The Killer Next Door(73)
They shuffle around the corpse, trying to work out the best way to carry it. Settle, in the end, for Thomas taking the feet and Hossein and Cher sharing the top end. Thomas counts down: three… two… one… and they straighten up together. Cher gasps at the sheer weight of him, at the pain shooting up through her foot. He’s a forklift truck, a reinforced ambulance, a supersized operating table. He’s not a man, she thinks, and feels her junk-fed muscles strain under her share, the sweat spring to her scalp like someone’s turned on a tap. There’s something else in there, there’s got to be. A whale. A load of cement. But she sees a jellyfish hand creep out from the fold in the plastic, and knows it isn’t true.
It seems to take an hour to get up the steps to the garden. Though they strain at the plastic, they can’t stop the heavy middle section from drooping, and it catches on each edge as they pass it. Her teeth grind against each other as she struggles to control the pain, and a protest from her cracked tooth at least distracts her from the howls of rage coming from her leg. They stop three times and rest their package on the bricks while they pant and flex their backs. She understands now what they mean by the phrase dead weight. Even Roy Preece can’t have been this heavy when he was breathing. She greys out a couple of times, aware of nothing but the deep crimson agony in the central core of her being, but eventually, though she has long since lost track of her surroundings, she realises that her flip-flops are on soft cool grass, and they are out in the open.
‘Keep going,’ Thomas urges, his whisper urgent. There’s no chance of secrecy now, of pretending they’re not there. A casual insomniac glancing out through their curtains will know exactly what they’re doing. ‘Hurry. Not much further. Come on.’
She limps forward. Her foot seems to have given up, decided that complaining is pointless, died down to a deep pulsating ache that she knows promises trouble for tomorrow. They’re able to let out a bit of slack in their screaming arms now they’re on the flat. They shuffle awkwardly between Vesta’s pots, then hobble crabwise across the uncut grass, feet catching, balance uncertain. What must we look like, she wonders, out here in the dark. But she knows the answer, and doesn’t ask the question again.
The shed approaches. Twenty feet… ten… five… She can hear her pulse in her ears, feels sure that the veins are sticking out of her skin like tree roots. Tendons stand out like hawsers in Hossein’s neck. Thomas looks like he’s going to burst. They reach the open door, and relief floods through her. Thomas backs in to the darkness. We’re nearly there. We’re nearly —
He sticks. The door’s too narrow. Roy’s life of chocolate and sausage rolls and late-night pizza has rendered him too wide to fit.
‘Shit,’ hisses Cher, and drops her corner. There’s a noise inside the shed – a tumbling, thumping noise – and she realises that Thomas, caught unawares by the sudden halt, has lost his grip and fallen over.
‘No,’ says Cher. ‘Not now, fuck’s sake.’
She hears him grunt and pull himself up, then the pulling starts from the other side again. Cher and Hossein brace themselves, and push. Their burden just bunches up against the frame, gets thicker, lodges the wood more deeply into itself.
‘Stop.’ Thomas’s voice sounds horribly loud on the night air. They suck their breath in and halt. Wait for the sound of sirens. Someone must have heard them by now. Come to their bedroom window to see what the neighbours are up to. She stares around, looks up at the Poshes’ hundred-pound roller blinds, but nothing stirs in the gardens, no faces appear at the windows.
He speaks again, sotto voce. ‘Turn him on his side.’
Don’t see how that will help, thinks Cher, but they obey. The body still sticks, like a cork in a bottle. But it’s soft tissue, without the underlying hardness of hip bones.
‘Tuck him in,’ comes the voice.
‘What?’
‘Tuck him in. Go on.’
Oh, God. She looks at Hossein and he looks back. He’s on the far side from the pendulous stomach. He can reach across and pull, but it’s going to be her job to tuck. She gulps. I’m fifteen, she thinks again. It’s all downhill from here.
He’s over halfway in, his stomach forced up towards his nipples by the pressure of the door frame. Cher balls her hands into fists, closes her eyes and presses. She’s never kneaded bread, but she thinks it might be a similar sensation.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Poshes next door are throwing a party. At two o’clock in the afternoon, while Hossein is flushing out the drains with the power jet that Thomas, true to his word, hired from HSS, the sound of plummy merriment begins to float over the fence, and the air fills with a tantalising scent of a Saturday barbecue. The street fills up with SUVs, and Thomas’s rusty old Honda stands out like a bungalow in an executive development.