The Killer Next Door (21 page)

A house like number twenty-three doesn’t militate a high web presence. As far as he knows, he’s the only person who’s ever lived here who owned a computer, though the fact that Hossein seems to write quite regularly for a number of political websites suggests that he must, at the very least, have access to one. Gerard Bright turns up briefly as the star of a few slow-season comic newspaper stories – nothing like a private school music teacher cocking up to make a few gloating headlines in the quality press – but otherwise his viola and he just feature in a few concert programmes so amateur that the organisers never got round to taking them off the web afterwards. In fact, it seems as though he’s playing in a series of low-rent chamber concerts in local venues across the south-east this week, as luck would have it, the last one tonight. God knows what would have happened if he’d been here last night, or if he were here tonight. A whole new outcome flashes briefly across Thomas’s imagination. He dismisses them, hastily. Can’t think about that, he thinks. I have too much to do, too much to organise.

There are few mentions of Vesta Collins, but she pops up in the
Northbourne Advertiser
at every jubilee, smiling gamely in a party hat. He was surprised to find no signs at all of Cher or Collette, but he’s tracked down Cher, now, or at least the tragic little FIND CHERYL FARRELL Facebook page, set up by social services, that seems to have been the only effort anyone’s made to find her. The page is almost eighteen months old and the sulky twelve-year-old (clearly the most recent photo anybody’s bothered to take) face that stares out from it in school uniform is barely recognisable. Cheryl Farrell was a thickset black kid with frizzy black hair rubber-banded into two bunches like horns on the top of her head. She looks nothing like the leggy, brown-skinned girl with the corkscrew curls who’s slumped on a deckchair in the garden.

He feels that he knows them all better after their shared experiences. He’s certain, now, rather than suspecting, that Collette is on the run from someone, and that all of them are ready to be told what to do, as long as it keeps them off the radar. He watched their faces as he spoke last night, saw the ill-masked gratitude on each of them as he took control, and he knows that they will do anything he wants. I’m their friend now, he thinks. They used to avoid me when they saw me, find reasons why they had to be elsewhere. But now I’m their saviour. After tonight, when it’s all over and everybody’s home and safe and they’re counting their blessings, I’ll be one of them. I’ll be included. The dad of the house, where Vesta is the gran.

I’ve had a lucky escape, really. They’re never going to speak, never going to tell. They’ll clear it all away, and I’ll be more careful, safe again to be with my girls.

He turns back into the room, feeling light-hearted for the first time in what feels like years. He has things to sort out – not least how to dispose of the contents of the freezer, now the blender’s out of the question – but he feels he’s been given his life back once more.

The girls sit side by side on his little sofa, a man-sized gap between them. Nikki’s come out beautifully from her forty days of sleep. A little wrinkled, and her mouth slightly further open than we would ideally like, but otherwise she’s perfect. They sit together peacefully, wide eyes and curled hair and shiny painted nails, and wait for him. He checks his watch: it’s four o’clock, the party’s in full swing and everything downstairs is under control. Tonight, once it’s dark and the guests have gone and the lights are out and the trains are no longer running, there will be work to do, but for now a lazy afternoon rolls itself out before him.

He lowers himself gently on to the sofa between his lovelies, and slips a hand into one of each of theirs. Rests his head against the cushions and looks from one to the other, captivated by their quiet beauty. It’s shaping up to be a wonderful summer.

When they open the boot, the smell – shit and Camembert and nail-varnish remover and toasted durian – explodes from the confined space as though it’s alive. It wraps itself round them like a fog, makes them gasp and choke, hands over their mouths to force the sounds back in. Collette’s eyes blur with tears. She looks wildly round, sees that they are pouring down Hossein’s face, too. Thomas has taken his glasses off, is polishing them, ferociously, on the hem of his shirt. Only Cher remains impassive. Just stands there with something akin to a sneer on her face. She jerks her head impatiently, steps forward and takes hold of the plastic sheet.

He’s crammed into the small space like batter. This afternoon he was rigid with rigor, but twelve more hours of sweaty heat in the airless shed, and it has passed. He slid in bonelessly, and settled like cake mix into a tin.

But getting him out is like wrestling jelly. Limbs and hair and belly, great slabs of thigh and lolling head sliding about in the confines of the boot, refuse to afford them any traction. They struggle for a minute, silent for fear of waking the neighbours, elbowing each other and tying their arms in knots like the Keystone Cops, but the Landlord is stuck fast.

Thomas lets out a tiny hiss, grips Collette by the upper arm. He shakes his head and gestures to her to move back. She obeys, meekly. She’s amazed and relieved by the way Thomas has taken on authority, delegated tasks – just known what to do while the rest of them were floundering in panic. She taps Cher on the elbow, jerks her thumb towards her chest to tell her to move.

Thomas stands with one hand on the boot lid, looking down at the body as though it were a logic puzzle. Then, with a single, smooth movement, he lays his hands on one corner of sheeting and hauls upwards. Like an extra in
The Walking Dead
, Roy sits up in his plastic wrapping, turns and flops over the lip of the boot, like a jack-in-a-box. Slowly at first, then faster, as his centre of gravity shifts, he slithers over the lip and on to the tarmac, like a great blue maggot.

They bump him down the steps, each crackle of plastic and scrape of a sole jerking them to a silent stop. We’ve come so far, now, thinks Collette. Please God don’t let us get caught now. There’s nothing we can do but go forward. She wishes they could hurry, but they can’t afford to get careless. Four people and a stinking corpse: there’s no way you can talk yourself out of that one. By the door, Thomas shuttles through the bunch of keys they fished from Roy’s damp pocket, looking for the one that opens it. Collette climbs back up a couple of steps and scans the street. Any moment now it’s going to fill with a posse of torch-bearing householders, she knows it. A light will come on, then another light, then a voice will ask what they’re doing, and…

And then the door is open. Thomas bends and starts to drag Roy through. Collette rushes down the steps and joins the others.

It’s a night of smells. She can feel that they’ve come straight into a room; a stuffy, hard-surfaced room that smells of frying and onions and sweat and stale alcohol, just like the Landlord himself before other, stronger, smells took over. Laminate floor beneath her feet, some sort of storage unit to her right; nothing that soaks up sound anywhere near, just the dull echo of their panicked breathing, the shuffle of their feet.

The weight dragging on her shoulders gets suddenly heavier, and she realises that Thomas has dropped his share of the burden. She does the same, hears the Landlord’s skull crack against the floor. The door closes.

‘Where’s the lights?’ hisses Cher.

‘Hang on.’ He’s speaking normally now, confident that they’re not overheard. She hears him feel his way across the room to the window, and they are plunged in darkness as a blind is drawn down.

A hand slips into hers and squeezes. Over the smell of the room and the smell of the dead man, she catches a slight whiff off the clean, sandalwood scent of Hossein. He doesn’t say a word, but she feels comforted, suddenly safer. She waits, calmer now, as Thomas works his way back to the door and feels around for the light switch.

He hits it, and they are bathed in light so bright that her hands fly to her eyes. When she opens them, she sees her three companions blinking, their features washed out, pale with fear and tiredness, eyes wild as they check out their surroundings. Cher still holds on to her corner of the plastic. Lets go as she realises that she is the only one. She looks around her, at the lair of her tormentor, and voices her judgement.

‘Fucking hell. What a shithole.’

Collette looks around. It’s quite a large room, the width of the building and probably half its depth. Walls that were probably once magnolia, favourite choice of property developers everywhere, but which have started to turn sepia with age, greasy black marks all around the light switches where he’s groped around in the dark and never used a wet wipe.

A featureless, joyless room. She guesses, from the lack of embellishment, that it was converted at the height of the 1980s extra-dry Chardonnay boom, when everyone liked to think that they craved a minimalist lifestyle and forgot that they would need storage to achieve it. It’s a bachelor pad, she thinks: a real one, not the style palaces you’re supposed to imagine when you hear the phrase. A place that’s lived in by a man who’s never bothered to make it attractive, because that’s what
women
do. He’s just bought things as he’s gone along and dumped the old ones in the corner.

There’s barely a thing in here that a normal person would call furniture. Her small bedsit is opulent by comparison. How long’s he lived here? she wonders. It could be any time at all, but judging by that pile of stereo equipment over where the fireplace must have been once, it’s decades. He’s bought stuff and put it down, and never thought about finding something to put it on.

In front of her stands a sofa. Tubular legs and black leather, the chrome chipped and smeared and the cushions sagging deep in the middle, the imprint of ten thousand nights watching one or other of the three televisions that sit opposite, wired up, it seems, to a DVD player, a video player and a Sky box. Why a man would need more than one telly, she’ll never know, but she’s not a man. Between them, with just a foot-wide gap from the sofa so that no one on it would have to stretch to reach it, there’s a black-painted MDF coffee table with a smoked glass surface. Yes, the 1980s, she thinks. He bought the flat off the developer, went to MFI and got some man-stuff, and hasn’t done a thing since. The walls are lined with a hotchpotch of storage: metal shelves of the sort you find in a garage and those dark-veneer dressers that were all the rage before IKEA invaded with its palette of birch. A few cushions that he’s used for comfort rather than decoration on the sofa, and a polyester blanket, also in black. In the gaping space where a table should be, an exercise bike and what looks like it might once have been a rowing machine; souvenirs of moments long ago when Roy Preece thought he’d get fit and find a wife, but has long since adapted into laundry storage. On the shelving, row upon row of media. Videos, furthest away, then piles and piles of DVDs, no pretence of order or caring how they look. Most of the cases are blank, but she can see from the glimpsed covers of the few pre-printed ones that the Landlord hasn’t been watching chick-flicks as he’s lain on that sofa. She can see cocks and breasts and buttocks from where she stands. Mostly breasts.

Hossein takes them in with a look of elegant disgust. Looks down at the coffee table. It’s strewn with the litter of a bachelor’s neglectful existence: aluminium takeaway cartons with traces of curry still clinging to the sides, a half-eaten kebab in its polystyrene box, screwed-up chip paper, a scatter of cardboard boxes, a collection of remote controls, an Android tablet in silver chrome, a bottle of baby lotion, a box of Kleenex. Poking out from beneath, she sees a bin liner, half-full with more of the same. He looks politely away, as though doing so will somehow spare the dead man his shame.

Cher voices what they’re all thinking. ‘Eugh,’ she says. She looks down at the shrouded form at her feet and pulls a face. Don’t, thinks Collette. Don’t say it. We’re all thinking about it already. We don’t need to talk about it.

‘Three tellies,’ Cher says. ‘What the hell did he want with three tellies?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Collette.

‘You don’t think he used to watch ’em all at once, do you? Eugh,
God
.’

‘That’s enough, Cher,’ she says, firmly. She really doesn’t want to think about it.

Cher looks thoughtful. ‘I don’t suppose…’ she begins.

Collette knows where this is going. ‘No. We’re not taking anything.’

‘But I
need
a telly,’ says Cher. ‘You
know
I need a telly.’

‘I said no,’ Collette says, and she suddenly thinks, oh, God, I sound like her mum. She’ll be telling me she’s sorry she was born in a minute.

‘But —’

‘No, Cher,’ says Hossein. ‘I’m sorry. No. It’s not going to happen.’

Cher looks thunderous. Looking at her now, Collette can totally believe that she’s fifteen. Her veneer of worldliness is paper-thin when it comes down to it. She’s in the middle of committing a crime, and she’s practically thinking about nail varnish and mascara. ‘Right,’ she says, in that you’ll-be-sorry voice she remember from her own teens. She chucks her chin in the air and pulls a face. ‘Come on, then. We haven’t got all
night
.’

Before anyone else can move, she strides over to the body and yanks on the loose end of the plastic wrapper. The Landlord rolls out like a genie from a carpet, bumps up on his side against the wall, comes to rest staring at their feet. His eyes have clouded over and his skin, scrubbed clean with the power jet before they put him in the car, has begun to turn grey.

Cher starts to fold up the plastic, all business now she’s starting to feel safe. ‘Come on, then,’ she says, and starts towards the door.

‘Hang on,’ says Thomas.

Cher stops. ‘What?’

‘We can’t leave him like that,’ he says.

Cher puts her hands on her hips. ‘It’s a bit late to come over all respect-for-the-dead,’ she says. ‘We had to squash him down to get him into that boot.’

‘No,’ says Thomas, ‘it’s not that. Look at him.’

For a moment, they all look. A blubbering whale of a man lying against a skirting board, his eight chins dipping into the neck of the green T-shirt Thomas had gone and bought him. A swollen tongue protrudes from slack white lips and his feet and shins are covered in rough, flaking skin where his circulation had begun to fail.

‘What?’ asks Cher.

‘Look at his colour.’

They look. Grey-white on the front and then, they notice, red on the back. From what they can see of his skin, where cloth has rucked up and flesh has burst out, Roy’s gone two-tone. He’s turned into a Battenberg: all spongy-pale on one side and pinky-purple on the other. He looks like someone’s stood over him with a rolling pin and tenderised him from top to bottom.

Cher shakes her head and frowns. ‘What the fuck is that?’

Hossein clears his throat. ‘Livor mortis,’ he says.

‘Liver what?’

‘Livor mortis,’ he says. ‘It’s when the blood settles after death. It doesn’t stay in the veins, it… comes out. It makes the flesh turn that colour, where it settles.’

‘Christ,’ says Cher, ‘how the fuck do you know a word like that?’

‘It’s Latin,’ says Hossein. ‘It’s the same in any language.’

‘Okay,’ says Cher. ‘So what do you want me to do? Get out my make-up?’

Hossein shakes his head. ‘Thomas’s right. We can’t leave him like that.’

‘Go on then, professor. Why not?’

‘When they find him —’

‘
If
they find him.’

‘They
will
find him eventually, Cher,’ he says. ‘And when they do, they’ll know he’s been moved.’

‘How?’

‘Blood follows gravity,’ he says.

‘You’re in Britain now,’ she says. She always gets rude when she’s feeling ignorant. It’s a defence system she learned long ago. ‘Speak English.’

‘Wherever is the lowest bit, that’s where the blood goes. When you die. It doesn’t just stay where it was.’

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘So they’re going to know he was on his back,’ he says. ‘So they’ll know someone moved him.’

‘So what? They’re not going to be thinking it was a heart attack with that dent in his head, are they?’

‘No, they’re right,’ says Collette. ‘If we leave him like that, they’ll know it wasn’t a burglar. They’ll know he didn’t die here.’

‘They’ll know he didn’t die here anyway, won’t they?’

‘Why?’ asks Thomas.

‘
Doh
. No blood.’

‘Skin’s not broken on his head,’ says Thomas. ‘Did you notice him bleeding at Vesta’s?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Come on, then,’ says Collette. ‘Let’s roll him over.’