The Killer Next Door (22 page)

Sunday. Vesta has always liked Sundays. She likes the way the road is quiet, the way the house tends to start its life and noise mid-morning. Her Sunday routine is always the same: a lie-in till nine o’clock, a nice breakfast of poached eggs on Marmite toast followed by Sung Eucharist at All Saints church on Norwood Road, a glass of sherry at the social in the vestry, then a quick diversion into Morrisons on the way home to see what’s in the reduced fridge. By two o’clock, they’ve often decided that the Sunday-lunch crowd has passed and have reduced the few remaining joints to half price. It’s one of the nice things about nowadays – that joints come in all sizes, including spinster-size. She likes to spend Sunday afternoons pottering about the kitchen, doing a bit of baking, making sure everything’s in shape for the coming week and looking forward to her dinner.

This Sunday, she wakes at six and smells the drains – Hossein has cleared them, but it will take time before the lingering aroma disperses – and it all comes crashing down on her head. Two nights ago, I killed a man, she thinks. I can’t go to church in a state of sin. I can’t mix with those good people, take the host, laugh over the cheese straws any more. It’s all over. Everything I knew before has gone.

She lies on her back in her single bed and stares dry-eyed at the ceiling. This ceiling, the cracks slowly growing across it, has been the first sight to greet her each day for the best part of the last thirty years. It has been her safety and her contentment. Not a big life, but a good one, with all the never marrying and the no kids and the moments of loneliness. It’s been a better life than many, and I’ve lived it as well as I could. And now it’s gone. For ever.

I shall never feel happy here again, she thinks. I’ve lived here all my life, and now my home is gone.

She sits up and pulls on her dressing gown. Might as well get up, she thinks. No point lying here. That’s not going to get any parsnips buttered.

The sound of the phrase in her head causes her a sudden wrench of sadness. It’s one of her mother’s phrases, the slightly skewed clichés that have slid into her own vocabulary without her even really noticing. Needs must when the devil dances. Where there’s muck there’s muck. Don’t listen to him; he’s the devil’s apricot. Whenever she says them, even in her own head, she hears them in her mother’s voice, and she’s right back, just for a moment, in the room with her. Her lovely mother. Her churchgoing, houseproud, lovely mother, flowered apron and steel-grey hair. She would be so ashamed of me, she thinks. So ashamed of what has happened in her home.

And then the tears come.

Collette can’t sleep. She has to go and see Janine as usual today, keep up the routine, behave, as they have all agreed, exactly as they normally would. And she hopes that one day, if she goes often enough, Janine will remember her. But today will exhaust her. She’s been awake all night, and barely slept yesterday, and she feels as though the calcium has been sucked from her bones; that the slightest jar will make her simply shatter.

I should go, she thinks. I should just pack up and go. It’s not like she even knows who I am, like it makes the slightest difference to her that I’m here. All I’m doing is turning myself into a sitting duck. But, oh, God, if I could talk to her one more time. If I could just see her eyes light up when she sees me, know that she remembers who I am. She wasn’t a bad mum, she really wasn’t. She didn’t mean to be. I’ve spent so much of my life blaming her, but there were good times, too. In between the uncles and the new dads and the ‘he took your lunch money’, there was us, and we loved each other. It’s not her fault that I got ideas above my station, decided to shortcut my way to a decent income. And now I’ve been gone three years. I abandoned her when she really needed me, and I can’t leave her to die alone.

She remembers a good time, back when she was Lisa, and small: when they went to Margate on holiday: one of those cut-price deals from one of the newspapers. Janine went to the library and snipped the coupon every day for three weeks, and they had a chalet in a holiday park. And it was sunburnt shoulders and Janine sitting with the other mums as she went on the slides and the roundabouts, and teaching her to swim in the great big communal pool, and she remembers watching her mum stand up and sing ‘Stand By Your Man’ at the talent competition, and she got every single note bang on, and she looked so golden and glittery and Lisa felt so proud she could have exploded. I can’t leave her, she thinks. I can’t. No one should die alone. And if I’m not going to leave, where would I go other than here? Where else would I find, where nobody wants to know who I am, where nobody’s writing me down and making a record?

But they’ll find you. You’re mad, being in London, even for a short while. If Tony doesn’t find you, DI Cheyne will, and that’s pretty much the same thing, just more circuitous. He wants me because he knows
she
wants me, and
she
wants me because she thinks I’m the way to send him down, but either way, I’m fucked. You just have to look at News International to know how leaky the Met is. And once he knows I’ve dobbed him in, no amount of witness protection will keep me safe. I need to leave. I have to. It’s the only way I’ll stay alive.

But Janine, she thinks. I can’t leave her. I can’t leave my mother till she’s gone.

Hossein lies pinned to his bed and weeps for his dead wife. It’s nearly five years since she went out to her women’s group meeting and never came home, and each day, still, he wakes and weeps when he finds she isn’t there. The basic story is no mystery to him: it will have been the Secret Police that took her and the Secret Police that never sent her back. The rest of it he will never know, and the pain of that is often more than he feels he can bear.

He speaks to her, sometimes, in his empty room, as though doing so will somehow bring her back. He says her name: ‘
Roshana, Roshana, Roshana
’, like a magical incantation. And when the room stays silent, when no soft voice speaks in return, he bends double with pain in his bed, grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes and sobs for the lost past.

I had rather, he says to her ghost, I had rather it had been me. I had rather we went together, that I had followed you. If I’d known how it felt without you, I would have died in your place, my love. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I loved you so much, and I couldn’t protect you. My brave, my beautiful. My Roshana.

It’s been over a year since he moved here from the asylum centre, and it’s better, it’s undoubtedly better, but the room is cheerless and he has never found the will to improve it. He thinks of their flat in Tehran, the family things, the rugs and pottery, the roses she grew on the balcony, high above the trees on Khorasan, and wonders what she would think of these sad cream walls, the dark blue bedclothes, the two pots that constitute his kitchen.

Two photos are all he has left: two photos from a life built together; all that managed to make it to the end of his journey. A formal shot of their wedding day, the two of them so young, side by side on an ornate throne, their hands entwined, as they waited to take their place at the sofreh-ye aghd and begin their feast. The other, his favourite shot of her, is wrinkled from travelling all the way here next to his heart. In it she leans, in western clothes – palazzo pants and a crisp white blouse with a frilled lace collar that stood up all the way to her earlobes – on a white balustrade by the Caspian Sea, a stiff breeze blowing her thick hair into her eyes as she turns and smiles at him. Roshana, free of the
chador
, is taking the risk of being observed to feel the air on her skin, her soft brown lips, her strong features, her elegant hands. The gold earrings she wears in it, her wedding ring, all gone and nothing left. He’s carefully framed the pictures, preserved them from harm, and still, four years on, he cannot look at them without a wrench in his heart.

I must live, he thinks. There is no alternative. I won’t be here, trapped in this waiting limbo, for ever. One day my application will reach the top of the pile. Day by day that day moves closer, but then what shall I do? What is there for me? No book I write, no speech I make, no plans, journeys, demonstrations will ever bring you back. If we’d had a child, Roshana… They say the pain fades with time, but time does nothing but make the ache sink deeper. I miss you. Oh, I miss you. If you were here with me…

Cher can sleep anywhere; it’s a skill she’s had to learn. She came home soon after dawn, climbed under her single sheet in the morning coolness and dropped off immediately, and the cat slunk in to join her as she slept. She sleeps, and sleep heals, but in sleep they also come back. You can escape anything, she has found, except when you’re dreaming.

She mutters in her sleep. Her frozen muscles strain to run, strain to fight. Sometimes, when she wakes in the early afternoon, she is sore and aching, as though she’s run a marathon.

A slight breeze stirs her thin curtains and cools her boiling forehead. Inside her head, she’s back in the attic. She’s found her way into the Landlord’s cupboard again, and climbed those stairs, and she’s in among the dust-motes and the shrouded furniture. Only this time, her nanna’s furniture is there. She can see the old familiar shapes, and wants to weep: the Welsh dresser with its display of mismatched china, cast-offs of dinner services that have passed out of Big House fashion, the squashy settee with the shiny flowered fabric that Nanna kept for best. The little varnished pine table that sat against the wall in the kitchen, where Cher ate every meal, the wall clock with the painted convolvulus on the face behind the hands. The Venus bird bath from her nanna’s bungalow garden, the goddess cradling a conch shell in her arms rather than stepping half naked from it, the collection of whimsical pigs that cluttered every surface.

And Cher is hiding, under a dust sheet under a table, because she’s heard her father’s tread on the stairs and it’s where her nanna’s told her to hide. Don’t come out, she’s said. Don’t come out for anything. I’ve called the police and they’re on their way. Just don’t come out.

Cher lied to Collette on Friday night. She does know who her father is. And she knows where he is, as well. He’s in jail for killing her nanna.

Oh, no, she mouths silently into her stuffy bedroom. Oh, no, no, no. Not again. Not Nanna. Oh, save me. Her hands creep up to cover her face and, in her sleep, she rocks.

They don’t even bother to talk, in her dreams, now. When Cher was twelve, there was plenty of talk. There was shouting from her father and pleading from her nanna. There was his name, over and over again. Danny. Oh, Danny, don’t do this. Come back when you’ve not been drinking and maybe then you can see her. But in the years that have passed, each time she relives it, the overture gets shorter. Now it goes straight to the main event. Her nanna’s black shoes, the little heel, the crossbar strap, and his trainers, grey from the rain outside, striding across the parched floorboards to stand in front of her.

And then the noises. The dull, hard crack of fist on face. And over and over, her nanna’s heels raised off the ground, kicking helplessly as he holds her like a punchbag. Her nanna saying his name over and over
Danny, oh, Danny, no Danny, Danny
please
. Cher pokes her fingers all the way into her ear canals, but still she hears when the punches turn crunchy, and when they turn pulpy. And then the feet stop kicking, and she sees the ankles crumple as he drops her. Her nanna slides down on to the kitchen floor, and her face hits it with a wet slap because her arms have no strength to break the fall. And she’s not her nanna any more. She’s a weird mask of blood and broken bone, and all her teeth are gone. But still, as he pulls his foot back to kick – the trainers spattered red now, blood soaked deep into the laces – she raises a finger to her broken lips and gazes at her with her broken eyes.

And her dad’s voice. Calm as a tea party. ‘You can come out now, Cheryl,’ he says. ‘Daddy’s here.’

Under her sheet, Cher claws at the air and mouths a silent scream. And then the dream passes and she curls around her cat.

It’s so strange, thinks Thomas, how a single experience can change the way you feel about someone for ever. Five days ago, she was just the stupid little girl downstairs. Loud-voiced, tactless, a bit tarty, always in trouble – and now he sees her.
Really
sees her, for the first time.

She’s like me, he thinks. She was the only one among them who really stayed calm. I can’t believe she’s so young. So young, and unprotected, and she handled herself like a queen. Even when I found her broken in the street, there wasn’t a tear. Not a moment’s hesitation, not a sign of fear. She just did what needed to be done, and she did it well.

He sits in his armchair and drinks his coffee. He used to enjoy Sundays more, when he knew that there was a Citizen’s Advice day coming up next day. But now it’s just another day among the others in a life spent waiting for the two days when he has a function in the world. These budget cuts haven’t only sliced away protection for the vulnerable: they’ve sliced away his own sense of self. That’s all he’s ever wanted to be: a good neighbour, a helpful friend, a citizen who makes a contribution. I’ve certainly done the first this weekend, he thinks, and the second. Please, God, let me make it a hat-trick this week.

She’s pretty, he thinks. When she’s not done up in those bright fake colours the young are so keen on these days. When her hair’s just loosely piled on her head and she’s forgotten about make-up, she’s a real natural beauty. That lovely skin: so smooth, so flawless – well, it was, and I’m sure it will be again, when it’s healed – apart from the little smattering of freckles across her snubbed little nose. It’s the perfect shade of tawny. How lucky, he thinks. She’s not had much of a start in life, but at least she’s got looks.

It’s another golden, twinkly day, a welcome breeze stirring the leaves of the shady chestnut tree. His girls face him on the sofa, both dressed in green. A good summer colour: dignified, sophisticated. Nikki’s dress is a vibrant lime. An unlikely choice on a redhead, but it really works; brings out her golden highlights and makes her eyes shine. Marianne’s back in her olive silk, his favourite dress of all. She looks so elegant when she wears it. So calm and poised, so…