The Killer Next Door (24 page)

She thinks it through and decides to go in the daytime. A teenager carrying a television through the streets in the dark is asking for a stop-and-search, whereas you can walk around with pretty much anything while the shops are open. She once carted a bike, with its lock still on, all the way from Twickenham to Kingston, and nobody even batted an eyelid. For sure, a casual-looking girl with no obvious signs of drug abuse carting a flat-screen under her arm will be fine.

Cher’s thought and thought about that telly. She’s never had a television of her own, never even had control of a remote. And God knows she’s longed for one. A telly will make all the difference to her life, and the Landlord has three that he no longer needs. And besides, he owes her that much. That’s what she figures.

She passes a couple of people in the street and smiles boldly at them. The trick is to always look like you belong; like you have a right to be wherever you are at the time. Look shifty, and people will assume that you
are
shifty. Fix them with a smile and cry out ‘good morning’, and nine times out of ten, in a city like this, they will shrug themselves into their imaginary coats and hurry by, mumbling an embarrassed greeting in return. The rest are either up to something shifty themselves, or they’re a bit mad, so they don’t really count.

She strides confidently to the Landlord’s basement stairs and skips down them, pulling on her gloves. Fishes from her pocket the bunch of keys she lifted off Thomas in the car when they were on the way home, and leafs through them. She identifies them in no time. Can’t believe it took Thomas so long, though she supposes it
was
dark when he was looking. They stand out from the Beulah keys because they’re new, and shiny, and have more than three levers to them. She undoes the mortise, then turns the Yale and steps cheerfully inside.

In an instant she is gagging. She had remembered the smell from the boot, and had expected to have to make an adjustment, but eight days has magnified it so much that it takes her breath away completely. Her throat closes up and she feels her gorge rise. She’s never smelled anything like this. The smell of ripe shit in Vesta’s bathroom is like flowers in comparison. Her lungs don’t seem to want to take this fetid air into themselves. They rebel each time she tries to breathe, let only tiny sips of it through before her epiglottis clamps down and everything stops.

How can the neighbours not smell this, she thinks. It’s not possible. Maybe it’s… God, I’ve never smelled anything like this. Nothing close to it. Maybe they just don’t know what it is?

She switches the light on. Lets out a huge bronchial cough, the sort that can turn too easily into the gag reflex. But once it’s out, she finds that she is able to breathe. Not normally, not by a long chalk, and she has to keep her lips clamped firmly closed, but enough that she doesn’t have to flee the room.

The Landlord has been leaking. The floor is sticky with fluids. They have spread outwards across the beech-look laminate by several feet, have stained the wall against which his right arm presses. Now the first wave of nausea has passed, she’s interested. He’s not her first corpse. But her mum and her nanna were freshly dead when she saw them, and she didn’t have a lot of time to study them before they were swept up by forensics and taken away for autopsy, then given the old cosmetic beautification by an undertaker. By the time they were buried, they looked like waxworks. Overpainted, their features sewn up with clever threadwork into Mona Lisa smiles.

The Landlord doesn’t look like that. Eight days has not been kind. His huge belly has swollen to the size of a Space Hopper and all his limbs have bloated. How it’s not split open, she has no idea. It can only be a matter of time. In the places where, when she last saw him, his skin was grey-white, it is greenish, now, and mottled like a marble floor, the occasional patch of livid crimson breaking through where his skin seems to have started to literally slide off the fat beneath. The parts that were purple are lustreless ebony black. His T-shirt, stretched so tight that the seams are beginning to split, seems to be undulating. For a moment she thinks it must be some kind of optical illusion, until she notices something small and white, the size of a couple of grains of rice, work its way over his swollen lower lip and drop to the floor.

‘Fucking ’ell,’ says Cher.

She stays and looks for a bit, fascinated. Her body still fights to act out its revulsion, hitting her with sudden, convulsive throat spasms so that she has to keep her hand clamped over her mouth, but her mind is clear, and curious. She’s always been inquisitive that way. If she’d learned to read really well and gone to a school where the staff had any ambitions for their students other than keeping them from rioting before playtime, she’d have been being encouraged into the sciences by now. So this is what happens when you get buried, she thinks. I’m bloody well getting cremated.

She spends a few minutes staring at the pullulating cloth, drinking in the detail – the wide-open, grey-misted eyes, like the zombies in
The Walking Dead
, the way that the fluid leakage seems concentrated around the head and, God help us, the flattened buttocks, the fact that the marble patterning – if it were a tattoo, say, or body paint rather than putrefaction – is almost pretty in its delicacy. I won’t forget this in a hurry, she thinks. Shame there’s no one I can tell about it, really. Probably not ever.

A car door slams in the street and snaps her from her reverie. She remembers the purpose of her visit, looks at her quarry. The big telly, the one she really lusts after, is situated directly over the corpse’s head, its cord trailing through a pool of brackish goo. Maybe not, she thinks, and goes round the coffee table to the small screen on the other side.

It’s a nice little apparatus, no more than a couple of years old. Silver casing and a Sony logo. Actually, this is better, she thinks. I’ll have to move on at some point, when they find him or whatever, and that big thing’s not exactly portable, is it? She bends down and unplugs it from the aerial socket, switches off the electricity and takes the plug from the extension adaptor on the floor. Stands on tiptoe to reach over the media cabinet below it and lift it from the wall-bracket on which it perches. It looks quite precarious, and she balances carefully to make sure not to drop it when it comes free.

It doesn’t come free. Taken by surprise, Cher wobbles on the balls of her feet and has to grab the telly by its frame to prevent herself overbalancing. She swears under her breath – doing anything lungfully is ill-advised in her current circumstances – and drops down on to her heels, her damaged ankle letting out a shriek that reminds her that she still needs to take care. She bends down to look for a hook, or a latch, or some other piece of Japanese ingenuity that’s lending the set stability. What she finds wrings another, louder word from her lips. A screw runs through a hole in the metal bracket, and is firmly embedded in the underside of the machine.

‘Fuck,’ mutters Cher. Might have known this wasn’t going to be that easy, she thinks. Like the universe was ever going to cut me a break.

‘You bastard,’ she says to the bloated body, and could swear that it releases another gust of swamp gas in response. ‘Bet you think you’re having the last laugh, don’t you?’

She stands up and glares round the room. Enough porn to power the Titanic, but nothing practical anywhere to be seen. The remains of a kebab on the table has gone green and sprouted fur. ‘Eugh,’ she says to the Landlord, ‘you really were a filthy fucker, weren’t you? If you’d put as much energy into walking as you did into wanking, you probably wouldn’t look like that now.’

The Landlord doesn’t answer. She tries the drawers of the media cabinet and finds little other than a bunch of unlabelled DVDs and those bunches of useless wires and plugs that seem to breed secretly in the dark places of every house.

‘Bugger,’ she mutters. She’s going to have to go further into the flat to see if she can find anything to undo the screw with. A knife would probably do it. If he owns a knife. It doesn’t look like he ate much that he couldn’t eat with his hands.

Even with the bare light bulb on, the hall is dark, and stuffy. The two doors to her left and the one at the end of the hall – hollow, unpanelled doors, seen-better-days white gloss paint, those old-people half-moon pull handles – are closed, and neither light nor air seep through. More of the same boring laminate, no embellishments other than a row of half full recycling boxes and a couple of grubby coats on hooks. A joyless sort of place, she thinks, as she walks up it to what she assumes will be the kitchen. Not exactly living for pleasure, was he? Apart from eating kebabs and fingering his privates.

She has all sorts of plans for the things she’ll do with her home, when she gets on her feet at last, based on things she’s seen through windows, or in the pages of magazines. If your life is made up of necessities, your head is filled with all the pretty shiny things that would make it complete. Pink paper lampshades. A collection of paper fans, opened out and pinned to the wall. Sari fabric draped round curtain poles. Floor cushions. A Tiffany lamp. One of those make-up chests that looks like a steamer trunk. A collection of slogan mugs hanging from hooks under a shelf full of tea caddies. A wall motto, spelled out in big gold letters. She’s not sure what it will read, but she likes the look of them. A fake fur bedspread. Nothing slaggy, like animal print. Classy. Wolfskin. Or mink, maybe.

She finds it hard to imagine how someone with the sort of money the Landlord has – had – could live in a place that looks like a storage unit. Even with Vesta paying practically squat, he must have been taking in over a grand a week, and a lot of it – hers and Collette’s, anyway – cash-in-hand, as well, so no tax. Cher can totally see why someone blessed with what she regards as footballer levels of wealth would fill their house with high-spec electronics, so she’s not surprised by the televisions, but the rest of the flat, its sparse furnishings, its piles of redundant stuff that suggest that he was simply too lazy to take them to the dump, is a disappointment. She’d sort of imagined him sitting on a gold sofa, wearing a gold lamé tracksuit and fingering his gold pendant chains as he watched
Dallas
on a gold TV and sent texts from a mobile encrusted with Swarovski crystals. Instead it’s chocolate milk bottles in plastic recycling boxes and a small collection of offcuts of timber stored along the hall wainscot.

The kitchen is a galley, lined on both sides with cabinets in the nineties Spaceship Interior style. Scratched stainless steel surfaces, chrome door handles, lino that’s done up to look like those steel plates you find on walkways. I’d never have that, thinks Cher. Why would you have that? You’d never keep it clean, all those bobbles. Nobody would have a kitchen that looked like this if they meant to cook here. It’s the kitchen of someone who lives on takeout.

Nonetheless, there are greasy plates piled up by the sink, and a rancid waste bin. She goes through the cupboards and drawers at lightning speed. Plates. Pint glasses. Cutlery: but the knife blades are thick, like kids’ school knives. She doubts they’ll fit in a screw head. Well, he must have a screwdriver somewhere, she thinks, or how did he screw it in in the first place?

She carries on. A bunch of pans that look inherited – pitted exteriors, handles with melt marks and scratches – and unused. A drawerful of spatulas. A cupboard so full of gas bills and council tax reminders that she has difficulty getting it closed again once it’s open. A collection of tea towels that have the eerie look of souvenirs about them. Inherited again, she thinks. Like the apron and oven gloves that hang on the end wall. A cork pinboard to which two dozen delivery menus and a couple of minicab cards are fixed with drawing pins. Cleaning stuff. She raises her eyebrows at this. She’s not seen much evidence that he uses it. A bucket with a grey old rag hanging over the edge. A pressure cooker. A slow cooker full of Tupperware lids. A toasted sandwich maker.

Nothing tool-like; nothing that will help her. She goes back down the hall, pokes her head into the bathroom. Mildew along the border of a glass shower screen, a hair attached to a bar of soap, a cardboard box on the toilet cistern stuffed with chemist drugs: laxatives, Immodium, Boots Soothing Heartburn Relief pills, cough mixture, Bonjela. She doesn’t bother with more than a cursory look. No one keeps tools in the bathroom unless they’ve been doing work in there.

A flash of memory. The tool kit on Vesta’s bathroom floor.

‘Oh, shit,’ she says, out loud. Her voice echoes off the tiled walls, mocks her. They took the kit down to the building site when they dropped off the remains of the damp proofing. Some Slovak will have most of it strapped round his waist by now.

She comes out of the bathroom, disconsolate. She’s about to go back to the kitchen and try one of the knives when she notices the cupboard. It’s a big cupboard that fills the space where the stairs up to the ground floor used to be. For some reason, she’s taken the narrowness of the hall, the jink at the end, for granted, maybe because Vesta’s basement hall is narrower, if anything. Ah, now, there you go, she thinks. I should’ve thought that even someone like him would have a Hoover hidden away somewhere.

It takes her a moment to work out how to open the door, picking at its seam with her fingernail, until she tries pushing on it, and it swings open. It’s big enough and deep enough to house a cloakroom, if he had wanted one, though someone his size wouldn’t have used it with any great ease. Instead, it’s filled with more of the sort of junk that lies about the living room: arm and leg weights, an ironing board, an old record player and a box of vinyl records, the vacuum cleaner, an old fold-up director’s chair. A series of narrow shelves on the wall just inside the door houses boxes of bits and bobs: light bulbs, screws, nails, superglue, fuses, batteries: and on the floor, in the back, another toolkit box.