The Killer Next Door (23 page)

… dry.

Thomas sits forward and two lines appear between his eyebrows. He’s been too busy to give the girls their full share of attention this weekend, but Marianne is looking distinctly desiccated. The skin over the décolletage, where the elegant bones have always given her supermodel status in his eyes, looks distinctly flaky. He puts his coffee down and goes over to look more closely. Marianne gazes placidly at him as he bends to study her breastbone. Yes. He can’t remember when he last looked this carefully, but the skin is rougher than it used to be. It’s scaly, like a snake beginning to shed its skin.

She always holds it together when she’s in the room, and when she’s coming out past that sour-faced bitch on the reception desk, with her judgements and her pointed stapling, and maybe her careless way with a phone number, but seeing Janine wrings tears from her every day. The empty face, the faded skin, the oxygen tube clamped to her face and taped there to stop her wandering mad hand from ripping it out. God knows, Janine, I’ve resented you, but I’ve never wanted to see you like this.

When she steps into the sunlight, she wants to scream at the sky. That’s my mum. My mum. The party girl. The good time had by all. How can she be like this? How can it have happened? Oh, God, how can she not know me?

She wants to break things and rip her hair out, but each day she straps on her dignity as the tears stream down her face and she walks away from those cold receptionist eyes. Don’t look back. Don’t look. Just keep walking. One foot in front of the other. Steady as she goes. Willowherb and ragged robin, the edge of the road crumbled away into chalky soil. Keep walking. Just keep walking. She pulls her sunglasses from her bag and clamps them to her eyes. She’s never wanted strangers to see her crying.

Janine is dying. They’ve told her as much. Every day, that heart beats less and the lungs fill up a little more. And she won’t let me hold her hand. I see her fingers plucking, plucking, plucking at the tan plastic cover on her chair, and when I reach out to soothe it, she snatches it away, looks accusingly at me like I’m trying to hurt her. She hardly speaks any more. Just random mumbled syllables, mostly, her brain cells dying, dying away for lack of air. I want her to die, she thinks, but I don’t want to lose her. Not like this. Not when I’m not allowed to say goodbye. Not when…

Malik is standing outside the Costcutter on Christchurch Road.

She’s so wrapped up in her thoughts that she doesn’t see him until she is almost upon him. Then something about his bearing – the slim Armani-clad body that she knows from experience is made of solid muscle – suddenly catches her eye, and she dives into the Venus bar and hides herself behind a potted palm.

Her heart hammers, and she hears the sound of the sea. Somewhere, a long way away, a clatter of glassware coming out of a dishwasher, a voice asking in a pointed manner if it can help. She turns and waves at the barman, and he shakes his head and turns away, rubbing at a wine glass with a cloth.

Collette creeps forward to the folding door. She’s not even sure if it
is
him. His hair is different. When she last saw him, he had a buzz-cut. Now it’s long enough to curl over his collar, swept back from his face with some product that glistens.

Yes, it’s him, all right. She shivers, despite the heat of the day. What’s he doing here? What the hell is he doing here?

Malik seems to be watching the road from behind his sunglasses, scanning it up and down with those laser-beam eyes. The underground is a hundred yards away, but it might as well be a mile. She can’t walk past him. She’s changed, but not so much he won’t recognise her if she’s who he’s looking for.

It might not be, Collette. It could be coincidence. London’s full of Turks; there’s practically one on every street corner. You don’t even know if he
works
for Tony any more. For all you know, you’re standing in his bar.

Yeah, she thinks. Want to test that theory?

‘Can I help you?’ the barman asks again. He’s going to throw me out in a minute, she thinks. Walks across the wooden floor and buys a glass of Sauvignon. It’s early to be drinking. The place is empty apart from two thirty-something women eating panini and wearing sunglasses. The barman silently pours her drink out, slides it across the counter.

‘Meeting someone?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Avoiding someone.’

‘Ah,’ he says, and goes back to polishing his glasses. He’s not interested. She’s just another lush finding an excuse to start her day.

She walks back to the doorway. He’s still there, still outside Costcutter, hands crossed over his crotch like a footballer waiting for a penalty, still looking. He scans the road like a Terminator: a slow 180-degree sweep up, down, up, down, the whole movement taking maybe ten seconds.

Look, the whole place is full of people, she thinks. What can he do?

Follow you.

She has to go. She knows that. It’s only a matter of time before he changes his vantage point – he’s not standing on the route from Sunnyvale to Collier’s Wood underground for nothing. He’s not waiting for a girlfriend.

Her hair has grown, and grown out, since they last saw each other, and she’s stopped straightening it and let the natural curl come in. And she’s put on weight. When you ran a bar full of twenty-year-old girls who took their clothes off for a living, keeping yourself awake on coffee and the odd line like everyone else, your natural weight quickly became whippet-like, but it was never a weight that she could have maintained while eating. She’s gone up two full dress sizes since she left, though that still only makes her a twelve. And she’s wearing flat sandals – he’s never seen her in anything other than towering heels. From the back, she reassures herself, I look like a completely different person.

She counts as she watches his scanning technique. Yes, ten seconds. If she leaves as he reaches the apogee of his turning arc, she can get twenty, thirty feet down the road before his eyes hit her back. Far enough that he won’t know her. Far enough that she’ll just be another girl in the street. She walks down to the far side of the restaurant’s bistro folding doors, puts her wine down untouched on a table, waits, counts and exits.

Don’t show fear. They operate on fear. Just keep walking, normal pace, and don’t look back. He’s not going to try anything now, even if he does see you. Stay where there are people and you’ll be safe. It’s when they find out where you live that you’re really in trouble.

She tells herself these things, but she only half believes them. She strides out along Christchurch Road, her footsteps unnaturally loud in her ears, as though she were in an echo chamber. Breathe. Breathe, Collette. They want you to be afraid. You get afraid, you get disorientated. You get disorientated, you make mistakes.

She hears his feet turn on the pavement and start to follow…

Drawn up by the mouth of Christchurch Close is a shiny black Beemer. Tinted windows, chrome accessories, undoubtedly this year’s model. Totally Tony. She can see someone in the driver’s seat, a darker shadow behind the dark glass. Unless Tony’s had a change of staff, it’s most likely the Albanian, Burim. Rough manners, an attitude that says he will settle any disagreement with a knife. Malik’s number two, but never backward in coming forward.

They could take me now, she thinks. The two of them. Take a chance on it and flip me into that car in broad daylight. Where is he? Where’s Malik? I wish I could risk a quick look; see how much he’s caught up. He sounds so close. His heels click and scrape on the surface. Segs. She remembers that he always hammered metal segs into his shoes the moment he bought them. He said they made them wear better. It was only later that she realised that they also inflicted more damage if he felt a need to stamp.

She can’t tell if the figure in the car has seen her. She dips her head and crosses the road. If Burim wants to get her, she’s going to make him leave the car and give her warning. No silent electric slide of the window and a steel-hard hand shooting out to grab her wrist for him. She lifts her bag off her shoulder and puts it over her head so that the strap crosses her body. If she’s going to have to fight, or run, she needs both hands free.

The sunshine is so bright that, even through her shades, it hurts her eyes. Step, breathe, step, breathe.

Away from the shops around the tube, there are fewer people on the pavement, but the road is filled with the blessed hum of noonday traffic. If they try to take her, they will be seen. She reaches the far-side pavement and stops to choose her direction. Go on to the bus stop, or go back? You might get past him, or he might just turn around and follow you down the escalator. These suburban stations are all but empty at this time of day. You’ll be most likely alone on the platform with him, nothing but air between you and the track.

Okay. The bus. I’ll take the bus.

They can follow the bus. I can take it to Tooting. It’s always busy there, because of the hospital, and the market and the shops. Go to Tooting, get on the tube. If you cut through Sainsbury’s, come out the back way, you might get there before he realises where you’ve gone.

She scans her possible routes home in her head. Maybe I should go into town. Victoria, Waterloo – they’re both busy. Lots of places where buses and cabs can go and cars are forbidden. If I go up to one of those… then back down to Clapham Junction. Busiest station in the country. When a train lets out there, that long, long tunnel beneath the tracks is like
28 Days Later
. If Malik’s following, I can change to another platform before he’s even seen where I’ve gone. Hide in one of the shops. Go out the exit where the cars drop off: most people don’t even seem to notice it’s there as they rush up towards the main barriers. Yes. Clapham Junction. If I’m lucky, I can get the Northbourne train first time.

And if you’re not, you’ll lead him straight to your front door.

Ahead, she sees a bus approaching. The stop is a hundred yards away, no distance at all. The display on the front says it’s going to Wimbledon, but it’s single-storey, which suggests that it might well take a long route to get there. But it’s a bus, and that’s people, and people are safety for now. Wimbledon’s always busy, around the station. If he follows her now, she can lose him there.

Without looking over her shoulder, Collette takes to her heels and sprints.

‘Excuse me!’

In another life, this woman would have run the WAAF. She has a natural built-in foghorn, a height and stature you only get from generations of plentiful meat. Thomas sits up to attention as she marches towards him wheeling her three-wheeled lightweight buggy, an OshKosh toddler straining to keep up without dropping its Peppa Pig. She gets within talking distance, but her tone stays the same, as though they are communicating across a playing field. She’s got a touch of sunburn. That high medieval forehead, made higher by the sort of Alice band he hasn’t seen since the 1980s, will be peeling later. ‘Do you mind not feeding my dog?’ she shouts.

He adopts his harmless smile and blinks at her, myopically. Chucks his new black spaniel friend behind the ear and lets it go. ‘Molly!’ she shouts. The dog, ignoring her, circles the bench on which Thomas sits a single time, sniffing the ground in the hope that he might have dropped a titbit, then comes back and sits at his feet, gazing up, expectantly.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Thomas. He puts his hands pointedly in his lap and says to the woman, ‘It’s just a bit of kidney. Nothing harmful.’

‘
Molly
!
’ she shouts again. The dog ignores her. Its eyes plead until he sees the whites at their edges. ‘Yes, but she’s on an all-
natural
diet, you see,’ she informs him, staying ten feet away, as though she is nervous of getting closer.

The common is full of sunbathers and picnickers and joggers and drinkers, the way it has been all summer long. On a day like this, when a twenty-foot gap from your nearest neighbour feels like luxury, she stands no chance at all of coming to harm unless she eats a hotdog from the unlicensed wheelie-cart, but there’s a type of woman who revels in their sense of vulnerability, he’s noticed. Somehow the thought that someone could want to harm them makes them feel special.

‘Nothing more natural than a nice bit of kidney,’ he says, and smiles his most endearing smile.

The toddler starts to approach and she yanks on its harness reins and hauls it backwards, presses it, unwillingly, against her thighs.

‘It’s not preserved or anything,’ he says. ‘It’s just kidney. I’m clearing out the freezer. Didn’t want it to go to waste.’

The woman snorts. ‘Molly eats chicken breast and rice and vegetables,’ she says. ‘Not
offal
.’

‘No dairy?’ he teases, and she looks horrified. Then he sees her suspect that he might be taking the mick, and looks affronted.

‘Anyway, please don’t feed her,’ she says again, trying to wrest back the control. Hello, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, he thinks. Even your
dog
is special. ‘Would
you
like someone else feeding
your
dog?’

Thomas considers the question, thinks that he probably wouldn’t mind that much, then thinks that this might well be the wrong answer, so settles for apologising again. ‘She’s a lovely dog,’ he tells her. ‘Ever so friendly.’

She accepts the compliment without much grace. ‘Come
on
, Molly!’

Thomas shoos the dog away, and it sulks over until it is close enough for her to clip its lead to its collar. She jerks the lead a couple of times, irritably, then starts to walk off towards Station Road. The toddler stays for a moment, chewing Peppa Pig’s crusty ear and staring at him. He can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl, but doesn’t suppose it matters either way. It will quickly learn to be whatever Mama wants it to be, if it has any sense of self-preservation. He gives it a four-finger wave and it turns on its heels as its mother gives another tug on its reins.

Thomas sits back and extends his arms along the back of bench. Turns his face to the azure sky and enjoys the late afternoon. Never mind. There’ll be another one along in a moment. It’s Northbourne Common. All the dogs of Northbourne have come to love Thomas over the past few days. He’s the man with the treats. The special titbits, carefully selected from the choicest of cuts. He can’t believe he didn’t think of this before.

As he has predicted, he doesn’t have to wait long. The post-work
passeggiata
is in full swing and the park is a sea of dogs. He tosses a sliver of heart in the path of a Jack Russell, a choice slice of liver beneath the questing nose of a Weimeraner.

The Egyptians believed that the dead needed their internal organs with them, if they were to survive the afterlife. Once they were removed from the bodies, they were stored in canopic jars, preserved in herbs and honey and sealed with resin, and stored close at hand for when they were needed. Thomas is a man of the age of science. He knows that his girls are going nowhere. And the Ancient Egyptians didn’t have blenders, or refrigerators with freezer compartments.

At first, he thought that this new method of disposal might be a nuisance – the weekly defrost-and-blend ritual had seemed so
convenient.
But he’s discovered that it’s quite the opposite. He really enjoys his sojourns in the park. It gets him out of the house, into the fresh air, provides a seemingly endless opportunity for social moments. The flat has been feeling oppressively small for the past few days, especially now he’s started to fall out of love with Marianne. He doesn’t like the sense of reproach about her peeling skin. Feels like he’s being judged and found wanting. It’s not
my
fault, he thinks, resentfully. It’s this bloody weather. Drying everything out. Just look at the lawns in this park: it’s like the Gobi desert.

His hand brushes a hard edge of cold metal and he looks to see what it is. It’s a little plaque, brass, screwed firmly to the cross-strut. ‘In loving memory of John and Lizzie Brewer,’ it reads. ‘1922–96, 1924–2005. They loved this park.’

That’s sweet, he thinks, running his finger over the lettering, while at the same moment a suffocating feeling of melancholy washes through him. That was all I ever wanted, he thinks, a bit of love, a bit of lifelong companionship. It can’t be that hard. You just have to look at all the nonentities strolling hand-in-hand to see that. Why did it never happen to
me
? Every bench in this park has a plaque like that, put up by their children, mostly, or their widows or the friends who mourn them. Who’s going to do that for me?

He shakes his head like the dogs he’s been feeding, to shrug off the mood. Gets up and goes for a stroll past the bandstand, to leave it behind. There’s a coffee stand there, and its owners have erected a small collection of tin tables and chairs in among the benches. It’s where a lot of park regulars go, to meet and greet and pass the time of day. Thomas doesn’t count as a regular, yet; he’s only been coming here a few days. But he has hopes. One day, he’s sure, someone will smile in recognition and give him the friendly nod.

A pair of dog walkers chats at the coffee stand, adding sweetener to their drinks, while their charges – three Scotties, a Pom, two pugs and a Dalmatian – mill about at the extreme end of multi-leads and sniff about at the base of a waste-bin. A perfect opportunity, right there. He potters over and empties the remainder of his bag in among them, enjoys the pleasure with which they wolf down the unexpected goodies, the shining eyes that turn towards him in search of more.

He squats down and scratches behind the Pom’s neck ruff. It licks its lips and gives him a huge, foxy grin and he rewards it with a final piece of well-chopped tripe. It snarfs it up with a tail-wag so violent it almost loses it feet, and pants hopefully at him as he stands up once more. Thomas likes dogs. So trusting, so loyal. He sometimes thinks that, had he had another life – one where landlords allowed pets, for instance – he might not have had need of his girlfriends at all.

‘Sorry, poppet,’ he tells the friendly Pom. ‘That’s the lot for today. See you tomorrow, maybe?’

He walks back through the sunshine on the path to home. He feels no great need to dawdle. He’ll be taking a walk every day this week. The freezer compartment is full to bursting, and he suspects that he might soon need to free up some room.