No one seems to know what to say to this. They murmur in agreement. As an epitaph, it’s not much, thinks Collette. Roy Preece: he ate a lot of chocolate and read the Beano. I wonder what mine will be? I wonder if I’ll get an epitaph at all? You tend to only get an epitaph if there’s a body to bury.
Hossein appears in the doorway. ‘Vesta? Do you recognise this?’
He holds out a man’s T-shirt, white-gone-grey and marked with grease. Vesta looks at it as though it’s a hundred yards away, then shakes her head.
‘Only it was in the…’ He loses his vocabulary, blinks and pulls a face as he tries to find the word, ‘… hole. You know. In the wall. Sort of tubey thing that lets the gas out.’
‘The vent?’ asks Collette.
‘Yes. The vent.’
‘Of the boiler?’ asks Thomas.
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t want to do that,’ Thomas says to Vesta, who’s slow on the uptake. ‘Might as well lock yourself in the garage with the car engine running.’
‘I want a drink,’ says Vesta, and bursts into tears.
Chapter Thirty-One
As they come down the front steps, Cher lets out a hiss of pain, and Collette, remembering, grabs her by the arm. ‘How are you feeling?’ she whispers.
Cher hops her way down the steps with a grimace and, when she reaches the bottom, whispers, ‘Like I’ve been beaten up, thankth for athking.’
She’s deliberately lisping to stop the sound from carrying on the still night air. It’s an old trick that passed from kid to kid in the care homes, along with skills like lock picking and uses for aerosols. But they both glance nervously to their left, up at the front windows, as though they expect to see that the man who didn’t come to his door when they were shouting outside Vesta’s will be looking out from between his curtains. But Gerard Bright’s sashes are down and the glass is dark. He must be out. There’s been no music from his flat all day, now Collette thinks of it. Maybe he’s away. Perhaps the universe is cutting them a break after all.
Beulah Grove is dark. Despite the open windows that show on all the upper floors in the street it seems that Vesta’s cries for help have gone unheeded beyond number twenty-three. But everyone knows that, in London, only the threat of theft will fling a householder from their sleep.
‘I can do thith by mythelf,’ whispers Collette. Cher glances at her sideways.
‘No,’ she replies. ‘It’s easier with two of us, and I know where they are. You don’t want to be blundering around there in the dark.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
Cher’s ankle is really hurting, now. Lying in her bed, she’d begun to think that it was improving, but now she’s limping along the street it feels loose and hot and unsteady, as though something’s ripped inside. I won’t be running for a while, that’s for sure, she thinks, and feels a little moment of relief at the thought that her rinsing days are over. It’s a stupid way to make a living, actually more dangerous than straight honest whoring. As she’s found to her cost, an angry, ripped-off client is the worst client of all. Each step she takes jars through her body from foot to neck. Can’t afford to make a fuss, she thinks, and grits her aching teeth. Got to just get on with it.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ asks Collette. ‘Are the antibiotics doing their stuff?’
‘Hope so,’ she replies grimly, blanks out the worst-case scenarios. Even Cher knows that antibiotics don’t work against viruses. There’s an ache low in her tummy, but she doesn’t mind that; assumes it’s evidence that the Levonelle morning-after pill Collette got from the chemist’s yesterday morning is working. ‘Headache’s gone, anyway. So that’s good.’
‘Good,’ says Collette.
‘Sorry I didn’t tell you,’ says Cher. ‘You just… you don’t know who you can trust, around here.’
‘I know. It’s okay. I’ve not exactly been shouting my own business from the rooftops, have I?’
They reach the scruffy front garden of number twenty-seven. It’s full of rubble, the stump of the tree that used to lever up the slabs of the pavement in front raw where it’s been cut off and painted over with poison. The windows gape, glassless, at them, still framed by scaffolding. The new owners seem to have knocked out every wall on the upper ground floor. Cher doesn’t know much about how these things are done, but it seems to her that the whole place must be ready to fall down.
She leads the way into the side-return, stepping carefully round discarded cement buckets and piles of old bricks. At the far end, bright blue even in the darkness, a folded length of damp-proof membrane lies propped against the closed door. Cher noticed it a few days ago as she was passing, remembered it because she was surprised some pikey hadn’t been past and lifted it. Maybe it’s just leftovers and the builders don’t care, but it’s perfect for their purpose.