The Killer Next Door

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Vesta doesn’t go to a hotel. She can’t bear to not know what’s happening to her home, can’t leave Cher, can’t face the thought of not having her things around her. It’s a miserable evening spent moving as many of her belongings as aren’t soiled to the front room and proofing the door with blankets against the stench. But still the smell elbows its way through. In the toilet, the lavatory overflows with its backed-up load and the floor is an inch deep in filth. Even the bath has regurgitated, and lies half full with stagnant sludge. No point in trying to clear it up. While the drains are still blocked, any attempts to deal with the results will be rendered pointless the moment someone upstairs forgets themselves and flushes their cistern. It would be like cleaning the Augean stables. Literally.

She eats with Cher: feeds her Heinz tomato soup and a soft white bread roll, spoon by spoon, crumb by crumb, letting her suck her way to nutriment through swollen lips, then comes down to her stinky basement and crawls, exhausted, into the makeshift bed she’s made on the settee. She leaves the front window open, to try to get some clean air into the room, and falls, despite the unfamiliar sounds out in the street, into an uncomfortable doze some time before midnight.

She dreams that she’s up in Cher’s room and they have barricaded the door with the bed. Someone is trying to get in. The door handle rattles in its socket and fingernails scratch, scratch, scratch at the panels. And they can hear breathing. Breathing, breathing, breathing.

And then, in the dark, something tells her that the sounds are real.

Wakefulness runs through her like cold water. She’s lying on her back, knees drawn up under her blanket, scanning the night with her fading ears. She looks around, wildly, can’t place where she is for a moment before she remembers what has happened.

It’s all right, she thinks, and settles back against the cushion. Just a sound in the street and a silly dream, someone passing by. You’re not used to it, you’ve been sleeping in the same bedroom for so long you’re bound to -

A sound from the back of the flat. Unmistakable. The sound of her back door opening.

No. No, no, no. It’s just your mind. Just -

A floorboard creaks in the kitchen. Someone is coming in.

Vesta’s body defaults into foetal position on the cushions. She pulls the blanket uselessly over her face, as though it will protect her. Oh, no. Oh, no, no. What do I do? I can’t get out. He’s in there between the outside and me. I’m old and stiff. If I try to run up the stairs, he’ll catch me while I’m still trying to get the door unlocked…

Slowly, slowly, she works her way off the couch and creeps to the door. Maybe, at least, I can hold it shut. If he comes this way I’ll sit against it, push with all my weight, and maybe he won’t be able to…

She presses an ear against the door, holds her breath. She’s wearing nothing but a nightie, her dressing gown still hanging on the back of the bedroom door, her clothes lost in the darkness. Maybe if I turn the light on, make a noise? Maybe he’ll go away, if he knows I’m here?

And maybe he’ll come looking for me.

He’s in the kitchen, but the lights are off. She’s emptied the lower cupboards, piled pans and serving dishes and cake tins on the surfaces in case the flood should worsen. It’s crowded and chaotic in there, hard to navigate, especially in the dark. She hears some extremity of him catch something, hears it fall to the floor with a metallic clatter that seems to go on for ever and ever.

Silence. Oh, God, he’s listening.

Vesta freezes. Holds her breath, hears the pulse race in her ears. Shut up, shut up. I can’t hear anything. I don’t know where he is.

In the house, nothing moves. She doesn’t even know if Collette is in, but there’s no sound from upstairs. From the window a slight draught of air suggests that it’s late. There’s no one to hear me, she thinks. No one’s awake. Oh, God, why did I put those bars on the window? I thought they would keep people out. I never thought that they would keep me in.

The intruder moves again, more boldly. He must have decided that no one has heard him. He thinks no one’s going to come. Just like that time before. No one came then. Why would they now?

He’s moving away, towards the back of the house.

What’s he doing? There’s only the bathroom back there. There’s nothing there.

And once he’s found that out, he’ll come this way.

Suddenly, as the first wave of panic dies back, she feels a surge of defiance. Hold on, she thinks. This is my home. It’s the same man who broke in before. Come back for more. Come back to get more stuff off the little old lady. From my house.

Well, he’s not bloody going to. If he thinks he can just carry on trying to scare me, he can damn well think again. My mum and dad went through the Blitz in this house. I lived here when it was nothing but junkies and dealers up this way, when half the houses were squats – and no one dared try coming in here. What’s happened to you, Vesta? Where’s your backbone?

She casts about for a weapon with which to defend herself. The fire irons, bright polished brass, still live by the fireplace even though it was converted to gas in the 1960s. I’ll give the bugger a clout, she thinks, and send him on his way. Use the same poker he used to smash my mother’s statues with. That’s what I’ll do. There’re enough victim women in this house without me adding to it. I’ll give him a thick ear and a nasty fright, and he won’t dare try it again.

But despite her defiant thoughts, she lacks the courage to cross the room and leave the door unguarded. She has visions of him coming through as she bends in to the fireplace, of being on her before she can straighten up. She leans against the door and scans the stuff she’s brought through, looking for something closer to hand. Her eyes fall on the iron, sitting now on the gateleg table, heavy, old-fashioned, perfect.

She snatches it up, wraps the flex round her hand and listens again at the door. Yes, he’s still out back, in the bathroom. She can hear him moving about in there, a clink of metal on metal that she cannot place. She comes out into the sweaty corridor, moves stealthily up towards him.

It stinks, now the doors are open. Forty degrees of heat and standing sewage don’t make happy bedfellows. She’d be throwing up if the intervening hours hadn’t hardened her stomach. I bloody hate you, Roy Preece, she thinks. First thing tomorrow, if the drain people aren’t here by eight o’clock, I’m going straight round to yours and I’m going to hammer your door down till you bloody well come here and fix it.

More strange sounds. She sees now that he has a torch, and that he’s rested it on the sink to light whatever it is he is doing in the back of the room. All there is there is the old water heater, big and chunky and forty years old, hanging off the outside wall so its exhaust pipe has somewhere to vent. What’s he doing? What on earth is he doing?

Vesta creeps barefoot into the kitchen, recoils at the feel of greasy muck beneath her soles. She treads on something semi-solid, has to bite back a moan of disgust as it squidges up between her toes. It’s slippery underfoot, like wearing leather soles on ice. Now that she’s near him, can see the vague, gigantic shape of him in the darkness, she feels less certain. Grips the handle of the iron tighter and holds it in front of herself like a shield. From the dim light that illuminates the room, she can see that the man is huge: that he fills the space as though it were a cupboard. He’s got a bag of stuff at his feet, and something that looks like a wrench in his hand. And here I am, she thinks, in nothing but a nightie, thinking I’m going to see him off.

For a moment, she considers turning back. I could still make it, if I’m quiet, she thinks. Go out through that open kitchen door and nip out through the garden. Go round the front and knock up the others and… and get them to help. God’s sake, Vesta, you’re sixty-nine, not thirty-nine.

Then he turns to get something from his bag, and catches sight of the white cotton that covers her thighs.

Time slows to a crawl. Vesta feels herself leave her body for a moment, sees herself from behind, a frail elderly woman quailing as the giant unfurls itself in the gloom. Sees herself dying, here among the sewage, being found tomorrow morning, grey and gone and rotting.

She lunges, swings the iron at the end of her arm like a mace, and feels it connect. Hears an ‘oof’ from the burglar and is surprised by how suddenly her forward motion is halted by the solidness of his skull.

Her feet go out from under her. She flies through the air like a cartoon character, arms flailing, and hits the back of her head.

The world goes black.