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.
A house like number twenty-three doesn’t militate a high web presence. As far as he knows, he’s the only person who’s ever lived here who owned a computer, though the fact that Hossein seems to write quite regularly for a number of political websites suggests that he must, at the very least, have access to one. Gerard Bright turns up briefly as the star of a few slow-season comic newspaper stories – nothing like a private school music teacher cocking up to make a few gloating headlines in the quality press – but otherwise his viola and he just feature in a few concert programmes so amateur that the organisers never got round to taking them off the web afterwards. In fact, it seems as though he’s playing in a series of low-rent chamber concerts in local venues across the south-east this week, as luck would have it, the last one tonight. God knows what would have happened if he’d been here last night, or if he were here tonight. A whole new outcome flashes briefly across Thomas’s imagination. He dismisses them, hastily. Can’t think about that, he thinks. I have too much to do, too much to organise.
There are few mentions of Vesta Collins, but she pops up in the Northbourne Advertiser at every jubilee, smiling gamely in a party hat. He was surprised to find no signs at all of Cher or Collette, but he’s tracked down Cher, now, or at least the tragic little FIND CHERYL FARRELL Facebook page, set up by social services, that seems to have been the only effort anyone’s made to find her. The page is almost eighteen months old and the sulky twelve-year-old (clearly the most recent photo anybody’s bothered to take) face that stares out from it in school uniform is barely recognisable. Cheryl Farrell was a thickset black kid with frizzy black hair rubber-banded into two bunches like horns on the top of her head. She looks nothing like the leggy, brown-skinned girl with the corkscrew curls who’s slumped on a deckchair in the garden.
He feels that he knows them all better after their shared experiences. He’s certain, now, rather than suspecting, that Collette is on the run from someone, and that all of them are ready to be told what to do, as long as it keeps them off the radar. He watched their faces as he spoke last night, saw the ill-masked gratitude on each of them as he took control, and he knows that they will do anything he wants. I’m their friend now, he thinks. They used to avoid me when they saw me, find reasons why they had to be elsewhere. But now I’m their saviour. After tonight, when it’s all over and everybody’s home and safe and they’re counting their blessings, I’ll be one of them. I’ll be included. The dad of the house, where Vesta is the gran.
I’ve had a lucky escape, really. They’re never going to speak, never going to tell. They’ll clear it all away, and I’ll be more careful, safe again to be with my girls.
He turns back into the room, feeling light-hearted for the first time in what feels like years. He has things to sort out – not least how to dispose of the contents of the freezer, now the blender’s out of the question – but he feels he’s been given his life back once more.
The girls sit side by side on his little sofa, a man-sized gap between them. Nikki’s come out beautifully from her forty days of sleep. A little wrinkled, and her mouth slightly further open than we would ideally like, but otherwise she’s perfect. They sit together peacefully, wide eyes and curled hair and shiny painted nails, and wait for him. He checks his watch: it’s four o’clock, the party’s in full swing and everything downstairs is under control. Tonight, once it’s dark and the guests have gone and the lights are out and the trains are no longer running, there will be work to do, but for now a lazy afternoon rolls itself out before him.