The Killer Next Door (13 page)

Alice lies on the floor, face-up and grinning. The Lover kneels beside her and surveys his tool collection. Lidl and its special offers are a godsend. Disposing of Jecca and Katrina was a long, sweaty business, filled with noise and the fear of discovery, but thanks to Polish tradesmen and the European retailers who supply them, he feels, for the first time, fully equipped. Lined up in a row on the groundsheet he has a circular saw (£29.99), an electric carving knife (£8.99), a mini-tool kit for hobbyists (good for getting into inconvenient corners) (£19.99) amd a set of hacksaws (£6.99) – and a sledgehammer (£13.99) tucked in behind the shed in the garden, for later. God bless the Common Market, and God bless China, he thinks. All your DIY needs catered for, on the cheap.

Sic transit gloria mundi
: nothing lasts for ever. The Lover knows that now. He’d hoped his ladies would carry him through to his life’s end, but it seems that, in the British climate, even the best of preservation is not foolproof. That’s why they keep the mummies in airtight boxes in the British Museum, of course. It wasn’t only the skill of the embalmers that ensured the longevity of the ancient world’s kings and queens, but the aridity of the desert winds.

Alice has become unbearable to be around. She splits and flakes, and her teeth drop from her mouth when he moves her, and he can’t ignore the fact that she smells any more. Her nails are coming away from their beds and slide about beneath the brush when he paints them. Superglue seemed to do the trick for a while, but with each passing week the dry flesh beneath deteriorates at a faster pace and they loosen again. He finds himself resenting her slightly more each day when he wakes and sees the wisps of faded hair that cling to the leathery scalp, the shrunken ears whose lobes seem to have slipped downwards until they are nearly touching her jawline, the razor-edged scapulae poking through her once-smooth shoulders. He knows that the state of her is mostly his fault, that he should have done his research more thoroughly, but still he resents her.

It’s the disappointment, he thinks. You go to all that trouble, you lavish such love and attention on someone, and they leave you anyway. No wonder I’ve started to resent her. It’s always best to end it first. But I’m tired of it, so tired of it: of picking up the pieces and carrying on, of getting fond and getting hopeful and still ending up alone.

Her eyes are closed. They have been since he held her in his arms and felt her heart stop beating. It’s another thing he holds against her: that she cannot gaze at him the way Marianne does. Discovering that you really can buy anything you like on eBay has been a huge boon, too. Marianne has beautiful green eyes; Jenaer glass dating back to the Spanish Civil war. They cost nearly fifty pounds each, but they were worth every penny. When Nikki comes out from her hiding place, blue eyes just like the ones that made him want her in the first place will be waiting to grace her face.

But, meantime, he must make space for her. There’s no room for freeloaders in his life, or in this room. And yet, he’s not without nostalgia. She had soft, soft skin. He remembers noticing it first of all about her. Lovely English skin, touched with roses, flawless. He loved to touch it, to stroke it, to feel it smooth beneath his fingertips. Hard to believe that this saddle leather is the same substance.

She grins at him, toothlessly, appealing for mercy. But he’s over her now. It’s strange, he thinks, how quickly love can be replaced by indifference. I adored her, once, but now she’s an inconvenience, a chore that must be done to make room for better times.

‘I’m sorry, Alice,’ he says. ‘It was never going to be for ever. You knew that, surely?’

He picks up the circular saw.

And here he is, as she knew he would be. Standing at the foot of her bed, come in, no doubt, through the open window, toying with his BlackBerry and smiling at her in the half-light. His thinning hair is swept back with gel and he wears a slick Armani suit, like the last time she saw him. His eyes catch the shaft of light that comes in through the crack in the curtains, and gleam. His smile widens, and she sees that his teeth are sharpened into daggers.

Collette is instantly awake, but is slowing herself down by the time her feet hit the floor. Tony, or Malik or Burim, turns up almost every night, at some point; always the same, always smiling. Some nights he holds a knife, or a length of electric flex. Some nights he just stands over the bed and grins. She hasn’t slept straight through since the night she ran. Sleep is a luxury whose price is security. Those who can shut the world out and leave it at will are usually blessed by a world that doesn’t want to shut them up.

She collapses back beneath her sheet, the pillow hard and lumpy beneath her head despite its newness, and stares round the room in the light that filters through the curtains, checks the corners as though he might just have stepped back into the shadows, to toy with her. He was always the sort of man who loved to toy. The sort of man who would tell a joke so his business rival would throw his head back in hearty laughter and expose his throat.

There are noises, despite the hour. The tinkle of a piano sonata, turned down but still audible through the wall. From the basement window with its safe, strong bars, American voices arguing on the TV. Cher, talking to her cat in a baby voice, and the drone of Thomas’s voice, intermittently, seemingly unanswered, the way it sounds when someone’s on the phone. In the street, quiet footsteps pass the house, surprisingly many for a road that leads nowhere. A couple walk past, laughing. In the distance, the shrieks of a fox and a tomcat disputing territory.

He will find me, she thinks. It’s only a matter of time. For all I know, he’s found me already. For all I know, he’s right outside the window.

The thought makes her cold, despite the clammy night. She throws herself from the bed and slams the window down. Slips a hand between the curtains to secure the catch, afraid, suddenly, to show herself to the world outside.

The sounds are cut off and the night goes still. I should have bought a fan. I know I can’t sleep with the window open. I’ll buy a fan tomorrow. Oh, God, I mustn’t keep spending money. I know it seems like a lot, but it’s not, when it’s all you have left, when you’ve nursing home fees to pay, when you never know when you’re going to have to run again. This air’s so still. It’s like it’s pressing down on my head. Can I live like this? Can I live like this for ever?

She sits back down on the bed, her foot brushing against the bag as she does so. I need to find a place to hide that lot, she thinks. Can’t just have it lying about. I don’t really know anything about these people, and
someone
has to have burgled that old lady downstairs. You’re nuts, Collette. You need to get it out of sight. Split it up and get it out of sight.

She checks the street through the chink in the curtains before she turns on the light. The pavements are empty and, apart from a pool of light falling against the street wall from Vesta’s basement window, show no signs of life. Closing the window hasn’t made her feel safer. If anything, with his presence still permeating her subconscious, it’s made her feel hemmed in. The clock on her phone tells her it’s nearly two. She won’t sleep again until dawn, at least.

She upends the bag across the bed. So little, for so much: nineteen bundles, less than a couple of centimetres thick, and one broken one, doubled over in a rubber band. Twice as much, three years ago, but even then it was little enough that it fitted into a sports bag. She takes one bundle in each hand and starts to work her way round the room, searching for hiding places.

Three years ago: red blood on white skin, and stupid Lisa frozen to the spot. Tony laughing by the bar with his whisky glass, the man on the floor coughing up a tooth, a middle molar. It bounces on the carpet, tittups up against his shoe.

Their heads, turning…

All rooms are full of hiding places, if you’re looking. She’s become a past master at finding them. She kept half her money taped in plastic bags to the back of a heavy old commode, in Paris; five thousand pounds in a Tampax box in Berlin. The trick is to remember where you’ve put it, not to lose ten grand when you move on, as she did in Naples. The armchair has a loose cover, to hide the holes and stains beneath. She tucks half a dozen bundles round the edge of the cushion, tweaks the cover to hide the bulge. Goes back to the bed, picks up two more, moves on, thoughts churning.

Should I have run?

She asks herself that every day. Maybe I could have brazened it out, stepped round the curtain and played the hard-face, one of them.

You saw what they were doing to that man. That wasn’t execution. No clean dispatch, no merciful bullet to the head, like a dog. That was torture. That was getting their kicks from watching a man choke to death on his own blood. You saw how they were enjoying it. You think they would have hesitated to use you up for afters?

And what if they didn’t? What if they took you in and made you one of their own? You know you would never have got away, right? No four weeks’ notice and bringing in doughnuts for your colleagues on your last day. Just: life as a possession, always thinking of the consequences for not doing as you’re told. You put yourself in this position the day you accepted that job, she tells herself, even if you did lie to yourself about it. No bar manager gets paid that sort of money. Not unless someone’s buying their silence.

Maybe I should have taken that policewoman up on her offer. Gone in and handed myself over. Surely a life in witness protection would be better, more stable, than this?

The man next door turns off his music and the silence is so sudden that she finds herself checking once again to ensure that she is alone. Upstairs, Cher paces, paces, paces. Collette looks in the cupboard under the sink, finds a butter dish, of all things, covered in greasy dust, and stuffs it full with money. I should get some tape tomorrow. I can stick a bundle to the back of both those drawers; that’ll take care of two of them.

And she knows the answer about the police. Has known it since she started noticing the cash pass through. He
owns
the police. No one operates that casually, throws his presence about, keeps his profile above the parapet, unless he feels safe. And no one who basically runs a knocking-shop feels safe from raids unless the raiders have been paid off. Someone’s in his pocket, at least one someone. And she doesn’t know who. Never will, even when the knock in the night lets her know she’s been found.

Scarlet blood on white skin, fingers crushed and bent like Twiglets. That won’t be me. I won’t let it be me.

She’s sweating like a mule in the airless room. Stops to run a glass of water, leans against the sink to drink it, runs her eye over her hiding place, looking, looking, for more.

Vesta rifles through the post on the hall table, divides it into neat piles for its recipients – whole armfuls each week – gathers the junk for departed tenants into a bundle to put in the bin. It’s not a task that takes long. Half a dozen windowed envelopes for Thomas, a couple – brown paper, official stamps – for Hossein. Something from the council for her – her tax rebate, she hopes. Old ladies, she’s noticed, get less and less mail as pensionable age recedes behind them. Even the
Reader
’
s Digest
doesn’t want to give her fifty thousand pounds tax free any more.

Gerard Bright has a postcard, addressed in a childish hand. She mostly notices it because it’s the first piece of handwritten mail to come through the door in a month. She has a cousin in Melbourne who sends cards with clockwork reliability on birthdays and Christmas, though it’s over twenty years since they last saw each other at her auntie’s funeral in Ilfracombe. She sends them back with the same dedication: the last of her family, a single precious jewel among the seven billion. He includes a Xeroxed round robin yarn of children and grandchildren, a second wife and a land cruiser. Vesta just sends good wishes. She has little to boast of. No one wants news of friends they have never met. It’s one of the reasons people have children, that blood relations lend legitimacy to boasting to strangers.

She puts the card on top of his bank statement. Something to brighten his face up, she thinks. He always looks so grey and mournful when she sees him, the only person in London not to sport a suntan this summer, as though he spends his life in a cave, like a fungus.

There’s nothing, as usual, for Cher – she’s not had a single letter since she came here – and nothing, she notices, for the new girl, either. If you pay your power on a meter key, it’s still possible not to exist at all in the modern world, whatever the government says.

Seeing Gerard Bright’s card reminds her that she’s not had a single card herself this summer. She used to get them from time to time, from former neighbours, old colleagues from the primary school kitchen in their static caravans down on the coast, even the odd friend from school. She would prop them in pride of place on the mantelpiece, to look at and make her feel remembered, to give her dreams of a seaside escape of her own. One day, she thinks. If he ups his offer to twenty grand – God knows, that would still only be ten per cent of what the flat is worth – I could just about do it. A little static near a pebble beach, just a patch of patio to see out my days… but eight? Once I’d paid the movers, I’d barely have enough for a deposit.

She hears a key in the door and slips the junk mail into her Budgens bag, along with the potatoes and the eggs and the bit of bacon she’s bought as a treat. Smiles as Cher lets herself in, pretty and normal today, no wigs, no fake glasses, just an orange cotton dress above the knee and a pair of gold plastic flip-flops, white earphones in her ears, a Pucci-patterned headscarf tied round the base of her Afro making her look older, more sophisticated, like a model on the front of an album from the 1970s. ‘Hello, love!’

‘Hiya.’ Cher pulls out a single earphone and she hears a tinny scritch of music. She looks down at the little gadget in her hand – all smooth and shiny with a circular thing at the top – frowning as though she’s unsure how it works, then presses and holds a button on the side. Takes out the other ’phone and wraps the wire round the machine. ‘You been out?’

‘Just for a bit. Went up the High Street for a few bits and bobs. What’ve you been doing with yourself?’

‘Went and had a sit on the Common,’ says Cher. ‘Did a bit of scrumping. Loads of people up there.’

‘Scrumping? I never noticed any apple trees on the common.’

‘They don’t always grow on trees,’ says Cher, mysteriously, and tucks the iPod into her pocket. ‘How’ve you been? How’re your drains? He been and done anything about them yet?’

‘Good grief,’ she says. ‘Don’t remind me. I was in a good mood a minute ago. If he has, he hasn’t told me. You in the mood for a cuppa?’

‘I’d kill for something cold. You seen my cat anywhere?’

‘I’m sure he’s about. He’ll be asleep on your bed at this time of day, I should think. I’ve got bitter lemon in the fridge. I made it yesterday.’

Cher looks incredulous. ‘You
made
bitter lemon? I thought it was one of those things they made in factories. Like Pepsi.’

‘Oh, good grief, you young people! You don’t know
anything
, do you?’

‘No,’ says Cher, complacently. ‘We’re young, innit?’

She strides past Vesta, all legs and ankle bracelets. ‘D’you want a hand with that?’

‘No, love, I’m fine, it’s not heavy. You go ahead and put the kettle on.’

‘’kay,’ says Cher, and pulls the door open. Puts her foot on the top step, shouts in surprise and falls forwards into the dark. Vesta hears an ‘oof’ and the sound of tumbling. She runs to the doorway, grabs the frame and peers into the gloom. ‘Cher? Cher! Are you all right? What happened? Cher?’

She feels above the door for the light switch, clicks it on and puts her head into the stairwell. Cher is halfway down the stairs, hanging on to the banister at the point where it begins, one leg buckled beneath her, the other straight out down the steps, her flip-flop dangling from her big toe. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘That was close.’

‘Are you okay?’ Vesta suddenly feels nervous and tottery and old. She puts her bag down and works her way towards her with a hand on each wall.

Cher sits up, unfurls her leg and rubs her upper arm. ‘Ow.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I – there was something on the top step. I trod on it and it went right out from under me.’

Vesta reaches her and sits down beside her. ‘What on earth…? I didn’t leave anything on the stairs.’

Cher groans and gingerly tries her legs. Emits an inward hiss of breath as her right foot hits the carpet. I don’t want to wish anyone ill, thinks Vesta, but thank God it was her, not me. That would have been a broken hip and an ambulance, if it were me.

‘Are you okay? Anything broken?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ve fucked my ankle, but I don’t think it’s anything worse than that.’

‘Language, Cher,’ Vesta corrects automatically. She pulls herself up by the banister and follows the girl as she hops down to the hall.

Cher leans against the wall and switches on the light with her shoulder blade. Rubs at the carpet burn on her thigh. ‘So what the hell was it?’

Vesta looks up the oatmeal stair carpet. On the top step, there’s a nasty, wet-looking stain; black and brackish. ‘I don’t…’ Her eyes trace back down the stairs, look down at the floor beneath their feet. ‘Oh, God!’

There’s a rat resting up against her shoe. A rat the size of a Pomeranian, yellow incisors hanging from its open mouth, dark fur matted and oily, bald pink tail winding round and knotting itself in the pink viscera that hang from a bulging, flattened torso.

Cher follows her gaze, stiffens against the wall, pushing back against it as though she hopes it will open up and let her through. ‘Oh. Oh, God, oh no, oh…’

‘Well, I’ll be blowed. Where on earth did that come from?’ Vesta is simultaneously fascinated and repelled. The rat smells like her drains; old and foetid and long, long dead. Its eyes are milky-white. As she watches, a bluebottle crawls from the half-open mouth and bumbles away up the corridor towards the kitchen. ‘It looks like it’s been dead a while. It can’t have been lying there all this time. I would have noticed.’

‘I don’t care,’ moans Cher. ‘It stinks. It’s that bloody cat. He’s fetched it in. I
knew
I shouldn’t have adopted him.’

‘Psycho? No, it can’t be Psycho. That’s carrion, that is. He’s not a hyena. I don’t understand. How did it come to be here?’

Absently, Cher lifts up her sprained foot and looks at its underside. Claps a hand over her mouth and stares at Vesta, wide-eyed. Her sole is coated with blood and slime. The contents of the creature’s guts have smeared themselves up her leg as she fell, green and black and…

When she moves her hand, her words come out in a rush, strangled and small. ‘Oh, God, I’m gonna be sick.’

Vesta feels the skin on her neck crawl. ‘No! Don’t you dare! Don’t you
dare
! Come on. Let’s get you to the bathroom.’

She grabs the girl by the arm and manhandles her up the passageway. Cher is gagging as she hops and her cheeks are filling. ‘Don’t you
dare
, Cher. Don’t you
dare
! If you throw up on my carpet, so help me, I’ll… I’ll…’

As they pass through the kitchen, she notices, to her surprise, that the outside door is open. She’s sure she remembers putting the bolt on before she went to the shops, but right now all she can think of is the hurricane that’s about to hit. She drags Cher into the bathroom, her own hand clamped over the one the girl has over her mouth, throws her down like a sack of potatoes over the toilet and feels a cold sweat of nausea break out on her own forehead as Cher’s lunch – a hamburger and fries by the look and smell – explodes into the pan. Oh, God, she thinks, there’s a rotten sewer rat squashed flat into my carpet. It looked like it had been run over by a truck and it’s in my carpet. I’m going to have to scrape it up.

Cher makes a noise like a wildebeest trapped in a crocodile swamp as Vesta rushes to the sink and adds the fug of cheesy croissant and milky coffee to the odours in the air. Heaves again at the sight of the solids caught in the drain cover. Runs the taps and splashes her face, then collapses on the floor, leaning against the bath.

‘Oh, God,’ Cher mutters. She wipes her face with a forearm, flushes the chain and crawls back to join Vesta. ‘Fuck,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says her friend, and lets the word that would have had her beaten within an inch of her life when she was Cher’s age slide pleasurably from her tongue. ‘Fuck.’

‘It’s all over my leg,’ says Cher.

‘I know. We’ll wash it off with the shower hose.’

‘That rat was
rank
.’

‘That’s what I love about you,’ says Vesta, ‘you’re so observant.’ And they begin to laugh.