The Killer Next Door(5)

The Landlord looks faintly pleased. He thinks he’s got me, she thinks. Thinks he’s sussed me out. He’d be twirling his moustaches, right now, if he had them. ‘Well,’ he says, his voice full of speculation, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘It’s not your problem,’ she tells him, humbly. ‘I understand that. But it means that I… you know… I don’t really have anything by way of references, because I always lived at home, before I went away.’

‘What were you doing in Spain?’ he asks.

She tells the prepared story, the one that nobody ever wants to hear. ‘I got married. He owned a bar on the Costa del Sol. More fool me… Anyway, here I am now, no husband. Life, isn’t it?’

He eyes her, speculatively. The pound signs are lighting up behind his spectacles. ‘I daresay we can come to an arrangement,’ he says.

Who are you kidding? You’re a cash-in-hand landlord who rents his rooms out through cards in newsagents’ windows. I don’t suppose you’ve checked a reference in your life, as long as the money comes on time. Of course we can come to an arrangement.

‘Maybe if I gave you an extra month’s deposit?’ she offers, as though the idea has only just come to her. ‘I think I could probably manage that. I’ve got a bit put by. At least I managed to salvage that much, even if my dignity’s still in Torremolinos.’

He looks pleased, then wolfish. ‘You know it’s already first, last and damage, don’t you?’

‘I thought it would be,’ she says evenly, and looks at a greasy stain on the wall, at a level with her face. Someone – people – obviously feel their way up here in the dark, the flats of their hands against the wall to steady themselves. I bet none of those light bulbs works.

‘Well, maybe you’d like to see the studio,’ he says.



‘Studio’ is an exaggeration, but she had expected that from the fact that she’d found it advertised on a slightly grubby file card in a newsagent’s window rather than on a glossy photo stand in an estate agent’s. Northbourne is gentrifying fast, but City money has yet to drift this far south, and these Victorian streets still play host to a dwindling number of plasterboard walls and two-burner stoves and halls full of bicycles.

It’s a decent-sized room, at least. At the front of the house, it must have been the drawing room once. But it smells. It’s stale from sitting through a heatwave with the large sash window that overlooks the street firmly closed and her predecessor’s discarded clothes in a heap in the corner. But also, she notices, because there is a small pile of food on the countertop to her left. A bag of potatoes, blackened and liquefying, half an onion, a block of cheese, an open jar of blueish pickle and the stump end of a sliced loaf, barely recognisable beneath blankets of hairy mould. In the sink, a bowl and a mug have been left to soak in water that has taken on the scent of a sewer. There’s the drip, drip, drip of a tap.

The Landlord has the grace to look slightly abashed. ‘Like I say,’ he says, ‘I haven’t had the chance to get it cleaned up.’

Collette puts the Adidas bag down on the floor, relieved to be rid of it after another journey during which she kept hold of it constantly, fearfully, terrified to let it out of her sight. Without it, she’d be sunk, but she’s heartily sick of the sight of it.

‘Where’s the bathroom?’ she asks.

She’d known it was too much to hope that a ‘studio’ in this neck of the woods would have the luxury of an en-suite and she’s glad that she’s always had a strong stomach with a relatively insensitive gag reflex, because she’s tired of running. She tries to persuade herself that it’s not so bad. Once the window’s been open a while and all that stuff’s safely out for the bin man, and I’ve burned a couple of scented candles – it’s not for ever, after all. Just until you’ve done the right thing. God knows what’s in that fridge, though.

‘So the other people…’ she says. ‘Who else lives here at the moment?’

He gives her one of those goggling looks that suggests that the question is somehow impertinent. ‘If I’m going to be sharing a bathroom,’ she adds, ‘I wouldn’t mind knowing who I’ll be sharing it with?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ he says. ‘Nice quiet man, Gerard Bright. Recently divorced, I think. Music teacher. The others are harmless enough. No junkies or anything, if you’re worried about that. And it’s only Mr Bright you’ll be sharing with. The two upstairs have a bathroom between them, too.’