Free Thirteen Steps Down by Ruth Rendell Page A

didn't laugh or scoff. "There's more things in heaven and earth ... "
    she began but couldn't remember the rest. "I think, like, if there's been
    an awful thing like a murder in aplace, the dead person or the killer-well,
    they may come backand revisit the scene of the crime. It's their energy,"
    she wenton vaguely, "it kind of hangs around and makes the person well,
    materialize."
    Just what he thought. He was going to ask her about the mysterious
    opening and shutting of that door, but then he rememberedthe cat had
    done it. "Would it have to be the scene of the crime? I mean, where
    someone died? Could it be a placewhere another crime was committed?"
    "She's not an expert, Mix," Ed said. "She's not a medium."
    Mix took no notice. "Suppose it was a murderer who'd tried to do
    another murder but it went wrong? Would he come back to the place
    where it went wrong?"
    "He might," Steph said rather dubiously, and then, "Look, is this really
    happening? That funny old place you live in, is it haunted or what?"
    "Funny old place" was right, but Mix didn't much like someone else
    calling it that. It seemed an insult to his beautiful flat. "I reckon I may
    have seen--something," he said carefully.
    "What sort of something?" Ed was agog.
    The more sensitive and perhaps intuitive Steph read the expression on
    Mix's face. "He doesn't want to talk about it, Ed. I mean, would you? You
    know what Ed said, Mix. You need help."
    "Do I?"
    "Look, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll let you have a loan of this and you can
    drive the thing away with it if it comes again." She unfastened the Gothic
    cross of purple and black stones thathung round her neck from a silver
    chain. "Here, you have it."
    "Oh, no, I might lose it!"
    "Not the end of the world if you do. It only cost me fifteen quid. And my
    mum says I shouldn't wear it, she says it's what's the word, Ed?"
    "Blasphemous," said Ed.
    "That's it, blasphemous. My mum knows a medium and she said it
    would work. If I needed it. She said any cross would work."
    Mix studied the cross. He thought it ugly, the stones so obviously glass,
    the silver so evidently nickel. But it was a cross and as such might do
    the trick. If he threw it at Reggie or evenif he only held it up in front of
    him, the ghost might melt away like a spiral of smoke or a genie going
    back into a bottle.

    Gwendolen had found a plastic bone in her bedroom. At first she couldn't
    think what it was doing there or where it had come from and then she
    remembered Olive's little dog playing with it. She offered it to Otto, who
    shrank away with an expression of contempt on his face, as if repelled by
    the smell of dog. The bone wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper and put
    inside the washing machine for safekeeping, she waited for Olive to
    phone and complain about her loss.
    With the diminishing of her income, Gwendolen had become very
    careful with money and disliked spending it on unnecessary phone calls.
    If Olive wanted her animal's toy, let her phone or come around and fetch
    it. But the days went by and there was no call and no visit. Gwendolen
    used the washing machine only when she had accumulated a stack of
    dirty laundry. When this happened she nearly washed the bone and the
    newspaper, stuffing the clothes in before she noticed. There were a
    number of small Asian-run shops as well as the bigger grocers in
    Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Grove where she did her shopping,
    carefully comparing prices--every single penny piece counted--before
    making up her mind. To reach any of them she had to pass the block of
    flats where Olive lived. Putting on her good black silk coat with the tiny
    covered buttons, now some thirty years old, and an all round straw hat
    because the day looked warm, she set off with the bone in the bottom of
    her shopping trolley. This was covered in Black Watch tartan and, being
    only nine years old, quite smart still.
    Dropping in on Olive, she rang her bell in the lobby. No answer. Nor did
    the porter get