The Killer Next Door

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Collette wakes to the sound of wailing. A woman’s voice, high with panic, calling, ‘No! No! Oh, God, no, no, no, wake up! Oh, God, wake up! Help! Please! Somebody help me!’

Vesta. She’s out of her bed in her top and leggings – her escape clothes – before she is really awake. She has to stop for a second and rest a hand against the wall as the blood rushes to her head and Hossein’s footsteps thunder across her ceiling. Then she slips her feet into her Keds and meets him at the bottom of the stairs.

Hossein’s face is still slack with sleep, his black hair sticking up in tufts. ‘What’s going on?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it Vesta?’

‘I think so.’

‘I heard someone shouting. Is everyone okay?’

They jump. Thomas has followed Hossein down the stairs so silently that neither of them had known he was there. He looks exactly as he always looks – checked lawn shirt, tan slacks, slightly tinted specs – as though he merely goes into suspended animation at night rather than sleeping. ‘Is someone hurt?’

Hossein frowns and says something in Farsi. Strides past him and bangs on Vesta’s door with the flat of his hand. ‘Vesta? Are you okay? Vesta?’

Whether she’s okay or not, she doesn’t hear him. Just keens into the night, ‘Oh, God, oh somebody help me! Wake up! Wake up! I can’t lift him! Wake up!’

Collette looks over her shoulder, expects the elusive Gerard Bright to put his head out of the door and stare at them with those red-rimmed eyes of his. But the door stays closed. The phone is off the hook, she notices, the receiver dangling by its cord. Funny, she thinks. How did that happen?

They stare at each other in the dimness of the hallway. Thomas tries the door handle, impotently, as though he thinks it will have magically become one that turns. ‘Back door?’

Hossein shakes his head. ‘It will be worse. I reinforced the frame after the burglary.’

He raises his hand and bangs again. ‘Vesta!’ Launches himself bodily at the door and bounces off it, clutching his shoulder. Tries again.

‘Has anybody got a key?’ asks Thomas.

Hossein gives him the sort of wide-eyed head waggle you see in nightclubs just before trouble kicks off. ‘Has anybody got a key to yours?’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ says Collette. She pushes past Thomas, looks at the door, then stands on one foot and kicks out at the lock with the other. Hossein hears something splinter. Collette kicks again.

She’s half my size, thinks Hossein. This is shaming. ‘Hold on,’ he says, and takes her place. Copies her with his big bare foot, all his strength behind him. The lock gives under his third kick, and the door flies back and bangs against the wall.

Collette is past him and halfway down the stairs before he’s regained his balance. ‘Vesta?’ she calls. ‘Vesta, where are you?’

Hossein pauses to switch on the light. Collette is at the bottom of the stairs, looking wildly about her. The smell hits them like a steam train. Faeces and urine and… something dead. Sweet and dead, like it’s been that way a while. Hossein walks past her and she follows him towards the back of the house, where Vesta’s voice comes from.

She’s in the bathroom, crumpled on the floor, with what looks like a steam iron sticking out obscenely from between her thighs. She’s brown and green with filth, her hair matted down with something unspeakable. Her eyes plead wildly. ‘Help me,’ she says again. ‘Oh, God, I can’t move him. He’s too heavy. I can’t – he’ll drown.’

Behind her, in the gloom of the unlit bathroom, the top of a pair of gigantic buttocks moons at them over the waistband of a pair of drooping sweat pants. The owner is on his knees, bent forward in prayer position, face down in the overflowing toilet pan. He isn’t moving.

‘I hit him,’ sobs Vesta. ‘I hit him! I didn’t know it was him. How could I know it was him? It’s the middle of the night. What’s he doing here? He shouldn’t be here! And then I slipped. In this… this… it’s… slippy, and I banged my head, and when I came round, he was… oh, God, I’ve killed him! I tried to get him out. I tried. But I can’t shift him. Oh, God, help him! Somebody! Help him!’

‘Shit,’ says Hossein.

Never a truer word. ‘You can say that again,’ says Collette.

Vesta tugs hopelessly at the back of the man’s marquee of a T-shirt. It stretches and compresses the flesh within so that the dimpled buttocks seem to swell and grow. The body bumps slightly and the head bobs in the toilet pan.

‘Is that the Landlord?’ asks Collette.

‘I think so,’ says Thomas. ‘It looks like him.’

They’ve all followed that backside up a set of stairs at some point in their lives. It’s not a memory you easily forget.

‘What’s he doing here?’ asks Thomas.

Vesta looks up at them in astonishment. Tears have etched pink streaks through her green-brown facemask and her eyes shine white in the half-light. ‘Don’t just… Help me, for God’s sake!’

Thomas looks at Hossein, who looks at Collette. Collette looks back at Thomas and folds her arms across her body. Jigs uneasily from foot to foot. There’s no way she wants to touch him. What if someone decides he needs mouth-to-mouth?

‘How long has he been like that?’ asks Thomas, echoing her thoughts.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know!’

‘Well, how long were you out for?’

Vesta suddenly shows a flash of her old self. Rolls her eyes and tuts. ‘Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t have been unconscious, would I?’

‘Sorry,’ says Thomas. ‘It’s just – well, it makes a difference. To, you know, whether it’s worth…’

The man in the toilet shows no signs of stirring. His face is buried to the ears in effluent and his arms are slack, his fingers trailing across the lino like sausages. The pants have ridden down in the front and Collette can glimpse an apron of fat that extends halfway down his thighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘but what do you expect us to do?’

‘Get him out. Help him – something.’

‘I think he’s dead already,’ says Hossein, succinctly.

‘We should get him out, though.’ Collette looks at him, pleadingly. When I say we, she thinks, I mean you men. I’m all for the gender division of labour, in this instance. ‘We should. In case.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ asks Hossein. ‘It’s two in the morning.’

‘Drowning,’ says Vesta. ‘Can we talk about this later?’

‘Yes,’ says Hossein. Takes a deep breath and offers her a hand to get up off the floor. She slips, twice, on her bare soles as she rises; props herself against the wall. In her nightie she looks small and frail, that strange warrior queen quality to her features stripped away, and every second of her almost-seventy years is etched across her face. Hossein puts his fists on his hips and stares at the body. It really is huge. It looks like a narwhal has climbed out through the drains and fainted.

‘What the fook’s going on here?’ says a voice. Cher, black eye and split lip, stands in the kitchen in leggings and a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt, her forehead creased in confusion, a hand on the door-jamb propping her up as she holds her injured ankle off the floor.

Vesta starts to weep. ‘I thought it was a burglar. How was I to know it was him? What was he doing here at this time of night?’

Collette overcomes her horror of the dirt and goes over to put an arm round Vesta’s shoulders. Under her nightie, she’s all skin and bone, and shivering as though the temperature has suddenly dropped. Poor Vesta, she thinks, I can’t imagine how this must feel.

‘I don’t know,’ says Hossein, and nudges the tool bag with his foot. The bottom cover of the water heater has been removed, and propped in the bath. ‘But I don’t think it was a social call.’

‘He’s all over shite,’ says Cher.

‘Thanks for pointing that out,’ says Hossein.

‘How did he end up like that?’

‘I hit him with a steam iron,’ says Vesta. ‘I thought he was a burglar.’

‘C’mon,’ says Thomas. ‘We have to get him out.’

Hossein pulls a face that says that he would rather be back in Evin prison than here, and steps forward to give him a hand. Gingerly, they each hook a hand into an armpit, and heave. The liquid in the toilet pan slurps, sucks like quicksand, then lets go with a sulphurous belch. The Landlord flips free, lurches out of their grip and lands face up in the doorway.

His eyes and mouth are open and his skin is blue.

‘Oh, God,’ says Cher. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’

They gather round the corpse in silence. He lies propped against the wall tiles, and drips. Sewage runs slowly from his mouth and nose; green-brown drool, like a zombie’s. He’s lost his spectacles. They must be down there in the toilet bowl, but no one volunteers to retrieve them. The fact that his eyes have been open since they pulled him out makes it clear that he will have no further use for them.

‘I guess there’s no point in trying CPR, then,’ says Collette.

‘No,’ says Thomas. ‘I’d say he’s been dead for a while. You must’ve been out for a bit, Vesta. Do you feel okay?’

‘How do you think I feel?’

Cher stands by the cooker and absently fingers the lump on her own skull. ‘What do we do now?’ she asks.