‘Not as far as I know.’
‘Well,’ says Vesta, again. The itinerant movements of the young never cease to amaze her. ‘Maybe she went back to Glasgow. Did she make up with her folks, did you hear?’
‘Vesta,’ says Hossein, ‘nobody tells me anything. I sometimes think you’re the only one who realises I speak English.’
‘Well,’ says Vesta again. ‘So what’s she like?’
‘Don’t know,’ says Hossein. ‘She only got here today. I heard the Landlord letting her in, so I…’
‘Oh, you big scaredy-cat.’
He shrugs again. She’s right, of course. A man his age shouldn’t be hiding from strangers, even if they do have Roy Preece attached. They reach the steps and he bends to slide the handle back into the case. Picks it up and starts towards the door. ‘Good God, woman. What have you got in here?’
‘Oh, sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have anywhere to dispose of the bodies. It was only a bed and breakfast.’
‘How many people you killed? Have you no self-control? You’ve only been gone two weeks.’
She starts up the steps behind him, winces as she bends her knee. She can’t wait to have a sit-down and put her feet up, have a cuppa. There’s not much in the flat, but she at least had the foresight to lay in a pint of UHT before she left. Not as good as fresh, but better than nothing, and there’s no way she’s leaving the house again today. There’s a packet of digestives in the tin, she’s pretty sure, and a block of cheddar in the fridge. There are times when the reduced appetite of age is a great convenience.
Hossein opens the front door, and stands by to wait for her to pass. From behind Gerard Bright’s door a piece of music, all piano and sobbing cello, plays on and on as it had done the day she left for Ilfracombe; it’s as though she’d just popped out to the corner shop. She steps in to the hall and notices that the familiar smells of her childhood – dust and impermanence, and a slight whiff of damp – have had another layer added to them. Something… meaty, she thinks; like something’s died under the floorboards and has yet to desiccate. We need to get this place aired out, she thinks. There’s no ventilation on this stairwell, with all the doors shut most of the time.
She stretches, her journey finally over, and leafs through the mail on the hall table. A couple of circulars – the usual stuff, animal charities thinking she’s a sucker, old-people insurers reminding her she’s going to die. ‘Oh, but it’s good to be home,’ she says, and isn’t sure she means it.
‘No place like it,’ says Hossein, but she misses the faint irony in his voice.
She puffs out her cheeks and drops the letters into her bag, ready for the recycling bin. ‘Can I tempt you to a cuppa?’ she asks Hossein. ‘Before you go out?’
He checks his watch. ‘Sure. I don’t have to hurry.’
She fetches her key from her handbag. ‘I’ll put the kettle on, then.’
She knows the moment she ducks in through her narrow door under the hall stairs that something isn’t right. The air in the flat is too fresh. For a moment, she wonders if she forgot to close a window before she left for Devon, but then she switches on the light at the top of the stairs and sees that her umbrella stand – her mother’s umbrella stand – is lying on its side.
For a moment, her brain freezes. The sight of the unexpected where all is so familiar leaves her grasping for thought. ‘Oh,’ she says. Then, catching sight of The Crying Boy, his frame askew on the wall, she suddenly knows what has happened and her guts lurch. ‘Oh,’ she says again.
She hears Hossein drag the bag in through the door as she feels her way wordlessly down the stairs, clutching on to the banister as soon as it starts, like a proper old person. Her legs are weak, her breath watery. Sixty-nine years she has lived here, the world changing around her and neighbours coming and going, but this has always been her place of safety. No one has ever come in here without invitation. No one has ever invaded.
She reaches the bottom of the steps with a flood of relief and dread as she feels the solid ground beneath her feet. The hall is scattered with umbrellas and walking sticks, her father’s precious books tossed out from their shelf on to the faded Axminster, her coats, her mother’s hats – globes of fake fur and fabric roses she could never bear to give to the charity shop – ripped from the hooks above and trodden into the ground. ‘Oh,’ she says again. Hossein, concentrating on balancing his burden down the steep staircase, has yet to see the chaos, is yet to remark upon it.
She doesn’t want to go any further. Wants to turn tail and run, go back to Ilfracombe, not have to face it. Glancing up the corridor towards her tiny kitchen, she can see light where the outside door should be. It’s hanging open, on its hinges, kicked or jemmied during one of the nights she slept unknowing in her bed and breakfast, lulled by the sounds of gulls and water.
Vesta puts a hand on to her breastbone, feels her heart thud in her chest. It’s too much. This is too much. She steps over the fallen umbrella stand and peers into the living room. The curtains are open, the nets still drawn, but the light that penetrates here, even on a blazing summer day like today, is thin and pale. She switches on the light, looks around her, feels tears spring into her throat.
‘Oh, Hossein,’ she says. ‘Oh, my Lord.’
Chapter Seven
She lies on the bed, listens to the sound of voices in the corridor outside. There’s something going on beyond her door; something’s happened. She hears a man’s voice, foreign; the guttural aitch of the East raised over the classical music that started up an hour after she arrived and continues to pierce her party wall. From somewhere in the distance, floating through the window over the sticky air, the sound of sobbing, a woman’s voice saying, periodically: ‘No! Oh, no! Oh, no!’
Collette rolls on to her side, picks up the pillow and presses it to her ear. She’s exhausted, wrung out after her journey, after three years spent looking over her shoulder, dreading the weeks or months to come. She’s desperate to sleep, desperate to feel that, even for a few days, a few weeks, she can let her guard down and rest while she finds out what’s going to happen with Janine. It’s okay, she tells herself. You don’t have to get involved. Just keep yourself to yourself and -
A series of loud bangs on her door wrenches her upright. Someone’s thumping on it as though they plan to break through.
Collette sits on a stranger’s musky sheets and stares as the wood judders beneath a fist. A man’s voice, the foreign accent that she heard passing out in the hall earlier, an edge of intemperate urgency. ‘Hello? Hello?’
Angry men. The world is full of angry men. She can’t face an angry man today. She feels like she’s been running from them all her life.
He thumps again, rattles at her door handle. ‘Hello? Are you in there? I need to talk to you.’
Maybe if I just keep quiet… at least this one doesn’t seem to have a key…
Another burst of hammering. ‘HELLO?’
She pushes herself off the bed and crosses the room. No spyhole, no chain, no bolts: it’s as secure as a sauna, this room. She steels herself, throws the door open, ready to fight.
The most beautiful man she has ever seen stands in the corridor, clenched fist raised at her face. Golden skin and sad, almond eyes, glossy black hair and a beard trimmed close to sharp, angular cheeks. A generous mouth that, even in what is clearly a state of some disturbance, is dimpled at the sides by good humour. Collette gasps, and blushes.
He misinterprets the sound. Looks at his upraised hand and drops it to his side. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were going to open it.’
It’s a precise diction, its foreign edge poetical, educated, the consonants carefully separated. He’s learned his English from the BBC, not CNN.