The Killer Next Door(117)

She pulls herself together. No one has ever missed Cher, or mourned her. She won’t be one of the people who’ve let her down. She puts her foot on the windowsill, uses the slip of the tiles to slide herself upwards. Gets a foot in the hinge and kicks again. Now her head is five feet from the roof’s ridge, her foot a knee-bend from the top of the window frame. She feels her hip shriek with the strain of the angle, flat on her face, all her weight on her torso, and then her foot is there. She steadies, brings her other foot up beside it and bunny-hops to where she can grab the flashing.

Cher looks as if she’s fallen asleep. Up here, with no shelter from the wind, the rain gusts horizontally, catches her in the face like birdshot. It’s hard to believe that yesterday they were still in a heatwave, for today they are a long way into autumn. Weird little fucked-up island on the edge of the Arctic circle, she thinks, one of the world’s largest economies, and we’re still prioritising bankers’ second houses over kids like this. If she had disappeared, no one apart from us would know, much less care. She’s been disappeared for years.

She reaches out and touches the girl’s good arm. Cher jumps, opens her eyes and lets out a moan. Now she’s close up, Collette can see the damage she’s done to herself. Her collarbone jags out beneath her skin, and shades of black and brown and khaki spread across her chest, vanish inside her top. Her hand has been ripped open by something sharp, the cut dirty and wide and still bleeding. She’s going to need a hospital, this time. If Collette can get her down off this roof before she dies of the shock, she’s going to have to be sucked back into the system. This is beyond any of their abilities.

‘Come on,’ she says. She’s glad that Cher is small and light, at least. If she were even Vesta’s size this would be impossible. ‘This is going to hurt. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to make it not.’

Cher laughs, weakly. ‘I’ll just have to kill you later.’ Still got her sarcasm, which has to be a good sign. She lets out a cough, freezes, tries to suppress another.

Collette takes her good hand and helps her inch her way along the flashing. She can hear Cher’s teeth grind together with each bump, makes encouraging small talk of courage and the future. A millennium passes as they move, and yet they hear only a single car. Collette is as wet as the girl, now. Her hands are slippery, and she’s afraid that she will be unable to keep a grip if she starts to teeter.

Over the window; a few feet that look like a million miles. I can’t do this, thinks Collette. We’ll start to slide and I won’t be able to hold her. A buffet of wind catches them, blows Cher’s dripping hair off her face. The green tinge has gone from her skin, but so has the brown. Cher has turned white.

‘Be brave, sweetheart,’ says Collette, and cups her face in her hands. ‘We’re going to go down now, okay?’

Cher nods, like an automaton. I don’t like how quiet she is, thinks Collette. She should be making noises. And as she thinks it, Cher starts to sway on the roof beam. Back, forth, back, forth. In front of them the open window, behind her, the long drop.

Collette doesn’t have time to make a decision. She grabs Cher’s legs and pulls. Drags her off the point of the roof just as she slumps and goes limp. Holds her tight in her arms as they slide.

Her jeans snag on the window frame. Cher is on top of her now, her weight carrying them inexorably forward. Her eyes are open, the pupils staring into Collette’s. I can’t hold her, she thinks. She’s going to carry us over. Whatever happens, I can’t protect her shoulder. The best I can do is —

They drop through the window and bounce on the bed, and Cher wakes up and starts to scream.





Chapter Fifty


They stand over the body, silent in the rain.

‘We don’t have a choice,’ says Vesta.

‘No,’ says Hossein.

Thomas has landed head first. Vesta imagines him, sliding down the roof like a thrill-seeker in a water park, his hands star-fished out before him in a hopeless bid to slow himself, his mouth wide in a silent scream. And then the long dive through sodden air; the drawn-out second as the crazy paving rushed up to meet him, and then the blackness. Do you feel these things? Her experience of fear has always been that it lasted for ever. That every microsecond drew itself out, each sensation, movement, sight, smell, and sound was etched on her consciousness in a way that she never experienced in any other state. Is there a moment when you feel your skull shatter? she wonders.

‘No,’ says Vesta. ‘I don’t know what made us think we’d get away with it the first time.’