A pair of dog walkers chats at the coffee stand, adding sweetener to their drinks, while their charges – three Scotties, a Pom, two pugs and a Dalmatian – mill about at the extreme end of multi-leads and sniff about at the base of a waste-bin. A perfect opportunity, right there. He potters over and empties the remainder of his bag in among them, enjoys the pleasure with which they wolf down the unexpected goodies, the shining eyes that turn towards him in search of more.
He squats down and scratches behind the Pom’s neck ruff. It licks its lips and gives him a huge, foxy grin and he rewards it with a final piece of well-chopped tripe. It snarfs it up with a tail-wag so violent it almost loses it feet, and pants hopefully at him as he stands up once more. Thomas likes dogs. So trusting, so loyal. He sometimes thinks that, had he had another life – one where landlords allowed pets, for instance – he might not have had need of his girlfriends at all.
‘Sorry, poppet,’ he tells the friendly Pom. ‘That’s the lot for today. See you tomorrow, maybe?’
He walks back through the sunshine on the path to home. He feels no great need to dawdle. He’ll be taking a walk every day this week. The freezer compartment is full to bursting, and he suspects that he might soon need to free up some room.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
She thinks it through and decides to go in the daytime. A teenager carrying a television through the streets in the dark is asking for a stop-and-search, whereas you can walk around with pretty much anything while the shops are open. She once carted a bike, with its lock still on, all the way from Twickenham to Kingston, and nobody even batted an eyelid. For sure, a casual-looking girl with no obvious signs of drug abuse carting a flat-screen under her arm will be fine.
Cher’s thought and thought about that telly. She’s never had a television of her own, never even had control of a remote. And God knows she’s longed for one. A telly will make all the difference to her life, and the Landlord has three that he no longer needs. And besides, he owes her that much. That’s what she figures.
She passes a couple of people in the street and smiles boldly at them. The trick is to always look like you belong; like you have a right to be wherever you are at the time. Look shifty, and people will assume that you are shifty. Fix them with a smile and cry out ‘good morning’, and nine times out of ten, in a city like this, they will shrug themselves into their imaginary coats and hurry by, mumbling an embarrassed greeting in return. The rest are either up to something shifty themselves, or they’re a bit mad, so they don’t really count.
She strides confidently to the Landlord’s basement stairs and skips down them, pulling on her gloves. Fishes from her pocket the bunch of keys she lifted off Thomas in the car when they were on the way home, and leafs through them. She identifies them in no time. Can’t believe it took Thomas so long, though she supposes it was dark when he was looking. They stand out from the Beulah keys because they’re new, and shiny, and have more than three levers to them. She undoes the mortise, then turns the Yale and steps cheerfully inside.
In an instant she is gagging. She had remembered the smell from the boot, and had expected to have to make an adjustment, but eight days has magnified it so much that it takes her breath away completely. Her throat closes up and she feels her gorge rise. She’s never smelled anything like this. The smell of ripe shit in Vesta’s bathroom is like flowers in comparison. Her lungs don’t seem to want to take this fetid air into themselves. They rebel each time she tries to breathe, let only tiny sips of it through before her epiglottis clamps down and everything stops.
How can the neighbours not smell this, she thinks. It’s not possible. Maybe it’s… God, I’ve never smelled anything like this. Nothing close to it. Maybe they just don’t know what it is?
She switches the light on. Lets out a huge bronchial cough, the sort that can turn too easily into the gag reflex. But once it’s out, she finds that she is able to breathe. Not normally, not by a long chalk, and she has to keep her lips clamped firmly closed, but enough that she doesn’t have to flee the room.
The Landlord has been leaking. The floor is sticky with fluids. They have spread outwards across the beech-look laminate by several feet, have stained the wall against which his right arm presses. Now the first wave of nausea has passed, she’s interested. He’s not her first corpse. But her mum and her nanna were freshly dead when she saw them, and she didn’t have a lot of time to study them before they were swept up by forensics and taken away for autopsy, then given the old cosmetic beautification by an undertaker. By the time they were buried, they looked like waxworks. Overpainted, their features sewn up with clever threadwork into Mona Lisa smiles.