The Killer Next Door

Chapter Thirty

The silence seems to last for hours. Five people, gathered round a corpse, and suddenly no one wants to meet anyone’s eye. Even Vesta hangs her head. She feels sick: from the bang on the head, from the shock, from the wallowing in stuff that should be safely underground, from the sudden lurching change to her world. She rubs at her arms and sees that all it does is spread the slime. Grabs the kitchen paper and wipes hopelessly at her face. It will never come off. It’s her Lady Macbeth stain.

She looks under her lashes at the others. Collette has moved away, and is gnawing at a hangnail by the cooker. Probably shouldn’t be doing that, thinks Vesta, but doesn’t point it out. Hossein looks pensive in his red T-shirt, his old-fashioned striped pyjama bottoms with the cord tie. Cher huddles by the sink, looking terrified. Thomas stands in the doorway looking… what? Goodness me, she thinks, amazed. He looks intrigued. As if this is some sort of psychology experiment and he’s running it.

They’re going to put me in prison. I’ve killed someone and I’m going to jail. So this is how it ends: he always wanted me out of here and now he’s got his wish. He’ll be sick as a dog that he never got to benefit.

She looks round her devastated home. Mum would turn in her grave. She was always so houseproud, and I’ve tried my best to keep it the way she’d like it, always felt bad that I lacked her application and her eye, but now look. It’s all completely spoiled. She would cry and cry, if she knew. Every day, she washed these floors. She couldn’t abide dirt, and God knows the world was dirtier when I was a child than it is now.

Thomas speaks. ‘Do you want to call an ambulance?’

‘Don’t think that’ll do much good,’ says Cher. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, but there are ways that things are done,’ he says, ‘and that would be the normal way.’

Hossein leaves the room and comes back a few seconds later with Vesta’s old quilted dressing gown. He holds it out for her and she shrugs herself into it distractedly, stands by the Landlord’s swollen feet and hugs the collar round her neck. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says again. ‘I don’t. I didn’t mean to kill him.’

‘I’m sure they’ll understand that,’ says Collette. ‘It was an accident. How were you to know he’d let himself into your flat in the middle of the night?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Thomas. ‘With that great big dent in his head.’

Vesta bursts into tears. She’s been numb with shock for the past few minutes, but now emotion floods her, chills her. ‘I can’t! I can’t go to prison. I didn’t know… he was creeping around in my bathroom. He could have been anybody.’

‘You should be okay,’ says Thomas. ‘People do get sent to prison, but it’s usually for guns…’

‘You’re not helping much, Thomas,’ says Hossein.

‘I’m just telling the truth,’ he says. ‘We need to be realistic, here.’

She sees herself in a grey uniform, carrying a divided tray of textureless taupe foodstuffs through a room full of glaring women. Feels cinderblock walls close in, suffocates in the confines of a bunk bed. ‘I can’t. I just can’t go to prison. I’d die in prison. I’ve never been in trouble in my life.’

Collette speaks up. ‘And they’ll want to question all of us.’

The room falls quiet again.

Oh, God, thinks Vesta. What have I done?

‘Fuck,’ says Cher. ‘Then I’m screwed.’

Thomas’s curious expression deepens. ‘Why would that be, Cher?’

‘’Cause I’m only fifteen, you stupid dick,’ she snaps.

‘Language, Cher,’ says Vesta automatically, without the help of her brain.

Collette’s mouth falls open.

‘You’re fifteen?’

‘Are you thick, as well?’

Collette’s head is full of bees. She can barely hear her neighbours over the sound of buzzing. I have to get out of here, she thinks. There’s going to be police swarming all over the place, and once there’s been police, sure as night follows day there’s going to be press, especially with the way he’s died. It’s the sort of story the papers eat for breakfast. If the police don’t put two and two together, it’s only a matter of days before Tony does. Just one careless moment, a photographer waiting outside when I come out to put the bins out, and I’m toast. But what do I do? What do I do about Janine? I can’t leave London now. I can’t leave her. She’s dying. I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life…

‘But…’ she says, the protest only very loosely applied to Cher. The girl takes it as a reaction to her revelation, and glares at her. Of course she’s fifteen, thinks Collette. An attitude like that, she couldn’t be anything else. Why on earth didn’t I see it?

‘Ever been in a care home?’ asks Cher.

‘I… well, yes, as it goes.’

‘Well, then,’ Cher begins, then looks annoyed, as though Collette has stolen her thunder. She hobbles away and fishes a pack of Marlboro from the back of her leggings. Stands in the garden door and lights one with the little Bic tucked beneath the cellophane. ‘And the first person who tells me I’m too young to smoke gets this in their eye,’ she says. Her hand is trembling.

‘Roy Preece,’ says Thomas, gazing down at the Landlord. ‘What d’you suppose he was doing?’

‘He wanted me out,’ says Vesta. ‘He’s been trying to get me out for years.’

‘Well, it looks to me as if he was doing something with your boiler,’ says Thomas.

‘At two in the morning?’

‘I didn’t say he was doing anything good, did I?’

‘He thought I was wasn’t here,’ says Vesta. ‘That’s it! I told him I was going to stay in a hotel because of the drains. This afternoon. He must’ve thought I wasn’t going to be here. Like with the burglary. And that time when my garden got vandalised. He knew I was away, every time.’

Hossein frowns and walks away into the bathroom. They stand in silence and listen to him moving things around, the clang of metal on enamel as he shifts the boiler cover.

‘I can’t be here,’ says Collette. ‘If there’s going to be police. I’ll have to go, tonight. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Vesta, but I have to get out of here. I’d help, you know I’d help, but…’

‘I know. I understand.’ Despite her dirty face, the old dressing gown and the tangled hair, Vesta, with her noble bone structure, looks suddenly dignified in the wreck of her kitchen. She stands up straight and pulls her collar tight, stares off into the distance. Resigned, thinks Collette. She looks resigned. Like she’s given up already. ‘It’s my mess to sort out. It’s wrong to drag any of you into it.’

‘We’re in it already,’ says Thomas. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she says, and stops to bite back a surge of tears. ‘Yes, I know that, and I’m sorry.’

Thomas sighs, and comes over to stand by her. He rubs her arm, awkwardly. He doesn’t look as if the gesture comes naturally to him. He looks, thinks Collette, like someone who’s acting out sympathy based on things they’ve seen on telly. I hope he doesn’t hug her. She might scream. ‘Poor Vesta,’ he says. ‘This wasn’t your fault, you know.’

‘I thought he was a burglar,’ Vesta says, again. The phrase is coming automatically now, as though she’s rehearsing her statement.

‘Does he have any family?’ Thomas asks, gently.

She shakes her head. ‘No. Three sisters, there were, and they managed to produce one child between them. I suppose it explains a lot, really, if you think about it. Why he was like he was. Terribly spoilt, when he was a child. Always stuffing his face with chocolate. God knows how much pocket money he got; he always had a comic or a gadget or some trendy toy when you saw him. But his mum wouldn’t let him play with the other kids. She thought they were dirty so I don’t think he had any friends. He’d come here after school and hit a ball round the garden with his cricket bat, all by himself. Always smashing my herbaceous border. His aunties lived here, back then, in the upstairs. Never saw them have a visitor, either, apart from Roy and his mother. It’s not normal, is it?’

No one seems to know what to say to this. They murmur in agreement. As an epitaph, it’s not much, thinks Collette. Roy Preece: he ate a lot of chocolate and read the Beano. I wonder what mine will be? I wonder if I’ll get an epitaph at all? You tend to only get an epitaph if there’s a body to bury.

Hossein appears in the doorway. ‘Vesta? Do you recognise this?’

He holds out a man’s T-shirt, white-gone-grey and marked with grease. Vesta looks at it as though it’s a hundred yards away, then shakes her head.

‘Only it was in the…’ He loses his vocabulary, blinks and pulls a face as he tries to find the word, ‘… hole. You know. In the wall. Sort of tubey thing that lets the gas out.’

‘The vent?’ asks Collette.

‘Yes. The vent.’

‘Of the boiler?’ asks Thomas.

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want to do that,’ Thomas says to Vesta, who’s slow on the uptake. ‘Might as well lock yourself in the garage with the car engine running.’

‘I want a drink,’ says Vesta, and bursts into tears.