Already Dead(8)

‘It’s the way things go down on a Tuesday night in Edendale. You have no idea what it’s like out there on the streets.’





3





As she creaked slowly towards her front door, Dorothy Shelley supported herself on a walking stick. She wasn’t able to move very quickly these days. Well, she’d never exactly been an athlete. A walk with the dog to the end of Welbeck Street and back had been the limit of her exercise routine for more years than she cared to remember.

There was one time she’d tried horse riding during a holiday in the Scottish Highlands, persuaded into it by Gerald, who saw himself as some kind of John Wayne figure. Back then, her husband could be very persuasive when he set his mind on something. Persistent. too. She’d always let him get his way in the end. It was such a relief when he died and she could do some of the things she’d always wanted to do on her own. And exercise wasn’t one of them. It had taken her weeks to get over the bruising on her legs and backside from that horse. At least Gerald had been the one who fell off. Her life seemed to be made up of such small pleasures, scattered through the years of alternating tedium and irritation that had constituted her marriage.

Now, she was unsteady on her legs, and was frightened of moving too quickly in case the dog got under her feet and tripped her up. Jasper the Jack Russell was as elderly as his owner, or the equivalent in dog years. He wanted to stay close to her because he couldn’t see very well now. Her wobbly legs and his bad eyes were a lethal combination. She knew she was going to come a cropper one day, and her family would lose no time getting her out of the house and into a nursing home.

When she opened the door, she saw that it was raining. Tutting quietly, she pulled on a coat that was hanging by the door and slipped a PVC hood over her hair. For a moment, she looked at the slippers on her feet, but decided it was too much trouble to change into shoes. She wasn’t going far.

Mrs Shelley stepped out into Welbeck Street, taking her time negotiating the step. It was only a few paces to number eight, the house next door which Gerald had insisted on buying with the intention of knocking the two places together and forming a much larger property. A town house, he’d called it. A pipe dream, if ever there was one.

He’d never got round to finishing the project, of course. He never did, not once in his life. There had been a lot of dust and mess, then everything had stopped before a single wall came down. That was shortly before he died. His legacy was a house where all the plaster had been knocked off, the skirting boards ripped away, and the bathroom suite was sitting in a skip in the street.

At least the finished job had left her with a bit of income – a house converted in two flats, the rent coming in very handy to supplement her pension. It also provided her with a bit of company when she needed it, as well as someone younger to change a light bulb or put out the wheelie bins. She’d always made a point of getting the right sort of person when she was looking for a new tenant. Reliable and trustworthy professional people only.

Mrs Shelley was looking for her ground floor tenant now. She hadn’t seen him for days. She hadn’t even heard any of his music or noticed the smell of his coffee, which sometimes wafted out of the back door. She’d seen the cat in the back garden and tried to feed it a couple of times, but it had shied away from her, even when offered fresh chicken.

She knew she was getting a bit vague in her old age. Her son-in-law whispered that she was barmy, when he thought she couldn’t hear him. He was desperate to take over her properties. Preventing him from achieving that ambition was the one thing that kept her going.

But things confused her sometimes. Names and details escaped her. The most obvious facts could slip out of her memory. She wondered whether her tenant had told her that he was going away on holiday. Usually she got him to write important things down. But she had a feeling that something had gone wrong, and he might not have had time, or not wanted her to know where he was.

She hesitated outside the door of the flat. There was no answer to her knock, and the curtains were closed. She had a key, of course. She was the owner of the property, wasn’t she? Yes, she was quite sure she was. She hadn’t sold it or anything. She was the landlady, and she had a right to enter in an emergency.

But she didn’t want to do it. She was reluctant to intrude, didn’t want to disturb anybody or make it seem as though she was prying. She had to admit that she was also little bit frightened of what she might find if she went in.

Mrs Shelley turned away and shuffled back to her own house, telling herself that she’d catch her tenant tomorrow. She’d forgotten that she had already spent the last three days looking for Ben Cooper.