The Killer Next Door(72)
They’ve got him out on to the plastic. He lies on his side, blubber spreading across the ground like melted candlewax. Sweat drips from their faces and their shirts cling to their chests. Somewhere out in the dark, over near the railway, a fox barks. Out on the road, the sound of a car engine. There are people, thinks Cher. In London there are people all the time, even in the dead of night. Maybe that man in Flat One is lying there, listening to his heartbeat, wondering what we were doing breaking down Vesta’s door. Maybe he isn’t out at all, maybe he’s just too scared to admit that he’s in. She glances at the old sunburst clock on the kitchen wall, a spidery hand ticking off the seconds. Nearly half past three. An hour, maybe less, until daylight. At this time of year people get up to get in a morning’s fishing at the pond on Northbourne Common before they start their day’s work. Children, overheated in their stuffy bedrooms, will catch sight of the dawn and want attention.
Beyond the stink of the sewage, the hot scent of masculine sweat, she can smell the familiar honk of Landlord. That mix of fungus and must and three-day-old curry, the cheesy tang of desultory washing that has filled her room, and her worries, for months on end. I thought that was the worst smell in the world, she thinks, but he’ll soon smell a whole lot worse than that, and has to bite back a bark of hysterical laughter. My God, I’m fifteen, she thinks. I’m meant to be rowing with my mam and saving up for One Direction tickets. I’m meant to be choosing my GCSEs.
Thomas looks up at the sky. He looks curiously vital in his tinted specs, as though he’s on the adventure of a lifetime. But thank God for him, thinks Cher. He’s the only person who seems prepared to take charge around here. ‘Come on,’ he says, like a general urging his troops over the top. ‘One last push, and we’re done. Cher, do you think you can manage a corner?’
Cher gulps. Yes, with my sprained ankle and my bruised ribs and my face that’ll split open if I strain, sure. Any time. She bends, obediently, and takes hold of the plastic. Got to find a way. Get through tonight, take some pills, get some sleep. How can it get worse, anyway?
Thomas bends, and rolls the Landlord on to his back. A long, dank strand of comb-over has come loose and wraps itself around the puffy neck. Thomas picks it up between his fingers and strokes it back into place, the gesture almost tender, the first moment of care anyone has shown for Roy Preece’s dignity. No funeral-parlour niceties for him. No embalming fluid or lilies, no church candles discreetly burning to cover the smell of formaldehyde.
Cher remembers her nanna, in her coffin with its polyester-satin lining, her best shirt dress buttoned up to the neck and her mouth turned up at the corners, the marks on her face miraculously disguised by the skill of the cosmetician. And Cher standing there, flanked by two social workers as though she might make a break for it, and all the old people popping in and telling her how her nanna used to talk about her all the time at the pensioners’ club, sucking their Werther’s Originals and treating it like a day trip. Suddenly, she wants to cry, to howl at the moon, My nanna’s dead and there’s nobody left to love me. She bites fiercely at her lower lip and forces her face to imitate the frozen impassivity she sees around her. Only kids cry, she thinks. Only stupid little kids. You’re with the grown-ups, now.
Thomas takes hold of a corner of the sheet and pulls it across the Landlord’s body to hide the slack, staring face. The action seems to spur them all into life. They leap forward and pull it fully across, tuck it in like a sleeping bag. Thomas and Hossein take the other side and pull it back towards her, and suddenly he’s not the Landlord any more. He’s no longer leering Roy Preece with his roguish lip twitches and his way of hitching his trousers up that seemed at once both pathetic and obscene. Now he’s just a hulking bundle of dirty blue plastic, a nuisance in the garden, a problem to be solved.
‘He’s still filthy,’ says Hossein, tiredness making his accent stronger so the word comes out as feelthy. ‘We can’t put him back like that.’
Thomas rubs his hands together, almost gleefully. ‘I’ll get up to the tool hire place tomorrow,’ he says, ‘and hire a power jet. Once we’ve got these drains unblocked, we can get it all cleared up. We can just turn the hose on the lot of it, give him a change of clothes and no one will be any the wiser. Come on. Time’s wasting.’
Hossein looks doubtful, but takes his corner. ‘Remember to bend at the knees,’ says Thomas. ‘The last thing we need is someone putting their back out.’