The Devil's Staircase

by Helen FitzGerald

  30

  Celia’s eyes had widened with hope when she heard the door at the top of the staircase being kicked in. At last. Could it be true? Had she beaten him?

  But her eyes had closed a little by the time feet descended the stairs. Some people were standing over her. She could hear a gasp and a scream and she could see the faces for a while – three men, and a young woman. They whirled into one vision, as unreal as the world she’d occupied for the last month or so. Faces and clothing and pieces of skin, all blurry and unfamiliar. As she looked up at them, she tried to speak, or at least point, but she was fading, dying probably, and wouldn’t that be a shit, after all she’d been through, to not make it after all, to not hear the squeals of her family as they raced to find her, to not even have the strength to point at one of the men looking down at her and say ‘Is that him? Is that his voice? There’s something in the way he stands.’

  Celia only managed two words – ‘Big eyes.’ She wanted so badly to manage more than that, to get the monster who’d probably killed her. A wave of frustration swept over her as she heard herself try to speak – she was making rasping noises, nothing else, and the effort hurt so much that in the end she was glad to retreat into darkness.

  31

  A naked woman was dying in my arms. She looked nothing like the woman I’d seen in Greg’s newspaper clippings. Her face was blistered, her finger bone was protruding, her mouth was swollen and cut, her legs ripped to shreds, her tiny frame weak and bony. I looked into her eyes and talked: ‘Keep looking at me . . .Your boys are missing you . . .I’m going to get them, Sam and Johnny and Greg, in a minute . . . You’re going to get through this . . . You’re going to be with them again, be a Mummy and a wife . . . Everything will be fine, just fine . . . Look at me, okay?’

  She opened her mouth and tried to say something. She gasped, her tongue huge and bleeding. I could see the frustration in her eyes as she pleaded with me to understand what it was she was trying to say, but after managing the words ‘Big eyes’, nothing more came.

  She closed her eyes as the two paramedics arrived. I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to hold her, to be with her, to will her to live. I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt as I stepped away from her to let the paramedics take over. She’d been underneath my room all that time and I’d been too stoned and too stupid to save her.

  I ran up the blood-carpeted staircase, over the floorboards of the hallway, outside, over the street, and banged on Greg’s door screaming: ‘GREG! GREG! SHE’S ALIVE!’

  He opened the door a moment later. He was in his pyjamas. The boys were in their pyjamas behind him.

  ‘She’s alive! We’ve found her! In the basement of my house.’ ‘What?’ Greg said, disbelieving.

  ‘Celia. She’s in my house. Alive.’

  I would have taken his hand and led him to her, but he was too fast, as was Sam. They were running across the road and into the squat.

  ‘Stop!’ I yelled, running after him, holding Johnny in my arms. ‘Leave Sam with me! GREG!’

  Greg stopped and looked at me, understanding that this meant it wasn’t good. He turned to Sam. ‘Stay with Bronny,’ he said, ‘Stay there while I get Mummy. I’ll be back out in a minute.’

  I held Johnny and Sam on the step of their flat and we looked over the road, just as they had when they’d waited for their cat to come home.

  ‘She must have got my emails,’ Sam said. ‘I told her if she didn’t come back I’d steal Johnny’s Tardis.’

  I kissed Sam on the forehead. His eyes were different all of a sudden. They were the eyes of a seven-year-old.

  Eventually, Greg walked out beside the stretcher and then ran to us while they loaded the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

  ‘Mummy’s going to hospital. Stay with the paramedic till your Gran gets here.’

  Greg looked at me for a moment, his eyes squinting a little. He was wondering who I was, who I realy was. He grabbed Johnny from my lap and handed him to the paramedic. He then steered Sam over to join his little brother. Sam turned his head and smiled kindly at me.

  As Greg raced back across the road, I realised I was no longer his friend. I was no longer anyone’s friend. I was a squatter from nowhere who had possibly harboured and tortured an innocent woman in the basement.

  I ran into the squat. ‘Pete!’ I yelled. ‘Pete! Where are you?’ I needed to hold him so badly.

  ‘Down here,’ he said.

  Reluctantly, I walked down into the basement. Fliss, Cheryl-Anne, Pete, Zach and Hamish were there, staring at something in one of the two rooms. I walked towards them and looked inside the one with the door. It was light now, and I could hear the police cars arriving and I could see what they could see: pieces of paper pinned to the right hand side of the wall, rucksacks and sleeping bags lined up against the left, and two women propped upright in front of me, wrapped like mummies in cling film, their dead eyes staring at us through the plastic.

  I fainted.

  When I woke, a police officer was standing over me.

  32

  All seven of them were handcuffed – Bronny, Cheryl-Anne, Fliss, Zach, Hamish, Pete and Francesco – because they were all suspects. They’d been sugar-coated in rucksacks and passport stamps, but now they were to be unpeeled. Two girls had been killed in their drug-littered house. Perhaps a third. And for now, these debauched, homeless, family-less travellers were the only obvious candidates.

  Seven . . .

  Zach had been handcuffed while still staring at the cling film girls. He was statue-like, frozen. They’d had to drag him from the basement kicking and screaming because one of the girls was his sister. Last time he’d seen her was six months ago at Tullamarine Airport. He’d caught some early waves in Torquay, then jumped in the Land Cruiser. His parents had cried after the picnic had been eaten near Check-in Point 33, and they’d cried even more as their beautiful Jeanie disappeared behind the sliding gates at International Departures. On the way home, Jeanie’s parents phoned her three times. She was still in the passport queue, having a coffee at Gate 11, just boarding, better go, I love you!

  They didn’t expect her to ring often, but when she stopped altogether after a few months, they began to worry a little. Friends told them they shouldn’t. Kids doing the whole indefinite trip thing never ring home. She was probably out of range. They took their friends’ advice and relaxed, especially when Zach decided to head off as well. He’d track her down, give her a slap on the wrist, get her to call home for God’s sake.

  She’d gone to the Royal, he knew that, and Zach was chuffed when Francesco had said he remembered her.

  ‘She went off to a kibbutz I think . . . Don’t panic, she’ll get in touch.’

  So he didn’t panic. He got into the lifestyle, playing his guitar and smoking pot and taking cocaine and ecstasy and shagging girls and forgetting to phone home. He laughed when he thought back to how worried he’d been. Now he knew the deal – she, like him, had entered the travel zone, an otherworldly black hole where you forget you even have a family because the people you are with are better than family, more interesting and more interested. And you forget you have a home because wherever you are, whatever room you’re sharing with your new family, is your home.

  But Jeanie wasn’t in Israel. She was in cling film.

  Zach’s handcuffs were taken off not long after he arrived at the police station. He was no longer a suspect. He was a victim.

  Six . . .

  Generally speaking, Vera Oh reasoned, girls don’t kidnap, rape, torture and kill other girls. Cheryl-Anne might have worked with a man Myra Hindley-style, and the police wondered about this for a while, especially considering her angry racist ideas and the fact that she’d left her three-year-old child in another country just so she could have some fun.

  ‘What sort of woman is she?’ Vera Oh had said to her colleague after interviewing Cheryl-Anne McDonald from Wagga Wagga. ‘Kind of man-like, y’know?’

  But Cheryl-
Anne was also the kind of woman who kept a diary, who wrote her comings and goings in elaborate detail, gluing receipts and tickets to the pages, and she had come and gone at all the wrong times to have been involved Myra Hindley-style in any of the crimes.

  Cheryl-Anne’s handcuffs were unlocked soon after Zach’s. Five . . .

  As for Fliss, she’d arrived in London after Celia’s kidnapping, and was a blubbering mess, afraid of the dark, never mind blood.

  Four . . .

  Hamish had been in Ballarat, Australia, around the time of Celia’s disappearance.

  Three . . . Two . . . One . . .

  And then it was Pete’s turn, and when they’d finished running his name through the computer they didn’t even bother checking Francesco and Bronwyn because Francesco hadn’t spent most of his adult life in prison and Bronwyn hadn’t hidden a gimp mask under the mattress.

  Pete had.

  33

  As I waited to be released from the station, I thought back to that night at the Polish club. I’d been out of my box on ecstasy, and was rambling on about my new friends – how Cheryl-Anne ate peanut shells; how Fliss wore no underpants even with skirts. I remembered loving them undyingly.

  As a kind Asian police officer questioned me about the other suspects, she told me things I’d never known.

  Cheryl-Anne had refused to talk to her parents for three years. They wanted her to come home and see her beautiful daughter, but she just didn’t feel like it.

  I didn’t know Fliss’s fiancé had chucked her the day before their wedding, that she had come to London, devastated and angry, hoping to make it big as a model so she could return home triumphant, saying: ‘Look at me, you bastard, I am a supermodel and even if you beg I will never forgive you!’ I didn’t know how hard she’d tried to make it, that after hundreds of go-sees and auditions she’d turned to prostitution to get a good set of photographs together, and to keep the diet-amphetamines coming. She’d made quite a name for herself in the area, the police woman said, and was on the brink of being sacked from the Slug and Lettuce for using the storeroom as her boudoir.

  I didn’t know Zach had enough cocaine in his room to supply a small country.

  That Hamish had dropped out of university.

  That Pete was a serial killer.

  And they’d known nothing about me. Not one of them knew that I had worn death for years; that I had been running away from it and was starting to tire. None of them knew that I’d spent much of my youth watching an old man tend his horses in a disused railway, that when I visited my mother’s grave I felt nothing but anger. No one knew that I prayed for the pigs as they shuffled into the bacon factory. No one knew that I had fallen in love. Hopelessly.

  I signed some bail conditions. Basically, I wasn’t to leave the country till the court case was over. As I scribbled my name, I noticed Pete sitting at a table in an interview room. He was crying. His hands were holding his cheeks and tears were streaming down his face. He caught my eye and shook his head as if to say, ‘Not me.’ I shook my head: ‘Bastard.’

  He gestured for me to come over. I saw him ask the officer in his room something. The officer opened the door.

  ‘Miss Kelly?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Two minutes. ’

  Did I want to go in? Could I sit opposite him, knowing what he’d been accused of, when I could still feel his body on mine, still feel my heart flutter as it had when he’d lain beside me in the park?

  My head had decided not to go in, but my body had not obeyed.

  We were silent for a long time before Pete spoke.

  ‘I used to steal cars and they deported me. All I’ve done in this country is try and get home. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’m not a monster.’

  ‘They say you hid in a coffin at Heathrow.’

  ‘That’s not true. Don’t listen to them. I’m not what they say I am.’

  ‘Then who are you?’

  ‘I’m Peter McGuire, I’m twenty-four and I’m from a town outside of Adelaide. My mother’s a drunk. My father’s English. I’m in love with you.’

  I think my chair may have fallen on the ground when I stood up to leave, but I didn’t look back to check.

  34

  Bugger. It was very annoying. In fact, it made him short-tempered. If only they’d all gone to bed sooner, not taken that second pill, he’d have sorted it and moved on.

  He’d wanted to move on for some time. With the girl in the netball skirt perhaps. But instead of moving on with her, he had found himself standing beside her, looking down at the woman he was so over. My God, it was a disgrace, for a girl to get in that state.

  He’d felt short tempered as the others gagged at the girl while trying to hold spurting wounds and calling the ambulance and the police and the people across the road. All right, all right, so she seemed to have chopped herself into pieces to get out; so she was naked and brown and red all over. Just get over it already.

  He’d felt even more short-tempered at their reaction to the other room. It wasn’t anything to faint over, two naked girls wrapped in cling film from head to toe, their eyes looking out like crisp lettuce. It was their own fault. He’d never intended to kill them, but the state they’d gotten themselves into . . . unbelievable. He’d done them a favour, wrapping them. Better that than soggy and stinking, and all right, so it did smell a bit, but not as much as it should have, considering how long they’d been there.

  He thought back to when he’d been ill as a boy, and his mother had not come home, had not even phoned to say she’d met someone and would be away for a while. He’d felt really down back then, like taking the pills she’d left in the bathroom cabinet, but then the girl had run by his 1 2-year-old self’s bedroom window. Where was she now? What could he do to make himself feel better? Like he didn’t have a brick in his stomach?

  He felt as though he could sleep forever.

  Pete sat on his concrete bed thinking about the last time he’d been arrested. It was on the Eyre Highway. A police car had been chasing his stolen Jag along the straight flat road for four hours. In the end Pete ran out of petrol just before Ceduna. By the time the police car had caught up and parked beside him, he’d smoked two cigarettes and eaten one apple, core and all.

  ‘G’day,’ Pete said to the young cop.

  The young cop had not replied.

  It was several weeks before Pete had taken his usual seat at court.

  ‘Peter McGuire, you’ve been found guilty of eighteen charges of car theft, three counts of dangerous driving, thirteen counts of resisting arrest, and four counts of police assault. I have the background report before me and would like to proceed to sentencing without further delay.’

  The judge had leafed through the report.

  ‘“Hardly knew real father . . . Mother a drunk . . . Moved from foster home to foster home . . .” A sad tale for the sympathetic reader . . . But then, I’m not a sympathetic reader.’

  The judge had looked up at Pete. ‘I always found it funny that two hundred years ago they sent people like you over here. Break the law and they put you in paradise. Well, I’m sending you back.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ Pete asked.

  ‘Your father is English.’

  ‘He left when I was a kid.’

  ‘That’s right. To go back to Cambridge . . . Ever apply for a passport? Ever go to one of those ceremonies where you get all weepy over the anthem?’

  ‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ Pete had said.

  ‘And what a shame that’s been for all of us.’ He’d smiled. ‘I’d buy a raincoat if I were you.’

  When they’d dragged Pete down to the cell, he was crying like a baby.

  Other than the handcuffs, his journey was much the same as Bronny’s, even down to the free booze, which – to his surprise – the air-hostess gave him after the police escort fell asleep. His arrival wasn’t much different either. He had no one to meet him, not even a probation officer. He ended up sitting in a
small room at the airport with a friendly Scottish Celtic supporter from customs and a not so friendly immigration officer.

  ‘Don’t go back,’ the immigration officer said when he unlocked Pete’s handcuffs. ‘Don’t even think about going back.’

  Pete walked out of the Heathrow terminal and stood still in the rain. He was there for a long time, staring at the grey car park and grey sky and getting very, very wet.

  That was six months ago. He’d done a lot since then. Ever resourceful, he’d found the Bayswater underworld almost immediately, and had accumulated all the paperwork he needed to get back home, because getting back home was the only thing on his mind.

  His first attempt was mainstream. He got a false Aussie passport, and bought a Qantas ticket with the parts of sixty-three stolen cars.

  After that he did have a probation officer.

  Second time round he was more inventive. False Aussie passport, job-hopping on several cruise liners, then three months in HMP Belmarsh, London for the new offences and the breach of probation.

  After his release, he contacted the compliant Celtic-supporting customs official he’d met on his arrival.

  ‘Go cargo,’ the official advised. ‘I’ll arrange it.’

  ‘In a suitcase?’

  ‘Coffin. Big one. I’ll drill holes, wrap the corpse clean and tight. Get your supplies in . . . You’ll be there in twenty-one hours.’

  Pete didn’t have two grand, or the stomach, so he decided to take time out. He acquired some references, got a job using the only skill he had – muscle – and thought long and hard about other ways to get back home.

  Funny – Pete thought after Bronny had looked at him with sad, betrayed eyes and then run from the room as fast as she could – getting home seemed completely irrelevant now.

  After a while, Pete heard the voices of several officers talking outside his cell. He stood up and pressed his ear against the metal door. They were saying they were worried. They didn’t have quite enough. If she woke, one officer said, then they would, but it looked like they might have to let him go. Time was running out.