Well, he’s not bloody going to. If he thinks he can just carry on trying to scare me, he can damn well think again. My mum and dad went through the Blitz in this house. I lived here when it was nothing but junkies and dealers up this way, when half the houses were squats – and no one dared try coming in here. What’s happened to you, Vesta? Where’s your backbone?
She casts about for a weapon with which to defend herself. The fire irons, bright polished brass, still live by the fireplace even though it was converted to gas in the 1960s. I’ll give the bugger a clout, she thinks, and send him on his way. Use the same poker he used to smash my mother’s statues with. That’s what I’ll do. There’re enough victim women in this house without me adding to it. I’ll give him a thick ear and a nasty fright, and he won’t dare try it again.
But despite her defiant thoughts, she lacks the courage to cross the room and leave the door unguarded. She has visions of him coming through as she bends in to the fireplace, of being on her before she can straighten up. She leans against the door and scans the stuff she’s brought through, looking for something closer to hand. Her eyes fall on the iron, sitting now on the gateleg table, heavy, old-fashioned, perfect.
She snatches it up, wraps the flex round her hand and listens again at the door. Yes, he’s still out back, in the bathroom. She can hear him moving about in there, a clink of metal on metal that she cannot place. She comes out into the sweaty corridor, moves stealthily up towards him.
It stinks, now the doors are open. Forty degrees of heat and standing sewage don’t make happy bedfellows. She’d be throwing up if the intervening hours hadn’t hardened her stomach. I bloody hate you, Roy Preece, she thinks. First thing tomorrow, if the drain people aren’t here by eight o’clock, I’m going straight round to yours and I’m going to hammer your door down till you bloody well come here and fix it.
More strange sounds. She sees now that he has a torch, and that he’s rested it on the sink to light whatever it is he is doing in the back of the room. All there is there is the old water heater, big and chunky and forty years old, hanging off the outside wall so its exhaust pipe has somewhere to vent. What’s he doing? What on earth is he doing?
Vesta creeps barefoot into the kitchen, recoils at the feel of greasy muck beneath her soles. She treads on something semi-solid, has to bite back a moan of disgust as it squidges up between her toes. It’s slippery underfoot, like wearing leather soles on ice. Now that she’s near him, can see the vague, gigantic shape of him in the darkness, she feels less certain. Grips the handle of the iron tighter and holds it in front of herself like a shield. From the dim light that illuminates the room, she can see that the man is huge: that he fills the space as though it were a cupboard. He’s got a bag of stuff at his feet, and something that looks like a wrench in his hand. And here I am, she thinks, in nothing but a nightie, thinking I’m going to see him off.
For a moment, she considers turning back. I could still make it, if I’m quiet, she thinks. Go out through that open kitchen door and nip out through the garden. Go round the front and knock up the others and… and get them to help. God’s sake, Vesta, you’re sixty-nine, not thirty-nine.
Then he turns to get something from his bag, and catches sight of the white cotton that covers her thighs.
Time slows to a crawl. Vesta feels herself leave her body for a moment, sees herself from behind, a frail elderly woman quailing as the giant unfurls itself in the gloom. Sees herself dying, here among the sewage, being found tomorrow morning, grey and gone and rotting.
She lunges, swings the iron at the end of her arm like a mace, and feels it connect. Hears an ‘oof’ from the burglar and is surprised by how suddenly her forward motion is halted by the solidness of his skull.
Her feet go out from under her. She flies through the air like a cartoon character, arms flailing, and hits the back of her head.
The world goes black.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Collette wakes to the sound of wailing. A woman’s voice, high with panic, calling, ‘No! No! Oh, God, no, no, no, wake up! Oh, God, wake up! Help! Please! Somebody help me!’
Vesta. She’s out of her bed in her top and leggings – her escape clothes – before she is really awake. She has to stop for a second and rest a hand against the wall as the blood rushes to her head and Hossein’s footsteps thunder across her ceiling. Then she slips her feet into her Keds and meets him at the bottom of the stairs.
Hossein’s face is still slack with sleep, his black hair sticking up in tufts. ‘What’s going on?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is it Vesta?’
‘I think so.’
‘I heard someone shouting. Is everyone okay?’
They jump. Thomas has followed Hossein down the stairs so silently that neither of them had known he was there. He looks exactly as he always looks – checked lawn shirt, tan slacks, slightly tinted specs – as though he merely goes into suspended animation at night rather than sleeping. ‘Is someone hurt?’
Hossein frowns and says something in Farsi. Strides past him and bangs on Vesta’s door with the flat of his hand. ‘Vesta? Are you okay? Vesta?’
Whether she’s okay or not, she doesn’t hear him. Just keens into the night, ‘Oh, God, oh somebody help me! Wake up! Wake up! I can’t lift him! Wake up!’
Collette looks over her shoulder, expects the elusive Gerard Bright to put his head out of the door and stare at them with those red-rimmed eyes of his. But the door stays closed. The phone is off the hook, she notices, the receiver dangling by its cord. Funny, she thinks. How did that happen?
They stare at each other in the dimness of the hallway. Thomas tries the door handle, impotently, as though he thinks it will have magically become one that turns. ‘Back door?’
Hossein shakes his head. ‘It will be worse. I reinforced the frame after the burglary.’
He raises his hand and bangs again. ‘Vesta!’ Launches himself bodily at the door and bounces off it, clutching his shoulder. Tries again.
‘Has anybody got a key?’ asks Thomas.
Hossein gives him the sort of wide-eyed head waggle you see in nightclubs just before trouble kicks off. ‘Has anybody got a key to yours?’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ says Collette. She pushes past Thomas, looks at the door, then stands on one foot and kicks out at the lock with the other. Hossein hears something splinter. Collette kicks again.
She’s half my size, thinks Hossein. This is shaming. ‘Hold on,’ he says, and takes her place. Copies her with his big bare foot, all his strength behind him. The lock gives under his third kick, and the door flies back and bangs against the wall.
Collette is past him and halfway down the stairs before he’s regained his balance. ‘Vesta?’ she calls. ‘Vesta, where are you?’
Hossein pauses to switch on the light. Collette is at the bottom of the stairs, looking wildly about her. The smell hits them like a steam train. Faeces and urine and… something dead. Sweet and dead, like it’s been that way a while. Hossein walks past her and she follows him towards the back of the house, where Vesta’s voice comes from.
She’s in the bathroom, crumpled on the floor, with what looks like a steam iron sticking out obscenely from between her thighs. She’s brown and green with filth, her hair matted down with something unspeakable. Her eyes plead wildly. ‘Help me,’ she says again. ‘Oh, God, I can’t move him. He’s too heavy. I can’t – he’ll drown.’
Behind her, in the gloom of the unlit bathroom, the top of a pair of gigantic buttocks moons at them over the waistband of a pair of drooping sweat pants. The owner is on his knees, bent forward in prayer position, face down in the overflowing toilet pan. He isn’t moving.