Ruth Rendell - Thirteen Steps Down

PRAISE FOR RUTH RENDELL

Unequivocally the most brilliant mystery writer of our time. Her stories are a lesson in a human nature as capable of the most exotic love as it is of the cruelest murder. She does not avert her gaze she magnificently triumphs in a style that is uniquely hers and mesmerizing.

Patricia Cornwell

Rendells clear, shapely prose casts the mesmerizing spell of the confessional.

The New Yorker

Superior writing by one of the best in the world.

Ottawa Citizen

Rendell writes with such elegance and restraint, with such a literate voice and an insightful mind, that she transcends the mystery genre and achieves something almost sublime.

Los Angeles Times

One of the finest practitioners of her craft in the English-speaking world Even with the crowded, competitive and fecund world of career mystery writers, Ruth Rendell is recognized as a phenomenon.

The New York Times Book Review

Ruth Rendell is the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world.

Time

British crime at its best can be found in the fiction of Ruth Rendell, for whom no superlative is sufficient.

Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)

Ruth Rendell is surely one of the great novelists presently at work in our language. She is a writer whose work should be read by anyone who either enjoys brilliant mystery or distinguished literature.

Scott Turow

ALSO BY RUTH RENDELL

The Rottweiler
Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
Piranha to Scurfy
A Sight for Sore Eyes
The Keys to the Street
Blood Lines
The Crocodile Bird
Going Wrong
The Bridesmaid
Talking to Strange Men
Live Flesh
The Tree of Hands
The Killing Doll
Master of the Moor
The Lake of Darkness
Make Death Love Me
A Judgement in Stone
A Demon in My View
The Face of Trespass
One Across, Two Down
Vanity Dies Hard
To Fear a Painted Devil

CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD NOVELS

The Babes in the Wood
Harm Done
Road Rage
Simisola
Kissing the Gunners Daughter
The Veiled One
An Unkindness of Ravens
Speaker of Mandarin
Death Notes
A Sleeping Life
Shake Hands Forever
Some Lie and Some Die
Murder Being Once Done
No More Dying Then
A Guilty Thing Surprised
The Best Man to Die
Wolf to the Slaughter
Sins of the Fathers
A New Lease of Death
From Doon with Death

BY RUTH RENDELL WRITING AS BARBARA VINE

The Blood Doctor
Grasshopper
The Chimney Sweepers Boy
The Brimstone Wedding
No Night Is Too Long
Annas Book
King Solomons Carpet
Gallowglass
The House of Stairs
A Fatal Inversion
A Dark-Adapted Eye

For P. D. James
with affection and admiration

Mix was standing where the street should have been. Or where he thought it should have been. By this time shock and disbelief were past. Bitter disappointment, then rage, filled his body and climbed into his throat, half choking him. How dared they? How could they, whoever they were, destroy what should have been a national monument? The house itself should have been a museum, one of those blue plaques high up on its wall, the garden, lovingly preserved just as it was, part of a tour visiting parties could have made. If they had wanted a curator they need have looked no further than him.

Everything was new, carefully and soullessly designed. Soullessthat was the word and he was proud of himself for thinking it up. The place was pretty, he thought in disgust, typical yuppie-land building. The petunias in the flowerbeds particularly enraged him. Of course he knew that some time back before he was born they had changed the name from Rillington Place to Ruston Close but now there wasnt even a Ruston Close any more. He had brought an old map with him but it was useless, harder to find the old streets than searching for the childs features in the fifty-year-old face. Fifty years was right. It would be half a century since Reggie was caught and hanged. If they had to rename the streets, surely they could have put up a sign somewhere which said, Formerly Rillington Place. Or something to tell visitors they were in Reggie country. Hundreds must come here, some of them expectant and deeply disappointed, others knowing nothing of the places history, all of them encountering this smart little enclave of red brick and raised flowerbeds, geraniums and busy lizzies spilling out of window-boxes, and trees chosen for their golden and creamy white foliage.

It was midsummer and a fine day, the sky a cloudless blue. The little grass plots were a bright and lush green, a pink climbing plant draping a rosy cloak over walls cunningly constructed on varying levels. Mix turned away, the choking anger making his heart beat faster and more loudly, thud, thud, thud. If he had known everything had been eradicated, he would never have considered the flat in St Blaise House. He had come to this corner of Notting Hill solely because it had been Reggies district. Of course he had known the house itself was gone and its neighbours too but still he had been confident the place would be easily recognisable, a street shunned by the faint-hearted, frequented by intelligent enthusiasts like himself. But the feeble, the squeamish, the politically correct had had their way and torn it all down. They would have been laughing at the likes of him, he thought, and triumphant at replacing history with a tasteless housing estate.

The visit itself he had been saving up as a treat for when he was settled in. A treat! How often, when he was a child, had a promised treat turned into a let-down? Too often, he seemed to remember, and it didnt stop when one was grown-up and a responsible person. Still, he wasnt moving again, not after paying Ed and his mate to paint the place and refit the kitchen. He turned his back on the pretty little new houses, the trees and flowerbeds, and walked slowly up Oxford Gardens and across Ladbroke Grove to view the house where Reggies first victim had had a room. At least that wasnt changed. By the look of it, no one had painted it since the womans death in 1943. No one seemed to know which room it had been, there were no details in any of the books hed read. He gazed at the windows, speculating and making guesses, until someone looked out at him and he thought hed better move on.

St Blaise Avenue was quite up-market where it crossed Oxford Gardens, tree-lined with ornamental cherries, but the further he walked downhill it too went down until it was all sixties local authority housing, dry cleaners and motorcycle spare parts places and corner shops. All except for the terrace on the other side, isolated elegant Victorian, and the big house, the only one like it in the whole neighbourhood that wasnt divided into a dozen flats, St Blaise House. Pity they hadnt pulled that lot down, Mix thought, and left Rillington Place alone.