The Killer Next Door(13)

Collette rolls on to her side, picks up the pillow and presses it to her ear. She’s exhausted, wrung out after her journey, after three years spent looking over her shoulder, dreading the weeks or months to come. She’s desperate to sleep, desperate to feel that, even for a few days, a few weeks, she can let her guard down and rest while she finds out what’s going to happen with Janine. It’s okay, she tells herself. You don’t have to get involved. Just keep yourself to yourself and —

A series of loud bangs on her door wrenches her upright. Someone’s thumping on it as though they plan to break through.

Collette sits on a stranger’s musky sheets and stares as the wood judders beneath a fist. A man’s voice, the foreign accent that she heard passing out in the hall earlier, an edge of intemperate urgency. ‘Hello? Hello?’

Angry men. The world is full of angry men. She can’t face an angry man today. She feels like she’s been running from them all her life.

He thumps again, rattles at her door handle. ‘Hello? Are you in there? I need to talk to you.’

Maybe if I just keep quiet… at least this one doesn’t seem to have a key…

Another burst of hammering. ‘HELLO?’

She pushes herself off the bed and crosses the room. No spyhole, no chain, no bolts: it’s as secure as a sauna, this room. She steels herself, throws the door open, ready to fight.

The most beautiful man she has ever seen stands in the corridor, clenched fist raised at her face. Golden skin and sad, almond eyes, glossy black hair and a beard trimmed close to sharp, angular cheeks. A generous mouth that, even in what is clearly a state of some disturbance, is dimpled at the sides by good humour. Collette gasps, and blushes.

He misinterprets the sound. Looks at his upraised hand and drops it to his side. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were going to open it.’

It’s a precise diction, its foreign edge poetical, educated, the consonants carefully separated. He’s learned his English from the BBC, not CNN.

Collette feels her blush begin to subside, says: ‘That’s okay. Just lucky I didn’t open it a second later or you would’ve broken my nose.’

He laughs. ‘I was just…’ She sees him look her up and down, take in her crumpled face, her crumpled clothes. ‘I’m sorry, you were sleeping.’

Up the corridor, by the front door, the door to Flat One opens and a man – washed-out sandy hair and skin with the strange plasticky quality that always makes you think that the top few layers have somehow been burnt off – steps out and stares. Collette leans out of her own door and gives him what she hopes is a friendly smile. No point in being stand-offish with her neighbours. It’s not like they can’t all hear each other. The man blushes and looks down, then retreats into his domain. The sound of his music dies back as he closes his door again.

‘It’s okay,’ she says, hurriedly, not wanting to admit that this is how she’s been dressed all day. ‘Stupid thing to do, in the middle of the afternoon. I’ll be up all night, now.’

He offers a hand. ‘Hossein Zanjani,’ he says. ‘I live upstairs. Above you.’

‘Hello, Hossein.’ She shakes the hand, leaves it a beat. ‘I’m Collette.’

‘Collette,’ he says. ‘That’s a pretty name. French?’

Collette shakes her head. ‘Irish mother who spent too much time reading romance novels.’

And a useful name, as it turns out, given that she shed it in primary school after two terms of playground banter and used her second name. It was the work of a moment to swap it back to the front when she applied for her Irish passport.

She deliberately steps out through the door, into his territory. She already feels that the room behind her is her safety zone, but she learned a lot from watching Tony and Malik and Burim, in the time when they weren’t her enemies: watching them assert their authority with a single forward footstep, a cold smile, a refusal to allow their arms to cross their bodies. She pulls the door to behind her, leaving it slightly ajar but blocking off his view of her space.

‘What can I do for you?’ she asks.

He takes a step back, cedes the status.

‘I – so, you moved in this morning?’ he asks.

‘This morning,’ says Collette. ‘That’s right.’

‘The Landlord didn’t scare you away?’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ she says, and sees him blink with incomprehension. Okay. His English is good, but not that good. He’s not been here all that long. Either that, or he doesn’t get out, much.