Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Things have changed across the block.”

Detective Lieutenant Thomas Doyle ground his cigarette onto a plate and looked across the room, towards the window, where his friend was sitting in his old blue pyjamas, with his legs encased in casts. He wiped ash off his sleeve and sighed.

“Lisa, Jeff,” he said, “What happened?”

“Miss Torso has moved out with her feller,” said his friend, still looking away from him and out of the window, “Or perhaps another feller. I could hear 'em argue but they had the curtains closed.”

“Jeff...”

“Miss Lonelyhearts is alone again,” he continued, “Never trust a musician, eh?”

“Jeff...”

“There are new...”

Doyle walked across the room and laid his hand on his friend's arm. L.B. Jefferies turned around with an expression of surprise, as if he had had no idea that Doyle had been impatient. He turned his wheelchair and let his features droop into a look of doleful innocence.

“Sorry, Tom. What were you saying?”

Doyle sighed and lit another cigarette.

“What happened to Lisa, Jeff? Stella calls and says that you're alone and she's, well – she's concerned about you.”

Doyle cleared his throat.

“Don't hold that against her, Jeff. She only wants what's best for you.”

“Lisa?”

Jeff's eyes clouded and grew clear.

“Ah, yes, Lisa. Well, Tom, she has – gone. She was a kid, you know. A kid. A beautiful kid but, still – just a kid. She liked to get out on the town, you know? To dance. Look at me: I'm getting old, and, besides, I can't go out dancing with my legs like this.”

Doyle raised an eyebrow as his friend's attention drifted to the window, and the night, and the buildings opposite. Most of the curtains had been closed but some remained ajar while others were still open. A fat man was smoking on his balcony. He wore a pained expression. The detective shook his head and chastised himself for prying.

“So, she left?”

“Well, you know, Tom,” Jeff shrugged, “She hasn't come back.”

Doyle sat on the edge of the bed and wondered how long it had been since Jeff had slept there. He knew that Stella would have worked her fingers to the bone and her bones into dust to clean the apartment but a strange musty smell still hung there. Patches of stubble clung to the flesh beneath Jeff's chin.

“So, what now?” asked Doyle.

“Now?”

Jeff picked up the camera that was sitting by his chair.

“I have to get well,” he said, “I have to get back to work. I'll meet someone, perhaps. But now...”

He looked across the courtyard with his camera in his lap and his arms folded. Doyle sighed and blew cigarette smoke into the air. He shivered. It was getting cold.

Chapter Text

Jeff lit a cigarette and gazed into the night. The moon appeared to look back at him with cold indifference. As a boy he had been told that a man was living there, and he had peered up every night to catch a glimpse of him.

What did Tom know? He disapproved, that much was obvious, but he had disapproved as Jeff had watched old Thorwald. He had no imagination. A typical policeman. Lisa had disapproved as well, but Jeff suspected she had thought that he was watching other women. She was paranoid, that kid. She didn't know that when Miss Torso had appeared between her curtains in a brassiere he had politely turned away.

Jeff looked across the block. Miss Lonelyhearts was piling dishes onto a table laid for one. The fat man was skimming through a book before his shelves. The male half of the young couple who had replaced Miss Torso was wriggling out of his coat with a sober expression. Jeff wondered if he might be another Thorwald. Perhaps this was unfair. He had never even heard him argue with his wife. But people had not believed that there could be one murderous husband so it would be foolish to deny the possibility of a second.

Jeff sat back and stubbed his cigarette out onto the window sill. Perhaps there could be a murderous wife.

Stella bustled in from the bathroom.

“Don't do that, Mr Jefferies,” she said, “It isn't right.”

The old cleaner shook her head and extended her meaty arm to take the cigarette from between Jeff's fingers and drop it into the overflowing ashtray.

“And don't fall asleep with a cigarette,” she snapped, “The next time it happens it might catch fire and you can't run out of the apartment, can you? You'd be toast. Real toast.”

“Alright, Stella,” Jefferies sighed, “You sound like an old mother. Or an old wife.”

“Yes,” the woman said, raising her eyebrows, “And you could do with one, to get your life in order. I can't look after you all the time.”

“I can look after myself,” said Jeff, laconically.

Stella made a sound between a snarl and a sigh and began to make his bed, throwing the sheets around the mattress as if attempting to shake some sense into a child. Jeff stood out of the window with his lips drawn together and his eyes upon a brick in the opposite wall. Stella lifted his pillow and yanked it as if she would have liked to pull his ears.

“Well then, you can make your bed, and cook your food, and clean your floors, and wash your clothes, and scrub your walls and keep yourself company.”

“Stella, please,” said Jeff, leaning forward as if about to rise from his chair, “I didn't mean it like that.”

She pursed her lips so tightly that they disappeared.

“Just what are you going to see, Mr Jefferies?” she asked. “Another murder?”

“Maybe,” Jeff said, “Or up Marilyn Monroe's skirt.”

“Tsh.”

Stella walked into the kitchen and returned with a bologna sandwich.

“Eat,” she said, “You're getting thin.”

Jeff shrugged but picked up the sandwich and took a bite as Stella walked to the door, lingered there, glancing back at him, and walked out of the apartment. Jeff looked out of the window and chewed the thick lump of bread and meat mechanically.

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day,” Vincent Van Gough had said. It was true. Most of the curtains were closed but every time they moved - every time they twitched - the glimpse inside seemed all the more compelling. What could be happening behind them at such a time?

The Newly-Weds had closed their curtains and would be sleeping together. Miss Lonelyhearts had closed hers and would be sleeping alone. Never mind, miss, Jeff thought, at least the likes of us have space.

The fat man had closed his curtains and Jeff was about to take another bite of his sandwich when his eyes strayed across the curtains of the empty apartment above his, where the Thorwalds had used to live. The curtains were open, ever so slightly, allowing him a narrow view into the apartment. For a moment he thought he saw a face behind them. It was not the face that he remembered seeing before.

Chapter Text

Mrs Newly-Wed had walked into the kitchen from the bedroom wearing just a brassiere. Jeff had been about to drop his gaze when he had noticed a red mark on her left shoulder. He had studied it, as closely as his camera had allowed, as she had filled the kettle and begun to cook scrambled eggs. It was dark and vivid with a strange evenness of colour. He had been shifting his chair to take a better look when she had turned to glance out of the window and seen him gazing at her. Her eyes had widened and he had dropped the camera and scooted back into the room.

The footsteps on the stairs were loud and fast. Jeff tightened his fingers around his camera as a fist began to hammer on his door.

“Open up!”

It was a young, angry voice.

“Open up, you hear me! Open up, you pervert! Open the damn door!”

Jeff reached down to the table beside his chair and laid his hand upon the gun that he had bought after the Thorwald incident.

“Open up or I'll – or I'll break the door down!”

There was a pause as the young man considered his next move. The door shook gently as two feeble kicks disturbed its rest.

“Alright,” the young man said, “Alright, I'm going to the police.”

Jeff peeked through his window as the man returned to his flat. The blinds of his kitchen had been closed but Jeff could still peer into the lounge. The man walked into the room and spoke to his wife, who seemed dissatisfied with the results of his adventure.

Edging away from the window, Jeff glanced about his room. It was a mess. Clothes were scattered on the floor, covered in dust and ash. A plate was lying on his bed, piled with cold beef sandwiches that Stella had made for him the day before. He picked one up, sniffed it and realised that he was starving. In five minutes the plate was cleared.

Jeff spent the day smoking cigarettes and leafing through old magazines without ever paying attention to them. Now and then his fingers strayed towards the camera that he had placed on the window sill but he kept the blinds closed.

Doyle arrived in the evening.

“Glad to see you're finding other interests,” he said, glancing towards the window.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I'm talking about!”

Doyle picked up a magazine from the floor and hurled it into Jeff's lap.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“What?”

“We get a call from a Mr Peterson,” said Doyle, “Who says some pervert has been spying on his wife.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You're lucky I was able to squash it. Jeff this bullshit has been going on long enough...”

“She had a bruise on her right arm – or something, anyway, big, red and round...”

“Ever think that it could be a birthmark?”

Jeff opened and closed his mouth.

“You have to stop this, Jeff. Once I asked you, now I'm telling you. It's bad enough when you're ruining your own life but when you start to mess with other people's I have to bring down the hammer.”

Doyle looked at his friend, slumped in his chair with the expression of an ailing basset hound, and sighed.

“Why are you doing this, Jeff? What is the point of it?”

“I've seen people...”

“I know, and they don't like it!”

“Not those people. Other people. In Thorwald's flat.”

Doyle cursed as the match he had been lighting a cigarette with burned his fingertips. He shook it out and inhaled fiercely as he looked at Jeff.

“That all?” He grunted. “Place must have been sold.”

“It hasn't. They're still advertising.”

“Well, it's the brokers.”

“In the night?”

“Dumb kids, then. I don't know! What does it matter, Jeff?”

Jeff reached down beside his chair and lifted a bottle of beer into the air and then up to his lips. He took a mouthful, swallowed and then suppressed a burp. Doyle looked at him in silence.

“Want one?” Jeff asked.

“Not that stuff,” said Doyle, “I have too much respect for my liver.”

Jeff took another mouthful and then put down the bottle.

“You know, Tom,” he said, “If I have learned one in life it's that some things you can't learn.”

“Huh?”

“When I worked for magazines, you know, I had to trust my instinct. I had to trust my gut. I had to trust myself to know where I should put my camera to get a good shot. I had to trust myself when I took Thorwald down as well. I couldn't trust you guys to waste time poking walls, you know? Well, now I trust my instinct, and I trust my gut, and I trust myself to know that something odd is happening in that apartment block.”

“Something odd is happening in this apartment,” Doyle said.

“I'm serious.”

“So am I.”

Jeff picked up his bottle and drained the remnants of its beer.

“If you've come to lecture but not listen, Tom,” he said, “Then you might as well leave.”

“Alright,” Doyle said, coldly, grinding his cigarette out onto a plate, “I'll leave. But you cut this nonsense out or the next time I come will be as a policeman, not as a friend.”

He walked out and slammed the door. Jeff tossed his beer bottle onto his bed. It hit the pillow and bounced off onto the floor but did not shatter. Jeff reached down to pick it up. Perhaps he was in luck.

Jeff opened the blinds, just a crack, and peered into the night. The blinds of the Newly-weds' apartment were closed but the blinds of the Thorwald residence were open. As he watched, Jeff was surprised to notice that the window had been opened, and shocked to see little hands arising from the sofa.

A baby clambered up and onto the window frame. It crawled out, onto the ledge, and looked down at the big, cold slabs of stone twenty-five feet beneath it. Jeff found that his camera was in his hands, and through its lens he could discern a playful smile on the infant's lips. It balanced on the edge of life, surveying its death through big, innocent eyes, and then reached out a hand to drag its fingers through the air.

Jeff closed the curtains, breathing heavily, a coughed a wad of phlegm into his mouth. He swallowed it, grimacing, and opened the curtains again. The child had disappeared. A bird was sitting on the ledge. Jeff stared at the ground beneath the window but there was not so much as a scrap of cloth or stain of blood.

He must have imagined it. There was no child. He rubbed his face and glowered as he felt harsh bristles on his cheeks. Perhaps Tom had had a point. Perhaps he was losing it.

Jeff looked back across the block. The child was in the apartment, gazing through the window at him, with what appeared to be an expression of amusement.