The Killer Next Door

by Alex Marwood

  He wonders what Roshana would make of him now, squatting over a manhole with a hose in his hand, waiting for some sign that something might happen. She used to tease him about the way he rolled up his sleeves and assumed an air of manly competence, which was pretty well non-existent. There were times he resented it – but he would give anything to have it back now. Her beautiful hands, her swift rejoinders, her courage, the way she railed against restriction. He tries not to think too much about her, for when he does, he feels as though the loneliness will overwhelm him.

  He would be the first to admit that drains are not his area of expertise, but even so this blockage seems quite bizarre. The stuff he saw when he opened the manhole cover seemed to be at odds with the pool of blackened sewage he had been expecting. Sure, there’s sewage there, but it’s greasy, as though it’s been mixed with a gallon or two of cooking oil, and the greater part of the chamber seems to be stiff with something that looks unpleasantly like lard. Though there are six people living in this house, all cooking in their tiny kitchens, he finds it hard to believe that even all that could produce this much fat. I must talk to them all, once it’s clear, he thinks. They probably don’t know about fat: the way it hardens and turns to something that almost looks like stone once it’s coating the walls of a sewer. He only knows himself because he went down, as a cub reporter, into the bowels of the city with a team of sewer workers to see for himself, watched them scrape the stuff off the walls like barnacles off the underside of a boat.

  ‘That’s weird.’

  He looks up and finds Collette standing in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘It looks strange to you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Collette. ‘Is that fat? It looks like fat.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Is it moving?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like it.’

  ‘Careful, you don’t want to get a blowback.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he replies sarcastically. ‘I’ll do my best.’

  A burst of laughter from next door; men and women together, talking in confident, ringing tones. The expensively educated in this country seem to have different voices, he’s noticed. Not just the accent: the actual tone. It’s as though money gives you extra lung power, the women’s voices deeper, the men sounding as though their throats begin somewhere deep in their abdomens.

  ‘Sounds like someone’s having a good time, anyway,’ says Collette.

  Hossein looks at her. He knows they’re thinking the same thing. This wasn’t an event they had factored into the plan.

  ‘It’s okay,’ says Collette, uncertainly. ‘They’ll be done by teatime.’

  ‘Here’s hoping,’ says Hossein, and bends back to his work.

  Deep beneath the earth, something gives. He feels it through his hands: a jerk in the hose, then a slight softening of its rigid hardness. The visible part of the chamber empties, suddenly and swiftly, as though a giant mouth had sucked on the other end. Around the sides, the fat still clings, greyish-white and granular.

  ‘Yes!’ says Collette. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ says Hossein.

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  ‘I think I’ll keep this thing running for a bit,’ says Hossein. ‘If this stuff’s all the way down to the sewer, I think we need to get as much of it off the sides as we can.’

  ‘What is that?’ She comes over and squats beside him, looks disgustedly down at the sludge. He’s suddenly, acutely aware of her proximity, the soft roundness of her bare shoulder in her sundress, the smooth curve of her neck, the golden curls tumbling around her ears. She smells good: like freshly ironed linen and baking bread. He feels himself blush, and turns his gaze studiously back to the drain. ‘Where’s it come from?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like anything I’ve… we should dig it out, you know. We can’t just leave it there. It’ll just gum everything up again.’

  Hossein feels an urge to hurl. The fat looks evil, somehow. Unnatural. And now that the liquid sewage has drained away, he feels even less inclined to touch it. But he knows that Collette is right. There is an old plastic bucket in the corner of the area, covered in paint. If he uses the ladle from Vesta’s kitchen, it will probably work as a receptacle. They can dump it at the end of the garden. Dig a hole, if they have the strength left.

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’ asks Collette.

  ‘Cher’s with Vesta in the garden – and I think Gerard Bright is back in his room. I heard him coming in this morning. Thomas, I don’t know.’

  ‘How’s Vesta doing?’

  Hossein shrugs. ‘As you would expect, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She scratches the back of her neck and stares uncomfortably at the drain. ‘I’ll get the bucket,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, no,’ says Hossein. ‘It’s okay. I’ve got this.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Collette, and gives him a sweet, sunshiney smile.

  He gives the hose another push, and finds that he can feed another three feet into the drain.

  With all the water flying around in the shade, Hossein and Collette have no idea how hot the day has become. Sitting out in the sun is like being on a barbecue. The shed must be as hot as an oven inside, its contents baking like a slow pot roast. Vesta and Cher sit on the deckchairs, their backs turned firmly to the light, their eyes closed, in silence. Vesta looks old. It’s as though she’s aged a decade overnight, deep lines etched around her mouth, her skin grey and toneless, despite the long, long summer.

  Cher has covered her eyes with a pair of giant panda sunglasses, but the bruise on her face is still visible around the edges, beginning to turn green as it develops. Her lip has scabbed over and looks worse than it did when Thomas brought her home. She’s a skinny little thing; looks like a baby bird in her sprigged cotton sundress, and her platform wedges. Neither of them stirs, but nor are they asleep.

  The party is warming up over the fence, in as much as a British middle-class party ever warms up, the sound of glass clinking and confident voices ringing out in the hot air. The women’s laughter sounds like church bells. If they knew, thinks Vesta, what’s lying there on that concrete floor just yards away from them, they wouldn’t sound so sure of their place in the world. It must be great, living in a world where nothing’s ever undermined your self-belief. Where pension funds and mortgages figure because you think you’re going to live to ninety. Where your prospect for the night involves tipsy, sunburnt sleep and the worst thing that can happen to you is feeling jaded as you start the week, rather than creeping your way through darkened streets with a corpse in the boot of a car.

  The sunlight has that strange yellow-gold tinge you only find in cities. Pollution, presumably, but it’s a pleasurable thing to look at through half-closed eyes. Vesta turns her head and soaks up the rays. Hears the power jet’s engine cut out, and its hum be replaced by the sound of rhythmical scraping. Oh, dear, she thinks. I know I should help him, but I can’t do it. People look at me and think I can handle anything, they always have, but they’re wrong.

  Now the engine sound is gone, she can hear the conversations next door with greater clarity. A woman is telling a long, boring story about a trip to an all-inclusive resort hotel in Thailand. ‘Gaad, it was gorgeous. Premium-brand spirits and food all day. We didn’t really leave the pool, except to eat. And we had a waterfall in our room! Imagine! Your own waterfall!’

  ‘Did you go on any trips?’

  ‘There was a trip to an elephant sanctuary. We went on that, but we didn’t feel like anything much other than sleeping and sunbathing.’

  ‘Well, one works so hard. Sometimes I’d just give anything for a rest.’

  ‘I know. Exactly! And really, when you’ve got it all laid on like that, there doesn’t seem much point bothering with doing the tourist thing, really, does there?’

  ‘Not even shopping?’

  ‘Oh, yes, obviously shopping!’

  The food smells amaz
ing. Fragrant and clean and fresh, as if it’s come straight off the farm. Vesta’s mouth waters as gusts of savoury spice wafts over the fence and fill her nostrils. So funny how the world has changed. I grew up on roly-poly pudding, in a world where parsley sauce was regarded as exotic; and horseradish with your Sunday beef, if you had it. Mum and Dad would practically wrap wet towels round their faces when the Asians moved into the street and the gardens smelled of curry, but it always smelled like adventures to me. I still remember the first time I tasted jerk chicken. I thought I’d gone to heaven. So funny. Once upon a time, smells like those coming over the fence right now were smells you only smelled on the bottom rungs of society. And now they’ve brought it all back here with them and their giant people carriers. They could no more cook without garlic than they could without salt.

  I wonder, she thinks, how I shall see this day, when I look back on it? The surreality of it, the enforced inaction, all of us waiting for darkness to fall. Is this how everyone feels, when they’ve killed someone? Not jittery, not afraid, not sorrowful, but numb?

  In his attic eyrie, Thomas stands by the window and watches the va-et-vient below. Next door is having a party, and he has a great view from his attic dormer: children dressed in the sort of cotton pinafores and coloured dungarees you see in the catalogues that fall out of the Sunday Times stomp around in an inflatable paddling pool and bounce in a netted trampoline while adults stand about pouring white wine from a collection of bottles stored in an old enamel washtub full of ice. Every person in the garden has a cardigan tied round their shoulders, as though they’ve been handed it like a name badge as they came through the door. It’s a form of uniform, of course, no less recognisable than baseball caps or hoodies. It lets them know who to smile at in the street, who to ask for directions, who to cross the road to get away from. Half a dozen identical cocker spaniels pant in the shade of a pear tree.

  He feels surprisingly relieved at the way things have turned out. There’s a tension about what they have to do tonight, but, if all goes well, Vesta Collins has done him a favour. The others may be confused by the blockage in the drains, but he knew what it was the moment he set eyes on it. And if the Landlord had done as the silly old woman kept asking, and called a professional cleaning outfit, they would likely have guessed what it was as well. It wouldn’t be the first time in London’s recent history, after all, that drains got blocked by subcutaneous fat.

  I’ve been careless, he thinks. Stupidly, arrogantly careless, thinking that because my natron did such a good job of dissolving the stuff that it would carry it all the way to the sewers. Thinking that, because nowadays you can buy a blender for less than the price of a curry, you could just pour those entrails down the toilet, cup by cup. Sixty per cent of the brain alone is made of fat. Where did I think it was going to go?

  He needs a new plan – this much is evident. When he realised that Roy Preece was dead and police would soon be swarming over the house, he’d nearly died of fright. If he’d had less presence of mind, if he’d been less able to think on the spot and see his way forward, he would have bolted from that kitchen, from that frightful body and the idiot neighbours lolling about waiting for someone to tell them what to do, fled upstairs and tried to hide his girls. Now Alice is gone, there is room in the bed for both of them, and that’s good, but the flat is full of equipment for which he’s never bothered to work out proper storage places, and even he, inured as he is to the smell by living in such proximity with it, knows that the place still carries olfactory reminders of Nikki’s dissolution in its very fabric. I can’t leave myself vulnerable like this, he thinks. I’ve been a fool.

  He stands on tiptoe and leans from the window to snatch a view of the patio. The Iranian man, Hossein, seems to be finished with the power jet, and is scooping the remaining contents of the drain trap into a bucket. He has found a piece of cloth and tied it round his face like a bandit in a cowboy movie. His movements are deliberate, methodical. From what Thomas knows of his history, he’s a man well versed in keeping secrets when secrets need to be kept. Thomas does a web search on all of his neighbours as they move in, just to be sure, and is rarely surprised by what he finds. But Hossein Zanjani is clearly not a popular man, at least with the current regime in Iran. Unpopular enough, indeed, to have his own listing on the Amnesty website. He’s not worried that this will jeopardise his asylum application: he just doesn’t want the people with knives, or guns, or poison umbrellas, or whatever’s fashionable with the mullahs this year, to know where to track him down. He’s interesting, thinks Thomas, a man of principle. In other circumstances, he would probably never have gone along with this, but even a popular hero can be turned when he’s staring down the barrel of an AK47.

  A house like number twenty-three doesn’t militate a high web presence. As far as he knows, he’s the only person who’s ever lived here who owned a computer, though the fact that Hossein seems to write quite regularly for a number of political websites suggests that he must, at the very least, have access to one. Gerard Bright turns up briefly as the star of a few slow-season comic newspaper stories – nothing like a private school music teacher cocking up to make a few gloating headlines in the quality press – but otherwise his viola and he just feature in a few concert programmes so amateur that the organisers never got round to taking them off the web afterwards. In fact, it seems as though he’s playing in a series of low-rent chamber concerts in local venues across the south-east this week, as luck would have it, the last one tonight. God knows what would have happened if he’d been here last night, or if he were here tonight. A whole new outcome flashes briefly across Thomas’s imagination. He dismisses them, hastily. Can’t think about that, he thinks. I have too much to do, too much to organise.

  There are few mentions of Vesta Collins, but she pops up in the Northbourne Advertiser at every jubilee, smiling gamely in a party hat. He was surprised to find no signs at all of Cher or Collette, but he’s tracked down Cher, now, or at least the tragic little FIND CHERYL FARRELL Facebook page, set up by social services, that seems to have been the only effort anyone’s made to find her. The page is almost eighteen months old and the sulky twelve-year-old (clearly the most recent photo anybody’s bothered to take) face that stares out from it in school uniform is barely recognisable. Cheryl Farrell was a thickset black kid with frizzy black hair rubber-banded into two bunches like horns on the top of her head. She looks nothing like the leggy, brown-skinned girl with the corkscrew curls who’s slumped on a deckchair in the garden.

  He feels that he knows them all better after their shared experiences. He’s certain, now, rather than suspecting, that Collette is on the run from someone, and that all of them are ready to be told what to do, as long as it keeps them off the radar. He watched their faces as he spoke last night, saw the ill-masked gratitude on each of them as he took control, and he knows that they will do anything he wants. I’m their friend now, he thinks. They used to avoid me when they saw me, find reasons why they had to be elsewhere. But now I’m their saviour. After tonight, when it’s all over and everybody’s home and safe and they’re counting their blessings, I’ll be one of them. I’ll be included. The dad of the house, where Vesta is the gran.

  I’ve had a lucky escape, really. They’re never going to speak, never going to tell. They’ll clear it all away, and I’ll be more careful, safe again to be with my girls.

  He turns back into the room, feeling light-hearted for the first time in what feels like years. He has things to sort out – not least how to dispose of the contents of the freezer, now the blender’s out of the question – but he feels he’s been given his life back once more.

  The girls sit side by side on his little sofa, a man-sized gap between them. Nikki’s come out beautifully from her forty days of sleep. A little wrinkled, and her mouth slightly further open than we would ideally like, but otherwise she’s perfect. They sit together peacefully, wide eyes and curled hair and shiny painted nails, and wait for him. He checks his wa
tch: it’s four o’clock, the party’s in full swing and everything downstairs is under control. Tonight, once it’s dark and the guests have gone and the lights are out and the trains are no longer running, there will be work to do, but for now a lazy afternoon rolls itself out before him.

  He lowers himself gently on to the sofa between his lovelies, and slips a hand into one of each of theirs. Rests his head against the cushions and looks from one to the other, captivated by their quiet beauty. It’s shaping up to be a wonderful summer.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  When they open the boot, the smell – shit and Camembert and nail-varnish remover and toasted durian – explodes from the confined space as though it’s alive. It wraps itself round them like a fog, makes them gasp and choke, hands over their mouths to force the sounds back in. Collette’s eyes blur with tears. She looks wildly round, sees that they are pouring down Hossein’s face, too. Thomas has taken his glasses off, is polishing them, ferociously, on the hem of his shirt. Only Cher remains impassive. Just stands there with something akin to a sneer on her face. She jerks her head impatiently, steps forward and takes hold of the plastic sheet.

  He’s crammed into the small space like batter. This afternoon he was rigid with rigor, but twelve more hours of sweaty heat in the airless shed, and it has passed. He slid in bonelessly, and settled like cake mix into a tin.

  But getting him out is like wrestling jelly. Limbs and hair and belly, great slabs of thigh and lolling head sliding about in the confines of the boot, refuse to afford them any traction. They struggle for a minute, silent for fear of waking the neighbours, elbowing each other and tying their arms in knots like the Keystone Cops, but the Landlord is stuck fast.

  Thomas lets out a tiny hiss, grips Collette by the upper arm. He shakes his head and gestures to her to move back. She obeys, meekly. She’s amazed and relieved by the way Thomas has taken on authority, delegated tasks – just known what to do while the rest of them were floundering in panic. She taps Cher on the elbow, jerks her thumb towards her chest to tell her to move.