Now – 14th March
We can’t leave our flats now. Not until the body has been removed.
The lobby is cordoned off, the hallway on the first floor around the lift as well. Both stairwell doors are covered with sheets of white plastic so none of us can see what they’re doing down there. It’s going to be an awkward and messy job, I guess. The lift is stuck halfway between the floors and they won’t get him out easily.
Ella wanted me to go down and see what they were doing but that would have been madness. By the time I managed to pick myself up off the bathroom floor, the stairwells were already sealed anyway.
She’s panicking.
I’m not. Not any more. Strangely, it feels like a weight has lifted off my shoulders and I realise it was the uncertainty that was paralysing me, keeping me trapped in here for the past few days like a spooked animal.
Now he’s been found the real trouble begins, but I’m ready for what comes next, because now I have something to work with. We’ll be questioned tomorrow and when the police have gone we’ll get together as neighbours and discuss what was said, because that’s what happens at times like this. And from that I’ll find out how seriously his death is going to be taken by the police.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Callum says, again.
His eyes are wide like he’s still there in front of the lift doors he’d levered open, following Derek’s directions. The pair of them were convinced the smell was the source of our rat infestation, or at least an attractive site to them, which could be cleaned up.
‘It’s hardly the first dead body you’ve seen.’ I slip another cigarette out of the packet and light it with the butt of its predecessor. ‘You must have seen them in a far worse state, too.’
He looks at me sharply and I almost choke on my cigarette. Remembering that I haven’t been down there. I didn’t know what was happening until he knocked on my door and told me. Callum’s chin drops and he focuses on turning his mug around on the kitchen table by its chipped handle.
‘I was just a cook,’ he says softly.
It’s easy to forget where he’s from and what he’s seen and I feel bad for belittling his lingering trauma. I reach out and hold his hand across the table, feeling the power in his fingers as they close around mine, gentle as he always is with me. But his softness is another man’s demonstration of force and I sometimes wonder how strong he really is. What he’d be capable of if pushed in the wrong direction.
We both jump at a snap in the next room.
‘One of the traps,’ Callum says, but doesn’t move.
If it isn’t a clean break the rat will likely hang on for a few minutes. I don’t like to think of it suffering, perhaps trying to pull itself away from the steel teeth and spring-loaded bar, but I can’t ask him to do something about it. Not when he’s in this state.
‘Do you fancy some food?’ he asks abruptly. ‘I could do us cheese on toast?’
‘That’d be good,’ I say, even though I don’t want anything. ‘I think there’s bread left.’
‘Aye, good stuff. That’s what we need. Bit of comfort food.’
While he cleans off the grilling tray I go out on to the balcony with my cigarettes, wrapping my heavy wool cardigan tight around my body against the frost that stings my nose. It’s late. Gone two and the streets are at their quietest. That’s how you know this area has achieved respectability: expensive homes mean big mortgages mean early starts. Nobody’s tearing it up tonight, except me and Callum and our visitors downstairs.
Across the site the lit windows of the unoccupied flats draw my eye as they always do, but not for long. Below me the police vehicles are parked haphazardly on the paved area in front of the building, watched over by two uniformed officers. A third comes out of the building to join them, dressed in a white coverall now thrown back off his face. He bums a cigarette and gets a light, walks a few yards away to make a phone call. His gaze is turned up towards the neighbouring tower and I wonder if he envies them, what kind of place he’ll eventually go home to when he’s done here tonight. If he’s thinking about knocking on those doors for witness statements.
Will he be the one who questions us all tomorrow? The one Callum has briefly spoken to, given him the story he’s already given me. Does the detective believe him or has he pegged Callum as trouble? He probably looks the sort, to a copper’s eye. We all will. Hanging on in here in a way only the mad or dangerous would. Decent people, honest people, wouldn’t fight the developers. We’d make way for our betters in a quiet and dignified fashion.
Another plastic-clad figure comes out and opens up the back of a vehicle shaped like an ambulance but marked differently. A moment later I hear the sound of wheels moving slowly across the tarmac and swearing as they catch.
I lean over the balcony, holding my breath, not wanting to draw any attention to myself. I can see a black body bag strapped down on to a trolley, a person at the head end, another by the feet. I watch them load it into the vehicle, slam the door shut on him. They strip off their protective clothing and climb in the front, drive him away from here.
They will take his fingerprints and swab him for DNA. They’re going to find traces of me and Ella on him. I’ve already thrown out the clothes I was wearing that night. And luckily I have other black jeans and grey jumpers that will pass for those I’m wearing in the photographs. If it comes to that.
When it comes to that.
‘Food’s up,’ Callum calls.
Back inside he’s put the radio on, a classic rock station turned down low. He has very old-fashioned taste sometimes. The kitchen smells of toasted bread and hot fat and I realise I am actually hungry. We eat in silence, an occasional slamming door or shout coming up from outside. There’s the brief whoop of a siren as a car pulls away, off to answer a call where something might still be done. They have as much as they want or everything they can get and I take encouragement from the fact that they’ve only been here a few hours.
This won’t be a priority crime. It can’t be.
‘Who d’you think he was?’ Callum asks, wiping grease off his chin with the cuff of his sweatshirt. The question sounds casual but I’m not sure it is.
‘I don’t know. Homeless guy, maybe.’ I shake my head. ‘You’d have to be pretty out of it to end up walking into an empty lift shaft, wouldn’t you? Maybe a junkie.’
‘He wasn’t dressed like a junkie.’
‘There’s lots of kinds of junkies, Cal.’
‘Not round here there’s not. This boy looked clean.’ He props his elbows on the table, one big fist curled into his palm. ‘Looked to me like he was maybe one of the lads from Ella’s party.’
My face feels like a mask, cold and stiff, the flesh too tight across my bones. Callum is not stupid. He knows me. He knows where I’ve been and the things I’ve done. Some of them. The ones it felt safe to trust him with in a warm bed, in a dark room, in the early hours of mornings when he’s woken screaming and needing reassurance that he isn’t the only person who wishes they could erase parts of themselves.
‘I think we’d have heard by now if one of Ella’s friends went missing,’ I say slowly, so it sounds like the truth. ‘They’re not the type of people who just drop off the face of the earth without anyone noticing.’
For a long moment he stares at me and I don’t know what he’s thinking but the hard look in his eyes is so disconcerting that when he pushes back from the table I flinch.
Immediately his expression switches to concern and I smile at him. ‘I’ve had way too much coffee today, my nerves are shredded.’
‘Go and see what’s on TV; I’ll make you some warm milk.’
I force a laugh. ‘You’re making me feel like your elderly mother here.’
‘It’s been a long, strange night, hen.’ He comes around the table and settles his hands on my shoulders, quickly kisses the top of my head. ‘We could both use something to help us sleep.’
But I don’t sleep. We drink warm milk spiked with bourbon and lie together on the sofa, with the dead rat in the trap behind us leaking an ammonia smell like spilt nail-polish remover. The television is playing, showing a film I’ve seen before and don’t like, but it’s one of Callum’s favourites. He drifts off before the second ad break and I stay there for a while, my head on his chest, hearing the slow pump of his heart and a rattle in his lungs that sounds like something he should see a doctor about.
When I’m sure he’s deeply asleep I carefully get up and go out into the corridor. I head for the fourth floor. Another bulb has died since I was last up here. There’s only one left now at the far end and its light barely reaches where I stand. The shadows feel alive around me, the rooms haunted by their absconded tenants, the sheer weight of all that empty space pressing in as I bring out my phone and turn on the torch.
The light is sudden and stark and I yelp as it hits a rat sitting in the centre of the floor, flashing across its eyes before it darts away into a gap in the wall.
I steel myself and turn the torchlight on to the doors of the lift shaft. A dulled reflection stands in front of me, as blurred and insubstantial as I feel. A ghost of me, the me that was here that night, and I wish I could communicate with her and tell her not to get involved.
But it’s too late for that and I suspect I wouldn’t listen to me if I was her anyway.
Tonight the doors look different. The torchlight picks out patches of near-black where fingerprints have been lifted, but that’s the only sign of police activity.
Tentatively, I make my way to the far end of the corridor, to the flat where it happened, and find the door still locked, as I left it. The key is on the other side. I wish now that I’d kept it instead of pushing it under like a departing homeowner might have done. I desperately want to go in and look the place over one last time, check that I’ve cleaned the blood off the fireplace as carefully as I thought I had, that there’s no lingering smell of bleach.
It might be days before the police decide to check the flat. If they bother at all. They have no more reason to look in that one than in any of the others and will they waste resources searching each of the sixty flats in the building?
Not unless someone tips them off to its importance.
Back downstairs I find Callum has migrated from the uncomfortable sofa to my bed. He’s snoring as I tug off my fur-lined boots and unpeel my leggings but he murmurs when I lift the cover and climb on top of him. I work him with my hand until he’s hard and he smiles a sleepy smile and takes hold of my hips, pulling me down on to his cock. Neither of us speaks; there’s only the creak of the bed and our quickening breaths and the sound of skin on skin and, briefly, everything else falls away and I’m spared my fears and suspicions and the clockwork whirring of planning how to get free from what we’ve done.
‘Sorry,’ Callum gasps, a second before he comes.
The room spins back into focus.
He starts to move down the bed.
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘You can owe me one.’
He gives me a questioning look, because it isn’t how this usually works; I’ve trained him better than that. I kiss him then burrow into his chest so he can’t see my face any more.
As I’m drifting off, my phone rings and I want to let the call go unanswered, but I shouldn’t. Callum barely stirs when I slip away from him, grabbing my dressing gown from the back of the door, closing it behind me as I take the call.
‘Did I wake you?’ Ella asks, her voice slow and slurring around the words. ‘It’s too late, isn’t it, Molly?’
I feel a stone drop in my stomach. ‘Too late for what?’
‘Talking.’
‘Ella, sweetheart, have you taken something?’ I ask, trying to sound calm.
‘Just vodka,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything stupid. Nothing else stupid, anyway. Though, who’s to say if it wouldn’t actually be a very smart thing to do?’ She lets out a long sigh and then I hear her go for another drink. ‘I was always the smart one, you know?’
‘You still are,’ I tell her, curling up on the sofa, imagining her alone, drinking in bed, exhausted from the crying I can hear a residue of in her voice. ‘You’re smart enough to get through this, Ella. You just need to hold it together and stay calm. You can do this.’
‘I can’t.’ It’s a whisper, wet and loaded with despair. Then she starts babbling. ‘I’m going to crack, Molly. When they talk to me they’re going to see I’m guilty and I’ll see that they see it and then I’m going to come clean. I won’t be able to stop myself. I can feel it, it’s like I’m getting guiltier the longer I don’t tell anyone.’
‘You told me,’ I say desperately. ‘You’ve come clean, you don’t need to tell anyone else.’
Quickly I go and double-check the bedroom door is closed. Callum is snoring but I can’t risk him hearing this conversation. Even my side alone is damning and I feel sure we’re not through the worst of it yet from the way she’s whispering to herself, caught in a loop of recrimination and self-loathing between long swigs of vodka.
More than anything I want to grab that bottle off her, but she’s there and I’m here and all I have is my phone and as long as it takes to talk her through this.
‘I should go,’ Ella moans. ‘This all ends if I disappear. I can get some cash out and I’ll just take the Eurostar and disappear. You can tell people I went to meet up with some group or other. The police won’t even expect to find me then. Martin knows loads of people in Greece. He’ll know someone I can go and stay with. He says it’s pretty much lawless over there now; who’s going to come for me in that mess?’
There’s a worrying edge to her voice, a reckless determination similar to when she told me about Ryan Quinn’s plan for her. She knew that was stupid and she knows this is too, but she’s well capable of going through with it regardless.
‘If you run now you’ll be admitting your guilt,’ I say. ‘The police will definitely go looking for you and, given who your dad is, Ella, they’re going to be sure they bring you back. Don’t you think he’ll be worried about you? Don’t you think he’ll pull every string he can to make sure you’re brought home safe? Shit, he’ll probably trek across Europe looking for you himself.’
‘My dad. . .’
She speaks the words so softly I can’t get anything from the tone.
‘What about your dad?’ I ask tremulously, thinking this is it, she’s already told him. We’re done. Or she’s going to tell him and we’ll be done then. ‘Ella, honey, what about your dad?’
Another big, jagged sigh. ‘It’ll kill him if he ever finds out.’
‘He won’t find out,’ I tell her, as firmly as I can. ‘Not if you stay here and keep calm.’
‘All I ever wanted was for him to be proud of me.’ The sound of a cover rustling and a small sniffle. ‘I’ve messed everything up, Molly.’
Quietly she begins to sob and I feel a tug in my chest, wishing she’d come to me rather than working herself up into this state.
‘You haven’t messed everything up,’ I say. ‘You’ve been unlucky, that’s all. There’s a way through this, Ella, believe me.’ I force a smile I hope she can hear down the phone. ‘You are such a clever girl. You’re strong and resourceful and you are going to get through this. We are going to get through this together.’
Ella laughs. It’s almost a gasp, like a last breath before drowning.
‘I’m doing important work, aren’t I?’
‘Too important to give up on, yes.’
‘I don’t want to waste my life,’ she says, so desperately that I feel tears coming. ‘I want to do so much more than this.’
‘You can.’
‘I want to change things.’
‘You will,’ I tell her and even as I hope it’s true, I fear it isn’t. That she can’t get beyond this, that I can’t bring her through it in one piece.
That neither of us are quite good enough.