'Recognize that location?' asked Walter.
I suddenly realised why the setting had looked so familiar; the establishing shots had been filmed outside number nine. I hadn't recognized it immediately because Hampshire Place had been emptied of cars, and the lighting made it look so much more sinister than it really was.
'The special effects are really good,' I said to Walter, as the axe-blade whistled through the air for the umpteenth time and bit deep into the skull of Mr Wisley's maidservant, a sprightly minx who up till then had been displaying lots of cleavage as well as a cheeky line in Marxist ideology. In fact the special effects were awful, but they were a lot better than the acting and the script, and I was trying hard to say something complimentary.
'Aren't they just,' Walter enthused. 'Amazing what you can achieve these days. You know how the Soviets used to doctor their photographs so that politicians who fell out of favour ceased to exist? Well, now you can do the opposite. You can bring dead people back to life.'
'Really,' I said.
'Yes you can,' said Walter, failing to register my lack of interest. 'If you can only get someone on film, it's as good as having a piece of their DNA. You can make them walk and talk. One of these days, Hollywood will be able to do away with live actors altogether; they'll be able to dial up Greta Garbo and Humphrey Bogart — the greats — and programme entire new performances from them.'
The layout of the basement flat was different to those of the flats upstairs. There was no logic to it. The interior had evidently been demolished and the walls rebuilt from scratch. The route to the bathroom took me through Walter's bedroom, so I naturally took a good squint around. He was fanatically tidy. The only item of clothing not tucked away into one of the drawers or fitted wardrobes was a Ralph Lauren sweatshirt draped over the handlebars of a fearsome-looking home fitness machine. Like the video room, it was all very elegant, if a trifle anonymous. It was as though Walter had bought his furniture from a mail-order catalogue for harassed executives too busy to care.
I paused to look out of the bedroom window. This was the first time I'd seen the garden from this level, but it looked almost exactly the same as it did from three storeys up — hopelessly choked with weeds and overshadowed by the surrounding buildings, although I could just about make out a heavily weathered statue which might once have been a lion.
It was in the bathroom, as I washed my hands, that I heard a familiar sound.
Tap tap tap — the sound of distant typing.
I froze. The water continued to gush out over my hands, but the surroundings were so shiny white and brilliantly lit it was impossible to feel as uneasy as I normally did when I heard noises in my own dingy bathroom. I turned off the tap and the typing stopped. I turned it on again and the typing restarted.
It wasn't a typewriter at all — it was the pipes.
You don't know how relieved this makes me feel, I said to myself in the mirror. There is nothing to worry about. There never was anything to worry about.
Oh, these old houses.
It had been the plumbing all along.
One of the most perplexing mysteries of my life had just been solved, but that didn't mean I was prepared to forego my customary investigation of the bathroom cabinet. Walter's was stocked with various Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein aftershaves, American pharmaceuticals, and bottles of vitamins with names like Buzz-B, Soar-C and High-D-High. I spotted one small brown bottle without a label; thinking it might be a brand of aftershave or vitamin pill so exclusive it didn't even have a name, I unscrewed the cap and sniffed. The smell of old socks was so powerful that for a moment or two I felt quite dizzy and had to clutch the edge of the washbasin to steady myself.
Definitely not aftershave, I thought.
By the time I got back to Walter, he was fast-forwarding through yet another video.
'Thought you'd got lost,' he said offhandedly.
'What's this one?' I asked, trying to sound keen, though I was thankful The Pig and the Pendulum had ground to its grisly conclusion. The novelty of Walter's film director status had worn off. Now I was trying desperately to think of a way of getting out of there which wouldn't offend him or squelch any potential amorous activity between the two of us. Not that there had been anything in Walter's attitude or behaviour to suggest I might be in with a chance, but I wasn't going to burn my bridges before I'd even spotted their symbols on the map.
'This one's The Pork Butcher,' said Walter. 'Mondo Film reckons it's my chef d'oeuvre.'
'Do I detect a porcine theme?' I asked, recalling The Pig and the Pendulum.
'I guess so,' said Walter, looking pleased as punch that I'd noticed. 'But I like pigs, don't you? Cute, snuffly little creatures with wiggly tails. Were you aware they used to be kept around here in the nineteenth century? This part of Notting Hill was known as the Piggeries.'
'What, real live porkers? Where we're sitting now?'
'Maybe not this precise spot. A bit further north-west, perhaps. The people who lived here would complain about the smell of fat being boiled at night.'
'Why would they boil fat at night?'
'I don't know,' said Walter. 'I don't eat meat.'
'But you said you liked pigs…'
'Not to eat.'
'…and there's such a lot of blood in your films.'
'Don't let the blood fool you,' said Walter. 'Don't forget Hitler was a vegetarian.'
I couldn't see what Hitler had to do with it.
There were pigs aplenty in The Pork Butcher, albeit dead ones, bloody great carcasses split down the middle and suspended from hooks in the ceiling. But this wasn't the Piggeries; it was somewhere in South London, and — by the look of the haircuts and the old double-decker that had been hired to drive past the camera again and again, each time displaying a different route number — sometime during the Fifties.
The butcher's assistant was a mild-mannered weakling called Arthur who finally hit back against his bullying employers by hacking them to death with a large cleaver. Death by hacking was obviously a recurring motif in Walter's oeuvre.
Once again, the special effects were rather shoddy, but round about the second murder I began to feel slightly queasy. When Arthur embarked upon the arduous process of chopping his victims' corpses down into joints, lights and livers, and selling them to customers in the shop, I realized I'd had enough. I knew perfectly well that the meat being sliced and diced in such detail wasn't human, but I could still feel ominous rumblings in the pit of my stomach.
'I wonder if you'd mind…' I motioned towards the remote control in Walter's hand, wanting him to switch it off.
'What? Oh, you mean… Hey, you all right?'
I made it to the bathroom just in time. All the popcorn came up again. By the time I'd staggered back, feeling shaky and embarrassed, Walter had switched the television off and slotted the videos back into their places on the shelf. He strode towards me, enveloped me in his arms and kissed me noisily on both cheeks. A physical overture at last! Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling robust enough to respond.
'You puked?' he said in an awestruck tone. 'You actually puked? I can't believe you did that.'