Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  She should have marked him down as a stalker and fantasist, and have broken up with him right then. But somehow the moment had passed and she had found herself stuck with Lewis, worn down by his wheedling, moth-eaten charm.

  When he rang the bell, she sleepily rose and twisted the door handle, but nothing happened. The jamb was stuck in the frame again.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Lewis called through the wood.

  ‘You’ll have to kick it from your side,’ she instructed, and then he was in, staring up in concern as he passed through, rubbing his tattooed elbow.

  ‘You need to get that seen to. What if there was a fire?’

  ‘Maybe you can help me fix it.’

  ‘I’m a tech-head, not a mechanic.’ Lewis reckoned he designed websites, but had yet to show her any of his work. He circled slowly, appraising the flat. ‘Not bad, funny smell, what’s that stain? You need to give it a good clean. Have you got cable? Bit of damp there. Have you got anything to eat?’ He dropped back into a kitchen chair, tilting it, putting his trainers up on the table.

  ‘I thought you were going to bring wine?’

  ‘They didn’t have any. You got no dead-bolts on the windows. Someone could come up the drainpipe. Or down from the roof. I’m starving.’

  She instantly wanted him out of the flat. He was an intruder, ruining everything just by sitting there. They went to the pizzeria next door, and it was as she watched him slowly chewing his pepperoni slice, lost for something interesting to say, that she decided to finish with him.

  He accepted the news with good grace, which disturbed her more than if he had been hurt, because it suggested that he had either failed to understand or wasn’t especially bothered. Sure enough, when she paid and they rose to leave, he asked when he could come around again.

  ‘Lewis, were you listening? I don’t want to go out with you, or anyone else for that matter. I just need to be alone for a while.’

  Lewis played with the silver crucifix at his throat while he struggled with the concept of rejection. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked finally.

  ‘I’m not going to see you for a while. I’m settling in. I’ve got a lot to think about.’

  He looked blankly at her. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, I’m trained as a voice coach but the agency has yet to find me a job, my mother is subbing me rent so I need to pay her back, my dad’s upset that I’ve moved out—’ She halted, knowing that Lewis was already bored and thinking about himself. ‘Forget it, let’s just get out of here.’

  She stood awkwardly outside while he smoked, watching the rain lace itself along the restaurant’s canopy. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he promised, bouncing off into the storm as she fled back to her apartment.

  Lewis rang so often that she let her mobile go to voicemail without bothering to check who was calling. Luckily, she had not given him the number of the house phone.

  It took a week to clean the place properly and repaint the lounge, replacing dingy magnolia with sunshine yellow, but soon the rooms were reflecting the morning light instead of merely absorbing it. Stains were removed and smells were banished, but the front door remained stubbornly stuck. She would have liked to scrape the layers of paint back to the wood, but knew that the work was too much for her. All detail had been lost over the years, so that the rooms were little more than blurred ghost-images of their former selves.

  On Saturday morning she went downstairs to see her landlady, and found Mrs Hamalki’s daughter coming out of the ground-floor apartment. There was a look of permanent exhaustion in Maria’s eyes, as if the effort of merely remaining alive was too much for her.

  ‘My mum was attacked last night,’ she wearily explained. ‘Someone tried to break in. I’ve told her before. I’d have her with us, only it’s the kids.’

  ‘That’s awful. Is she all right?’

  ‘They kept her in the Whittington overnight to see if there was concussion, but she’s got a strong head. My dad used to knock her about. Me and my husband are just going to pick her up, but he’s not been at all well.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I heard someone at the door,’ Mrs Hamalki told Tam an hour later, seated in her kitchen. She had a faint grey bruise above her bloodshot right eye, but otherwise seemed in good spirits. ‘It was late, and I thought maybe you had lost your key. I went to answer it and there was a man—’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I don’t know, early twenties, wearing a black hoodie, a white boy is all I remember. It was raining hard and the hall light was out, but I could smell drink on him. He shoved right past me and headed for your stairs. I told him he couldn’t go up there and tried to stop him, just grabbed at his sleeve, and he whacked me and ran back out. It’s that bloody club next door, they’re all druggies and nutters in that place. I’ve complained to the council but they won’t do anything.’ She tipped some rum into her tea and gave it a stir. ‘If he comes back, I’ll take his face off. Fucking cheek, charging up my stairs. Where did he think he was?’

  Tam’s agent began sending her bookings for voice-coaching lessons. She had been hired to teach business managers how to handle presentations. The work required a lot of preparation, but was well paid. A week after starting in her new role, she returned home late on Saturday night and threw her coat onto the kitchen chair, only to realise that it had been moved a foot to the right. Nor was the TV remote where she had left it. A carton of orange juice had been taken from the fridge, finished and thrown in the bin.

  Walking around the apartment she sensed the faint presence, a fading vapour trail, of someone who had passed through the flat room by room, touching, moving, assessing—invading. She could detect a faint citrus perfume. She examined the lock, but there was no sign that it had been tampered with. The windows were firmly shut.

  She went to see Mrs Hamalki and asked, ‘Does anyone else have a set of keys to my flat?’

  ‘I used to have some, love, but the last tenant borrowed them and never gave them back. Funny little man he was, wrote for some weird magazine, didn’t have any friends. I used to feel a bit sorry for him. I had to chuck him out when he couldn’t pay the rent.’

  ‘He never comes back, does he?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. Actually I think he died. Can’t remember where I heard that. It might have been the one before.’ Mrs Hamalki peered up the shadowed staircase. ‘Anyway, what would he want to come back here for?’

  Two doors along was Caledonian Road Bolt & Lock, a low-rent Aladdin’s Cave lined with brass keys, toilet seats and door handles. The bloated, pale creature behind the counter wore old-school gold coin rings and had a seventies comb-over. He was pushing a battered chicken leg into his mouth and actually crunching the bones. He looked embarrassed about being caught with so much fried food.

  ‘You need a London bolt,’ he told her. ‘Know what that is? Fits into the floor, the ceiling and the door-jamb. Over there.’ He waved a greasy finger at a length of galvanized steel that looked like a medieval torture device.

  ‘I think it would make me feel like a prisoner,’ she replied.

  ‘Regular locks aren’t enough, not around here. There’s a big estate up the road, always a lot of trouble at the weekends.’

  ‘I just need a new lock.’

  ‘Know the easiest way to get into someone’s flat? All you need is a screwdriver. You put the sharp end over the keyhole, like so,’ he demonstrated. ‘Then give the handle a good whack with your fist. It punches the lock right through.’ He coughed and spat a sliver of chicken bone into his palm. ‘You could have a French bolt, extends twice the length into the mortise.’

  ‘I think I’d just like the regular lock replaced for now.’

  ‘Suit yourself, but a child could open one of those.’

  ‘Then give me one that a child can’t open,’ she said with impatience.

  ‘Sixty quid, cash, includes the fitting. I can come round tomorrow morning.’

  It was a rare fine d
ay, so she opened all the windows. The locksmith duly appeared and cut a new mortise into the jamb. ‘The wood’s warped,’ he pointed out. ‘Must be draughty.’

  ‘A bit,’ said Tam. ‘I just want to be sure that no-one can get in. Do you get many burglaries around here?’

  ‘Not as many as we used to. Turnover’s the problem. Too many short-let tenants take these places. They don’t always hand back their keys. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve changed this lock alone.’

  ‘There’ve been a lot of people in this house?’

  ‘Yeah, in this whole terrace. Because of the prison up the road. You’d get members of the family wanting to be near their loved ones. A lot of broken hearts. They’d come and go, but a few come back. There was this woman who broke into her old apartment, kept freaking out the new tenant. Never took anything, just quietly let herself in, stayed for a while and then left. Eventually they tracked her down and she explained why she was returning. Her son had rented the place before her, and had left all his old furniture and fittings behind. The boy had died of a drug overdose. His mother kept breaking in when she was drunk just to listen to her son’s voicemail recording on the phone. The weirdest part is that the new tenant swore he had replaced the message with one of his own, but the mother reckoned she could still hear her son’s voice on the line. Gives you the creeps, what some people get up to.’ He rocked back on his heels and examined his work. ‘Well, it ain’t foolproof, but at least you’re the only one who has the keys for it.’

  ‘Can you do the windows as well?’

  ‘You’re not likely to get someone climbing up a century-old drainpipe, but I’ll do them.’ By the time he had finished, the flat was sealed tight.

  Sophie called that night. ‘I think you should have a word with Lewis,’ she said. ‘He’s been having a go at you in his blog. It’s a betrayal of confidence. He’s talking about your sex life and everything. It’s seriously out of order.’

  It seemed to Tam that no matter how hard she tried to maintain her privacy, something always leaked out and became public; photos on phones, texts, emails, message boards, somebody could always find a way in to you. She called Lewis and warned him to take down the offending blog entries, which were not only explicit but described exactly where she lived. He promised to do so, but the very next day he cheerfully added the details of her phone call to his blog, and there was nothing she could do about it. She should have known this was how he would be, given his obsessive tendencies with the soap star.

  The new lock made no difference at all. She came home from work the following Saturday to find things moved again, this time in the upstairs bedroom—a pillow, a cushion, magazines, a hairbrush—trivial shifts, as if the apartment had been shunted slightly, or gently tipped, then righted.

  Through her agent she met another voice coach, called Suzi, and invited her over for a revision evening, but they ended up drinking, surfing old rom-coms and complaining about boyfriends. Still, by consciously choosing who to invite to the apartment, she felt that she was in some way reclaiming her right to the space. Suzi had a vile mouth on her, but her criticism was mainly reserved for men she had dated.

  ‘The worst one?’ she asked. ‘The very worst guy I ever went out with? No contest, I can win this hands down, nothing you say will be able to beat this.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ Tam urged with some trepidation.

  ‘He used to live on the French Riviera, bummed around looking after boats, and I suppose he was kind of attractive in that woman’s-magazine way, you know, a bit cheesy, all long wavy hair and narrowed eyes. He took me out to dinner and conveniently left his wallet at home, told me he didn’t have a girlfriend, that he was too shy, too busy to date, the usual bullshit. We went back to his apartment but something seemed wrong.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘I don’t know, the place felt heavily trafficked, as if a lot of girls had been through there putting things right, tidying everything up for him. It wasn’t how a man would keep a flat. Then his supposed best friend told me. He used to pick up women by writing the worst online contact ads in the world, really hateful stuff, like “I’m an old-fashioned sexist and would never date a woman who didn’t do exactly what I told her”, or “sometimes I’ve had to slap a girl around to keep her in line”, and so on. And he’d get, like, loads of replies. He’d picked the most desperate answers and contact them, because he knew that the kind of girl who answered an ad like that would let a man do anything to her. Oh, and he once paid a mate to take an AIDS test for him. Some time later I found out his nickname. They called him the Cunt of Monte Carlo.’

  Tam was taking a swig of wine and laughed so hard that she spat Lambrusco onto the carpet.

  Suzi rattled a bag of potato chips to find the ones that had the most salt on them. ‘I heard he got fat and all his hair fell out, so he had to move back to London. When you let one of those creeps in you let them all in, because it reveals the shockingly low level of your self-esteem.’

  ‘I think I have a ghost,’ said Tam abruptly, surprised by her own admission.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He comes in when I’m out and—rearranges stuff.’

  ‘Maybe an interior designer died here.’

  ‘No, really. Sometimes I come home and things are in the wrong place.’

  ‘Then you need to change the locks.’

  ‘I already did that, because my landlady says the previous tenant was a bit weird. But it’s made no difference.’

  ‘What about the windows?’

  ‘I’ve had burglar bolts put on them. And there’s a lingering scent—isn’t that common with ghosts?’

  ‘No such thing,’ said Suzi with definite authority. ‘It’s either a past tenant, in which case you need to find out more about who was here before you, or it’s a gay cat burglar. Mind you, I like what he’s done with the place.’ They both laughed, but Tam stopped first.

  ‘Seriously, you don’t believe there’s a kind of—energy—in old houses?’

  ‘I do, but it’s not caused by the passage of phantoms. I trained to be an architect, and I can tell you this part of the street is late Gothic Revival, around 1865. You’ve got terra cotta sunflowers, scrollwork and sash windows behind all those plastic fascias downstairs. Your floorboards are 140 years old. They breathe and buckle according to heat and humidity. I’ve seen chairs tipped over and pictures knocked from walls. Houses of this age flex themselves.’

  Tam hardly heard her. ‘I changed the locks,’ she said softly. ‘There’s no other way in.’

  ‘No other way in.’ Suzi rose unsteadily to her feet. ‘Well, let’s just check that.’

  Together they went through the apartment room by room, knocking on the walls. Suzi provided a commentary as they went. ‘Original lath and plaster under lining paper. Two brick partitions, support walls from when this was a family home. Parlour, day room, corridor, bedrooms at the end, servants’ rooms upstairs. Chimney breast here, bricked up now, can’t move that without the house falling down. The windows at the back have been filled in. New doorway cut through here, and here. Hall and walls removed after the invention of central heating. No need for such small rooms now you can easily keep them warm. The landing’s been opened out here, subdivided there. No secret passages that I can see.’

  ‘Then it has to be a ghost,’ said Tam.

  Mrs Hamalki had kept a rent book for years, and had listed at least sixteen tenants. She remembered odd things about a few of them, but nothing of use about any of them. ‘We had a murderer,’ she confided. ‘At least, everyone said he’d done his wife in.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you about it?’

  ‘Of course not, nobody ever said anything to his face. But we talked about it behind his back, as you do. He said his wife had moved to Vancouver without leaving a forwarding address, but seeing as she was agoraphobic it didn’t seem very likely. She just disappeared. Mind you, at that time we didn’t have indoor plumbing, so he couldn’t ha
ve dissolved her bones in an acid bath like John Haigh did.’

  ‘Have the police had any luck with finding your attacker?’ Tam asked.

  ‘If they have, they haven’t told me. I went next door and had a go at the club manager but he told me to fuck off. Nice way to speak to a lady. Did you talk to your boyfriend?’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend, but no, I don’t want to call and encourage him.’

  ‘You got a picture of him?’

  ‘I had one on my phone, but I erased it.’

  ‘Only I might have been able to tell if it was the same man. I don’t suppose he’ll come back.’ There was an element of wistfulness in the way she spoke, as if the intruder had performed some kind of useful service.

  More uneventful days and nights passed before the visitor returned, and this time Tam was scared. She awoke from troubled sleep and looked at the bedroom alarm clock: 2:48 a.m. There was someone moving about on the floor below.

  It sounded as if they were in the kitchen. She thought of leaving the light off and going to look—for about a tenth of a second. Then she flicked on the bedside lamp and crept out of bed to listen at the door. She heard the chink of a teacup, or a plate. China being gently tugged across wood. A tinkle of metal, a footfall, then another, an odd crunching sound, the creak of a floorboard, the crunching sound again. A shuffle, a thump.

  Drawing a deep breath she threw open the door and went downstairs as loudly as possible. Then, her nerve failing, she stopped on the staircase to listen. All movement in the kitchen had ceased. Was her visitor waiting for her, or had he already disappeared? She looked around for some kind of weapon, but only found a travel umbrella, leaning against the wall like a bat with rigor mortis. It was better than nothing. Holding it like a lance before her, she charged into the kitchen.