According to Cat’s still-limited knowledge of Scottish real estate procedures, this meant that an official bid had been received and accepted, pending legalities, but could still be gazumped by an even larger offer. The whole process could still take months – or so she hoped.
A few days later, however, the FOR SALE sign came down completely. And the listing disappeared from the property websites.
Oh well, Cat thought, there’s still a settlement period – that could take months as well.
But then, in early February, on a Saturday afternoon so bright and cheery that it virtually commanded her to go for a stroll, she heard noises in Number Six.
Shifting to her bedroom window she saw a van parked outside. A couple of removal guys in overalls were unloading some stylish furniture: a mid-century sofa set, a standing lamp, some mahogany bookcases. She heard them going up and down the stairs and lowering everything into place. After such a long absence, the return of the creaks and klonks and nnnnnnhhhhrrrrrrrrs was particularly distressing.
But what about the new tenant(s)? Cat could see no sign of him/her/them. Just the removal guys. Feeling ridiculous, she got down on her knees and tried peering through one of the Chubb keyholes. But again, all she saw was the movers. She decided that the new owner must be preparing the flat for letting, and wondered if she should ask the moving guys for details. But no sooner had she resolved to approach them than their van disappeared.
She got a text message from Maxine:
Is that a new tenant moving in?
To which she replied:
Not sure, will let you know.
She waited half an hour but heard nothing more. She went out for a long walk along the Union Canal – which despite the sunlight wore a thin coat of ice – but was too keyed-up to enjoy herself. When she got home she thought she heard more squeaks and clicks from upstairs but wasn’t sure – it might have been her imagination. She did her ironing. Scrubbed the bathroom floor. Read a book about the Kennedy assassination. Watched a David Attenborough documentary about warring chimpanzees. Cooked spaghetti alla puttanesca. Flipped through her folders on Scottish banking procedures.
She was trying to absorb the impenetrable jargon when she thought she heard movement – creak creak creak – but again decided she was imagining things. It sounded more like a mouse than a human being.
But that night she had a sense, close to a certainty, that there was someone in the bedroom directly over her head. She heard nothing until three a.m., however, when her hair-trigger senses detected a loud shhhhhhhhhhhh, like a tap being operated. She jolted awake and listened. But nothing after that.
In the morning she was surprised by a new text from Maxine:
Seen his MG? Stylish!
Cat had no idea what she was talking about until she heard an engine growling outside. She raced to the window and saw a canary-yellow roadster with wire-spoke wheels pulling out from Number Six’s parking space. She couldn’t make out the driver – the black canvas top was up – but the very fact that the car was heading out, rather than heading in, suggested that its owner had indeed slept upstairs.
But that didn’t make sense. How could anyone, let alone a newcomer, spend a whole night in the flat and make such little noise?
She decided she must be mistaken – the sportscar must belong to an interior designer or something – and late in the afternoon she headed out to do some shopping. At the supermarket she loaded up on healthy foods – she’d long weaned herself off the coffee and microwave meals she’d favoured during Moyle’s tenancy – and was returning home through the darkening streets when she noticed the MG back in the parking space of Number Six.
Disconcerted, she was halfway up the stairs, loaded shopping bag in one hand and keys in the other, when she heard someone closing a door above. And coming down the stairs. It could only be the new tenant. She braced herself – as for a catastrophic collision – and met him for the first time under the flickering stairwell light.
‘Oh, hi there,’ he said. ‘You must be my new neighbour.’
He was tanned, black-and-silver-haired, honey-eyed, denim-shirted and English-accented – wickedly handsome and yet strangely, disturbingly familiar.
‘Yes, yes,’ Cat said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘I’m Robin Boucher – delighted to meet you too. I hope I didn’t disturb you last night?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Moving in, moving around – all that?’
‘No, no, not at all.’
‘Glad to hear it. I noticed one of the water pipes clangs like a bell. I’ll get it fixed as soon as possible. And the floorboards need a little bit of adjustment – I’ll get them fixed as well.’
‘That’s . . . that’s very thoughtful of you.’
‘Think nothing of it. I lived for a while under a noisy neighbour and it made my life hell. So it’s the least I can do.’
‘I must admit,’ said Cat, ‘that I’ve had some problems. There’s virtually nothing between you and me, you see.’
‘Then I’ll do my best to tread softly. And in the meantime, if you have any complaints, just let me know and I’ll see what I can do. This light needs replacing too, by the looks of it.’
‘Oh yes’ – she saw that he was indicating the malfunctioning stair light – ‘I’ve tried fixing it myself but I can’t get the cover off.’
‘You need the right screwdriver. I’ll have a look at it later. Where are the bins around here, by the way?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The rubbish bins,’ he said. ‘The recycling bins.’
‘Oh yeah, yeah – there’s a black Dumpster near the transmission box and the recycling bins are down on the corner, near the bridge.’
‘Excellent,’ said Boucher, with a dazzling smile. ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you around, I hope.’
‘It’s inevitable,’ said Cat, smiling back.
He whisked past in a swirl of oaky cologne before wheeling around with a final thought.
‘Must say, it’s amazingly beautiful here,’ he said. ‘I feel so fortunate to have snared the place for such a reasonable price.’
‘So you’re the owner?’ Cat said. ‘Not a renter?’
‘The owner, yes. Lucky I’m not superstitious, eh?’
‘Superstitious?’
‘You know, what with all that happened up there? To that poor fellow who was carved into a thousand pieces?’
He had a mischievous glint in his eyes. And Cat wondered how on earth he could have learned the details of Moyle’s death. And why on earth he didn’t seem remotely bothered about it. But she was too intoxicated – by his charisma, his cologne, his irresistible presence – to ask any questions, or feel anything but a recurring stab of guilt.
‘Oh, that,’ she said dismissively. ‘Yeah, that was an odd story.’
‘Well,’ he said, still with a tawny gleam in his eyes, ‘I’ll catch you later. We must have a coffee sometime.’
‘I’d like that,’ said Cat, surprising herself by just how much she meant it.
And then he was down the stairs, out of sight, and the stair door was clicking neatly behind him.
Back in her flat Cat dumped her shopping on the kitchen table and had to pause for a few moments to deal with her feelings. The breathlessness. The constriction in her throat. The sense of weightlessness. It was as though she’d been electrocuted.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt that – if she’d ever felt that – and wasn’t sure she liked it.
CHAPTER
TWO
‘A younger george clooney!’ exclaimed Agnes, laughing delightedly. ‘Well, then – it’s a dream come true, right?’
Cat shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t say he looked exactly like Clooney. Just that he has the same little beard that Clooney sometimes has, the same haircut, the same twinkle in his eyes, the same sort of “sly observer” look. But that’s all. He doesn’t really look like any man I’ve seen before.’
It was 26 February
and the two women were squeezed into a corner booth of a crowded Irish pub near Lauriston Place. Outside, a brutal horizontal sleet was raking down the street; inside, a fog of exhalations and effluvium had misted the already smoky windows.
‘What colour are his eyes?’ Agnes asked. ‘His twinkling George Clooney eyes?’
‘This weird amber colour, like autumn leaves in sunlight. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Agnes guffawed. ‘And his teeth? You can tell a lot about a man by his teeth.’
‘Very neat, very white – and the sharpest canines I’ve ever seen.’
‘All the better to bite you with.’
‘No,’ Cat said. ‘I told you not to get the wrong idea. I’m only curious because there’s something not quite right about him, that’s all. Do you know he fixed the light?’
‘What light?’
‘There was this flickering light in the stairwell. It’s been that way ever since I moved in. And he just looked it, said he’d fix it, and the next thing I knew he did.’
‘Right,’ said Agnes, ‘and that’s weird because—?’
‘Well, it’s unusual, that’s all. Plus he’s super quiet. So quiet it’s uncanny. I mean, supernatural. I’ve never even heard him flush the toilet. Is that strange or not?’
‘Maybe he pisses in his pot plants.’
‘And he seems to know everything about me.’
‘How so?’
‘At our second meeting he was already calling me Cat – even though I’m sure I never told him my name.’
‘He probably saw an envelope addressed to you – you said it was a communal mailbox, didn’t you?’
‘But I never get any mail addressed to “Cat”.’
‘Probably one of the neighbours mentioned you, then.’
‘But he also made a sort-of reference to Florida – “You’d know all about heat, where you’re from” – and I’m positive I’ve never told anyone in the building where I came from.’
‘Maybe he just pinpointed you from your accent.’
‘What is he, Henry Higgins?’
‘Well, he probably just assumes that America is warmer than Scotland.’ Agnes, reaching for her Guinness, sighed in frustration. ‘I mean, shit, don’t you think you’re being a wee bit analytical, girl?’
‘I prefer to think of it as common sense. He’s living right above me, isn’t he? And yet I know virtually nothing about him. He’s neat, he’s very well ordered, and he has great taste in décor, but—’
‘Décor? How the hell do you know that?’
‘I saw inside his apartment and—’
‘You saw inside his apartment?’
‘He invited me in for coffee.’
Agnes nearly snorted into her Guinness. ‘For coffee? For coffee? You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘It means coffee,’ Cat insisted. ‘It meant coffee. I came up the stairs just as he was seeing some delivery guys out. He said, “Why not come in and have a look at what I’ve done to the place?” – and I did.’
‘Was he wearing a silk dressing gown and smoking a pipe?’
‘Nothing like that. I had a look around – the place is amazingly well-furnished, I don’t know where all the stuff came from – and he served up a coffee, that’s all.’
‘From a Nespresso machine?’
‘Look, I don’t know what it was from – he already had something brewing.’
‘I bet he did,’ said Agnes, sniggering. ‘He was doing some groundwork. Cat, I don’t really need to tell you that, do I?’
‘If that’s his game, then he chose the wrong girl. I’m not suggestible. And I mean that. Hypnotists can tell it about me in twenty seconds. I’m not suggestible.’
‘Being seduced isn’t the same as being hypnotised, you know.’
‘Of course it is – it’s a complete loss of control. So is falling in love.’
‘Have you ever been in love?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Then you’ve never been in love and you’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Possibly,’ Cat conceded, not unhappily. ‘Anyway, I tried to find out as much I could, as politely as possible, but he was evasive about everything. Didn’t want to talk about himself and always turned the conversation back on to me. He was very good at it – better than anyone I’ve ever interviewed.’
‘Where’s he from – did he say that much?’
‘From London somewhere.’
‘With a posh accent?’ Agnes affected a plummy voice: ‘Oh, how charming it is to make your acquaintance.’
‘Nothing like that. Sounds regular upper middle-class to me. From his voice alone I’d have trouble saying where in England he comes from.’
‘Not Oxbridge-educated, I hope?’
‘You mean Oxford?’
‘I mean Oxbridge – you’ve still got a lot to learn, girl. They hate us, you know.’
‘Who does?’
‘The born-to-rule crowd. The red trousers and raspberries set. Oh, they make the right noises but they always revert to type. The working classes, Northerners, Scots – they despise us. Boy, do we need another independence referendum.’
‘Well, I know nothing about that,’ said Cat, faintly annoyed by the digression. ‘But I’m not convinced that anything he told me, even the stuff about London, is true. So I tried looking into his financial history and—’
Agnes laughed explosively. ‘You looked into his financial history? You snake in the grass! You know what the Wing Commander would do if he found out?’
‘I know, I know, I’m not proud of it. But my curiosity got the better of me.’
‘Of course it did. Because you have no interest at all in this guy, right?’
‘Call it a need-to-know thing,’ Cat said. ‘If he knows so much about me then it’s only right that I should find out as much as possible about him.’
‘Aye right. So, what did you find?’
‘There are seven account holders in the UK named Robin Boucher, three of them in the London area. An author, an MD, a physiotherapist – but not one who matches the details of the guy upstairs.’
‘Age, occupation, that type of thing?’
‘Uh-huh. So I have to wonder if he’s lying to me again. If he lies to everyone. But why?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t hold a bank account.’
‘Possibly. I’d check his police record but I fear that’s going too far.’
‘Want me to do it?’
‘Could you?’ Cat asked. ‘I’d ask Terry Grimes – I’m sure he’d help me out, no problem – but I don’t want it getting back to Bellamy. It’s taken me long enough to climb a few rungs on the ladder and I know he’d just love to kick me down again.’
‘The fud. Sure, I can request a check for you, but are you sure you really want to know? I mean, this guy sounds like a dreamboat. Considerate, a handyman, movie-star looks – what more do you want?’
‘I want a neighbour I can trust, that’s all.’
‘Jesus, girl, what’s the matter with you? I know you had some awful experiences in your childhood, but why let that dominate your life? You’ve got to live a little, lassie.’
‘I’m not at all sure what you’re talking about, but this has got nothing to do with my past.’
‘Well, don’t tell me you wouldn’t fancy a good shag? Look at you, girl – if I were you, I’d never stop shagging. I’d shag you myself if you’d only give me a chance.’
Cat was grateful that the pub’s hubbub was drowning them out. ‘If you’re saying I look after myself physically—’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘Well, that’s only because I believe exercise and good nutrition are essential for your health.’
‘Aye right, and it’s purely for your health that you run around town in those sprayed-on tights.’
‘You’ve seen me out running?’
‘My spies are everywhere.’
Cat found the idea unnerving. ‘I b
rought those pants from Florida, where they’re about the only type of running pants you can buy. I’m not flaunting my glutes, whatever you might think.’
‘Your glutes? Your glutes? Good grief, girl, can you not even bring yourself to say arse? Or ass or butt – or whatever it is you people say?’
Cat sighed. ‘Just find out what you can, will you?’
‘Your wish is my command,’ Agnes said, laughing. ‘But first I’m going to ring up Ladbrokes and see if they’ll take a wager. A thousand to one that you’re not under Cock Robin’s duvet by the end of the next month.’
‘Don’t be absurd. Don’t be absurd.’
Cat almost added that she’d accept the odds herself but at the last second decided against it.
* * *
Back home that night she again found it difficult to believe, despite the insistent presence of Boucher’s MG, that anyone was home upstairs. There were no creaks, no hisses, no clanging pipes, no TV murmurings, nothing. Yet for some reason his presence was overwhelming. Cat even found herself lowering the volume on her TV and tiptoeing around so she would go unnoticed by him. It was absurd. When she dropped a pot while cooking she flinched like an assassin who’d accidentally snapped a twig.
Even in bed she couldn’t shake the notion that he was lying prostrate on his own mattress, hovering over her, staring down at her. It was so discomfiting that she rolled onto her side and drew herself into a ball. But then, in the pin-drop silence close to midnight, she heard what sounded like the stair door being eased shut. And maybe footfall on the steps. And maybe a key turning in the lock upstairs (she had to strain to hear it). A maybe a door gently closing. And then – definitely – the sound of a board or two creaking ever so unobtrusively above.
So Boucher had been out after all.
This thought should have settled her. It should have given her cause for self-rebuke. But it only got her mind racing again. Where had he been? What had he been doing? Why was he so secretive? And how did he achieve such ungodly silence?
Her increasingly fantastical solutions – at one stage she had him pinned as a cat burglar, at another he had morphed into a vampire – kept her awake into the wee hours and eventually took root in her dreams.
The Devil Upstairs Page 12