Five Stories High

by Jonathan Oliver

  Most of the mess that’s there in the kitchen is on the doors. I have to use two different chemicals to remove the blood, and I also took them off so that I could clean inside the hinges.

  I put my music on, finished the doors and started to clean the fridge. Then I heard Karen call out to me.

  “Milosz,” she said. “Come and see this.”

  I went into the bedroom. The bed was bare, just a mattress, and there were no curtains. There were many different wallpapers on the wall, and they were smeared in a rainbow of old blood.

  I asked Karen what she wanted me to look at. She had already filled three large Hazmat boxes with things that would be incinerated.

  She pointed to the wall next to the window. The wallpaper had lumps in it – no, I mean under it. Very small lumps that are not easy to see at first, which I think is why the police did not find them. Part of the paper was falling off the wall. Karen said that as she was washing it down, the paper started to come away. There were things dried under there.

  “What is that?” Karen asked.

  We got very close to it. I used my finger to touch it.

  “Skin,” I said to her. “It’s skin.”

  The Juror

  I HAD A mate who was on a jury once, and she said it was as boring as shit, so when I was called up, that’s what I thought it was going to be like. Boring. I wasn’t working at the time, and my mum said, “You may as well do it, Chelsea, they pay you for it, don’t they?”

  She couldn’t believe it when I told her what case it was. I’d been working in Ibiza when the story was all over the papers so I didn’t know as much as everyone else, which is why they wanted me on the jury. They would’ve had a right problem finding anyone in the UK who didn’t know all about it. Mum said the story was everywhere, and almost everyone had an opinion about it. There were those who were saying he was the abusive one and that he’d been trying to con The Butcher out of her money. Then there were men’s rights groups who were saying that she’d been psychological abusing him for months and that she’d snapped. But it was what she’d done to the body that everyone was talking about.

  Court isn’t like it is on the telly. The one we were in was smaller and shabbier than you’d expect and smelled like feet. And they wouldn’t let the press in as the judge – a woman – said she didn’t want them taking the piss and turning it all into a circus.

  First time I saw Malika, I couldn’t believe she actually done it. She was small and thin, and looked really old. I thought, She looks like someone’s mum.

  Yeah, they showed us pictures of what she done to him. We were each given a file with the photos of the crime scene in it. I remember having to wipe the cover of mine on my jeans as my palms were sweating that bad. They said a lot of the older injuries on his body could have been self-inflicted, but the bloke who was for the Crown said there was enough reasonable doubt about that. And if he was cutting himself and that, why didn’t she tell someone or get him to go and see a psychiatrist or something? It looked weird, like she was trying to hide it. Suspicious.

  They said we could have counselling afterwards, and quite a lot of them who were on the jury with me needed it. I tried to pretend I was just looking at something that wasn’t real, like a horror movie. No one was like, sick or anything, well not until we got to the part where she’d been sticking bits of him to the walls. They only found out about that when the crime scene cleaners come in. The forensics missed it and the bloke from the defence tried to make a big deal of this, saying it proved that the cops were incompetent.

  Robin had some history with crime, but just shoplifting when he was like a kid, and that’s normal, isn’t it? He was never violent they said, but I thought it was weird that she was his first real girlfriend. They spoke to the people he worked with and all the people who went to the gym, and on and on it went and they all said the same thing, that he was like this really quiet and gentle bloke who wouldn’t hurt a fly and that his behaviour changed when he met her.

  It was her ex-husband who swung it for most of us. He said she was always trying to control him, make him do what she wanted. Said they had lots of fights which caused him ‘emotional distress’. Then there were lots of psychologists who droned on and on talking about abuse. It wasn’t hard to follow, but you could see that by then most of us had made up our minds.

  After three weeks, when all of us were getting tired, they said we were going for an outing to go see the flat for ourselves. The defence bloke kept trying to block it, but I wanted to go. We’d seen the photographs and the floor plans and that, but it’s not the same as seeing something in person, is it?

  The house was ginormous, in a really posh area. Malik, the guy who’d offered to be the foreman, said some of the cars parked on the street were worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

  We all filed in, up the stairs, and were shown straight into the lounge. The blood had gone, and the furniture was lying around in all funny angles after the cleaners had finished with it, but you could tell it was all done in different styles, and that someone had started ripping the wallpaper off the walls there. The dining room was painted four different colours, and some of the paint was splattered on the ceiling. It was like her barrister said – Robin couldn’t make his mind up what style he wanted to do, so it was a real mish-mash. Malik said it gave him a headache. The kitchen was the same, half red, and half white. And that room really smelled of bleach. We were all scared to go in the bedroom, although some of the blokes on the jury kept making jokes to take their minds off it, but really, that room wasn’t too bad. It was the bathroom that gave me the creeps. The bath wasn’t plumbed in, and there was a new toilet sitting on its side in the shower, waiting to be installed. “How did they wash in here?” I remember asking Malik. The Butcher’s barrister had told us that Robin was going mental, and like I said, we’d seen the pictures, but being there in real-life really brought it home to you.

  Nicola, one of the older ladies, starting having trouble breathing and had to be taken out.

  I used to like horror movies – I don’t now – and just before we left I felt just like you do while you’re watching a series and waiting for the zombies to attack or whatever. Tense, your heart beating too fast. Only this was real fear.

  I didn’t like it in there. Not at all. There was something wrong with the place. Houses have vibes, don’t they? When I was a kid, I used to stay over at my friend Amanda’s house, but I never liked being there. I always slept badly, and in the end I asked my mum to make excuses for me so that I wouldn’t have to go. I found out years later that Amanda’s uncle had been messing with her, abusing her, you know. My mum turned white when I told her, “That could’ve been you, Chelsea,” she said. But what I’m saying is that I knew there wasn’t something right about Amanda’s house. And this one was the same. Yeah, I know part of it was because I knew what went on in there.

  She’s saying it was haunted now, isn’t she? When I read about that, I was like, yeah. Maybe she’s got a point.

  But there was something else that really stuck in my mind about the trial. We were shown the receipts for the stuff he’d bought when he was doing up the flat. Bloody hell. Thousands and thousands of pounds worth of stuff. A lamp, and I mean a small lamp – six hundred quid. Six hundred quid! A bookcase, nine hundred! And paint, not the stuff you get for a tenner at Homebase, but sixty quid! All I wanted to do when I read all this was text mum, she wouldn’t have believed it. And when I did tell her later she said, “No wonder she bloody killed him.”

  The Best Friend

  EVERYONE BUT ME had abandoned her. Everyone thought she was some sort of sick serial killer. The press had given her a nickname – The Butcher – and Malika had gone from being a respectable actuary to a man-hating, man-eating monster. Everyone and his dog had an opinion on what had gone on behind the doors of that flat.

  I went to the trial every day. Malika didn’t come across well. She sat there, hair greasy, the shoulders of her suit peppered with d
andruff. Face completely blank. She didn’t talk to her solicitor or that arsehole of a barrister – don’t get me started on him – she just sat there like a statue. I tried to catch her eye countless times, but she avoided me. You could see the jury didn’t warm to her.

  I only found out later that she hadn’t wanted a trial at first. She was going to plead guilty, but they’d talked her out of it. I think she let them because it began to dawn that if she was locked up for life then the flat would eventually have to be sold.

  The defence was ridiculous. Worn down by Robin’s obsessive behaviour, they said she’d snapped. A momentary lapse of reason exacerbated by the fact that she was going through the menopause – the ‘new’ insanity defence. A crock of shite.

  Vile Gerry did it for her too. He had an axe to grind, and boy did he go for it. He didn’t come straight out and say she abused him, but he implied it, which was almost worse. He’d always felt threatened by her, you see. Threatened because she was smart, made more money than he did.

  I know why she didn’t speak up about what Robin was doing to himself.

  She felt guilty. She thought she should have done more to stop it. I was angry at her for not defending herself. She didn’t get up on the stand and tell her side of the story. Nikesh says defence barristers avoid that whenever possible as it can backfire. And who would have believed her side of the story anyway?

  But I’m glad she’s doing this now. Telling the truth. Even if it isn’t a truth anyone will believe, it’s her truth.

  After she called me for help, I only went back to that flat once. She needed a good suit to wear to court, and her solicitor asked me if I’d collect one for her – I was the only one who knew her style. This was after that cleaner found the... bits in the walls. I should have just gone out and bought something off the peg for her. God knows why I didn’t. I suppose I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I’d be able to get her something she’d be comfortable in. Also... maybe part of me wanted to go back there. Why? I suppose that awful evening had taken on such a nightmarish quality – and for good reason – that it no longer seemed real. Nikesh was at work, and I didn’t tell him what I was going to do.

  I’d arranged for a specialist cleaning team to blitz the flat after the police had finished – yes, the ones who found the... you know – and they’d done a good job before they had to stop what they were doing. I couldn’t detect that butcher’s shop tang of spoiled meat; there was no irony after-stench of spilled blood.

  A policewoman in uniform was waiting for me outside. She was incredibly good-looking, film star quality almost, which gave the whole thing a tinge of unreality. As we walked up the stairs and into the flat, I rattled on, filling the silence with babble about the weather, but she didn’t say a word, just looked at me in disapproval. This made me unreasonably angry. How dare you, I wanted to scream. She’s innocent until proven guilty. Don’t judge her, don’t judge me. You don’t know her and you don’t know me.

  When we reached the bedroom door, she hung back.

  “Aren’t you coming in with me?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ll wait here.”

  I think she was scared.

  I avoided looking in the corner of the room, where I knew his body had lain, but I couldn’t avoid seeing the... the splashes on the paintwork that the cleaners hadn’t been able to eradicate, or the gaping holes in the wallpaper where the forensics had gathered their evidence. The place was a tip, and not just from the forensics and the attempt to mop up the blood. The room, like the rest of the flat, looked like a schizophrenic interior designer had gone to town on it. Nothing matched, and in some places paint had been heavily and messily applied over areas of freshly papered wall.

  My mouth dry, I shoved clothes randomly into the bag I’d bought along, adding a pair of shoes and a jumble of underwear from the drawer. I didn’t check to see if any of it was soiled; the police would have removed it if it had been, wouldn’t they? I’d kept telling myself that I’d just have to call out and the policewoman would be with me in a shot.

  Before I left – and don’t ask me what made me do this – I looked in the bathroom, where Meera had seen ‘the man’. And I was hit with a sudden feeling of heaviness, like someone was pressing down on my shoulders. Fear is a strange thing, and I stood there, frozen, until the policewoman called out to me, breaking the spell.

  Do you think I’m just saying this because I’m trying to get my friend off the hook? I’m not, I swear. I really did feel something genuinely disturbing in there.

  After she was convicted, Mal refused to let me visit her at first, but I sent her endless letters. It was strange writing a letter again after years of emails.

  Then, out of the blue, six months or so after she was put inside, she signed one of my visitor requests.

  I burst into tears when she was brought into the visiting room. She looked decades older and I almost didn’t recognise her. Her hair had grown out, and her face was lined and wan.

  She told me not to worry about her, and that “prison isn’t as bad as everyone makes out”.

  She was lying. I could see that.

  She wasn’t interested in small talk. “Listen to me, Helena,” she said. And then she told me about the flat’s history.

  “Why didn’t you say any of this in court?” I asked her.

  “Who would have believed me?” she said. “And I should have done more. I should have reached out to him and tried to stop it. It was pride, Helena. I had too much pride.”

  I said something about it not being her fault. Empty words. Then she leaned over the table and grabbed my wrist.

  “Listen,” she said. “Listen. I need you to go to the flat, Helena. I need you to go to the flat and burn it down.”

  The Niece

  HOW DID YOU find me?

  She told you? The Butcher?

  You’re doing a story on her, are you? About the flat? Which paper?

  Seriously?

  You paying? How much?

  Double it. Yeah, I’ll wait while you call your editor.

  Fine. What can it hurt now? She’s locked up, isn’t she? Yeah, I did hear she was changing her defence. Read it in the Standard. She’s got no chance. No one’s going to believe that. And take it from me, someone who’s actually been inside that flat, if it was haunted then I’m Hilary Clinton.

  Yeah. She did come and see me. A week before... you know, she did that to her boyfriend. Barry, my husband, says I’m lucky she didn’t flip out and attack me. Barry worries about things like that. He has trouble with depression, gets easily upset. He was the one who found my uncle, you see. He still has bad dreams about that.

  Before you start, that’s why I didn’t go to the police and tell them that she’d been to see me. Didn’t want to upset him. He doesn’t like a fuss.

  She just pitched up here. Didn’t call first. I was having a bit of a lie-in, and when I heard the buzzer go, I was going to ignore it. Wish I had now. Thought she was a Jehovah at first. Then she told me her name and that she’d bought my uncle’s flat. Barry had let the solicitors handle all that, so we didn’t know the name of the buyer, just that they were paying cash. That’s their job, isn’t it?

  She was holding a photo album – my uncle’s wedding album. “I thought you might want this,” she said. “I found it in the flat.” She was polite and looked presentable so I let her come in and ask her questions. She said she was interested in the flat’s history.

  I told her the truth. That it had belonged to my uncle John, my mum’s brother, but we hadn’t had much to do with him and only got to know him after mum died. He was reclusive. Rarely went out. I didn’t even know he was still alive until he pitched up at Mum’s funeral. She’d cut herself off from her family when she was a teenager you see, and she never spoke about her childhood. Barry says he thinks something went on there. When she lost it, early onset Alzheimer’s she had, she’d say things about her dad; mention things out of the blue. No. I don’t want to say what she s
aid. I don’t know if they were true or not.

  God knows who’d told Uncle John Mum had died. But there he was, this old man at the crematorium, who said he was my uncle, and that he lived in Zone 1. Well, me and Barry felt sorry for him, and started dropping in. There was no one else. He never had children. We brought him groceries, that kind of thing. Kept up a relationship out of the kindness of our hearts. It’s what you do for family, isn’t it? And it wasn’t easy getting over there, not with my fibromyalgia.

  He kept the place spotless, although his eyes were going. I said to him he ought to repaint it, the décor was very dated. That got him upset. That’s when he told me he kept it like that for his wife. Said he kept it exactly as she’d left it when she died, and when anything got worn out or faded, he’d hire a designer or what have you to replicate a cushion or wallpaper or whatever it was. “He must have money,” Barry said. “That can’t come cheap.”

  It’s romantic, isn’t it, when you think about it? Her death must have broken his heart.

  The Butcher asked me how she’d died, but Uncle John had never told us the details. Something tragic probably. Cancer or a car accident. She must have died young, as the décor was very old-fashioned.

  The Butcher asked me if my uncle had died in the flat.

  I told her yes, and that Barry had found him. Uncle John had given us a key, just in case, you know, and he was lying there in the bath. A stroke more than likely.

  He left us the flat, which was a real surprise to me and Barry. Meant that we could retire early and do up this place.

  Breaks my heart thinking about what she did in there. Uncle John would turn over in his grave if he knew.

  That place was a shrine to love and she destroyed it.

  The Prisoner