Mister Kreasey's Demon

Don't listen, Matt... came that other softer voice... And remember the little diary I said I'd keep for you - "Mister Kreasey's Demon" ? I'll keep it Matt. I'll keep it until, one day, we've found the demon and killed it.

'Amy? Amy?'

Kreasey nudged the spectacles back where they'd slipped down the bridge of his nose. He peeped through the squat brown bottle of tablets wondering whether he might need to take Diazepam for life. Young Amy would, sooner or later, find him an embarrassment beside her peer group once he was seen to rely for his strength on capsules rattling in a bottle which he couldn't hold without a tremor in his hand.

The face of Eddy Fallows seemed to loom up beneath his chin and then confront him, nose to nose, until he felt he could almost smell the garlic on Fallows' breath.

'Keep eatin' them pills,' he was sure he could hear Fallows and his following urge... 'then you won't need no cuttin' up...'

There was no bad breath. It was the memory of Fallows that would always smell foul. He'd heard only a rapping on his bedroom door.

'Kreasey? Mister Kreasey?'

The tone had risen nearly an octave, the rapping more insistent, distracting Kreasey from his thoughts. He held tight the cap to his medicine.

'Mister Kreasey?'

ourgirl... cuttin' up... Fallows seemed to interrupt. The knocking was becoming louder, more urgent. He held the cap tighter.

'Anyone at home?'

Cut you, teacher... cut you nice... nice!

'Mister Kreaseeeey!'

The only owner of a female voice - with access via the stairway to the inner door of his flat was his neighbour, the now retired and widowed doctor Mallaby. It had to be her, a woman fiercely proud of her elegant first floor flat, in Wisteria House; itself a small mansion bearing an imposing stucco facade and hinting of late Regency among the fine houses on Vanbrugh Park. She wasn't going to be ready for the culture shock when she pushed open his unlocked door to be confronted by the chaos in his conversion on the other side of the party wall.

If he stayed silent, she might not poke that enquiring nose in, see his sweat-soaked sheets, the shabbiness into which his once presentable first floor flat had slid, nor the kind of tablets on which he'd continued to depend since his dismissal.

'Can I come through? I'm not very good at shouting!'

His neighbour had invited herself down his inner hall and now she stood in his bedroom doorway, resolute, a lean old widow retired from the wards, no hint of a cream cake or a contour in her five-foot-five, hair fine, silvery, impeccably groomed, bun tied and clipped tastefully, spine straight, a paragon of deportment, invincible, that delicate bridge of her nose delicately nosing. He hadn't had time to conceal the sweat-soaked sheets and those sedatives lay scattered in his bed coverings like currants in a Spotted Dick - he the Dick.

'Sorry to disturb you. I - I know you haven't been too well with your -' her eyes had fallen to the stray capsules on the carpet close to her exquisitely polished brogues, 'your troubles at the college - shall I tell your visitor you're - indisposed?'

'I'm okay - tail end of flu - anything wrong misses - doctor Mallaby?' he corrected, noticing her face newly sculpted with disgust.

'It's- it's the student girl again - she's standing in the lobby. Doesn't seem to distinguish between the ground floor bell and the first floor,' she added, blinking the more rapidly over her intelligent eyes, wincing as though she wanted to spit out soap which had crept on to the tip of her tongue.