He pulled open the door beneath the drawer and groped inside. There was a carrier bag at the back of the compartment. It was full of glasses: around twenty pairs of spectacles, most of them old -fashioned, with brown frames. Jamie furrowed his brow and emptied the bag, tipping the glasses all over the floor, revealing a couple of what he quickly realised were hearing aids, and a single USB stick. Not knowing what to make of all this, he slipped the USB stick in his pocket and moved on.
He dug deeper in the cupboard, finding a manila folder. Inside it was a marriage certificate. He almost threw it aside, but a word caught his eye:
Pica.
His heartbeat skipped.
The two names on the certificate were Christopher Robert Newton and Lucy Marie Pica.
He tore through the rest of the desk until he found a letter with the estate agent’s heading: Anderson and Son. He read the letter in stunned horror. It confirmed the sale of the ground floor flat, 143 Mount Pleasant Street to Jamie Knight and Kirsty Phillips from Ms Lucy Pica. He dug deeper. There was another letter, dated May, confirming the sale of the flat from Letitia Matthews and David Robson to Lucy Pica.
Lucy had bought the flat in her maiden name from Letitia and David and then sold it on to Jamie and Kirsty, making a healthy profit – and getting two new people to torment into the bargain. And as the sellers of the flat, they would have the keys and plenty of time to install surveillance equipment so they could watch and listen to their victims’ suffering to make their pleasure even greater. The recordings of them having sex weren’t made through the ceiling as they’d suspected: as well as the camera in the living room there was probably a microphone somewhere in their bedroom, hidden beneath something, which would account for the muffled sound on the recordings. The keys also gave them the chance to walk into the flat at any time that Jamie and Kirsty weren’t at home.
Jamie threw all the papers to the floor. A wave of anger crashed over him, blinding him. He stood in the centre of the room. The walls spinning around and around, getting faster, everything going white, blurred; going red, crimson, the colour of blood.
He roared. The cry ripped something in his throat, made the room shake around him. He pulled the CCTV monitor out of its cabinet and threw it against the wall. All his working out had made him strong. The monitor hit the wall with a deafening crunch; shards of glass flew across the room. Jamie roared again.
There was only one way to deal with this.
He stomped across the room into the kitchen, throwing open the cupboards beneath the sink. He pulled out bottles of cleaner, bleach, rubber gloves, throwing them behind him. Then he saw what he had hoped to find: a large bottle of white spirit, almost full and extremely flammable. He unscrewed the top and went back into the living room. He splashed the white spirit around, up the walls, over the furniture. He carried it into the bedrooms and splashed some on the beds. He threw some against the poster of Chris. He trailed the stinking liquid from the bedrooms back into the living room.
He took his matches out of his pocket, then pulled out his cigarettes. He threw the empty white spirit bottle onto the carpet in front of him and wiped his hands on his trousers. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, and stood there, motionless, for a moment. He would be burning all the evidence, erasing any proof of what Chris and Lucy had done. He had one moment to change his mind.
He threw the lit cigarette across the room.
It hit a patch of spirit and immediately blue flames flickered to life, racing across the carpet, growing as they spread, orange replacing the blue, smoke quickly filling the room. The flames caught the end of the curtains, ran up the sofa. The crackle and roar grew louder and louder. Fire danced on every surface, and started heading towards Jamie, who had backed up to the threshold of the room. He stood in the doorway for a second, entranced by the flames, and then turned to get out.
It was at that moment that Chris ran into the flat and crashed into him.
Jamie went flying into the living room. Above the roar of the flames he could hear Chris bellowing a stream of expletives. He looked around wildly, taking in what was happening to his flat, his hands on his head, his mouth open. Jamie was surrounded by smoke. He coughed harshly; his eyes started to blur and run with tears. He knew it was only a matter of minutes before the fire consumed the whole room. He tried to get to his feet and Chris kicked him in the chest.
‘You fucker!’ Chris screamed. He kicked Jamie again, his boot connecting with the side of his head. He reached down and pulled him up. God, he was so strong. He threw Jamie against the wall, punched him in the stomach, then the face. Jamie felt something crack; his cheekbone. Chris punched him again and blood spurted from his nose. He just managed to stay upright. There was so much smoke; he couldn’t breathe. He felt his knees sag and thought he was going to fall.
But then he remembered what he had discovered in the flat. The CCTV. The letters from the estate agent. Another wave of anger gave him strength, made him cry out, hurting his throat. He threw himself at his neighbour, his hands reaching out and grabbing Chris round the throat, pushing him against the door frame. Chris tried to hit Jamie’s arms to break his grip, but Jamie was possessed, overwhelmed and empowered by anger, by all that had happened to him since he had met this man. He squeezed harder, digging his thumbs into Chris’s windpipe. Chris hit his arms again, hit them harder. He managed to knock Jamie’s arms away and fell sideways into the living room. He held his own throat, making a horrible choking sound.
Jamie could hardly see. The whole of the living room was on fire. Thick black smoke obscured everything. Jamie staggered down the hall, pulled open the front door and fell onto his knees on the doorstep. He sucked in air, trying to replace the smoke that filled his lungs. Beside him, the front windows of the flat smashed, blown out by the heat. Glass covered him, sticking in his hair. Smoke billowed out into the darkness.
He pushed himself up and went to stagger away. Then he remembered Chris. He was still inside, in the living room. He hated him – hated him so much – but, despite everything, he couldn’t just leave him to die.
He pulled off his shirt and screwed it up into a bundle, pressing it against his face. He went back into the flat. He could hear Chris calling out, his voice weak.
‘Help.’
Jamie moved towards the sound, but another blast of heat threw him backwards. A patch of ceiling collapsed in front of him, plaster and wood falling on top of him, knocking him to the floor. He was blinded, but he managed to roll over and crawl, back towards the front door. He couldn’t hear Chris calling out any more. The whole living room was gone; an inferno.
Jamie threw himself over the threshold, ran up the steps, collapsed on his knees on the front path. He felt someone grab hold of him. It was Brian. He tried to say something but all he could do was cough.
Brian pulled him away from the flat. Mary and Linda were standing on the pavement, staring at him. Mary was holding Lennon, who was wriggling, trying to get away. Brian was shouting at Jamie. ‘Where’s Chris? Where is he?’
He still couldn’t speak.
He looked up, and there was Lucy. She wasn’t screaming, or crying, or trying to get into the flat. She was simply staring; watching the smoke pour out of her flat, rising up towards the night sky. She watched the flames spread upwards until they could be seen behind the windows of the ground floor flat. Jamie followed her gaze. There it went. Their dream home. Up in smoke.
He lay on the pavement and laughed, coughed, laughed again. He could smell something pleasant. He realised it was the smell of singed hair. His eyebrows had been burnt off, as had most of his hair.
He heard the wail of sirens in the distance.
Jamie sat down on the bed and looked around at his new room. The walls were plain white, except for a couple of posters: an aerial view of London and a picture of an urban fox, the kind that had caused a tabloid panic recently when a baby was dragged from its bed. The posters had belonged to the previous occupant of the room, and he had been told he could take them down if he wanted to, but he quite liked them. He wasn’t scared of foxes.
The furniture in the room was basic: a single wardrobe, a bedside cabinet, a small chest of drawers. The mattress creaked beneath him. The room smelled stale, of dust and disinfectant, but he had opened the little window to let in some air. The room was fine, he told himself. It was a good place to get his life back on track.
He had been waiting a while for this room, slowly inching his way towards the top of the allocation list after a long time moving between B&Bs and a spell on the streets. There were dark holes in his memory, holes burnt into his brain by alcohol. But now he was on the wagon. That was part of the deal when they offered him a room in this hostel. He would stop drinking. He was even going to quit smoking.
He looked around again. Yes, it was fine. This would be a good base for his relaunch into society.
He went downstairs and saw Carol, one of the women who ran the hostel.
‘Hi Jamie. What do you think?’
‘Of the room? I like it.’
‘Good, good.’ She smiled. ‘We’ve got another couple of people moving in today. One will be moving in to the room next to yours.’
He nodded. ‘I’m going to go out for a walk. Check out my surroundings.’
‘Sure.’
He went out and walked into the wind. It was cold and he was relieved that he wasn’t still out on the streets. He saw a man sitting in the doorway of an abandoned shop. The man nodded at him, recognising a fellow spirit; another person who had fallen on hard times. But Jamie was on his way up. He felt a stab of guilt, knowing that soon he would again be part of the world that walked past the homeless without a glance. He told himself he would never forget what it was like to have nothing, but secretly hoped he would forget.
He walked down to the river and found an empty bench, then sat looking at the choppy water. He didn’t want to cross the river; he didn’t like crossing to the north of the Thames any more. That way lay the past, and a flat that had been gutted by fire. Two flats. The Newtons’, and his and Kirsty’s.
It had been in all the papers. There was a delay in the fire brigade coming to Mount Pleasant Street because the address was on a blacklist of hoaxers. Even though it had been Brian who called 999, the address had triggered an alert. A few minutes passed as the firemen checked that this wasn’t another hoax. Five vital minutes. An anonymous fire fighter was quoted as saying that if it wasn’t for that five minute delay, they might have arrived in time to save Chris. As it was, they were only able to stop the fire spreading further than the ground floor flat, saving Mary’s flat.
After he was well enough to leave hospital, Jamie was arrested and charged with murder. He was refused bail and spent months in prison awaiting trial. He pleaded not guilty, on the grounds that he had been driven to his actions by his neighbours. The trial became known as the ‘Magpies’ trial, after Jamie’s lawyer described Chris and Lucy as a pair of magpies, birds renowned for destroying the nests of other birds. This phrase caught the imagination of the press and the jury, who were also impressed by the evidence given by Letitia and David, who were persuaded to travel down from their Scottish retreat and speak up on Jamie’s behalf. Kirsty gave evidence too. And in the burnt-out remains of the flat, the police forensics team found a tiny charred spy camera concealed in the picture rail. They also found a microphone, hidden beneath the carpet in the bedroom.
Jamie was found not guilty and released.
He looked at the water now. After the trial, he had come down to the river and thought about ending it. He had nothing left. Among the papers that perished in the fire was a letter from the house insurance company telling him his last direct debit had failed. When the flat burnt down, it was uninsured. He had stood beside the river and wondered what it would feel like to throw himself in, for the waters to close over him – but he couldn’t do it.
He was glad he hadn’t. Because after a long time on the edge, he was finally regaining control of his life. He had been given a second chance and he wasn’t going to waste it.
For a long time, he had wrestled with his conscience. Because although he had pleaded not guilty, he felt guilty. With the evidence he had found in the flat, he could have gone to the police and shown them that Lucy and Chris had been making their lives a living hell. But because he had lost it at that moment, a man had died. He was responsible for the death of another human being, even if it was Chris, one of the two people he hated more than anyone else in the world. He wondered what had happened to the other one: Lucy. She had sat on her own during the trial, staring at Jamie, making him feel cold and vulnerable. Jamie’s lawyer had urged Jamie to ask the police to prosecute Lucy for harassment. Jamie said no. He just wanted to forget about it. He imagined she was living with someone else now, in a flat somewhere, making somebody else’s life miserable.
Last week, he had been sitting in a small cafe in Brixton when Heather walked in. She did a double take, then came over and sat down.
‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Your eyebrows.’
‘I know. Apparently, they’ll never grow back.’
‘God.’
She bought him a coffee and they talked. Jamie told her what he had been doing since the trial. She tutted a lot and looked sympathetic. She was now working at a hospital nearby. It was no fun working at St Thomas’s since Kirsty left.
‘Have you heard from her at all?’ she asked.
‘No. The last time I saw her was at the trial. I tried to talk to her afterwards but she hurried off with her mum and dad.’ He paused. ‘Are you in touch with her?’
Heather nodded. ‘Yes, although I don’t see her very often. She lives in Reading now.’
‘Is she married?’
‘No, but she has got a new boyfriend. Andrew. I feel awkward telling you.’
‘It’s OK. I didn’t expect her to spend the rest of her life on her own.’