The Killer Next Door(90)

She comes out of the bathroom, disconsolate. She’s about to go back to the kitchen and try one of the knives when she notices the cupboard. It’s a big cupboard that fills the space where the stairs up to the ground floor used to be. For some reason, she’s taken the narrowness of the hall, the jink at the end, for granted, maybe because Vesta’s basement hall is narrower, if anything. Ah, now, there you go, she thinks. I should’ve thought that even someone like him would have a Hoover hidden away somewhere.

It takes her a moment to work out how to open the door, picking at its seam with her fingernail, until she tries pushing on it, and it swings open. It’s big enough and deep enough to house a cloakroom, if he had wanted one, though someone his size wouldn’t have used it with any great ease. Instead, it’s filled with more of the sort of junk that lies about the living room: arm and leg weights, an ironing board, an old record player and a box of vinyl records, the vacuum cleaner, an old fold-up director’s chair. A series of narrow shelves on the wall just inside the door houses boxes of bits and bobs: light bulbs, screws, nails, superglue, fuses, batteries: and on the floor, in the back, another toolkit box.

‘Aha!’ she cries, triumphantly. Dives on it joyfully, drags it into the light. It has one of those lids that split in two, and beneath that a plastic tray with more of the same crap as on the shelves in its little divided sections. She lifts it out and puts it on the floor, expecting to find the tools in the void beneath. Looks back in – and takes a huge, gasping breath.

It’s not tools. It’s money. Lots and lots of money. Ten and twenty and fifty pound notes, stacked neatly by denomination. Cher stares at it and her pupils expand. Cash that nearly fills the box. There must be thousands and thousands, here in the cupboard.

‘Fuckin’ Ada,’ she says.

She can hardly bear to touch it, in case it vanishes like some fairy glimmer under her hand. Then she does, and feels that it is real, and sighs in astonishment. Looks guiltily over her shoulder, suddenly expecting someone to come in and find her here, and touches it again.

She sits down heavily on the hard, cold floor. She knows beyond doubt now what they mean by a rush of blood to the head. It really is thousands, she thinks. Thousands and thousands. That’s why this flat is such a shithole, why everything looks like it’s on the edge of falling apart: he’s been socking the rent money away under the stairs.

She picks up a bundle of fifty pound notes. A generous handful, maybe three inches thick. Looks at it the way an entomologist would look at some insect species they’d heard about but never seen. The notes are real, all right. She has no idea how much money she holds in her hand, but she suspects that it might be more than has passed through them in the whole of her life to this moment. Lovely mellow reds, the queen serene and smug on one side, blokes in wigs on the other. Paper quality that feels like luxury itself.

I can’t, she thinks. I can’t. I mustn’t. Oh, God, the things I could do with this. The things we could all do. But I can’t. It would tip us over. What we’ve done already is wrong. I know that. But it’s a wrong I can live with. It’s a wrong that stopped a load of other wrongs. But this?

She fans the notes out, puts them to her face and sniffs them. They smell like – money. Wonderful money. Wonderful, wonderful money, root of all freedom. The only people who really believe the ‘money doesn’t buy you happiness’ line are the ones who’ve never had to live without it.

Through the open door to the living room, she can see the melting corpse on the floor. A miserable life, a miserable death. No one to mourn him, no one to care. Died because he was greedy, in the end. Because his love for this stuff made him think an old lady’s life didn’t matter. And he didn’t even get to spend it. Didn’t enjoy his life. Just stashed it in a box and lived on his settee, watching other people live their lives on his TV screens.

Reluctantly, she puts the notes back on top of the pile. Strokes them, as though they were alive. They’re someone else’s, she thinks. Not mine. I’m not that person. If I take them, I’m all the things I ran away to stop myself becoming. Doing the things I do to keep the wolf from the door is one thing. I’d be doing this to chase down luxury. I’d be stepping over the line.

She can’t stop herself from creaming half a dozen notes off the top. She’s not a saint. Tucks them into her bra and feels better. Call it a rent rebate, she thinks. That’s a couple of weeks’ fags and groceries, some shoes and a good winter coat – compensation for the time I couldn’t work.