The Killer Next Door (9 page)

He thinks you’re still in Spain. Don’t sweat it. He’s not looking for you here; he still thinks you’re in Spain.

It’s only two or three miles to Collier’s Wood, but the trip involves two trains and a tube. Five stops to Clapham Junction, two stops to Balham, then three on the Northern Line. London’s transport system almost invariably involves going round an unnecessary corner, the neighbouring boroughs often the most laborious to get to; she’d forgotten that factor, when she picked Northbourne on the map. It will be almost two hours to get there and back each time, and because of the change of transport and the enforced trip into Zone 2, would cost the best part of a tenner without an Oyster card. Suddenly, the thought of taking one of those minicabs from the kiosk at Northbourne Junction seems less of an extravagance.

She makes sure to travel well out of rush hour, but still, by the time the tube doors open, she is bathed in sweat and nursing a dry, crackly throat. The air as she comes up the escalator, usually a moment’s pleasure, provides little relief. The day is still, hanging over the streets like punishment.

She buys a bottle of water at the little shop by the station, and searches the phone menu for the satnav. She’s not bothered to buy a new handset this time, just replaced the SIM. She’s getting better with each move at slowing down her spending, finding new ways to move to a new city on the cheap. If she wants to keep ahead of Tony Stott, she needs to string the cash out for as long as she can.

The thought of Tony makes her check, instinctively, over her shoulder. Fuck’s sake, Collette. He doesn’t know where you are. He doesn’t know where your mother is. It’s not like we’ve shared a surname since I was eight. And it’s not like anyone at Nefertiti’s spent their nights having cosy chats about their families. He thinks you’re still in Spain. But still, the years in hiding have taken their toll on her, made her fear each passing shadow.

Sunnyvale is a ten-minute walk away, in a cul-de-sac off Christchurch Close. They’re always a way away from public transport, these places, though there’s a bus stop at the end of the road for the people who’ve really mastered this city’s labyrinthine routes. It makes sense, really: it’s not as though the residents are going to be going anywhere, and a lot of them don’t get a visitor from one month’s end to the next. God preserve me from dementia, she shudders. She sets off up the main road past the bookies and the Royal Mail sorting office, weaves her way between mid-morning knots of uniformed smokers. The bottle of water vanishes down her throat as though it were just a thimbleful. It’s the sort of weather that makes you wonder if you’re diabetic, she thinks. Christ, I’m getting middle-aged.

All these suburbs, blending into one. Collier’s Wood is slightly newer than Northbourne and lacks, from what she can see, the networks of Victorian artisan terraces and solicitors’ villas that have made Tooting, and now her own area, so appealing to the fixer-uppers with an eye on the Cotswolds thirty years down the line. She passes a sad little arcade, a pretty church marooned in a field of 1930s semis. Edwardiana is right back in with Londoners, now, so how long until these stuccoed porches and low-silled windows begin to look attractive to generations who no longer remember them as nasty-modern? It’s the way of the British, she muses. We like old things. And when we can’t afford the old things, we start seeing newer things as old, stake a claim of our own, and drive the renters and the drifters and the immigrants on to somewhere newer.

She turns off the main road into Christchurch Close, and the tarmac gives way to cement block paving; a high, wire-topped wall along one side and blocky 1950s brick housing on the other. When her mother was young, she thinks, these were the sorts of places people dreamed of being located to: the bombsites filled in with affordable housing. There’s a symmetry to Janine coming to somewhere like this on her downward slide.

Collette turns up the Sunnyvale cul-de-sac, skirts the metal bollard that blocks off its maw, there to stop stray cars from seeking out a parking space but allow the ambulances in when the need comes. The home straddles the end of the road, forty feet up past the garden fences, its concrete turning circle jollied up by resin pots of dying geraniums. A line of hanging baskets – busy Lizzies, salmon-coloured, jarring with dark purple petunias – droops in the sun trap of the yellow brick frontage. It’s clear that someone’s tried their best to cheer the place up, alleviate its functional air, but no amount of watering can combat this heat. The little border of grass on the far side of the pavement is dusty and frizzy, like neglected old-lady hair.

Collette stands for a moment and looks up at the white plastic lettering that runs along the parapet of the lean-to porch.
SUNNYVALE
, it reads. She’s found her mother’s final home.

Inside, it smells as she had expected: floral disinfectant, floor polish, the graveyard scent of chrysanthemums in a vase on the reception desk, food cooked till it no longer needs chewing and the faint, unmistakeable odour of unchanged nappies. A woman sits behind the desk, in polyester scrubs. She’s turned a fan straight on to her face and leans back, eyes closed, cooling herself in its blast, until she hears the door open. She looks up and assumes the robotic smile that seems to have become part of the healthcare canon. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Yes.’ Collette advances across the small lobby, glimpses a huddled figure, dressing-gown tied tightly round a shapeless torso, making its way slowly up the corridor to her right with the help of a walking frame. ‘I’m Elizabeth Dunne. I called this morning.’

The woman shifts through a list on a clipboard, importantly. ‘And you’ve come to see…?’

‘Janine Baker.’

She runs her pen down a list, ticks something off. ‘Ah, yes, Janine. I saw she was due a visitor.’

Since when did they stop giving old people the dignity of a surname? ‘That’s right,’ says Collette.

The woman presses a bell on the desk beside her. It sounds out, Big Ben chimes with a shrill electronic top note, somewhere not far away within the building. ‘Someone’ll be along in a minute,’ she says.

‘Thanks,’ says Collette. Looks about her for somewhere to sit and, not finding anything in the Spartan lobby, stands awkwardly before the desk like a supplicant.

‘We’ve not seen you before, I think,’ says the woman, and there’s an edge of judgement to her voice. Your mother’s been here for three months, now, says the tone. Where have you been?

‘No,’ says Collette, and feels the blush creep further up her cheeks. Cheeky mare. You don’t know anything about it. ‘I’ve been away.’

‘Away?’ Lucky for some, says the single word. Wouldn’t it be nice for all of us, if we could be
away
when responsibility called?

‘Abroad,’ she says. Adds, defensively: ‘Working. I couldn’t get away before.’

‘No, dear,’ says the woman. ‘Well, it can be a terrible inconvenience.’

Oh, fuck you, thinks Collette. Who do you think you are? Do you really think that the ones who end up here, the ones with no one to take them in, are totally innocent of their situation? Don’t you think we’d have at least tried to have them with us, if they’d been nicer when we were young? And it’s not like I haven’t been drip-drip-dripping my cash into her bank account, to pay for your services and keep her out of council care.

She doesn’t voice it. It can’t be a greatly rewarding job, this. Making the families feel guilty must be one of the few pleasures she gets.

‘Well, I’m back now,’ she says. ‘For as long as it takes.’

‘Good for you,’ says the woman, patronisingly.

I just hope it’s not too long, thinks Collette. God help me, I shouldn’t be wishing her life away, but it’s only a matter of time before they find out I’m in London, even if they don’t know why. They seem to have contacts
everywhere
.

‘Actually,’ says the receptionist, ‘while I’ve got you, we probably need to update your contact details, if you’re not in Spain any more. Have you got a phone number? In case of – you know – emergencies?’

She’s not memorised it yet; has to look on the menu to reel it off. The woman types, hits the tab key. Looks up. ‘And where are you living?’

She’s about to say the address when her natural suspicions stop her. There’s no need for them to know. It’s not like she’ll be switching the phone off. She tells the woman the address of her mother’s flat, because it’s the first thing that springs to her mind.

Footsteps soft-shuffle down the corridor and a man appears, wearing what look like chef’s whites. He wields a bunch of keys, like a jailor, and peers enquiringly past the flowers at the receptionist.

‘Visitor for Janine Baker.’

He raises his eyebrows. ‘Oh,
riiiight
.’

‘Her daughter,’ says the woman, significantly.

He turns to Collette and gives her an up-and-down look. ‘I was beginning to think she was all alone in the world.’

‘Yes,’ says Collette. ‘I couldn’t get here sooner, I’m afraid. I’ve been abroad. I had to make arrangements.’

‘Fair enough.’ He turns and starts walking back up the corridor. She hesitates for a moment, unsure as to whether she’s supposed to follow or not, then, when he turns and looks over his shoulder, hurries to catch up.

Deeper into the building, the smell of nappies is stronger and the smell of polish weaker. They pause at a double fire door as he unlocks it. ‘It’s a toss-up,’ he explains. ‘I know you’re meant to keep them unlocked, but whoever made that rule clearly wasn’t trying to herd cats like we are. I’m Michael, by the way.’

Collette nods and mutters a second greeting. On the far side, the atmosphere is slightly damp, slightly feral, like the air in the underground she’s just come off, the walls a soothing mint green. She walks beside him, glimpses an empty dining hall, Formica tables and a wall-length window overlooking a garden full of privet and the corrugated iron wall of a warehouse. I must start stockpiling opiates, she thinks. I don’t want my last view to be of this. A seascape, a bottle of gin and a bottle of Oromorph: that’ll do me if I make it that far. In a lounge, shrivelled forms sit on non-absorbent surfaces and stare silently at Jeremy Kyle on the television. Each chair has a built-in tray sticking out from its right arm, each bearing a medical-pink earthenware teacup. There are no visitors, no people standing up by themselves who aren’t in uniform. Wrong time of day, thinks Collette. At least, I hope so.

‘Your mum’s in her room,’ says Michael. ‘She likes to stay there most of the time. Till lunchtime, at least.’

‘Fair enough,’ says Collette. Janine was never a very sociable sort, in between boyfriends. God knows how she managed to replace them, sitting in her chair smoking and gazing at the telly while her peers went out arm in arm to the bingo, but she did. Even got three of them to marry her, for a bit. ‘How’s she doing?’

They reach a junction and the wall colours change abruptly. To her right, sky blue, to her left, where he leads her, candy pink. Even in second childhood, the genders are distinguished by decor. ‘She’s fine,’ he says soothingly.

Always good to get a medical opinion. ‘Sometimes she’s a bit confused, but mostly she’s quite content,’ he adds.

So why did they decide she needed taking away? wonders Collette. This is how I remember her all my life, though I suppose the Temazepam and gin might have had a bit to do with that. Cardiac-related dementia, they called it when they informed her. Her heart’s failing and the oxygen’s just not getting through to her brain.

They reach a door, which sits ajar like all the others she’s passed, so the staff can see the inhabitants without going inside. No real privacy in a twilight home. Collette wonders if they even close the doors at night and suspects that they don’t. From behind the door they have just passed, a reedy voice rises in a wail. ‘They won’t let me they won’t let me they won’t
let
me! Bugger them. Why can’t I? All I want is…’

‘Here we are,’ says Michael, drowning the voice out. ‘Now, don’t be surprised if she’s gone downhill a bit since you last visited. It can come as a shock, I know, but Mum’s still inside.’

Last time she saw her was in the garden of Collette’s flat in Stoke Newington: her hard-won respectability, her move into home-ownership. Three-odd years ago, looking unimpressed as she smoked her Bensons under a monstrous parasol, gin and tonic rattling ice in her hand. I loved that flat, thinks Collette. I was so proud of it. It was my proof that all the work I’d done was paying off. I wonder what’s happened to it? Taken back by the bank, I suppose. Someone else is living there now, enjoying my kitchen, probably using my parasol and congratulating themselves on their auction bargain. And Lisa’s probably credit-blacklisted until the end of time.

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘I’ll remember.’

He calls in through the gap in the doorway. ‘Janine, love? Are you decent?’

He mother’s voice, but not. It’s gone reedy, like that of the weeper next door, and breathless. ‘Yes, thank you, dear.’

‘I’ve got a visitor for you,’ he calls, and pushes the door full-open.

Janine sits in a high-backed faux-leather fauteuil in front of a window that looks out on to a blank wall, two plastic tubes hooked into her nostrils. She looks up with childlike curiosity and a big smile, then her face falls, fills with confusion.

‘Are you sure you’ve got the right room?’ she asks, between breaths. ‘Who are
you
?’

Collette feels a lurch. She was never much of a mother, but she can’t have forgotten me, surely? ‘It’s me, Mum,’ she says, and walks further into the room. Crouches down beside her mother’s chair and looks up. ‘Lisa.’

Janine’s shrunk. She looks like a facsimile of herself, like someone’s run her through a photocopier that’s running low on toner. Last time Collette saw her, her hair had been loose-permed and lowlights ran through a base of yellow blonde. Now, she’s grey: grey skin, grey eyes, grey greasy hair that looks like it’s been cut with the kitchen scissors, charcoal lines running up from her lips and into her nostrils. She stares at Collette for a long time, then shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says, decisively. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Lisa’s only seventeen. You’re bloody ancient.’