The Killer Next Door (7 page)

‘Thing is,’ he continues, ‘I’ve been charging you well below market rent for this place. I felt sorry for you. Wanted to help you get on your feet. But I’m afraid the rent’s got to go up next month,’ he tells her.

Cher’s chin jerks up. ‘What?’

‘Yes,’ he says, and gives her his oiliest smile. ‘I’m afraid so.’

She doesn’t look so bored now. ‘But…’ she says, ‘hang on a minute!’

‘Yes?’ he says.

‘I’ve only been here four months.’

He spreads his hands in the air before him. ‘Sorry. Prices are rising all over the shop.’

‘How much are you talking?’

‘I was thinking three hundred.’

Cher’s face colours. ‘I… are you
serious
?’

If there’s one thing the Landlord likes more than a young girl, it’s a young girl over a barrel. ‘You can always go somewhere else,’ he says. ‘No skin off my nose. There’s people queuing up for a room like this.’

‘But you can’t just… it’s not legal.’

The Landlord raises his eyebrows and smirks. ‘I think you need a contract for something to be legal, Cher, dear. And I’m sure you’ve got your pick of places that take tenants without a reference or a direct debit. It’s all the rage, in this day and age. Still, if you want to report me…’

He lets the sentence hang in the air as her blush spreads. She knows she’s stuck. Doesn’t stand a chance.

‘The council, perhaps?’

She looks away, covers her stomach with her arm and takes another puff of her cigarette.

‘Social services?’

She glares at him, defiant in defeat.

‘We could call them now, if you like,’ he offers, to ram his advantage home. ‘Give them your details?’

‘No, that’s okay.’ Her voice is dull, stripped of the lilt he found so irritating.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘That’s settled, then. Don’t worry. It’s only starting next month. Plenty of time. How is everything? You comfortable?’

Cher shrugs. ‘Whatever,’ she says.

He’s not going to get any more from her today. Launches himself off the kitchen counter and lumbers to the door. ‘Well, I’m always at the end of the phone, if you, you know, need anything.’

He turns in the doorway, and smiles at her. ‘Oh, and you really shouldn’t be smoking at your age,’ he says. ‘It’s not good for you.’

She doesn’t answer.

Out on the landing, he gets out his keys again and checks the house for noises. There’s music from the downstairs front, but otherwise the place is quiet. There’s not a sound from behind Cher’s door. He imagines her standing where he left her with her face in her hands, and smiles.

He goes over to his cupboard door. Undoes the padlock and lays it on the carpet, pulls the door wide to allow himself to pass through. It’s a tiny space – a triangle beneath the stairs, four feet deep, the street window, whitewashed, saving him from having to pay to light it – and there’s barely room for him, but the Landlord is skilled at manoeuvring his bulk through a thin man’s world. He squeezes in, plops himself into the old office chair – no arms, because there’s too much Landlord to fit between them – that sits inside, and pulls the door to behind him.

On shelves built neatly into the underside of the staircase treads, red lights blink at him. One disc has filled itself and popped out of its slot. The Landlord unzips the leather case that holds the rent book, and swaps the disc for a blank one in a slot in the side of the case. Entertainment for later. It’s going to be a good night.

‘
Hola, chica
.’

Oh, Christ, he thinks he’s so witty. When she had a French SIM, it was ‘
bonjour, ch
é
rie
’
, in Italy ‘
ciao, bella
’, Switzerland ‘
grüss Gott
’. Everywhere she hides, they find her, and every time he does, he announces himself in the local language.

But at least he doesn’t know where I’ve gone to, yet, she thinks, not if he’s still saying hello in Spanish, reminding herself to buy a British SIM.

‘
Carrer de la Ciutat
,’ he says. ‘Nice. Classy. Glad to know you’re still in the money, anyway. Shame it’s
my
money.’

Collette doesn’t speak. She always hopes, somehow, that if he doesn’t hear her voice he’ll think he’s mistaken. She’s cleared out just in time. That clearly
was
Burim she saw in the street, not a figment of her imagination. Six whole months she managed in Barcelona. One of her better runs. She wonders if she’s brushed up against whoever it was who tracked her down as she walked down the street, as she locked and unlocked the flats’ front door, sat at a table in
Catedral
. It’s the worst thing about her situation: that every stranger on every corner could be the man who’s watching out for her.

Tony waits for her to speak. Cat and mouse: a game that’s been going on for three years. Collette hiding away, scrabbling herself into dark corners, and Tony toying, pretending to have turned his back and lost interest, letting her think she might, this time, have escaped, and all the time ready to pounce the moment she allows herself to breathe.

How is he getting my numbers? How? They’re pay as you go, for God’s sake. I buy them in station booths.

‘Nice flat, too,’ he says. ‘Shady. I like that. It can get hot, at this time of year. Burim says he liked your décor, by the way. Very Mediterranean, he said. All that turquoise.’

There’s sweat trickling between her breasts. She’s had the window shut all night, after that doomsayer Thomas cursed her sleep with it open, and the room is like a sauna. In Barcelona, even away from the front where she lived, there was always a movement of air off the sea, and shutters that kept the light and burglars out but let through the sea breeze. This room is close and smelly. Sometimes she thinks that the smell is coming in through the airbrick where the fireplace used to be, but it’s just as likely that her predecessor’s hygiene skills were not of the best, and she’s not got round to buying new bedclothes, despite her resolve on the day she arrived.

Ah, Tony, if you could see me now, she thinks. You’d probably walk straight past me in the street without blinking.

‘So isn’t it about time you gave it up?’ he asks. ‘Haven’t you had enough, yet? We only want to talk to you, you know.’

Did I forget? Did I? Am I losing my mind? It’s too early for dementia, isn’t it? That door has been open all summer. Maybe I was just too excited about my holiday to remember to lock it…

She goes again to look at the back door, as though the mystery of how it came to be hanging open, unbroken, will somehow reveal itself if she stares for long enough. All my life, she thinks, I’ve made the safe choices. I’ve never taken a risk, always stuck to the featureless lowlands. It seemed like such a good thing, a secure lease at twenty-seven, but now… now it feels like I was putting myself in prison. I should have got up and gone, when Mum and Dad died, not stayed on here because it was all I’d ever known. What sort of life is this?

Each time Vesta sits down to rest, she starts to shake, so she carries on cleaning, powered by ibuprofen and PG Tips, trying to wipe away the traces of whoever it is who’s been here. Her home, barely changed since her parents’ passing, genteelly threadbare with decades of respectable dusting, feels suddenly changed, now some stranger has torn through it like a tornado. The day-after-day, the making do, the blind eyes turned to wear and tear because it was easier than confronting the Landlord, or his grabby old aunt before him, and stirring up their resentment of the sitting tenant. When did my expectations get so small? she wonders. While everybody else got caught up in the self-improvement race, while they found themselves and stretched their worlds and travelled, I stayed in the 1930s, in the decade before I was even born, living by my parents’ values, knowing my place.

She stretches her aching back and catches sight of her expression – the face she used to pull when dosed with cod liver oil from a teaspoon as a child – in the mirror above the mantelpiece. She’s been seeing her face in this carved wood frame for the whole of her life. Still feels a sense of profound shock every time she glances into it and sees an almost-seventy-year-old woman staring back. Where did it all go? Did I really do so little, that I’m still living here, surrounded by reminders of my parents’ tenancy before me – the Waterford vase, Mum’s collection of ceramic cottages, the framed photos of long-dead ancestors on the tallboy,
The Crying Boy
in his frame on the wall, Nan’s good teaset behind the glass of the display cabinet – with hardly a mark of my own life added on top?

Her own death looms large in her mind these days. She looks around her living room, and suddenly sees it through the contemptuous eyes of the outsider who has treated it with such gleeful disrespect. She’s made the occasional attempt to stamp her own personality on the place, with the frugal resources of a spinster dinner lady. The upright suite with its lace-edged antimacassars has been replaced by a flower-pattern settee and a tub armchair, her mother’s fussy wallpaper painted over in neutral colours, but most of the things this stranger has destroyed come from a time before she was even thought of – the plates, glasses, books, pictures, the occasional table, the Coronation plate that used to hang on the wall and the Murano bird brought back by her dad after the war ended. Even my bits of jewellery that came from Mum, she thinks. And when I go, what will I leave behind? And who, anyway, is there to leave it to?

Vesta has lived her whole life in this cave beneath Beulah Grove, in the basement half-light, never knowing what the weather was like without opening the back door. She has seen the neighbourhood go from genteel lower-middle to Irish-rough to Caribbean poor and, over recent years, swing gradually into the hands of people who sound like they should be running a village fete. She was born here, in what is now her bedroom, and is beginning to suspect that she might die here, too. Grew up in her own little nook, walled off by her father in plyboard and woodchip, in a corner of the lounge, has eaten nearly every meal of her life at the little gateleg table by the back wall, nursed her elderly parents as, one by one, time took them, and took over the tenancy when her mother died, in 1971, back in the days when tenants still had rights. She’s seen off three landlords and, from the look of this one lately, might well see off a fourth. But Londoners are meant to be adventurers, she thinks. You’re not meant to come
from
here. You’re meant to come
to
here.

I’m luckier than some people, she thinks. A secure tenancy is a secure tenancy. At least I won’t end my life out on the street. But oh, what happened to my life?

She doesn’t know what, if anything, her invader was looking for. The tea caddy where she keeps the scratched savings of a life lived frugally on the old-age pension hasn’t been raided, and her mother’s engagement and wedding rings, the eternity ring with which her father marked her own belated birth, still nestle in their felt-lined boxes on the bedroom mantelpiece. Her electrical equipment is outdated and chunky, but a junkie would probably have got a tenner for the telly. It’s spite, she thinks. Pure spite. He just broke in to spoil my home. Why else would you upturn a funeral urn and tread the ashes into the carpet?

Holding on to the table, Vesta lowers herself to the ground and starts to sweep together the contents of her memory box, tipped out randomly among her parents’ cremains. She hates herself for having fallen prey to such indecisiveness about what to do with them. They only hold a space for so long at the crematorium and after that, you’re on your own. For forty years, she’s meant to take them to some beauty spot, some place with a view, and scatter them there, but every time she’s tried to remember a place they might have loved, her mind has gone blank. They didn’t
do
much. Her mother’s whole world encompassed errands on the High Street and the occasional walk on the common, a trip to the shops in Kingston a major undertaking. They never even went into town, as far as she remembers. For all the use they made of London – big, scary, exciting London – they might as well have lived in Cardiff. No wonder I’ve never done anything myself, she thinks. It’s over a decade since I last went in to Oxford Street, even.

Such a paltry little box of keepsakes; nothing of value, nothing that will mean anything to anyone else. When I die all alone in a hospice, she thinks, they’ll send in the house clearers, and the whole lot will go in a skip. Oh, stop it, Vesta, she scolds herself. Pull yourself together. The world is full of nice people. You can’t let one spite-filled random act of vandalism ruin it for you. Such kindness I’ve seen over the past couple of days. I have to remember that, hold on to that. There’s more kindness than nastiness in the world.

From above, she can hear Gerard Bright’s music thunder through the floorboards. Normally she tunes it out, adopts a live-and-let-live approach, but he seems to have been playing
The Ride of the Valkyries
since breakfast time, and the sound of the new girl in the back room, walking up and down, up and down, has driven her out of the bedroom. She goes over to the window, where there is light, and leafs through her handful of photos – relatives long since dead, friends and neighbours moved on, moved up, returned to their countries of origin – and feels a surge of loneliness. I was always good at making friends, she thinks. But I haven’t the first idea where they all are, now. That’s London, for you. There’s more of a sense of community than outsiders give us credit for, but the communities don’t last.

She hears footsteps rattle up the pavement, and glances up at the window. The little girl from the first floor, Cher, walks past, all legs and backpack from this angle. She’s wearing that wig again, hiding her lovely hair as if she’s ashamed of it, and is dressed as if she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. She goes out a couple of times a week like that, and the sight makes Vesta melancholy. Enjoy it, my love, she wills the girl. You have no idea how much you’ll miss those looks when they’re gone.

Cher peers down and sees her, and waves airily down from on high. Such a pretty face. Vesta feels herself touched by sunshine, smiles broadly, and waves back. Lovely girl. A bit lost, she senses, a bit aimless, as if she’s waiting for someone to point her where to go. And so young. She barely looks old enough to have left school. Mind you, I long since lost my knack for telling how old people are, she thinks. Policemen have been looking young to me for decades. Maybe it’s just one of those things about being nearly seventy that everyone under thirty looks as if they’re barely out of nappies.

She slides the window open. ‘Hello, love.’

‘Hiya,’ says Cher. ‘How’s the clearing up going?’

‘Oh, you know,’ says Vesta. ‘Where are you coming back from?’

‘College,’ says Cher. They both know it isn’t true, but it’s their unspoken agreement that Vesta won’t say anything if Cher at least looks as if she’s trying to improve herself.

‘You’re back early,’ says Vesta. From the state of her reading Vesta guesses that Cher’s still not enrolled anywhere as she’d suggested. I must do something about that, she thinks. Maybe I could teach her myself? Because it’s not stupidity that’s stopping her.

‘Short day,’ says Cher. ‘It’s so bloody hot it’s hard to concentrate.’

‘I bet. You got time for a cuppa?’

Cher mimes checking the watch she doesn’t wear. ‘Sure.’

‘Back door’s open. Come on down.’

She potters through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Pulls a face at the smell coming in through the open door. She’s got to catch the Landlord about those drains, again. Her kitchen sink is taking the best part of an hour to empty, cooling greasily an inch below the overflow. Five pounds a week she’s been spending on chemicals to keep the outlet moving, but the drains barely seem to work at all, now. That bottle of something he poured down the outside drain before she left has done no good at all. Probably just a gallon of bleach from Poundstretcher, anyway. He’ll never spend money if he has a choice about it.

The gate in the side-return creaks, and Cher appears at the top of the steps, picking her way delicately between the plant pots. Psycho the cat trots complaisantly in her wake. He must have been waiting somewhere in the shade for her to come home. He’s really attached himself to her, thinks Vesta. That’s nice. It’s nice to think he’s found himself a good friend. She would love to have him herself, but the Landlord would use it as an excuse to break her lease before he’d got through his first tin of Whiskas. Cher has shed her wig, and dangles it from one hand like a Regency lady holding a fan. Her hair is tied up on the back of her head, her neck exposed to let out the sweat.

‘It’s a stinker out there,’ she says, and starts down the chipped brick steps. Catches the whiff of the drains and pulls a face. ‘Feee-you,’ she says, and waves the wig in front of her face as though that will make the smell go away. She’s such a kid, thinks Vesta, again. It’s so bizarre, the way teenagers are: twenty-five one second and seven the next. ‘That’s a bit rank, isn’t it?’

‘It’s the drains,’ says Vesta. ‘They’re blocked again.’

‘He needs to call Dyno-Rod, that mean old bastard.’

‘I keep telling him. It’s all those kitchenettes. Emptying their bacon fat down their plugholes.’

Cher shakes her head. ‘Not me.’

‘Yes, well, that’s because you live on pizza and chocolate. These drains were built for a family house, not a block of flats, and he needs to deal with it. Someone’s going to go down with food poisoning, and it’ll probably be me. Milk and two, is it, love?’

Cher bounces down the last two steps, tittups over to her door. ‘Ta.’

‘Let’s have it in the garden,’ says Vesta. ‘Get away from the smell.’

She hands Cher her cup and follows her up into the sunshine, passing through her potted herb garden. Sweet aromas of sage and rosemary, basil and mint rise off the heated bushes as they brush past. Now, this is what a garden
should
smell like, she thinks. Feels a little swell of pleasure at the patch of civilisation she’s carved out of the dilapidation beyond.

It’s a big garden, bigger than normal for London, the railway tracks at its end having saved it from being carved up for development. Vesta has kept the front third tidied and cultivated all her life. It was her contribution to the family when she was a child, bringing flavour and colour to her mother’s sepia household, and the green-finger bug has stayed with her ever since. Narrow beds of bright annuals, fetched back, one by one, from the greengrocer’s discount shelf, surround a tablecloth of manicured lawn on which two old-fashioned deckchairs recline in the dazzle. Beyond the beds, a tangle of foot-long grass, run to seed so often it’s almost a hayfield, a blind rhododendron that contrives to look dank even in this weather, a couple of aged plum trees, stunted by some bug that’s way beyond Vesta’s knowledge, a mess of rubble and bonfire ash and goosegrass surrounding a tumbledown shed.

‘Looks lovely out here,’ says Cher.

‘Thanks,’ says Vesta, and they sit in the deckchairs with their back to the chaos. Each takes their first sip of tea and lets out the great British ‘ahhhh’ as they settle back. The generations may look completely different, thinks Vesta, but some things never change. The cat finds a patch of sun and rolls on to his back to show the handkerchief of white on his belly. She smiles.

‘You look more cheerful,’ says Cher. ‘You almost done in there?’

‘Not completely. But at least I can sit down, now.’

‘Christ. They really made a mess, didn’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ooh, that reminds me.’ Cher leans over her backpack and rummages inside. ‘I got you a present.’ She finds what she’s looking for, and holds it out, a small hard object wrapped in a T-shirt. She looks pleased with herself. ‘I hope you like it.’

‘Oh, Cher, you shouldn’t waste your money on buying me…’ begins Vesta, then stops dead when she sees what’s inside the bundle. It’s a dancing lady, bone china, imperial purple ball dress swirling around impossibly thin ankles, a blaze of carmine hair improbably stiff on a single shoulder. Round azure eyes and a snub nose, tiny mouth hand-painted in shiny crimson. It’s the spit of one of her mother’s that lies in pieces with the rest of the collection, wrapped in newspaper in her kitchen bin. ‘Oh, Cher,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t have. What on earth did you think you were doing? You can’t afford this.’