Lost

  “Not my favorite thing, heights,” said Jenkins, and closed his eyes. “But what else was to be done?”

  “So we get out there in the filthy fecking weather, and the wind wobbles the ladder like a vengeance. But we get up onto the roof all right and walk around a bit.

  “We’re up there, poking about the rear chimney stack, the one that leads down here. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. They capped it with an ironstone chimney pot shaped like a castle in a big chess game. The leads seemed snug enough. A little cracking in the mortar around the chimney pot. We think maybe this is it. We chip the chimney pot off its mount and set it to, on the parapet. It’s a great monstrous thing, and heavy. And then the rapping begins up top, too, coming from inside the house, coming out. But it sounds different when you’re outside.”

  Winnie wanted to ask that they move into the front room, looking out over the staid, empty forecourt of Rudge House, farther away from the kitchen and the pantry wall still making Morse code at them. But she merely said, “Oh?”

  “It sounded like a voice, is what he wants to say,” said Jenkins. His eyes were brimming. “Some sound pushed through a throat, that’s all, but what throat, or whose, or when, we could not tell.”

  “He had his little fit, he did,” said Mac, pointing at Jenkins. “He lost his brekkie and clawed at his clothes. I wanted to go get the priest and nuke that buggery wailer into kingdom come. But he wouldn’t let me.”

  “He’s a moron,” said Jenkins, not unkindly, “he’s that most superstitious sort of fellow; only bothers to believe in God and the blessed saints because he likes to believe in the devil and his army of familiars. In actual fact, of any given Sunday he’d just as soon run down a man of the cloth and rob the widow of her mite. He has no scruples, don’t you know, no faith, only dim fears, which he populates out of The X-Files and The Twilight Zone.”

  Mac said, “It’s a case of house possession, isn’t it? And Mister Colum Jenkins bawled like an infant at the sound of it.”

  “What did it say?” Winnie only asked because the longer they talked, the more time passed since the nails retracted into the wall, and the easier it became to breathe.

  “The consonants were vowels, the vowels were mud, the language was far away, possibly beastly,” said Jenkins.

  “Like if you gave a dog electroshock and convinced him he could speak English,” said Mac, “only he couldn’t, of course.”

  “Why did you weep?” said Winnie.

  “Everyone’s got a grief,” said Jenkins, “mine is mine and none of your concern, but mine came up the chimney to remind me of itself.”

  “You’re as superstitious as he is, only you use a different grammar,” said Winnie. “How long did it go on? How loud was it? When did it stop? What did you do then?”

  Mac said, “We couldn’t knock up the compound—so many parts sand to so many parts cement—to mortar it into place. Not till the rain let up. So we headed back in. Then the ladder jumped—it just jumped, like a skipping rope—and tipped into the alley. I was already in the window and Jenkins following; he fell on top of me to avoid losing his balance into the alley. He had a seizure then. His pills.”

  “Bad heart,” said Jenkins. “Been so for a while, but frights make it worse.”

  “You went a bit snoozers on me. Browned your boxers too, didn’t you. Talk about stink.”

  “And the ladder . . . ?” said Winnie quickly.

  “Still in the alley. Never got to it yet.” Jenkins avoided Mac’s eye.

  “And the chimney pot is up there uncemented?”

  “It’s forty, fifty pounds of fired clay. Short of a gale-force wind, nothing’s going to budge it. We’ll right it soon enough.”

  “Tell her about your dream,” said Mac. His head was back and tilted, his eyes hooded, his lips on one side drawn up into a mean pucker. “When you were out cold. Go on, then.”

  “You shut your mouth,” said Jenkins. “It’s none of her concern, nor yours. I’m sorry I spoke of it.”

  “Go on, tell her, Jenky-jenks.”

  Jenkins took a breath. Winnie saw him halting in his thoughts. “Now you,” she said to Mac, “you just hold on.” To be funny, addressing the pantry wall: “You, I don’t want to hear it.” She took Jenkins by the elbow. “Come on, then. Have a seat. There’s nothing here that we can’t all walk away from. I’m going to make a cup of tea.”

  “Oh, you don’t know,” said Jenkins, “we can walk all we want, but the good it does?”

  “You stupid git. Tell her the dream or I will.”

  “I told you to shut up,” said Winnie. “Why don’t you just go. Please? Grab a sandwich or something. We’re going to have some tea.”

  “Wouldn’t scarper off, leaving my mate here, not with dead Mr. C in the walls, no, darlin’, no.”

  She stopped talking to him then, made two cups of tea, and sat down near to Jenkins. “This is all going to seem so ridiculous when we get to the bottom of it,” she said. “Please. I don’t care what you dreamed.”

  “Tell her.”

  “I don’t hold by dreams,” said Jenkins, “it’s not my way. But this was such a dream. I was so deep in it, not drowning but—bewildered—no word for it really. Everything hung in strands of gray, but it wasn’t rain and it wasn’t fog, it wasn’t thread, it wasn’t smoke, nor yet was it the scarring of stone with a chisel, nor the ripped seams of old plush curtains, but it was like all that.”

  The house held its breath.

  “Tell the part about your daughter. It’s good, this,” said Mac. He looked ready to down a pint of Guinness and settle back to hear an old geezer retell the story of the Trojan horse. “Listen and you’ll see.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” said Winnie. “I’m not going to listen. The past has nothing to do with us, it’s only what we make of the present that counts, the both of you.”

  “She’s a whore, works the Strand,” muttered Mac appreciatively. “You want to hear a dream that a dad can have about his daughter?”

  “Piss off, I’ll skewer you with my screwdriver, you,” said Jenkins, half rising, his face now gamboge.

  “What’s wanted is a fecking exorcism here before the devil in the pantry wall gets out to claim your soul. What he dreamed,” said Mac, “was a nightmare. Someone got his daughter, some fiend. His daughter. She’s gone missing for several months. Or else she’s gone swanning off somewhere, no forwarding address for old Da here. She doesn’t come home to wash her smalls in the family sink anymore.”

  She got between them before Jenkins attacked him, and there was just a little tussle then. She walloped Mac on the side of the head with a box of Weetabix, to score a point more than to hurt him. Mac retired to the front hall, snorting with laughter. He made a noisy show of taking a leak in the bathroom without closing the door. She stood and settled her hand on Jenkins as his shoulders heaved and he worked to regain some dignity. “Let it go, the pair of you,” she said in a low voice, as if he were four years old, “you’re each as bad as the other.” She dragged out a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “I don’t believe a word of it, anyway; you two are having too much fun beating each other up for me to pay attention.”

  “Ah, but he’s telling the truth about the girl, she’s missing,” wheezed Jenkins. “And it was a harsh dream. It was my daughter and it was not, in that indecisive, maddening way of dreams. She was talking to me, but she was clawed and chewed—”

  “I don’t want—”

  “It gets worse. There was a fiend; she’s lashed—”

  “I don’t want,” said Winnie firmly but picking her way as kindly as she could. “I have enough dreams of my own, and this is none of my business. I’m paying it no attention at all. It’s John’s being missing that’s getting to you. To me too. Take some deep breaths now. It’s okay.”

  She waited for Jenkins to regain composure. Mac wandered back into the kitchen with a saucy expression. “Why does a whore stop having Sunday tea with he
r da?” said Mac. “He slags her off one time too many for having a job she can do lying down? His dream is all guilt, nothing but. What has he said to her that gets up her nose? It’s his fault for being a silly preachy bugger. He’s always telling me to make something of myself too. As if I need to hear his mind about it.”

  She took a deep breath and said, “Look, fellows. This is your job and I don’t care if you walk out or if you tear the wall down. I’m going to go to the police, and then I’m going to pack my bags and get out of here.”

  She picked up her coat with as much dignity as she could and made her way down the stairs. Out the front door into the sentimental rain that colored the world in halftone shades, as in Jenkins’s dream. How useless her mind was in this situation; it only knew how to work in stories. She couldn’t think what could retract those nails into the wall that didn’t have a supernatural origin.

  She knew what Wendy Pritzke would make of this material, that was the curse: Wendy was with her, working on her own story even as Winnie went sliding and slopping down the hill, trying to remember where she might have seen a police station in Hampstead.

  . . . that girl. Maybe one of those slim-hipped boy-girls, downright gaunt. Wearing clothes too big for her, all hanging on her like medieval rags—that coarse-woven stuff like burlap. She’d be out on the pavement where she usually did business, stalking the stalker. A modern-day Robo-prostitute, not to be trifled with, ready to wreak revenge at last on the ghost of Jack the Ripper. On behalf of all the women who’d died at his knife.

  And what of this notion of Jack the Ripper, his ghost, howling up the chimney stack, ready to emerge when the time was right, ready to do battle again? He had been called the Ripper because of his tactics with the knife, his talent at bloody vivisection. Could some fille Jenkins or someone like her--some modern-day prostitute with an appetite for vengeance--take the life of a ghost? And how could you take the life of someone dead?

  And how had he died? Who had ripped the Ripper a hundred-some years ago? The paterfamilias, or an intended victim getting the upper hand?

  But this was nonsense, a distraction. She had to focus. Could she remember where the police station was? Down Rosslyn Hill, was it? And what would she say when she got there? How could she tell the officer at the desk about superstitious Mac and skeptical Jenkins, and the rapping sound, and the retracting nails? Would the Metropolitan Police come by and tear the place apart? What if they did, and John showed up, having been out on an extended work emergency, or even a tryst of some sort that he was hiding from Allegra Lowe as well as Winnie Rudge? The authorities would be onto him about his plans to put an illegal staircase and deck onto a protected building without the proper permission.

  The police would just get on the phone and call John’s office; why hadn’t she done that? Because she was in the custom usually of staying out of his life, she knew, but it was time to break that old habit.

  She stopped and bought a phone card, found his work number in her book, dialed. “Adjusting Services,” said the voice that answered, a woman’s efficient voice in that faintly curdled South African accent.

  “John Comestor, please.”

  “Who is calling, please?”

  “Winifred Rudge.”

  She was put on hold a minute. The rain battered at her back. “Sorry,” said the voice, returning, “he’s not here.”

  “This is his cousin. Is he out of town, do you know?”

  “I don’t know his movements. Frightfully sorry.”

  “But has he been in this week? I’ve just arrived from the States and I’m hoping to see him while I’m here.”

  “I don’t work this department usually; I’m filling in today for Gillian, who’s out sick.”

  Gillian and John, an item? No. Gillian was married and sixty besides.

  “Look, can you please ask around? I really need to know where he is.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, miss. It’s company policy not to reveal the schedules or destinations of our adjustors. I’m sure you can understand. There’s little else I can help you with. I do apologize.”

  “You can tell me if you’ve seen him at least. Please.”

  “There are other lines going. Dreadfully sorry.” She rang off.

  He was traveling on work; he’d been called away suddenly; why couldn’t they just say?

  Unless—and this was her fiction spasm happening again—the office staff there had been coached to respond to her with no information at all about him. Why would John do that to her?

  Turning back from the phone, blinking into the rain, Winnie thought that if Colum Jenkins called John’s office, maybe he’d get a different answer than Winnie had gotten. Maybe the temp would think, “Not a woman, so not the cousin he’s avoiding; I can answer differently.” It was worth a try. There was nothing else to do.

  Except, as she passed it, to step into the overheated offices of Bromley Channing Estate Agents, just as the thought struck her, and stand there dripping on the sisal matting. The properties were posted between laminated sheets in the window, hanging chicly on fishing line. Photographs of facades and aren’t-we-smart parlors with fresh flowers. Winnie was grateful that the alibi of middle age made all kinds of mild lies possible. “I was thinking of buying and I saw your sign,” she said to the receptionist, “on a building in Holly Bush Hill, a flat. Is it taken yet?”

  “Oh, a flat,” said the receptionist, as if dealing with anything less than former mansions of Sting was not worth swiveling around in her chair to check on. “Not many of those this time of year. Spring is when they start to come on the market.”

  “What’s your range?” said an agent, bobbing forward between desks.

  “I saw a sign,” said Winnie. She gave the address.

  “That’s in the three-to-five file,” said the agent. He meant three to five hundred thousand pounds. A hot market again.

  “Oh, yes,” said the receptionist, finding the specs. “It happens we’ve got a broker over there at the moment. Aren’t we lucky. Can you pop round?”

  “I’m on foot,” said Winnie. “I don’t pop anywhere, but I trudge pretty efficiently. Have him wait.”

  “Let me get him on the mobile. He’ll have to let you in. Hold on. Hello there Kendall Amanda here are you at the Weatherall Walk first-floor one-and-a-half bedrooms? Right. You just stepping out or will you be there a bit?” She aimed her pinky toward her mouth, ready to kill time by destroying her nails, then cocked her chin up toward Winnie to say, “You can get there in ten minutes, he’ll still be there, your name is?—”

  Winnie paused and then said, “Wendy. Wendy Pritzke.”

  “She’ll be right over, American lady. Miss Pritzke.” Amanda slammed the phone and withdrew a photocopied map of Hampstead Village from a drawer, but Winnie said, “I know where it is, I’ve told you. I’ll just head over there.”

  “He’s Kendall Waugh,” called Amanda after Winnie.

  Waugh was an overweight estate agent with a belt made of rattlesnake skin. He huffed and panted as he led Winnie toward the back of the flat, where a man and a woman were muttering to themselves in disagreement. “My clients are nearly through here but we have another place to see down on Honeybourne Road,” said Kendall Waugh. “Let me just answer their questions, Miss Prizzy, and then I’ll show you round quickly.”

  “I can have a look myself,” she said. She was looking as she spoke. The layout of the flat for sale was identical to John’s flat above and, she assumed, to Mrs. Maddingly’s flat below. Three small rooms in the older building, facing Weatherall Walk, two additional rooms snugly joined to the newer house behind. The flat had belonged to Mrs. Maddingly several decades ago, but there was no sign of her whimsical disarray. The place was empty of furniture and sorely in need of sprucing up. The coping was dingy. But Winnie wasn’t in the market for a flat, she was supposed to be hunting for some natural cause of the unnatural disasters occurring in John’s flat upstairs.

  She could see nothing
of interest. The chimney stack rose from below and continued above, exactly as geometry and architecture would have it. In the large room it had once heated and lit, the chimney breast was boarded over. “Could this fireplace be opened up and made to work?” she said to Kendall Waugh.

  “I’ll just finish here if I may have a moment, one moment,” he called, affecting patience, but unconvincingly. Winnie stood in the gloom, in a box of cold room, and heard the voices in the annex. In certain sorts of rain, when the clouds come down close as they were today, it was sometimes hard to keep the mind fixed to the current year.

  She’d noticed the syndrome mostly on gray February days, back when she was living in the more expensive and so more thinly developed Boston suburbs. The wet tree trunks, the low sky the color of tarnished silver, the muted smoky green of yews and white pines and arborvitae, the retracting mounds of dirty snow, the skin of the world pulling in phlegmy puddles, the occasional stab of red in holly berries. In palette, at least, it was the same cold world of the Wampanoags, the Puritans, the colonists and revolutionaries, the Federalists and revivalists and Victorians and so on.

  Similarly, in London, the wind bullied the windows in their casings as rattlingly as it must have done all through the past three hundred years and more. The gray skies drawn in over the mighty and inattentive Atlantic were the very same gray, corrected for reduction of pollution from coal fires, of course, thanks to the Clean Air Act.

  She roused herself back to whatever of the here and now she could still trust, or care about. She heard Kendall Waugh answering a question. “That, I can tell you actually. We’ve got at the office a very fine pamphlet that talks about this street and actually mentions the structure. It was put up in the early nineteenth century, which makes it almost two hundred years old of course as you know, by a merchant named Rudge. Rudge House and all that. He was in imports, the tea trade.”

  “He wasn’t a merchant,” said Winnie, “he wasn’t in tea. He started in Cornwall tin mining and became an expert in beam supports. Excuse me, and not to change the subject, but have you been showing people through here all day today?”