With the anguish of another sleepless night ahead, she retrieved the bottle of port she took care to hide in her bedside cabinet. Bought on her way home from work the previous evening, it had cut into her weekly budget in a big way. With no more shifts at the Mockin’ and no more Charles, Joy needed to start economising again; she couldn’t afford to overspend. But she needed this, and poured some into her toothbrush mug and drank it down. Poured a little more and swallowed that too. She had to block out Charles’s face somehow. She returned the bottle, its sides sticky under her fingers, then rinsed out the mug and lifted the blind as high as it would go. Not that she ever fully closed it; the basement tended to be gloomy even on the brightest of days and needed all the light in the sky there was. Since childhood, she had always liked to uncover the window whenever she was in bed. There was something comforting about watching a night sky with her head on the pillow. Nowadays, it gave her something to do when sleep wouldn’t come.
The sheets were cold, and she lay down and listened to sounds of life filtering through the ceiling. Voices, taps running, a smoker’s cough rattling along the passageway above. Sounds that made her feel lonelier and more removed from the rest of the world than ever. But hadn’t she always been alone? Nothing had changed that much. Thinking back on how Queenie had been with her recently. Temperamental, snappy. That would have been her hormones. They must have been all over the place. It made sense to her now, the sickness and Queenie pretending she had a stomach bug. The way she kept touching her tummy that time they had breakfast at Bayswater. Joy could almost feel sorry for her. Almost.
She stared at the ewer on the floor. The soap dish bought from Woolworths during her very first week in London. The basin of grey water in which she had perfunctorily washed. She looked around the room, at the faded pink roses on the wallpaper.
‘Goodnight,’ she told it.
Light out, and the moon went on like a lamp. It pinched out the edges of her meagre furniture. The washstand and the open cupboard door where the chamber pot stood. The brass balls at the foot of her bed. Then, counting the seconds, she waited for the mice to start scratching behind the skirting boards…
* * *
Until she was woken an hour or so later by another scratching coming from outside.
Joy pushed back the covers and moved to the window. Tipped her head to the moon and gulped it down. There were stars too. Millions of them. Spooky policeman’s buttons, sparkly and silver and rare for a night in London.
A face at the glass.
There one second, gone the next.
She screamed. Breath glazed the window. Inside or out? She couldn’t be sure. Frantic, she swivelled to check over her shoulder. There was nobody there, and in the dwindling seconds, doubting her senses, she couldn’t be sure she had seen anyone at all.
It was her imagination playing tricks and she told herself to calm down. Everything was fine, she was safe. There was no way that man was prowling around out there, waiting to hurt her. That time in the cemetery was just her imagination working overtime too. Yes, he was strange and she didn’t like the way he looked at her, but what had he actually done? Nothing.
He wouldn’t.
Would he?
62
Gone midnight. Terrence dragged himself up the stairs to his bed-sitting room at the rear of the house. He’d come straight home after performing at the Mockin’ Bird – there was little point going to Albert’s. The way things were between him and Malcolm, and having next to no money, it was best to stay away. Not that the Mockin’ Bird was much fun any more either. Things weren’t the same without Queenie fronting the band. Terrence missed her and promised himself he’d call round to see her in Balfour Road just as soon as he could. He needed to find a way to check on Joy too. Christie’s cockeyed threat that time he’d come to the bank, the fact he knew her name, it had been playing on his mind.
Sensing the ghostly presence of generations past, he stroked the peeling wallpaper and imagined the souls of previous tenants pressed between the centuries-old colours and patterns. Thought the chipped gloss on the skirting boards and doors – showing layers of yellow, turquoise then finally brown – marked the passing of years like the rings on a tree. He had the sense he was losing his grip on reality. His life. He wasn’t sure if he could go on. The strain of keeping Christie at bay, at keeping what he was a secret, was proving too hard.
His landlady must have heard the front door go and came out of her ground-floor rooms.
‘There you are, Mr Banks.’ Her cheeks bulging with a half-eaten sandwich. ‘You’ve not been avoiding me, have you?’
‘Not at all.’ Terrence stopped halfway up and forced a smile down on the head wrapped in its chequered scarf.
‘Good, that’s good.’ She swallowed. ‘And you’ll be sure to settle the rent you owe? Because you’re a month in arrears now, remember.’
‘Rest assured, Mrs Spencer, I’ll be settling what I owe before the week’s out.’ How? His panicky thoughts.
‘I knew you were sound.’ His landlady bestowed a generous smile. ‘I was only saying to my Bert how it’s not like you to be behind. You’re our best lodger.’
‘Just a little blip, Mrs Spencer. I’ve had some extra expenses with my mother these past weeks. Unforeseen things, you know.’ He continued with his lie. ‘But rest assured, it will all be paid to you soon.’ He patted the wallet in his pocket, fat with what he’d borrowed from the cash box at work and needed to hand over to Christie – the man was making him a thief as well as a liar.
‘Is everything all right with you, Mr Banks?’ His landlady picked at what was left of the ham in her sandwich. ‘Cos you’ve been looking a bit peaky if you don’t mind me saying.’
The telephone rang from its wall bracket in the hall. It rang and kept on ringing. It saved him from the need to invent a reason for his shabby appearance.
‘If that’s for me, just tell them I’m not here, would you?’ He waved a hand in its general direction.
‘Flamin’ thing’s been going all day.’ His landlady put what was left of her sandwich in her mouth, chewed around the words. ‘There’s never no one there. I was thinking, if it carries on, I should tell the police. What d’you think, Mr Banks?’
Terrence pretended not to hear and went up to his room. Switched on the single ceiling bulb.
Police?
He didn’t want them coming here asking questions. Supposing it was Christie making these silent calls, as it might well have been, there was no way of proving it. No, he needed to deal with whatever this was in his own way. And he would, just as soon as he’d worked out how to put a stop to that man for good.
63
Joy woke hours later. Opened her eyes to the lilac-streaked morning leaching in through the blind she had pulled down over the window. Despite the port, she hadn’t slept well. Shaken up by the face at the glass – imagined or otherwise – it had haunted her dreams and still wouldn’t leave her alone. Was it that leery man with his dog? To think someone had been out there watching left her feeling more exposed than she had done since arriving in London.
Yawning as she pushed back the covers, she dropped her legs down over the side of the bed, her toes groping for the ruined satin slippers. She left the blind where it was and switched on a lamp, then wandered over to what passed for a kitchen and pressed the tip of her nose to the small side window to see what the day was doing. Her breath misted the glass as she looked out on the brick-walled ginnel, then further up to the identical terraced houses on the opposite side. Tall, elegant, Victorian brick dwellings topped with sky-grazing chimneys. She could see families pushing prams along the pavement blown with the last of winter’s leaves. Couples wrapped in scarves and linking arms. People who looked as if they were making the most of the morning. It made her sad. Rudderless and cast out on a bilious sea, what was she supposed to do with her time now she had no one to share it with?
The answer came sooner than she could have imagined. On her way back to
the bed to tidy the covers, she trod on the little enamel brooch Charles had bought her all those months ago. The one she’d believed she had lost. It pierced the sole of her slipper, not enough to hurt, just enough to let her know it was there. When she picked it up, she saw the pin had buckled and spent the next few minutes trying to straighten it. But her fingers weren’t strong enough, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get the clasp to work again.
‘Smuggler’s Cove,’ she murmured, her eyes strangely dry. Defeated, finding her treasured brooch broken was the final straw. She had reached a crossroads with no idea which way to turn. ‘Smuggler’s Cove.’
Then suddenly the way ahead cleared and she knew what needed to be done. It had been staring her in the face all along. Tidying her hair in a sloppy ponytail, letting wispy bits trail down her neck, she got down on her hands and knees to retrieve the shoebox holding Charles’s letters and the treasured souvenirs from their time together. A box she kept her heart in. She tipped its contents, along with the broken brooch, into a large brown envelope she had once carried papers from work home in. Tore off a sheet of writing paper from a pad and scribbled the few sentences she’d been rehearsing in her head. Then she sealed the flap and wrote a name and address on the front in big black capital letters. That done, she took down her suitcase from where it had been gathering dust on the top of her kitchen cupboard and packed a few items of clothing and her wash-up bag, along with the paperback she was reading. Pulled on a grey skirt, blouse and cardigan, her stout black shoes and old green school coat that was still damp from the day before. She tied Amy’s pretty scarf about her neck and took a sideways look at her diamond engagement ring on the bedside cabinet. Snagging the light, it glinted indolently among her reading matter. Too late to put it in the envelope with the other things, she picked it up and placed it beside the sink for whoever moved in after her. It would be a nice surprise, the thought cheering her a little.
She locked her suitcase, picked up the envelope she’d tied with string and opened the door. Before closing it behind her, she paused on the threshold to say farewell to the pigeon who had been keeping her company since she’d arrived here. But to her bewilderment, its perch was empty. Strange. She frowned at the space it had left behind, its column of droppings; her little feathery friend was always there to greet her in the mornings. Refusing to believe it had gone, she searched the entrance area in the hope it had opted for another perch, but no, it must have flown away. Gripping the handle of her suitcase, the bulky envelope under her arm, she followed the journey of a sudden beam of sunshine, gulping down its dazzle as if this was to be the last of it. And it was. The light she stood in changed. Everything was cast into a weird apricot as the sun slipped behind a curtain of black storm clouds.
64
With a copy of The Times tucked under his arm, Terrence let himself into his lodgings. Quiet, he didn’t want to alert his landlady and for there to be another awkward conversation about the rent money he still hadn’t paid her. He climbed the stairs, avoiding the treads that creaked, his hatred for Christie building with each step.
Clever though, wasn’t he? Christie’s method of torture… psychological torture… it was working. It was grinding him down and making him think he was losing his mind. The snivelling little runt was steadily, but surely, driving him into the ground.
He unlocked the door of his bed-sitting room and switched on the ceiling light. The blackout blind no one had bothered to take down was half-drawn over the window. Shutting out the night but leaving a slice of the chimney pots opposite, the pale smoke rising into the chilly air. He looked at his empty bed with its iron bedstead and mauve eiderdown. He could climb beneath it, not bother to change out of his suit or take off his shoes, and drift off into oblivion and never wake up.
Since he had encountered the wretched Christie, Terrence’s life had evolved in such a way that he had come to expect very little from it. He had, almost overnight, become the persecuted man. He thought of Christie with a sullen disgust. Terrence could fantasise all he liked but it took guts to kill someone. Yes, he’d killed in the war, safe from behind his gun; he hated himself for it and still suffered from nightmares. If he wanted Christie dead without a gun – which was something he didn’t have – he would need to make physical contact, and the idea appalled him. But he had to do something; he needed to stop the man before he destroyed him completely.
Terrence wandered about his room, looking for inspiration as to how to finish Christie and end this agony, but was greeted by nothing more rousing than his two flat-faced windows, staring dark and cold onto an indifferent street. He switched off the overhead bulb in favour of two lamps, filled the kettle and set it to boil for the company it would give. He opened the door of a cupboard in his kitchen area, knowing that inside there was a bowl of cold potatoes and a shrivelled joint. Sticky-skinned from roasting and trussed with string, he could have it for his supper. Leftovers from a meal he had cooked that Malcolm had failed to show up for. He sliced the potatoes along with some strips of beef into a frying pan and set a place for one.
If he had been asked to describe what he and Malcolm were these days, he would say they were merely ships that passed in the night. Their lights barely distinguishable to one another, drifting further and further apart. He had seen him last Sunday. He usually did at weekends. Between Malcolm’s shifts on the Underground and Terrence’s work at the bank, then sessions at the Mockin’ Bird. They had collided along the alleyway that led to Albert’s. Malcolm in his zoot suit and two-tone shoes shining in the moonlight. Terrence in his overcoat and hat. Malcolm had stared right through him, and when Terrence had gone to sit down beside him on one of Albert’s battered couches, putting an arm around his shoulders, wanting to talk, Malcolm had flung it away.
‘I can’t do it no more, Terry. I’m frightened we’re gonna get caught. After that run-in with the rozzers I had last time… I can’t do it, man.’
Waiting for his potatoes to brown, Terrence opened out his broadsheet. The trial of Timothy Evans had begun at the Old Bailey and the newspaper was full of the upsetting circumstances surrounding the murders of Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, Geraldine. Terrence read how Evans had changed his initial statement – the one he’d given at the police station in Merthyr Tydfil, confessing he’d put his wife’s body down a drain. A story that unravelled as soon as the Met examined the drains at 10 Rillington Place and found no body. A more thorough search of the property was conducted, and the bodies of Beryl and fourteen-month-old Geraldine were found in the wash house in the backyard. Both had been strangled.
Terrence closed his eyes to the dark, superstitious, Transylvania-type land this story evoked. A land of trees, for some reason. Their gnarled trunks rising straight and unnatural as of those a child might outline with crayons; soaring high as giants and multiplying off into a never-ending nothingness. Opening his eyes, the daydream broken by sounds of his frying supper, he saw what came next in the paragraph. Evans’ claim that he’d only made his initial statement to protect his neighbour, John Christie. A man who had offered to perform an abortion on his wife, Beryl, who had been depressed at finding herself pregnant again. And that upon his arrival home on the night of Tuesday, the eighth of November, Evans was informed by Christie that the procedure had gone wrong.
‘Christ!’ Terrence slapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Does Queenie know about this?’
That was the night she had gone there, the night Terrence had chased through the streets of Notting Hill desperate to stop her. This could be it; this could be what he’d been waiting for. He read on, his heart in his mouth. But to his crashing disappointment, it didn’t look as if anyone believed Evans’ accusation about Christie, and according to this, he had gone on to make yet another statement, confessing to both murders.
‘By God, that Christie’s got the luck of the devil. This poor man, this poor Timothy Evans, he’s been damned by his own hand. This is an open-and-shut case,’ he mumbled and turned his
potatoes over with a spatula. ‘Evans probably only admitted to it because he was under extreme duress.’ Terrence knew all too well what that felt like, especially recently. ‘Bloody police, this is how they work, they have all the tools to tighten the screws. It’s probably where Christie got it from – he spent time in the police, didn’t he? Probably watched their interviewing techniques, playing on people’s fears, the steady application of pressure until you crack. And I bet the crawly bastard duped the court just like he duped Mum. Going on about how he received commendations for his wartime services as a special constable and his injuries during the First War… Oh, come on,’ he talked to himself, spurring himself on. ‘I’ve got to do something, he can’t be allowed to get away with it and, really, how hard could it be to kill him?’ He gulped, the thought of murder turning his stomach. ‘But I haven’t got a choice, I’ve got to sort him out… It’s my life or his.’
His appetite gone, Terrence turned off the gas ring and lights and left the pan and its contents to coagulate in the dark. He undressed for bed. Scooping out his wallet and a handful of loose coins from his pocket, he made a neat stack on the bedside table. The sheets were cold against his bare legs and he knew they would keep him awake. After finally drifting to sleep, he woke with a start to the blackness and through it, the ringing of the telephone. He tipped himself out of bed, put on his blue flannel dressing gown and charged downstairs to lift the receiver. His heart: a fish, flip-flopping in his mouth.
The Girl at My Door: An utterly gripping mystery thriller based on a true crime Page 27