The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Page 39

  It didn’t let up even when they got home, but he wasn’t listening. He marvelled at how closely he was able to mimic the condition with which Karen, his lip-reader, had been born. Thinking of Karen, moreover, relaxed him inside, while Christine kept on, even once they’d got into bed. Elective deafness – it beat hysterical blindness.

  When he was sure Christine had left the house – the slammed door, the gate that clanged – he got up and showered. Within half an hour, having spent ten minutes pointing the DVD remote at the television, he was behind the wheel of the car with his son in the back seat. South Tottenham in twenty minutes was a bigger ask by day than by night, but he gave it his best shot. Rush hour was over (Christine, in common with everyone who worked on weekly magazines, finished earlier than she started), but skirting the congestion charge zone was still a challenge.

  He parked where he had the night before and turned to see that Jack was asleep. He left him there, locked the car and walked up. He had decided, while lying in bed with his back to Christine, that it would be worth going up into the loft. Somewhere in the loft was a box containing old diaries, including one for 1986. He had never been a consistent diarist, but some years had seen him make more notes than others. It was worth a rummage among the spider’s webs and desiccated wasps’ nests. His size meant he didn’t bang his head on the latticework of pine beams.

  The loft still smelled faintly of formalin. He suspected it always would until he got rid of the suitcase at the far end. He shone the torch in its direction. Big old-fashioned brown leather case, rescued from a skip and cleaned up. Solid, sturdy, two catches and a strap with a buckle. Could take a fair weight.

  He redirected the torch at the line of dusty boxes closer to the trap door. The first box contained T-shirts that he never wore any more but couldn’t bear to throw away. The second was full of old typescripts stiff with Tipp-Ex. The diaries were in the third box along. He bent down and sorted through: 1974, a shiny black Pocket Diary filled mainly with notes on the history of the Crusades; 1976, the summer of the heatwave, Angling Times diary, roach and perch that should have been returned to the water left under stones to die; 1980, the deaths of his three remaining grandparents, three funerals in one year, coffins in the front room, all burials; 1982, his first term at university, meeting Martin, his best friend for a while. Martin was a year older, which had impressed Maddox. The age difference hadn’t mattered. Everything was changing. Leaving school, leaving home. Living in halls. Martin was a medical student. They would stay up late drinking coffee and Martin would smoke cigarettes and tell Maddox about medicine, about anatomy and about the bodies he was learning to dissect.

  Maddox could listen to Martin for hours. The later they stayed up, the more profound their discussions seemed to become. Maddox watched as Martin dragged on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for an eternity, stretching the moment, before blowing it out in perfect rings. When Martin talked about the bodies in the anatomy lab, Maddox became entranced. He imagined Martin alone in the lab with a dozen flayed corpses. Bending over them, examining them, carefully removing a strip of muscle, severing a tendon. Getting up close to the secrets, the mysteries, of death. Martin said it didn’t matter how long he spent washing his hands, they still smelled of formalin. He held them under Maddox’s nose, then moved to cup his cheeks in an affectionate, stroking gesture.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” he said, as his hand landed on Maddox’s knee.

  “Could you get me in there? Into the lab?” Maddox asked, shaking his head, picturing himself among the bodies, as Martin’s hand moved up his thigh.

  “No. But I could bring you something out. Something you could keep.”

  Martin’s hand had reached Maddox’s lap and Maddox was mildly surprised to discover that far from objecting, he was aroused. If this was to be the downpayment on whatever Martin might fetch him back from the dissection table, so be it.

  “I’ve got something for you,” Martin said a couple of days later, “in my room.”

  Maddox followed Martin to his room.

  “So where is it?” Maddox asked.

  “Can’t just leave that sort of thing lying about. But what’s the rush?”

  Martin lay down on the bed and unbuckled his belt.

  Maddox hesitated, considered walking out, but he felt certain he’d always regret it if he left empty-handed. Instead, he knelt beside the bed and spat into his palm.

  Afterwards, Martin pulled open his desk drawer.

  “There you go,” he said.

  Maddox withdrew a strong-smelling package. He started to work at the knot in the outermost plastic bag, but it wouldn’t come easily. He asked Martin what it contained.

  “A piece of subcutaneous fat from the body of a middle-aged man. If anyone ever asks, you didn’t get it from me.”

  Maddox returned to his own room on the seventh floor, washing his hands on the way. He cut open the bag and unwrapped his spoils. The gobbet of fat, four inches by two, looked like a piece of tripe, white and bloodless, and the stench of formalin made him feel sick and excited at the same time. Maddox was careful not to touch the fat as he wrapped it up again and secured the package with tape. He opened his wardrobe and pulled out the brown suitcase he’d liberated from a skip in Judd Street.

  He saw less of Martin after that. At first he contrived subtly to avoid him and then started going out with Valerie, a girl with fat arms and wide hips he picked up in the union bar on cocktails night. He wasn’t convinced they were a good match, but the opportunity was convenient, given the Martin situation.

  The piece of fat remained wrapped up in its suitcase, which smelled so strongly that Maddox only had to open the case and take a sniff to re-experience how he had felt when Martin had given him the body part. As he lay in bed trying to get to sleep (alone. Valerie didn’t last more than a few weeks) he sometimes thought about the man who had knowingly willed his cadaver to science. He wondered what his name might have been and what kind of man he was. What he might have been in life. He would hardly have been able to foresee what would happen to the small part of him that was now nestled inside Maddox’s wardrobe.

  When Maddox left the hall of residence for a flat in Holloway, the case went with him, still empty but for its human remains. He kept it on top of a cupboard. It stayed there for two years. When he moved into the flat in N15, he put the suitcase in the loft, where it had remained ever since. The piece of fat was no longer in Maddox’s possession, but the suitcase was not free of the smell of formalin.

  Maddox’s 1986 diary was at the bottom of the box. It took only a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for. “Hellraiser, 11:00 a.m.” he’d written in the space reserved for Friday 10 October. A little further down was an address: 187 Dollis Hill Lane.

  He drove to Dollis Hill via Cranley Gardens, but on this occasion didn’t stop.

  “Why didn’t I think of checking my old diaries before, eh, Jack?” he said, looking in the rear-view mirror.

  His son was silent, staring out of the window.

  Turning into Dollis Hill Lane from Edgware Road, he slowed to a crawl, oblivious to the noisy rebuke of the driver immediately behind him, who pulled out and swerved to overtake, engine racing, finger given. Maddox brought the car to a halt on a slight incline outside No.187. He looked at the house and felt an unsettling combination of familiarity and non-recognition. Attraction and repulsion. He had to stare at the house for two or three minutes before he realised why he had driven past it so many times and failed to recognise it.

  Like most things recalled from the past, it was smaller than the version in his memory. But the main difference was the apparent age of the building. He remembered a Victorian villa, possibly Edwardian. The house in front of him was new. The rendering on the front gable end had gone up in the last few years. The wood-framed bay windows on the first floor were of recent construction. The casement window in the top flat, second floor, was obviously new. The mansard roof was a familiar shape, b
ut the clay Rosemarys were all fresh from the tile shop. The materials were new, but the style was not. The basic design was unchanged, from what he could remember of the exterior shots in the film, which he’d looked at again before coming out, but in spite of that the house looked new. As if a skeleton had grown new muscle and flesh.

  “Just like Frank,” he said out loud.

  “What, Daddy?”

  “Just like Frank in the film.”

  “What film?”

  “They made a film in this house and I came to see them make it. You’re too young to see it yet. One day, maybe.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a man who disappears and then comes back to life with the help of his girlfriend. It happened in that room up there.” He pointed to the top flat. “Although, the windows are wrong,” he said, trying to remember the second-floor window in the film. “I need to check it again.”

  The only part of the exterior that looked as if they’d taken care to try to match the original was the front door.

  As he’d walked from the Hellraiser set back to the tube two decades earlier, he’d read and re-read Linzi’s number on the tornout piece of Filofax paper. He called her the next day and they arranged to meet for a drink.

  “Why are you so interested in this house, Daddy?” Jack asked from the back seat.

  “Because of what happened here. Because of the film. And because I met somebody here. Somebody I knew before I met your mother.”

  Linzi lived in East Finchley. They went to see films at the Phoenix or met for drinks in Muswell Hill. Malaysian meals in Crouch End. He showed her the house in Hillfield Avenue where he had visited Clive Barker.

  “Peter Straub used to live on the same road, just further up the hill,” he told her.

  “Who’s Peter Straub?”

  “Have you heard of Stephen King?”

  “Of course.”

  “Straub and King wrote a book together. The Talisman. They wrote it here. Or part of it, anyway. King also wrote a story called ‘Crouch End’, which was interesting, not one of his best.”

  Maddox and Linzi started meeting during the day at the Wisteria Tea Rooms on Middle Lane and it was there, among the pot plants and mismatched crockery, that Maddox realised with a kind of slow, swooning surprise that he was happy. The realisation was so slow because the feeling was so unfamiliar. They took long walks through Highgate Cemetery and across Hampstead Heath.

  Weeks became months. The cherry blossom came out in long straight lines down Cecile Park, and fell to the pavements, and came out again. Linzi often stayed at Maddox’s flat in South Tottenham, but frowned distastefully at his true-crime books. One morning while she was still asleep, Maddox was dressing, looking for a particular T-shirt. Unable to find it, he climbed up the ladder into the loft. Searching through a box of old clothes, he didn’t hear Linzi climbing the ladder or see her head and shoulders suddenly intrude into the loft space.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Shit.” He jumped, hitting his head. “Ow. That hurt. Shit. Nothing. Looking for something.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Nothing.”

  He urged her back down the ladder and made sure the trap door was fastened before pulling on the Eraserhead T-shirt he’d been looking for.

  Whenever he went into the loft from then on, whether Linzi was around or not, he would pull the ladder up after him and close the trap door. The loft was private.

  When he got back to the flat that evening, he went up into the loft again – duly covering his tracks, although he was alone – and took the small wrapped parcel from the suitcase. The lid fell shut, the old-fashioned clasps sliding home without his needing to fasten them. Quality craftsmanship.

  When it was dark, he buried the slice of tissue in the waste ground behind the flats.

  As the decade approached its end, the directionless lifestyle that Maddox and Linzi had drifted into seemed to become more expensive. The bills turned red. Maddox started working regular shifts on the subs’ desk at the Independent. He hated it but it paid well. Linzi applied for a full-time job at a ladies’ salon in Finsbury Park. They took a day trip to Brighton. They went to an art show in the Unitarian Church where Maddox bought Linzi a small watercolour and she picked out a booklet of poems by the artist’s husband as a return gift. They had lunch in a vegetarian café. Maddox talked about the frustrations of cutting reviews to fit and coming up with snappy headlines, when what he’d rather be doing was writing the copy himself. Linzi had no complaints about the salon. “Gerry – he’s the boss – he’s a really lovely guy,” she said. “Nicest boss I’ve ever had.”

  They spent the afternoon in the pubs and secondhand bookshops of the North Laines. Maddox found a Ramsey Campbell anthology, an M. John Harrison collection and The New Murderers’ Who’s Who. On the train waiting to leave Brighton station to return to London, with the sun throwing long dark shapes across the platforms, Linzi read to Maddox from the pamphlet of verse.

  “ ‘This is all I ever wanted / to meet you in the fast decaying shadows / on the outskirts of this or any city / alone and in exile.’”

  As the train rattled through Sussex, Maddox pored over the photographs in his true-crime book.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to a caption: “Brighton Trunk Crime No.2: The trunk’s contents.”

  “Very romantic,” Linzi said as she turned to the window, but Maddox couldn’t look away from the crumpled stockings on the legs of the victim, Violette Kaye. Her broken neck. The pinched scowl on her decomposed face. To Maddox the picture was as beautiful as it was terrible.

  Over the next few days, Maddox read up on the Brighton Trunk Murders of 1934. He discovered that Tony Mancini, who had confessed to putting Violette Kay’s body in the trunk but claimed she had died accidentally (only to retract that claim and accept responsibility for her murder more than forty years later), had lodged at 52 Kemp Street. He rooted around for the poetry pamphlet Linzi had bought him. He found it under a pile of magazines. The poet’s name was Michael Kemp. He wanted to share his discovery of this coincidence with Linzi when she arrived at his flat with scissors and hairdressing cape.

  “Why not save a bit of money?” she said, moving the chair from Maddox’s desk into the middle of the room. As she worked on his hair, she talked about Gerry from the salon. “He’s so funny,” she said. “The customers love him. He certainly keeps me and the other girls entertained.”

  “Male hairdressers in women’s salons are all puffs, surely?”

  Linzi stopped cutting and looked at him.

  “So?” she said. “So what if they are? And anyway, Gerry’s not gay. No way.”

  “Really? How can you be so sure?”

  “A girl knows. Okay?”

  “Have you fucked him then or what?”

  She took a step back. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “How else would you know? Gerry seems to be all you can talk about.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Maddox shot to his feet, tearing off the cape.

  “You know what,” he said, seizing the scissors, “I’ll cut my own fucking hair and do a better job of it. At least I won’t have to listen to you going on about Gerry.”

  He started to hack at his own hair, grabbing handfuls and cutting away. Linzi recoiled in horror, unable to look away, as if she were watching a road accident.

  “Maybe I should tell you about all the women at the Independent?” he suggested. “Sheila Johnston, Sabine Durrant, Christine Healey . . . I don’t know where to start.”

  It wasn’t until he jabbed the scissors threateningly in her direction that she snatched up her bag and ran out.

  The next day he sent flowers. He didn’t call, didn’t push it. Just flowers and a note: “Sorry.”

  Then he called. Told her he didn’t know what had come over him. It wouldn’t happen again. He knew he’d be lucky if she forgave him, but he hoped he’d be lucky. He hadn’t f
elt like this about anyone before and he didn’t want to lose her. The irony was, he told her, he’d been thinking his flat was getting a bit small and maybe they should look for a place together. He’d understand if she wanted to kick it into touch, but hoped she’d give him another chance.

  She said to give her some time.

  He shaved his head.

  He drove down to Finsbury Park and watched from across the street as she worked on clients. Bobbing left and right. Holding their hair in her hands. Eye contact in the mirror. Gerry fussing around, sharing a joke, trailing an arm. As she’d implied, though, he was distributing his attentions equally among Linzi and the two other girls.

  Mornings and evenings, he kept a watch on her flat in Finchley. She left and returned on her own. He chose a route between his flat and hers that took in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. He parked outside No.23 and watched the darkened windows of the top flat. He wondered if any of the neighbours had been Nilsen’s contemporaries. If this man passing by now with a tartan shopping trolley had ever nodded good morning to the mass murderer. If that woman leaving her house across the street had ever smiled at him. Maddox got out of the car and touched the low wall outside the property with the tips of his fingers.

  Linzi agreed to meet up. Maddox suggested the Wisteria Tea Rooms. It was almost like starting over. Cautious steps. Shy smiles. His hair had grown back.

  “What got into you?”

  “I don’t know. I thought we’d agreed to draw a line under it.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  At the next table a woman was feeding a baby.

  “Do you ever think about having children?” Linzi asked, out of the blue.

  “A boy,” Maddox said straightaway. “I’d call him Jack.”

  Maddox didn’t mention Gerry. He took on extra shifts. Slowly, they built up trust again. One day, driving back to his place after dropping Linzi off at hers, he saw that a board had gone up outside 23 Cranley Gardens. For sale. He rang the agents. Yes, it was the top flat, second floor. It was on at £64,950, but when Maddox dropped by to pick up a copy of the details (DELIGHTFUL TOP FLOOR ONE BEDROOM CONVERSION FLAT), they’d reduced it to £59,950. He made an appointment, told Linzi he’d arranged a surprise. Picked her up early, drove to Cranley Gardens. He’d never brought her this way. She didn’t know whose flat it had been.