The Killer Next Door (30 page)

She joins in. ‘“I like-a say, this very day, I like-a change your na-a-ame”.’

‘Yes,’ says Janine. ‘That’s it. That’s right, my darling.’

And she closes her eyes and never comes back. For the rest of the night, they sit with her, and hold her hands, and sing, until she leaves for good.

She’ll go, now, thinks Vesta. Poor old Hossein. He’ll miss her as much as I will. More, maybe. Being by himself’s only something he’s had to learn lately.

She feels blank. Dazed. She’s desperate for sleep, longs for the narcotic bliss of unconsciousness. Remembers coming home from the all-night vigil over her father’s bed, in a car much like this, tired Nigerian driver, air-freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror, LBC on the radio. When her mother passed, she stumbled from the room and lay down in her own bed in the front room and slept until the undertaker knocked on the door. That was in the days when the basement door was still open to the street, before Roy Preece had it shut off, to protect her, he said, from burglars. I want to die at home, she thinks. Just not the home I’m living in.

Collette leans against the window and watches the south London streets go by. The driver has put a CD of mixed soul music into the player and turned it up slightly louder than necessary, a sweet gesture to give them their privacy. She sees him watch her in the mirror as they wait at the traffic lights at Tooting Bec, the sari shops and sweetshops just opening for morning trade. I need a bacon sandwich, she thinks. Funny how death always seems to make you hungry.

The heatwave finally broke in the night and fat raindrops fall against the windscreen. Vesta cracks her window open and breathes deeply of the fecund, green scent of cracked earth and exhausted foliage. London smells muddy in the rain. Especially after such a long time without it, the coat of smuts and dust that has settled on streets and cars and buildings washing down to grime the pavements. It’ll be autumn soon, she thinks. And then another long London winter, the rain and the cold somehow getting through your clothes in a way that country people could never imagine. But Collette will be long gone by then, and Hossein’s heart will be broken. I’ve seen the way he looks at her, when he thinks she’s looking away. It’s not like he can go too, is it? Not just now, but later. His future’s here. He can’t spend it on the run.

Collette has been silent since they left the hospital. Dry-eyed. Still in shock, thinks Vesta, even though she’s known that this was coming. It’s always still a shock. I had eighteen months with Mum, changing her sheets and mopping her brow and cleaning her down with a sponge as she crumbled away into her pillow, but I still didn’t expect it when it finally came. Still felt like I was falling off a cliff. I remember: until the funeral, it was like looking at the world from the other side of a wall of glass. Everything – sound, smell, touch – was doughy and dull, as if someone had turned the dials down on my senses. That’s how she’ll be feeling now. Just – empty.

As they wait to turn right into Tooting Bec Road, she notices a shiny black car, smoked glass windows, two cars back with its indicator on. Why would you want to drive around in something that looks like a hearse? she wonders. There’s enough death in the world without reminding yourself of it every second you’re on the road. It bounds forward as the lights change, cuts across the oncoming traffic as though the law didn’t exist at all, provokes a chorus of blasting horns. Collette seems to jump from her fugue state and stares at the shaking fists of the drivers on the Balham High Road.

‘Bloody Mercedes,’ says their driver. ‘It’s always Mercedes, isn’t it? They think they own the road.’

Collette’s head drops back against the headrest and the life goes out of her eyes. Vesta waits a few seconds, then says: ‘You did well tonight, Collette.’

Collette looks at her with watery eyes. ‘Thanks.’

‘How do you feel?’

She grimaces, shrugs. ‘You know,’ she says.

Might as well broach the subject, thinks Vesta. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘About what she said. About Tony. That must have been… a shock.’

‘I might have known,’ says Collette. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t work it out. She’d do anything for a man who paid her a bit of attention. I just didn’t think he’d find her. Denial, I suppose. That’s what they’d say it was.’

‘You can’t know everything, Collette. That was good of you, though. I admired you. What you did with it.’

‘Thanks,’ says Collette.

‘You mustn’t take it to heart. I daresay she didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘No, I daresay,’ says Collette, but there’s an ugly edge of bitterness to her voice.

Vesta tries another route to comfort. ‘Hossein’ll be waiting when we get back. They all will.’

Collette sighs. ‘I think I could just do with some sleep.’

‘I’m sure. Me too. Some sleep before you start dealing with things.’

Collette’s brow puckers, as though it’s not occurred to her that there might be things to deal with.

‘You’ll want to call an undertaker,’ she says. ‘They gave you some cards, didn’t they?’

‘Um, I…’ she holds her bag out, open, as though this constitutes some kind of answer. ‘I don’t even know if I’m going to miss her, Vesta.’

Vesta lays a hand over hers. What do you want me to say, lovey? Don’t worry, the pain will kick in soon?

‘You have to just take this stuff one day at a time,’ she says, horribly aware of all the clichés that death forces from one’s lips. She has heard so many with-the-angels-now palliatives from well-meaning people over the years that she wants to bring in a law to ban them.

They turn right past the common, and Vesta notices that the Mercedes is still behind them. Maybe it
is
a hearse, she thinks. Or a funeral car. What would someone in a car like that be doing down here in the middle of the day? ‘It will kick in sometime, I’m afraid. You can’t avoid it. It’s just – how it is.’

‘Maybe it won’t,’ says Collette. ‘She’s been gone a long time already. And so have I. I don’t know if there’s much point in throwing a funeral, really. It’s not like I know who her friends were. Even if she had any. All she ever wanted to talk about was what had happened on
EastEnders
, when I used to go and see her. Or moan on about the council.’

‘Oh, Collette,’ says Vesta, ‘you’ve
got
to have a funeral.’

A flash of defiance. ‘I don’t, you know.’

Their driver is agog. She can feel him longing to turn the music down so he can hear properly. Collette’s head slumps back against the window, and she stares out once again, her lips pursed. They reach the three-way junction at the bottom of Northbourne Common, and the driver takes the right-hand branch.

Vesta leans forward. ‘No, sorry. We need the other road. The one that runs past the station.’

He puts his brakes on, pulls over to the side to prepare for a U-turn. The black Merc glides past them and turns in to a side road fifty yards up on the left. Suddenly, Collette is sitting up, alert, staring after it. Oh, God, it’s not, is it, thinks Vesta. I couldn’t have been that unobservant, could I?

The driver makes the turn in three moves and heads back towards Station Road. Collette cranes through the rear window. She’s grinding her teeth. If it comes out now, thinks Vesta, I don’t know what we’ll do. Go on to Gatwick?

They get caught at the traffic lights and have to wait a full minute. A small queue builds up behind them: a Fiesta, a Panda and what looks like the Poshes’ SUV, though it could be any SUV, really. Featureless, soulless guzzlers of petrol, a mystery in a world that claims to be worried about resources. No black bonnet emerges from the side road, no cashmere overcoats with the collars turned up against the rain.

Collette sits back as they turn the corner. ‘I can’t go on like this,’ she says. ‘Jumping at shadows. Hiding every time I see a tinted window.’

‘Yes,’ says Vesta.

‘It’s time I moved on,’ she says.

‘Hossein will be sad. I’ll be sad, too, come to that.’

Collette clamps her lips together and stares out of the window again.

‘He will, you know,’ says Vesta. ‘You’re the first… well, I’ve never seen him interested in anyone…’

Collette tries to ignore her. ‘I don’t suppose anybody much wants to stay in that house now,’ she says. ‘He’ll be gone the minute he gets the chance, trust me. But I’m not dragging him into all this. He doesn’t deserve that. I was only here because of…’ She has to wait a beat before she carries on. The crying’s going to start really soon, now, thinks Vesta. She thinks she’s hard as nails, but she’ll be in bits by tonight. ‘… because of her. I’m stupid. I shouldn’t have got mixed up with all of you. Christ, what a mess. He deserves better than that. He was fine here, your little cosy family and your cups of tea, before he knew I existed. He’ll be fine when I’m gone, too. We’re not some Romeo and Juliet. It just… is. What it is. You’ll all be fine. You’ll be better off, really. Give it a couple of weeks and you’ll all have forgotten I was ever here.’

Vesta raises her eyebrows. ‘You think I want to still be here? After…
that
?’

Collette shuts up.

‘Good God. I bloody hate the place. If that…
bugger
had just given me a bit of cash I’d have been out of there like a shot.’

This seems to come as news to Collette. ‘Really?’

Vesta pulls a face at her. This conversation is getting too personal for a public place. ‘Yes,’ she says.

Collette considers her. ‘It’s a crappy life, on the road. Really. You don’t want to do that.’

‘No. No, you’re right. I was thinking more about the seaside, myself. Open a café, feed the seagulls. But I’ve blown that now, haven’t I? I’m going to be stuck in that hole in the ground with the damp and the drains and the… ghosts for the rest of my life.’

Collette’s eyes fill with tears. ‘My God, Vesta. I’d do
anything
. I’m so tired. I’m
so damn tired
. Sometimes I think I’m so tired I just want to die.’

She will never be quite sure how it happened. Cats are like that. All love-love and climbing up for a cuddle, then one day they’re hanging off your face with their claws unsheathed. Maybe he has an infection somewhere that she’s not noticed, maybe it’s just a bad mood because his usual marauding had been curtailed by the rain, but Psycho, love of her life, suddenly goes from rolling over and showing her his tummy to slashing at her.

One of his claws catches in the skin on the bridge of her nose, half a centimetre from her eye, and suddenly the two of them are struggling, Cher shrieking in pain and rage and the cat, startled, digging the claw in further then thrashing about trying to extract himself. Then he’s free, and he’s flying across the room under the impetus of her throw and crashing against the wall. He lands on the carpet, stunned, and crouches there, glaring at her in reproach.

Cher slaps a hand up to the cut on her nose. Blood pours out of it, soaking into the corner of her eye, where it stings. ‘Fuck,’ she says to the cat, then, as the pain kicks in, yells ‘FUCK!’ Then white-hot rage fills her, and she runs at him, picks him up by the scruff of his neck and slaps his backside with furious passion. Psycho squirms in her grip, but he doesn’t fight back. Even as she’s beating him, she’s thinking oh, God, it was an accident, what am I doing? But the pain is ferocious and she’s in the full grip of her animal brain.

She carts him over to the door, opens it and hurls him on to the landing. Later, she will at least be able to comfort herself that she wasn’t so out of control that she threw him out of the window. Psycho somersaults through the air and lands on the carpet on all fours. His eyes are huge with hurt. People who don’t live with cats don’t know this: that if you know them well, their emotions are written large across their faces, if you only care to look. He hangs his head like a beaten dog, and bobs from foot to foot.

‘Yeah,
fuck off
!
’ she bellows. ‘I don’t want to bloody see you, you
bastard
!’

She slams the door, shaking, and goes to examine her nose in the mirror. The cut is only a few millimetres long – nothing on the injuries from which she’s still recovering, but the fact that he’s missed her eye by a whisker makes her blood run cold. Imagination overtakes her, makes her jump outside her body and see herself, cat attached to her eyeball, membrane breaking and juicy jelly cascading over her cheek. She shudders and presses her hand to her eyes. Wets a bit of bog paper from the roll she half-inched from a pub a few weeks back, dabs at the cut.

The cat scratches at her door. He doesn’t like being excluded, is trying to apologise. ‘Piss off,’ she calls. God, it’s lucky they’re all still out at the hospital, she thinks. I’d have scared them half to death with my shouting.

Psycho yowls, and a piteous paw appears in the gap at the bottom of the door. She’s already over the anger, but she can’t resist punishing him a little more. He can stay out there till I’m ready. Little sod. She screws her eye shut and sprays a little perfume on the cut. A cut nose is one thing: a septic nose a whole other ballgame.

A few seconds of frantic scrabbling, then it stops. Cher can feel the rejection beaming through the wood. Oh, poor old sod, she thinks. He’s my best friend and he didn’t mean to do it. She chooses a little round plaster from the box Collette brought up when she was sick, and fixes it over the cut. It’s only oozing, now. It felt like it had gone all the way through to the bone at the time, but it’s clearly not that serious. She goes and opens the door.

Psycho is sulking. He has retreated to the corner by the Landlord’s cupboard, and has hunched himself into a tea cosy, his chin tucked in to his chest and his eyes wet with reproach. ‘Oh, sorry, lover,’ she says. ‘It’s all right. I’m not cross any more.’

She goes over to pick him up. He clocks her approach, and shoots off up the landing, towards the bathroom. Christ,
cats
. You can never snub them without getting snubbed right back. ‘Oh, come on, Psycho,’ she says, trying her reasonable tone, and follows. ‘You hurt me too, you know.’

He stops by the bathroom door and stares balefully at her. ‘Honestly,’ she says. ‘If you had the right sort of mouth, you’d be pouting. Come on. Let me make it up to you.’

She tries blinking at him, but he just lashes his tail in return. Now all she wants is to scoop his hard little body up into her arms and kiss the top of his head until he forgives her. She loves that cat. Loves him stupidly. He’s the first creature she’s ever been able to love without worrying, and she’s distressed to think that she might have spoiled it all. ‘Oh, Psycho,’ she says, and goes to grab him. He slinks backwards, ducks down and slides through her fingers, bolts back up to the other end of the landing. Stops and stares at her by Thomas’s door, then pops out a paw and pulls it open. Vanishes up the attic stairs.

Cher hesitates. Thomas is not a hospitable sort of soul, though she feels she knows him better than she did. He has the largest flat of all of them, apart from Vesta, but no one has ever seen inside. There’s music coming down the stairs, a sound that surprises her, as she’s never heard anything through her ceiling. She can’t imagine Roy Preece going to the expense of soundproofing when it got converted, but there you go. Every now and then she’s heard some heavy noise, like something being dropped or dragged, but she’s never heard music. She’d always assumed he was just a quiet neighbour.

Would he be pissed off? If I just went up? Maybe if I call up the stairs? I can’t help it if he’s left the door off the latch, can I?

She cracks the door open and pops her head inside. Pale beige carpeting. Very nice. And though the stairs are narrow, it’s lovely and bright in here, lit by the stained-glass window that used to illuminate the whole landing. ‘Hello?’ she calls.

There’s another door at the top, just slightly ajar. The Bee Gees. ‘Staying Alive’, out of
Saturday Night Fever
. Maybe that’s why I don’t hear it. There’s barely a bass line in there, by today’s standards. Most of the time it must be drowned out by that classical crap from downstairs, anyway, coming up through my floorboards. Totally not the sort of music I’d expect to be coming out of Thomas’s flat. If I’d expected anything, it would be screechy women and violins. I don’t suppose he can hear me over it.

She mounts the stairs, her hand pressed against the plywood wall that divides them from the Landlord’s cubbyhole. The window is lovely. From the outside it looks dull and dark, but from in here she can see a lovely pattern of flowers in greens and blues and reds. What a waste, she thinks. If I had this window, I’d have glass shelves all the way up, with glass ornaments on them to catch the light. He’s just got a couple of coats on hooks on the wall, and a row of boring-looking books on the windowsill.

It doesn’t smell too good, either. The cheesy, mushroomy smell that’s been getting stronger through the house as the drought went on seems to be concentrated here, and mingles with a heavy honk of chemical flowers. Bloody hell, thinks Cher. Open a window, maybe? She stops halfway up and calls out again, but no one comes.

Bloody cat, she thinks. I should just leave him to choke to death in that pong. He’ll come back when he’s ready. But she doesn’t want to leave him. Not with things so bad between them. He might never come back, if I don’t apologise properly, and I’ll just die if he doesn’t come back. I’ve got some sardines in tomato sauce down in my room. If I can get him back there, he’ll be back up snogging me with fish-breath in no time. She goes on up to the top and pushes open the door.

Sloped ceilings, and a smell so strong it brings her close to retching. She’s surprised how much space there is in here under the eaves. It would be a nice flat, if it didn’t look so unloved: manky old taupe three-piece, a battered row of kitchen units in green and brown, like her own, plastic all over the carpet as though he doesn’t want to dirty it. The cushions on either end of the three-seat settee have brown stains on them. Fake tan, she thinks. How weird. What looks like thigh marks, and the imprint of a bony bum. Like what Adrienne Maloof kept leaving all over people’s couches in
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
. I wonder if it really comes out with baby wipes? It doesn’t look like it would to me. It looks pretty deeply sunk in, like whoever was wearing it sat there for a long, long time.

The music is coming from an old-fashioned record player on the kitchen countertop. One of those box things you find in junk shops, orange and grey, with a tall spindle so you can stack singles on top of each other. She’s never seen one working before, and understands now why the music doesn’t travel: there are no speakers, just tinny falsetto voices issuing from the front of the player itself.

The track finishes and is replaced by the hiss and crackle of old vinyl. Now, she can hear the sound of water running in the bathroom. Oh, God, how embarrassing. He’s taking a shower. I’d better get that damn cat and scoot, before he comes out. Bet he won’t want to catch me looking at his cardboard air freshener collection. It’s bloody freaky. I know there’s a pong in here, but he’s got hundreds.

She tips her head to look at them as the first notes of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ crackle out, covering her presence again. He’s made something of a decorative point of them. They dangle from the roof beam, fixed in with drawing pins through their strings, wafting out mixed smells of pine and rose, freesia and sea breeze that cloy together like syrup, catching at the back of the throat and burning the inside of the nostrils. Cher can feel her chest and neck start to prickle, the first signs of an allergic reaction. She gets like that on buses sometimes, especially when it’s wet, when someone sits down next to her in damp cloth that’s been washed in that built-in-perfume washing powder. How can he not notice? she wonders. Surely he doesn’t think it’s a
good
smell?

And then she sees Psycho. He’s hopped up on to a table on the far side of the room and sits among a strange collection of knick-knacks, lashing his tail at her and pretending to be a statue. She gives him a blink, and his green eyes briefly blink back. He raises a paw to his mouth, licks it with a dainty pink tongue and swipes it over his ear. Oh, thank God, he’s forgiven me. Better get him down from there before he smashes something, though.

She goes over and whispers to him, and he looks up and gives her a smile. He sits between a pair of sunglasses – Chanel or Chanel knock-off, by the look of the brassy circles on the open arms – and a pendant on a chain, one of those enamelled Chinese fish with the multiple joints, turquoise and red. It’s a strange collection of things. A bunch of keys on a chain topped with a small ceramic shoe, a tiny leather-bound Bible, a ballpoint pen, clumsily encased in putty that’s been inset with shiny beads before it dried: the sort of project a child would do for Mother’s Day. A mug tree from whose arms hangs a collection of bracelets.

‘Oh, Psycho, I’m sorry,’ she says, and puts out a finger for him to butt with his head. Opens her arms to him. Psycho rears on his hind legs, throws himself against her chest and begins to purr. Wriggles upwards so his front paws are on her shoulder as she picks him up, presses his wet black nose into her ear as she hugs him tight. ‘Oh, my pussycat,’ she says. ‘Let’s not argue again.’

She’s still kissing his head as she turns round to go back the way she came and glances through the open bedroom door. Jumps, because there’s someone in there, a skinny woman, all shrivelled skin and staring blue eyes, stock-still on an old dining chair beside the bed. Cher blushes, opens her mouth to apologise, explain herself, then closes it, hard. She feels as though someone’s superglued her feet to the floor, wants to back away, turn, run like hell for the stairs – because the woman is Nikki.

Was
Nikki. Oh, God.

Nikki dried up, a Nikki made of leather. Her flaming red hair still recognisable, but brushed out, sprayed and curled in a grim, hard facsimile of an Oscar-night ‘do’. She’s Nikki, but crossed with a Galapagos tortoise, all hard and gnarly and thin, thin, thin. False fingernails, filed sharp and painted scarlet, stuck on to bony fingers, cheekbones to die for. A green shift dress, and feet and ankles, tendons standing out like guy ropes, each bone delineated by the thin, hard skin that adheres to it, all crammed into over-tight, film-star stilettos with winkle-picker toes.

She finds her breath, gulps in acrid air and turns to run for the door.

Thomas stands outside the bathroom, blocking her exit. He’s dressed like a surgeon, in a white plastic pinny that’s smeared with brown, and holding a small circular saw.