He’s crammed into the small space like batter. This afternoon he was rigid with rigor, but twelve more hours of sweaty heat in the airless shed, and it has passed. He slid in bonelessly, and settled like cake mix into a tin.
But getting him out is like wrestling jelly. Limbs and hair and belly, great slabs of thigh and lolling head sliding about in the confines of the boot, refuse to afford them any traction. They struggle for a minute, silent for fear of waking the neighbours, elbowing each other and tying their arms in knots like the Keystone Cops, but the Landlord is stuck fast.
Thomas lets out a tiny hiss, grips Collette by the upper arm. He shakes his head and gestures to her to move back. She obeys, meekly. She’s amazed and relieved by the way Thomas has taken on authority, delegated tasks – just known what to do while the rest of them were floundering in panic. She taps Cher on the elbow, jerks her thumb towards her chest to tell her to move.
Thomas stands with one hand on the boot lid, looking down at the body as though it were a logic puzzle. Then, with a single, smooth movement, he lays his hands on one corner of sheeting and hauls upwards. Like an extra in The Walking Dead, Roy sits up in his plastic wrapping, turns and flops over the lip of the boot, like a jack-in-a-box. Slowly at first, then faster, as his centre of gravity shifts, he slithers over the lip and on to the tarmac, like a great blue maggot.
They bump him down the steps, each crackle of plastic and scrape of a sole jerking them to a silent stop. We’ve come so far, now, thinks Collette. Please God don’t let us get caught now. There’s nothing we can do but go forward. She wishes they could hurry, but they can’t afford to get careless. Four people and a stinking corpse: there’s no way you can talk yourself out of that one. By the door, Thomas shuttles through the bunch of keys they fished from Roy’s damp pocket, looking for the one that opens it. Collette climbs back up a couple of steps and scans the street. Any moment now it’s going to fill with a posse of torch-bearing householders, she knows it. A light will come on, then another light, then a voice will ask what they’re doing, and…
And then the door is open. Thomas bends and starts to drag Roy through. Collette rushes down the steps and joins the others.
It’s a night of smells. She can feel that they’ve come straight into a room; a stuffy, hard-surfaced room that smells of frying and onions and sweat and stale alcohol, just like the Landlord himself before other, stronger, smells took over. Laminate floor beneath her feet, some sort of storage unit to her right; nothing that soaks up sound anywhere near, just the dull echo of their panicked breathing, the shuffle of their feet.
The weight dragging on her shoulders gets suddenly heavier, and she realises that Thomas has dropped his share of the burden. She does the same, hears the Landlord’s skull crack against the floor. The door closes.
‘Where’s the lights?’ hisses Cher.
‘Hang on.’ He’s speaking normally now, confident that they’re not overheard. She hears him feel his way across the room to the window, and they are plunged in darkness as a blind is drawn down.
A hand slips into hers and squeezes. Over the smell of the room and the smell of the dead man, she catches a slight whiff off the clean, sandalwood scent of Hossein. He doesn’t say a word, but she feels comforted, suddenly safer. She waits, calmer now, as Thomas works his way back to the door and feels around for the light switch.
He hits it, and they are bathed in light so bright that her hands fly to her eyes. When she opens them, she sees her three companions blinking, their features washed out, pale with fear and tiredness, eyes wild as they check out their surroundings. Cher still holds on to her corner of the plastic. Lets go as she realises that she is the only one. She looks around her, at the lair of her tormentor, and voices her judgement.
‘Fucking hell. What a shithole.’
Collette looks around. It’s quite a large room, the width of the building and probably half its depth. Walls that were probably once magnolia, favourite choice of property developers everywhere, but which have started to turn sepia with age, greasy black marks all around the light switches where he’s groped around in the dark and never used a wet wipe.
A featureless, joyless room. She guesses, from the lack of embellishment, that it was converted at the height of the 1980s extra-dry Chardonnay boom, when everyone liked to think that they craved a minimalist lifestyle and forgot that they would need storage to achieve it. It’s a bachelor pad, she thinks: a real one, not the style palaces you’re supposed to imagine when you hear the phrase. A place that’s lived in by a man who’s never bothered to make it attractive, because that’s what women do. He’s just bought things as he’s gone along and dumped the old ones in the corner.