For a moment, she considers turning back. I could still make it, if I’m quiet, she thinks. Go out through that open kitchen door and nip out through the garden. Go round the front and knock up the others and… and get them to help. God’s sake, Vesta, you’re sixty-nine, not thirty-nine.
Then he turns to get something from his bag, and catches sight of the white cotton that covers her thighs.
Time slows to a crawl. Vesta feels herself leave her body for a moment, sees herself from behind, a frail elderly woman quailing as the giant unfurls itself in the gloom. Sees herself dying, here among the sewage, being found tomorrow morning, grey and gone and rotting.
She lunges, swings the iron at the end of her arm like a mace, and feels it connect. Hears an ‘oof’ from the burglar and is surprised by how suddenly her forward motion is halted by the solidness of his skull.
Her feet go out from under her. She flies through the air like a cartoon character, arms flailing, and hits the back of her head.
The world goes black.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Collette wakes to the sound of wailing. A woman’s voice, high with panic, calling, ‘No! No! Oh, God, no, no, no, wake up! Oh, God, wake up! Help! Please! Somebody help me!’
Vesta. She’s out of her bed in her top and leggings – her escape clothes – before she is really awake. She has to stop for a second and rest a hand against the wall as the blood rushes to her head and Hossein’s footsteps thunder across her ceiling. Then she slips her feet into her Keds and meets him at the bottom of the stairs.
Hossein’s face is still slack with sleep, his black hair sticking up in tufts. ‘What’s going on?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it Vesta?’
‘I think so.’
‘I heard someone shouting. Is everyone okay?’
They jump. Thomas has followed Hossein down the stairs so silently that neither of them had known he was there. He looks exactly as he always looks – checked lawn shirt, tan slacks, slightly tinted specs – as though he merely goes into suspended animation at night rather than sleeping. ‘Is someone hurt?’
Hossein frowns and says something in Farsi. Strides past him and bangs on Vesta’s door with the flat of his hand. ‘Vesta? Are you okay? Vesta?’
Whether she’s okay or not, she doesn’t hear him. Just keens into the night, ‘Oh, God, oh somebody help me! Wake up! Wake up! I can’t lift him! Wake up!’
Collette looks over her shoulder, expects the elusive Gerard Bright to put his head out of the door and stare at them with those red-rimmed eyes of his. But the door stays closed. The phone is off the hook, she notices, the receiver dangling by its cord. Funny, she thinks. How did that happen?
They stare at each other in the dimness of the hallway. Thomas tries the door handle, impotently, as though he thinks it will have magically become one that turns. ‘Back door?’
Hossein shakes his head. ‘It will be worse. I reinforced the frame after the burglary.’
He raises his hand and bangs again. ‘Vesta!’ Launches himself bodily at the door and bounces off it, clutching his shoulder. Tries again.
‘Has anybody got a key?’ asks Thomas.
Hossein gives him the sort of wide-eyed head waggle you see in nightclubs just before trouble kicks off. ‘Has anybody got a key to yours?’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ says Collette. She pushes past Thomas, looks at the door, then stands on one foot and kicks out at the lock with the other. Hossein hears something splinter. Collette kicks again.
She’s half my size, thinks Hossein. This is shaming. ‘Hold on,’ he says, and takes her place. Copies her with his big bare foot, all his strength behind him. The lock gives under his third kick, and the door flies back and bangs against the wall.
Collette is past him and halfway down the stairs before he’s regained his balance. ‘Vesta?’ she calls. ‘Vesta, where are you?’
Hossein pauses to switch on the light. Collette is at the bottom of the stairs, looking wildly about her. The smell hits them like a steam train. Faeces and urine and… something dead. Sweet and dead, like it’s been that way a while. Hossein walks past her and she follows him towards the back of the house, where Vesta’s voice comes from.
She’s in the bathroom, crumpled on the floor, with what looks like a steam iron sticking out obscenely from between her thighs. She’s brown and green with filth, her hair matted down with something unspeakable. Her eyes plead wildly. ‘Help me,’ she says again. ‘Oh, God, I can’t move him. He’s too heavy. I can’t – he’ll drown.’
Behind her, in the gloom of the unlit bathroom, the top of a pair of gigantic buttocks moons at them over the waistband of a pair of drooping sweat pants. The owner is on his knees, bent forward in prayer position, face down in the overflowing toilet pan. He isn’t moving.