The Killer Next Door

Chapter Forty-Three

And now she’s lost, as she knew she would be.

She wakes to the sound of the front door slamming, finds herself in a tumble of limbs and smells his beautiful skin, and wants to cry. I can’t. Oh, no, this can’t have happened. Not now. Before, or never – but not now.

His arms are wrapped round her, one knee between her thighs. Even in the night, in their sleep, they have gravitated towards each other when the heat should have driven them apart. And she feels the bliss of his arm around her shoulder and feels his breath against her hot cheek, and she wants to howl at the moon, to rail at the fates. She’s stiff and pleasurably sore from the zeal of their fucking, the hands, tongues, lips, and skin, the words whispered, the laughing, the fingers intertwined, his beautiful, miraculous cock so hard and ardent, and she wants to weep.

I can’t be with you, Hossein. I can’t.

She picks up his hand and kisses the palm, and he opens his eyes. Smiles sleepily at her, his eyes creasing, and presses his lips against her cheek. Rolls over on to her, and her body gives and opens up to him, because she never, she never knew it could be like this. She’s not lived in a world where sex and love went hand in hand. And now he’s here and he’s beautiful and he’s perfect, her reward and her salvation – and she can’t be with him.

He strokes her hair back from her face and lets out a long, contented sigh. Pressed up against him, she can feel his cock begin to stir, and her body heating up in response. ‘What time is it?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know.’ She turns her head to look for her phone, and he stops her, holds her wrist against the pillow and melts her with his kisses. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘I don’t really care.’

Just once more, she thinks. Just once more before I tell him: something to remember, something to carry into my solitary old age. Can you live a lifetime on a single memory? I’ve never fucked someone before where I felt he even noticed, once he got going, that it was me, not someone else, in the room.

She frees her wrist and buries her fingers in his hair, and he butts against her palm like an attention-seeking cat. Kisses her wrist, enters her and laughs at the pleasure rush. ‘Oh, God, that’s the best feeling,’ he says.

‘I know,’ she gasps, and her head fills with liquid gold.

Their other basic needs drive them from the bed eventually. They both want to wash, and she’s pleased and relieved that he doesn’t suggest that they share a bathroom. She’s always been funny about that. Men who wanted to come in when she was naked and vulnerable in the tub: it always seemed like some deliberate gesture of disrespect, some statement of ownership. Instead, Hossein walks up the corridor with her, kisses her a dozen times at the foot of the stairs, strokes her face and promises to return. She goes into the scruffy bathroom, luxuriates in the hot water from the shower hose and thinks about the night before.

She feels strangely detached from the rest of the world, aware of her skin and her pulse and the heat between her thighs in a way she has no recollection of experiencing before. So this is what the fuss is about, she thinks. I thought I was experienced, but all I was was only someone who’d fucked a lot. She wants to run a long, warm bath and reflect on what’s passed between them, but she doesn’t want to miss it when he comes back, doesn’t want to miss a moment. She runs a hand over her throat where he kissed her, and closes her eyes. Oh, God, Hossein. Why did it have to happen now?

Beyond the door, she hears footsteps approach. Someone tries the bathroom door, and she tenses. She’s seeing a lurker round every corner, now. Knows she won’t feel safe in London again. The footsteps turn and go away, and a door closes. Just Gerard Bright, wanting a leak. Not everyone who tries a door handle wants to do you harm. She heaves herself from the water and wraps herself in Nikki’s old pink towel.

Back in her room, she pulls the rumpled bed back together, puts on eggs to hard boil. She doesn’t have much food – just the eggs and some bread and cheese, a few ripe plums. For the first time, she digs through the sorry collection of previous tenants’ leavings and tries to put together some poor show of hospitality. She has three plates, a couple of bowls, not much else. But she lays her wares out in what she can find and, after thinking for a moment, lays out the bedspread on the floor and puts them there, like a picnic.

He knocks, respectfully, on the door, and she rushes to let him in. He’s clean and shaved, his black hair slicked back and smelling of shampoo, his breath of toothpaste. He smiles at her, and she feels a strange liquid sensation in her guts. Suddenly, she feels shy in front of this man who’s touched every inch of her, who’s been so far inside her she thought they would actually combine. She lets him in and crosses the room in front of him, looking at the floor. Then he comes to her and puts his arms round her, kisses her face, her eyelids, her mouth, and she feels safe, like a child.

‘I brought some things,’ he says. ‘It’s not much, but…’

He hands her a cotton shopping bag with some strange script across the front. Farsi, she assumes, though it could be Arabic for all she knows. Inside are pistachios, halwa, a jar of what looks like home-made amba, little pots of sumac and black paprika, and a container of olives. She smiles at the gift.

‘So funny,’ she says. ‘You say it’s not much, but they’d be paying a score for this lot in Clapham. I can’t believe you’ve got amba, just, you know, in your room.’

‘You know amba?’

‘Of course. I’ve been a few places in the last few years.’

‘Where did you have it?’

‘Israel,’ she tells him.

Hossein hisses in through this teeth, then laughs. ‘I didn’t know they had amba in the Great Satan.’

She looks at him suspiciously for a moment, then sees that he is joking. ‘Well, I didn’t know your lot were so big on Iraqi condiments myself.’

‘You have a point,’ he says, and sits down cross-legged on the bedspread. She sits beside him, so she can press her upper arm against his, so she doesn’t have to look full in his face. She’s not ready for that. Not while she’s longing to feel his hand caressing her breasts.

He taps an egg on the side of a bowl, rolls it between his fingers and peels. She takes a small handful of nuts and cracks them open, one by one. They’re wonderfully fresh, sweet and salty on her tongue. I can’t let this carry on, she thinks. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I have to tell him.

‘Hossein?’

She closes her eyes for a moment and feels a wrench of sadness.

‘We can’t do this.’

He sighs and puts his egg down, uneaten. ‘I knew you were going to say that.’

‘But you understand, don’t you? You must see that…’

‘Yeah, I see. But that doesn’t mean I think you’re right.’

‘I can’t stay.’

He rubs his face like a kid, looks like he’s shut his finger in a door.

‘You should, Collette,’ he says. ‘You really should.’

‘Not after yesterday. Come on. You must be able to see that. It’s not safe. It’s just not safe.’

‘He doesn’t know where you are, Collette. We lost him. Don’t you remember?’

‘For now. But look, he’s got so close, I…’

‘Not so close. He was at the home. He must have been. We just weren’t looking. I’m sorry. I should have been a better bodyguard.’

‘It’s not you. It’s not your fault. But you don’t understand. Once they’ve got my scent, it’s only a matter of time. They found me in Paris, and Barca, and Tunis, and Prague… I’m so stupid. I should never have come back.’

‘But what about your mother?’ he asks. ‘Really, Collette. You’re going to leave now?’

A tear forces itself from the corner of her eye and runs down the side of her nose. She dashes it away, impatiently. ‘She doesn’t even know me.’

And now she’s crying and she can’t stop. Puts her hand across her mouth and looks away from him, and is grateful that he has the sense not to touch her. She doesn’t want sympathy. She wants gone.

‘I think about it, sometimes,’ he says. ‘Dying by myself. It’s the sort of thing you do think about, in a foreign country.’

‘I know,’ says Collette. ‘But most people do, you know, in the end. All the widows and the people by themselves, all the people who have accidents or end up in hospital before anyone can get to them.’

‘I was married, you know.’

She throws him a look over her shoulder. ‘No. No, I didn’t.’

‘Roshana.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I think she died. I assume she died. She went out one day and never came back. That’s what happens. One day she was with me, and the next she was gone.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘The awful thing is, I hope she was alone. Wherever she was. Because if she wasn’t, it’s probably worse.’

Now he looks away, and toys with the fringing on the edge of the bedspread, his mouth turned down and his eyes unfocused. That’s the thing, she thinks. I know we feel so close, so loved-up right now, but we don’t know each other. We know nothing about each other. Not really.

‘But I wish every day I had been with her,’ he says, eventually. ‘She was – for a long time I felt like the lights had been turned out.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.

‘And that’s not your fault,’ he says. ‘But what I’m saying – I don’t know what I’m saying, Collette. Just that it’s a terrible thing, to die alone.’

‘I’d rather die alone later than die now.’

He puts an olive between his beautiful lips and chews contemplatively. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘It’s not like I haven’t been there myself. Where do you think you’ll go?’

She shakes her head. ‘I hear Norway’s nice at this time of year.’

‘Bloody dark in the winter, though.’

She laughs. He finally reaches out and caresses the back of her neck. ‘Last night was…’ he says.

‘Oh, don’t,’ she says. ‘Oh, God, it’s not like I want to go.’

‘I know,’ he says, and puts his face close to hers. ‘And in another world, you know? I get it. Me too. I understand.’

His skin smells of cleanness and sandalwood. She looks down at his lips, half open, ready to kiss her, looks up at the golden eyes and the careworn lines beginning to settle around them. I think this is a good man, she thinks. I think the universe is having a laugh with me, showing me that there is such a thing.

‘But not today,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow I’ll help you, if you really mean to leave. And not tonight.’

‘No,’ she says, and takes his face in her hands. Kneels in front of him like Mary Magdalene. Kisses his mouth, breathes in the wonder of him.