The Killer Next Door

Chapter Twenty-One

Vesta rifles through the post on the hall table, divides it into neat piles for its recipients – whole armfuls each week – gathers the junk for departed tenants into a bundle to put in the bin. It’s not a task that takes long. Half a dozen windowed envelopes for Thomas, a couple – brown paper, official stamps – for Hossein. Something from the council for her – her tax rebate, she hopes. Old ladies, she’s noticed, get less and less mail as pensionable age recedes behind them. Even the Reader’s Digest doesn’t want to give her fifty thousand pounds tax free any more.

Gerard Bright has a postcard, addressed in a childish hand. She mostly notices it because it’s the first piece of handwritten mail to come through the door in a month. She has a cousin in Melbourne who sends cards with clockwork reliability on birthdays and Christmas, though it’s over twenty years since they last saw each other at her auntie’s funeral in Ilfracombe. She sends them back with the same dedication: the last of her family, a single precious jewel among the seven billion. He includes a Xeroxed round robin yarn of children and grandchildren, a second wife and a land cruiser. Vesta just sends good wishes. She has little to boast of. No one wants news of friends they have never met. It’s one of the reasons people have children, that blood relations lend legitimacy to boasting to strangers.

She puts the card on top of his bank statement. Something to brighten his face up, she thinks. He always looks so grey and mournful when she sees him, the only person in London not to sport a suntan this summer, as though he spends his life in a cave, like a fungus.

There’s nothing, as usual, for Cher – she’s not had a single letter since she came here – and nothing, she notices, for the new girl, either. If you pay your power on a meter key, it’s still possible not to exist at all in the modern world, whatever the government says.

Seeing Gerard Bright’s card reminds her that she’s not had a single card herself this summer. She used to get them from time to time, from former neighbours, old colleagues from the primary school kitchen in their static caravans down on the coast, even the odd friend from school. She would prop them in pride of place on the mantelpiece, to look at and make her feel remembered, to give her dreams of a seaside escape of her own. One day, she thinks. If he ups his offer to twenty grand – God knows, that would still only be ten per cent of what the flat is worth – I could just about do it. A little static near a pebble beach, just a patch of patio to see out my days… but eight? Once I’d paid the movers, I’d barely have enough for a deposit.

She hears a key in the door and slips the junk mail into her Budgens bag, along with the potatoes and the eggs and the bit of bacon she’s bought as a treat. Smiles as Cher lets herself in, pretty and normal today, no wigs, no fake glasses, just an orange cotton dress above the knee and a pair of gold plastic flip-flops, white earphones in her ears, a Pucci-patterned headscarf tied round the base of her Afro making her look older, more sophisticated, like a model on the front of an album from the 1970s. ‘Hello, love!’

‘Hiya.’ Cher pulls out a single earphone and she hears a tinny scritch of music. She looks down at the little gadget in her hand – all smooth and shiny with a circular thing at the top – frowning as though she’s unsure how it works, then presses and holds a button on the side. Takes out the other ’phone and wraps the wire round the machine. ‘You been out?’

‘Just for a bit. Went up the High Street for a few bits and bobs. What’ve you been doing with yourself?’

‘Went and had a sit on the Common,’ says Cher. ‘Did a bit of scrumping. Loads of people up there.’

‘Scrumping? I never noticed any apple trees on the common.’

‘They don’t always grow on trees,’ says Cher, mysteriously, and tucks the iPod into her pocket. ‘How’ve you been? How’re your drains? He been and done anything about them yet?’

‘Good grief,’ she says. ‘Don’t remind me. I was in a good mood a minute ago. If he has, he hasn’t told me. You in the mood for a cuppa?’

‘I’d kill for something cold. You seen my cat anywhere?’

‘I’m sure he’s about. He’ll be asleep on your bed at this time of day, I should think. I’ve got bitter lemon in the fridge. I made it yesterday.’

Cher looks incredulous. ‘You made bitter lemon? I thought it was one of those things they made in factories. Like Pepsi.’

‘Oh, good grief, you young people! You don’t know anything, do you?’

‘No,’ says Cher, complacently. ‘We’re young, innit?’

She strides past Vesta, all legs and ankle bracelets. ‘D’you want a hand with that?’

‘No, love, I’m fine, it’s not heavy. You go ahead and put the kettle on.’

‘’kay,’ says Cher, and pulls the door open. Puts her foot on the top step, shouts in surprise and falls forwards into the dark. Vesta hears an ‘oof’ and the sound of tumbling. She runs to the doorway, grabs the frame and peers into the gloom. ‘Cher? Cher! Are you all right? What happened? Cher?’

She feels above the door for the light switch, clicks it on and puts her head into the stairwell. Cher is halfway down the stairs, hanging on to the banister at the point where it begins, one leg buckled beneath her, the other straight out down the steps, her flip-flop dangling from her big toe. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘That was close.’

‘Are you okay?’ Vesta suddenly feels nervous and tottery and old. She puts her bag down and works her way towards her with a hand on each wall.

Cher sits up, unfurls her leg and rubs her upper arm. ‘Ow.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I – there was something on the top step. I trod on it and it went right out from under me.’

Vesta reaches her and sits down beside her. ‘What on earth…? I didn’t leave anything on the stairs.’

Cher groans and gingerly tries her legs. Emits an inward hiss of breath as her right foot hits the carpet. I don’t want to wish anyone ill, thinks Vesta, but thank God it was her, not me. That would have been a broken hip and an ambulance, if it were me.

‘Are you okay? Anything broken?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ve fucked my ankle, but I don’t think it’s anything worse than that.’

‘Language, Cher,’ Vesta corrects automatically. She pulls herself up by the banister and follows the girl as she hops down to the hall.

Cher leans against the wall and switches on the light with her shoulder blade. Rubs at the carpet burn on her thigh. ‘So what the hell was it?’

Vesta looks up the oatmeal stair carpet. On the top step, there’s a nasty, wet-looking stain; black and brackish. ‘I don’t…’ Her eyes trace back down the stairs, look down at the floor beneath their feet. ‘Oh, God!’

There’s a rat resting up against her shoe. A rat the size of a Pomeranian, yellow incisors hanging from its open mouth, dark fur matted and oily, bald pink tail winding round and knotting itself in the pink viscera that hang from a bulging, flattened torso.

Cher follows her gaze, stiffens against the wall, pushing back against it as though she hopes it will open up and let her through. ‘Oh. Oh, God, oh no, oh…’

‘Well, I’ll be blowed. Where on earth did that come from?’ Vesta is simultaneously fascinated and repelled. The rat smells like her drains; old and foetid and long, long dead. Its eyes are milky-white. As she watches, a bluebottle crawls from the half-open mouth and bumbles away up the corridor towards the kitchen. ‘It looks like it’s been dead a while. It can’t have been lying there all this time. I would have noticed.’

‘I don’t care,’ moans Cher. ‘It stinks. It’s that bloody cat. He’s fetched it in. I knew I shouldn’t have adopted him.’

‘Psycho? No, it can’t be Psycho. That’s carrion, that is. He’s not a hyena. I don’t understand. How did it come to be here?’

Absently, Cher lifts up her sprained foot and looks at its underside. Claps a hand over her mouth and stares at Vesta, wide-eyed. Her sole is coated with blood and slime. The contents of the creature’s guts have smeared themselves up her leg as she fell, green and black and…

When she moves her hand, her words come out in a rush, strangled and small. ‘Oh, God, I’m gonna be sick.’

Vesta feels the skin on her neck crawl. ‘No! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare! Come on. Let’s get you to the bathroom.’

She grabs the girl by the arm and manhandles her up the passageway. Cher is gagging as she hops and her cheeks are filling. ‘Don’t you dare, Cher. Don’t you dare! If you throw up on my carpet, so help me, I’ll… I’ll…’

As they pass through the kitchen, she notices, to her surprise, that the outside door is open. She’s sure she remembers putting the bolt on before she went to the shops, but right now all she can think of is the hurricane that’s about to hit. She drags Cher into the bathroom, her own hand clamped over the one the girl has over her mouth, throws her down like a sack of potatoes over the toilet and feels a cold sweat of nausea break out on her own forehead as Cher’s lunch – a hamburger and fries by the look and smell – explodes into the pan. Oh, God, she thinks, there’s a rotten sewer rat squashed flat into my carpet. It looked like it had been run over by a truck and it’s in my carpet. I’m going to have to scrape it up.

Cher makes a noise like a wildebeest trapped in a crocodile swamp as Vesta rushes to the sink and adds the fug of cheesy croissant and milky coffee to the odours in the air. Heaves again at the sight of the solids caught in the drain cover. Runs the taps and splashes her face, then collapses on the floor, leaning against the bath.

‘Oh, God,’ Cher mutters. She wipes her face with a forearm, flushes the chain and crawls back to join Vesta. ‘Fuck,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says her friend, and lets the word that would have had her beaten within an inch of her life when she was Cher’s age slide pleasurably from her tongue. ‘Fuck.’

‘It’s all over my leg,’ says Cher.

‘I know. We’ll wash it off with the shower hose.’

‘That rat was rank.’

‘That’s what I love about you,’ says Vesta, ‘you’re so observant.’ And they begin to laugh.