The Killer Next Door

Chapter Forty-Four

His disappointment is almost painful. He’s taken her clothes off – the shapeless skirt, the lace-edge shirt, the modest undergarments – and found that it’s hopeless. The God Girl has clearly lost half her bodyweight at some point, and lost it fast. If he were to delve into her viscera, he suspects he’d find a gastric band, or one of those balloons they inflate inside the stomach. There’s very little fat on her, it’s true, but her skin looks like a church candle that’s been left burning all through Lent. Like an altar cloth thrown down in the vestry, waiting for the laundry bag.

She’s hopeless. Useless. Nothing he can do, no ministrations, will ever make her right. She’s just an ugly white sack of blubber, an insult to his dreams.

It’s not even worth preserving her, if all he’ll want to do at the end is throw her away. He stands over the bath and glares at her reproachfully. She’s going off, rapidly, her buttocks and the backs of her thighs black with congealed blood, her pupils gone white. And she’s really starting to smell. He’s emptied the supermarket of Febreze and scent blocks, and stuck duck tape over the airbricks to stop the smell circulating, but he knows it’s only a matter of time before the people downstairs start to wonder where it’s coming from. He has to do something with her, this much he knows, but he’s not wasting his skills and time on preserving an object so uncomely. Why on earth did you attract my attention, he thinks, if you were going to let me down like this? I’m glad I don’t know your name. I don’t want to remember you.

Her rigor has passed, and her forearm is flopped down the outside of the bath, the hand and fingertips blackening almost as he watches. He picks up the hand, lets it drop, watches the loose flaps of skin hanging down from her upper arm wobble horribly in the raw light from the bare bulb above their heads. Whatever I do, I’ll have to do it soon, he thinks. What a waste of time.

He has no experience of taking a fresh corpse apart, but he knows it’s going to be a lot harder than it was with Alice or her predecessors. Fresh, juicy cartilage will be harder to cut through, and it will be nigh on impossible to break up fresh bones with any tools he can reasonably bring into the flat.

‘Piss,’ he says, out loud. Turns to the basin and splashes cold water on his face, puts his specs back on and looks at himself in the mirror. Such a mild face, a lock of hair falling foppishly loose over his forehead, his chest and shoulders slightly pudgy under his open-necked shirt. No one, he thinks, would think that I have a dead girl in my bathroom. They wouldn’t think anything about me, most of them. They’d just look straight through me, not even notice I was there. Which is good, of course, if you’re going to be dropping severed limbs in litter bins. But God, what a hassle. Why can’t she just magically disappear?

He sighs and gets down on his knees with his carving knife. The first and obvious step is the same as it’s always been. Rationally, he needs to get rid of the messy inside parts, the bits that spread, before he can start to think about dividing up that flappy torso.

So close to her face, he is assailed by a horrible feeling of being watched by those eggshell eyes. He grabs a hand towel from one of the suction hooks on the side of the basin, and throws it over her face, to hide it. Then he bends forward and slices into the distending belly, coughs as a gust of fetid air rushes out. There’s no pleasure in this. Other times, he’s been carried through the disgust by the pleasure of experimentation and, in latter times, his pride in his work. This is just a nasty, demanding chore, like doing his taxes.