With his brown chinos, white jacket and red hair he resembled a raspberry ice cream. He greeted me with a smile.
‘How are things, darlin’? Nice to meet you. I’m Andy Webber.’
He was overfamiliar, behaviour that never sat comfortably with me. I didn’t like his silly topknot or beard either.
‘I’m wonderful, thank you,’ I replied, and threw my bag over my shoulder. It weighed a ton.
‘So it’s number 7 you want to take a shufti around, right?’ I didn’t know what a ‘shufti’ was but I nodded anyway. ‘Cool, well, let me lead the way.’
Not so long ago, the flats before me had been council offices. A dreadful gas explosion had razed them to the ground and taken a dozen staff with it. Eventually, the building was rebuilt as apartments. Andy glossed over its history and blathered on about the flat’s potential and how many viewings he’d had since it’d been put on the market a few days earlier. We took the lift up three floors, but I wasn’t really listening to him. I just had a burning desire to spend a few moments in the place that Ryan called home.
My opponent wasn’t the only one who could do his research. I’d got the ball rolling with a written request to read the public coroner’s report, which listed Charlotte’s address. Curious to see where she’d called me from, I’d discovered on a property app that the flat was for sale. I made an appointment to view it, and after a brief meeting and handover with Effie before school, I was on my way. I’d already established with the estate agent that the vendor would not be in.
‘As you can see, it’s been recently redecorated,’ Andy explained. ‘The living and dining area is spacious and the kitchen has been refitted. It’s a perfect place for a single Pringle if this is the kind of gaff you’re looking for.’
It was hard to see any of that. All I saw was a cage with windows looking out onto a world Charlotte hadn’t wanted to be a part of anymore. No wonder she’d felt depressed and that it would only get worse once she had the baby.
I wandered around from room to room, mentally redecorating the place. Currently, it had come straight from the pages of an Ikea catalogue. Everything – from the cheap fireplace framing an electric coal-effect fire to the furniture – said first-time buyer, no idea.
‘Can I take a look at the bedrooms?’ I asked.
‘Sure,’ the estate agent replied, and began to lead the way.
‘It’s quite a pokey flat. I’m sure I can find them on my own.’
He shrugged, and remained in the kitchen while I opened the door to a tiny little box room, with just enough space for a mattress and a bedside cabinet. The duvet was pulled back and the pillows had head-shaped impressions in them – I guessed Ryan was now using it as his room. The next bedroom was a nursery. It smelled stale, like the door hadn’t been opened for some time. A mobile with drawings of zoo animals hung from the ceiling over a wooden cot. Everything in the room was either white or yellow: hedging their bets over the sex, I assumed. Knowing how weak its mother was and how devious its father could be made me even more confident I’d given the child a lucky escape.
The master bedroom was dimly lit, so I opened the curtains and began to poke around. Against one wall was the flat’s only piece of non-flatpack furniture, an antique dressing table with three rectangular mirrors. I wondered how many times Charlotte had looked at herself through their differing perspectives and failed to see what her husband had seen in her.
There were photos of her and Ryan inside mismatched frames on the dressing table, together with a few bottles of perfume. Taped to one mirror was the printout of a baby scan. Beneath it was a jewellery box containing rings and bracelets, all costume, of course.
I opened the wardrobe door and skimmed, hanger by hanger, her high-street-label clothes, her maternity wear outnumbering her pre-pregnancy clothing. Hidden at the back was a wedding dress – the simple, inexpensive lace gown I’d seen her wearing in the photo in Ryan’s grandfather’s room. It was covered in a clear plastic garment bag to prevent it from decaying like its owner.
‘Perfect,’ I muttered, pulling out a pair of yellow rubber gloves from my jacket pocket and slipping them over my hands. Then I reached into my bag to remove what was making it so heavy.
‘Everything all right in there?’ Andy’s voice came from behind the door. I quietly closed the wardrobe so he couldn’t see what I’d done, put the gloves back in my pocket and made my way back into the living room, nudging the dial of a thermostat on the wall up to full.
‘I think it’s a little too pedestrian for my needs,’ I said, and a look crossed his face that said I’d just wasted his time.
I was following him towards the front door when something on the top of a bureau caught my eye. Without him noticing, I grabbed it and slipped it inside my bag, smiling to myself.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
RYAN
It was impossible not to notice the heat or the smell as soon as I opened the door to the flat.
I’d spent Friday evening at Johnny’s house with a Thai takeout and a pay-per-view boxing match. And after a few beers, I’d slept over. It felt good to get away from the flat for a night. Much of the following day was spent with my dad at the cottage, making lists and prioritising the work that needed to be done, room by room. For the first time in a long while, I’d begun to allow a little optimism into my life and not allowed Laura Morris to dominate my thoughts.
But on my return home, it was boiling hot and reeked of something foul. I checked the fridge to see what had gone out of date so quickly, but the smell wasn’t coming from there. I figured someone viewing the flat must have caught their arm against the thermostat and accidentally turned it up, as I’d done it myself many a time. But that didn’t explain the odour.
It smelled the strongest in Charlotte’s and my bedroom. I looked under the bed, the dressing table and behind the curtain for the corpse of a dead mouse or rat. Charlotte had warned me that rats can climb up through the toilet bowl, even in a third-floor flat, though I hadn’t believed her until now. But as I edged closer to the wardrobe, I realised something inside it was causing the stench. I put my hand over my mouth as I opened the door.
‘Jesus!’ I yelled, and stumbled backwards. Charlotte’s wedding dress had been moved to the front, stripped from its polythene cover and the stomach area covered in blood.
At the foot of the dress was the small, pinky-white foetus of a dead piglet, also with blood on it. I kept approaching it, then stepping away, unsure of what to do and trying to process what the hell had happened during the thirty-six hours I’d been absent. Then, suddenly it hit me: Laura had been there. It was the only explanation. She’d been inside my bedroom, and not only was she mocking my dead wife but she was mocking my dead child, too. Furious, I held my breath and grabbed the stinking piglet using a tea towel, picked up my car keys, dropped the body into a recycling bin outside and made for my car.
Andy, the estate agent, was sitting in his office at his desk and facing the door when I stormed in, disturbing his quiet Saturday afternoon.
‘All right, mate,’ he began, ‘how—’
But I wasn’t interested in polite conversation.
‘Who have you shown around the flat in the last two days?’
‘Is something wrong?’
I raised my voice. ‘Who, Andy?’