The Killer Next Door(20)
He pauses at the foot of the steps to take a breather, and surveys his domain. Though he doesn’t have a lot of time for beauty, Roy Preece can see that number twenty-three is a handsome house, in a road of handsome houses. If it were in one of the gentrified boroughs – City-money Wandsworth, perhaps, or Media Putney – it would be worth two, three million, even in its current state, even with the railway running past the bottom of the garden and the old bat in the basement. As it is, with the Farrow & Ball front-door paint going up all over and the front pullins full of SUVs, he’ll have enough to live like a king for the rest of his life when he gets shot of the place. Go somewhere where life is cheap, and buy as much of it as he can.
The Landlord reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a handkerchief, mops his glistening face and the top of his head, and tucks it back in. The exertion of walking up from the station in the heat has left deep, damp stripes down his shirt. But it’s clean sweat, he thinks, and sets off up the steps.
Thomas Dunbar has left an envelope on the hall table, neatly separated from the piles of junk mail, most of it addressed to long-gone residents. He’s the only one of his tenants, as far as he can work out, who is actually gainfully employed. Punctilious, quiet, respectable. He works at the Citizens’ Advice and, since the hours there were cut back, has involved himself in some organisational role with a furniture recycling charity. He has paid his rent on time in every month of the thirty-six he’s been here. Never any trouble, with Thomas. Or, it seems, with Gerard Bright. His envelope’s there next to Dunbar’s, the Landlord’s name in neat block capitals on the front. The Landlord tucks them in his pocket, doesn’t bother to check their contents. He knows that Dunbar’s will contain a cheque for the precise amount of his debt, made out in careful, neat script, the gaps scored through with a ruled line and a capitalised ONLY, and that Bright’s will – God help him for leaving it out for anyone to nick – contain cash. Of course, he’s probably in there anyway, he thinks, listening, although there’s no music playing. Watching through the keyhole, for all I know. Anyone tried to nick it, he could be out there before they got to the front door.
He knocks on the door of flat two. Hears the sound of a bolt being pulled back and a chain being slipped on, raises an eyebrow. Collette opens the door in a knee-length cotton dress, her hair pulled back from her face with a rubber band. She looks better than she did when he first met her. I bet she’d brush up nicely, he thinks. Quite a looker, our Collette, if she’d wipe that don’t-touch-me look off her face. ‘All right?’ he says.
‘All right, thanks.’
‘I see you’ve added some extra security,’ he says.
She shrugs. ‘Yale lock’s not a huge amount of protection, is it? Specially given what happened to the old lady downstairs.’
‘I hope you’ve not damaged my door,’ he says.
‘You can take it off my deposit if I have.’
She looks him straight in the eye. The look of someone who’s used to handling stroppy clients. Managing that bar in Spain, he wonders. But he’s never believed any of her story, never will. Policewoman? Could be. A no-questions-asked rooming house like this attracts all sorts, and where all sorts are, the plod are rarely far behind. Teacher? He considers for a moment. Yes, that’s it. She’s another teacher. Split with her husband and on the downward slide, but she’ll never shed that air of judgement.
‘Settling in?’
‘Yes, thanks,’ she says. ‘I’ve got the rest of that money for you inside. Hang on a sec.’
She turns away and closes the door. He’s used to that. His tenants rarely seem to want to let him look inside their quarters. Ironic, really, considering that he has keys to every room in the house. He presses an ear against the door, hears the sound of things being moved around, and a zip being drawn. He is back in the middle of the corridor by the time she returns. She extends an arm from behind her chain, a sheaf of notes in her hand. ‘There you go,’ she says. ‘I think that’s the lot.’
The Landlord counts. Three hundred and twenty pounds, all present and correct. ‘Yup,’ he says. ‘That’s you done till next month.’
‘You’ll be giving me that receipt I asked for, of course?’ She gives him The Look again. No one’s asked him for a receipt since he made a brief, unsatisfactory foray into student accommodation back in the noughties, though Vesta Collins is a stickler for her rent book. He has a receipt book somewhere in his desk, he’s sure of it. It might be a bit yellow by now, but he doesn’t suppose that matters. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘I’ll drop it in next time I’m passing.’