Thirteen Steps Down Read Free Page A

she knew very well the shape and color of the one she wanted.
    The key in the pocket of her cardigan, she began to mount the stairs.
    It was a long way up but she was used to it. She might be over eighty
    but she was thin and strong. Never in her life had she had a day's
    illness. Of course she couldn't climb those stairs as fast as she could fifty
    years ago but that was only to be expected. Otto was sitting halfway up
    the top flight, dismembering and eating some small mammal. She took
    no notice of him nor he of her. The evening sun blazed through the
    Isabella window and since there was no wind to blow on the glass, an
    nearly perfect colored picture of the girl and the pot of basil appeared
    reflected on the floor, a circular mosaic of reds and blues and purples
    and greens. Gwendolen stopped to admire it. Rarely indeed was this
    facsimile so clear and still.
    She lingered for only a minute or two before inserting her key in the
    lock and letting herself into Cellini's flat.
    All this white paint was unwise, she thought. It showed every mark.
    And gray was a bad furnishing color, cold and stark. She walked into his
    bedroom, wondering why he bothered to make his bed when he would
    only have to unmake it at night. Everything was depressingly tidy. Very
    likely he suffered from that affliction she had read about in a newspaper,
    obsessivecompulsive disorder. The kitchen was just as bad. It looked like
    one of those on show at the Ideal Home Exhibition, to which Olive had
    insisted on taking her sometime in the eighties. A place for everything
    and everything in its place, not a packet or tin left on the counter,
    nothing in the sink. How could anyone live like that?
    She opened the door of the fridge. There was very little food to be seen
    but in the door rack were two bottles of wine and, in the very front of the
    middle shelf, a nearly full glass of something that looked like faintly
    colored water. Gwendolen sniffed it. Not water, certainly not. So he
    drank, did he? Shecouldn't say she was surprised. Making her way back
    into theliving room, she stopped at the bookshelves. Any books, nomatter
    of what kind, always drew her attention. These were not the sort she
    would read, perhaps that anyone should read. All of them, except for one
    called Sex for Men in the 21st Century, were about Christie. She had
    scarcely thought about the man for more than forty years and today she
    seemed not to be able to get away from him.
    As for Cellini, this would be another of his obsessions. The more I know
    people, said Gwendolen, quoting her father, the more I like books. She
    went downstairs and into the kitchen.There she fetched herself a cheese
    and pickle sandwich, ready made from the corner shop, and taking it
    and a glass of orange juice back to the dragon sofa, she returned to
    Middlemarch.

    Chapter 2

    It was a funny part of the world altogether. Mix hadn't got used to it yet,
    the Westway to the north and Wormwood Scrubs and its prison not far
    away, a tangle of little winding streets, big houses, purpose-built blocks,
    ugly Victorian terraces, Gothic places more like churches than homes,
    cottages cunningly designed on different levels to look as if they had been
    there for two hundred years, corner shops, MOT testing centers,
    garages, meeting halls, real churches for Holy Catholic Apostolics or
    Latter Day Saints and convents for Oblates and Carmelites. The whole
    place populated by people whose families had always been there and
    people whose families came from Freetown and Goa and Vilnius and
    Beirut and Aleppo.
    The Gilbert-Bambers also lived in West Eleven but the upmarket
    fashionable part. Their house was in Lansdowne Walk, not as big as Miss
    Chawcer's but more imposing, with Corinthian columns all along the
    front and urns with bushes in them on the balconies. It took Mix no
    more than five minutes to drive there and another five to park his car on
    a meter, costing him nothing after six-thirty. Colette gave him