The Killer Next Door(76)
‘Well, one works so hard. Sometimes I’d just give anything for a rest.’
‘I know. Exactly! And really, when you’ve got it all laid on like that, there doesn’t seem much point bothering with doing the tourist thing, really, does there?’
‘Not even shopping?’
‘Oh, yes, obviously shopping!’
The food smells amazing. Fragrant and clean and fresh, as if it’s come straight off the farm. Vesta’s mouth waters as gusts of savoury spice wafts over the fence and fill her nostrils. So funny how the world has changed. I grew up on roly-poly pudding, in a world where parsley sauce was regarded as exotic; and horseradish with your Sunday beef, if you had it. Mum and Dad would practically wrap wet towels round their faces when the Asians moved into the street and the gardens smelled of curry, but it always smelled like adventures to me. I still remember the first time I tasted jerk chicken. I thought I’d gone to heaven. So funny. Once upon a time, smells like those coming over the fence right now were smells you only smelled on the bottom rungs of society. And now they’ve brought it all back here with them and their giant people carriers. They could no more cook without garlic than they could without salt.
I wonder, she thinks, how I shall see this day, when I look back on it? The surreality of it, the enforced inaction, all of us waiting for darkness to fall. Is this how everyone feels, when they’ve killed someone? Not jittery, not afraid, not sorrowful, but numb?
In his attic eyrie, Thomas stands by the window and watches the va-et-vient below. Next door is having a party, and he has a great view from his attic dormer: children dressed in the sort of cotton pinafores and coloured dungarees you see in the catalogues that fall out of the Sunday Times stomp around in an inflatable paddling pool and bounce in a netted trampoline while adults stand about pouring white wine from a collection of bottles stored in an old enamel washtub full of ice. Every person in the garden has a cardigan tied round their shoulders, as though they’ve been handed it like a name badge as they came through the door. It’s a form of uniform, of course, no less recognisable than baseball caps or hoodies. It lets them know who to smile at in the street, who to ask for directions, who to cross the road to get away from. Half a dozen identical cocker spaniels pant in the shade of a pear tree.
He feels surprisingly relieved at the way things have turned out. There’s a tension about what they have to do tonight, but, if all goes well, Vesta Collins has done him a favour. The others may be confused by the blockage in the drains, but he knew what it was the moment he set eyes on it. And if the Landlord had done as the silly old woman kept asking, and called a professional cleaning outfit, they would likely have guessed what it was as well. It wouldn’t be the first time in London’s recent history, after all, that drains got blocked by subcutaneous fat.
I’ve been careless, he thinks. Stupidly, arrogantly careless, thinking that because my natron did such a good job of dissolving the stuff that it would carry it all the way to the sewers. Thinking that, because nowadays you can buy a blender for less than the price of a curry, you could just pour those entrails down the toilet, cup by cup. Sixty per cent of the brain alone is made of fat. Where did I think it was going to go?
He needs a new plan – this much is evident. When he realised that Roy Preece was dead and police would soon be swarming over the house, he’d nearly died of fright. If he’d had less presence of mind, if he’d been less able to think on the spot and see his way forward, he would have bolted from that kitchen, from that frightful body and the idiot neighbours lolling about waiting for someone to tell them what to do, fled upstairs and tried to hide his girls. Now Alice is gone, there is room in the bed for both of them, and that’s good, but the flat is full of equipment for which he’s never bothered to work out proper storage places, and even he, inured as he is to the smell by living in such proximity with it, knows that the place still carries olfactory reminders of Nikki’s dissolution in its very fabric. I can’t leave myself vulnerable like this, he thinks. I’ve been a fool.
He stands on tiptoe and leans from the window to snatch a view of the patio. The Iranian man, Hossein, seems to be finished with the power jet, and is scooping the remaining contents of the drain trap into a bucket. He has found a piece of cloth and tied it round his face like a bandit in a cowboy movie. His movements are deliberate, methodical. From what Thomas knows of his history, he’s a man well versed in keeping secrets when secrets need to be kept. Thomas does a web search on all of his neighbours as they move in, just to be sure, and is rarely surprised by what he finds. But Hossein Zanjani is clearly not a popular man, at least with the current regime in Iran. Unpopular enough, indeed, to have his own listing on the Amnesty website. He’s not worried that this will jeopardise his asylum application: he just doesn’t want the people with knives, or guns, or poison umbrellas, or whatever’s fashionable with the mullahs this year, to know where to track him down. He’s interesting, thinks Thomas, a man of principle. In other circumstances, he would probably never have gone along with this, but even a popular hero can be turned when he’s staring down the barrel of an AK47.