to force himself to dismiss it from his mind in case fear paralyzed his hands.
When it was done he made sure the boards were back exactly as they had been when the floor was first laid: dovetailed, parallel, and with no protruding edges. Gwendolen's body he had sealed up in the heavy plastic, first tying up the mouth ofthe bag with wire, then making his confidence in the security of this fastening absolutely sure with superglue. All the time heworked his back hurt him, the pain sometimes a steady achebut sometimes hammering instruments of torture into hisspine. These totally incapacitated him for whole minutes at a time so that he had to bend forward until his chest was almost on his knees, and hold his hands pressed into the small of his back.
When he had finished and the body was gone, he felt more than relief. It was as if he or someone had utterly destroyed it, by burning perhaps or by some chemical process. Or as if she had never died, only been hidden away beyond talking to the police, beyond return to this house. In the gloom the bedroom looked the same as ever with all tools and glue and wire put away. There were the old gas lamp, the tall chest of drawers with the crazed mirror on its top, the naked bedstead, the windowthat refused to open. Cobwebs still hung from the ceilingand dust still lay on the windowsill. This was the Westway's uietest time, its breakers almost stilled and its sighings muted.
A great weight seemed to be lifted from him. His back stillached, his ankle was still throbbing and he was very tired, buthe felt that his troubles would soon be over. All the time he was in there he had quite successfully kept away thoughts of the ghost, but they returned when he was out on the landing. Insidethe flat, he tried to relax, to read himself to sleep with theone Christie book he hadn't yet opened, though he'd had it forweeks. He lay on his bed and turned the pages of The Man WhoMade a Judge Cry but every chapter heading he read and every illustration he looked at reawakened fears that he might haveleft some incriminating evidence behind. The book too remindedhim of his fate if he were discovered, not the same as Christie's, for his killings had been in the time of capital punishment, but bad enough. It was at this point that he realized he had stopped calling the murderer Reggie and begun referringto him in his mind by his surname.
To stop himself repeating over and over, I killed a deadwoman, I killed a dead woman, he turned his thoughts to the problem of where Gwendolen was supposed to have gone. There was no way they could prove she hadn't gone, no way they could discover where she had or had not gone. Those two old women would soon grow tired of speculating about her. The house would remain empty for a while but for himself. He'd have no rent to pay in old Chawcer's absence and he'd stay where he was just until he'd become Nerissa's boyfriend.
There seemed no impediments now to getting to know her properly. She had always been so nice to him that she was probably waiting for him to come and see her, she might evenbe disappointed that he hadn't come yet and was thinking he'dl et her down. He'd go over to Campden Hill today. Thus he reassured himself.
It was two in the morning now. He anointed his back withthe anti-inflammatory preparation the pharmacist had recommendedand felt the glowing warmth it produced spread through his muscles. He took two ibuprofen, stripped off his clothes and lay on his bed, thinking, I killed a woman who was already dead.