Chapter 172: Top Flat, End II

Pembury House was 4 storeys of brown brick 400 metres from the end of Ashwell Court, and the notice about the lift engineer was still taped up by the button, curling at one corner, with 2019 on it. The bin store still had the abandoned trolley in the back of it. The stairwell smelled the way it always had, cold concrete and somebody’s fried onions and the pine bleach Adaeze’s cleaner used on a Friday.

Adaeze was at the bottom of the stairs in a long camel coat over a black jumper dress that stopped above the knee, with her hair braided back off her face and gold hoops in, and the key in her gloved hand. She looked at Jodie, and smiled, and started talking on the first step.

“You’ll walk up, the lift’s done nothing since 2019, I’ve had 3 men out to it and every one of them says it’s the board, and every board costs 4,000 pound, and every one of them wants paying to tell me that.

“The nurse used to carry her shopping up in 2 trips and the boy carried his bike. That bike lived on the landing for 2 years. I told her, it’s a fire risk, and she said, Mrs Nwosu, he’s 9, and I said I know he’s 9, and it stayed on the landing.

“She went to her mum’s in Leyton. Her mum had a fall. The boy left a plastic cup on the windowsill for the birds and I’ve not had the heart to move it.”

She stopped on the 2nd floor and got her breath.

“2 people have been round since. A man who asked if he could keep a motorbike in the room, and a girl who stood under that ceiling for 10 minutes and said it gave her the creeps, it was too white, and went. Too white. I said it’s a ceiling.”

She went up the last flight. On the top landing she turned right without looking and walked to the end, to the last door, and put the key in it.

“I had it painted after the nurse went,” she said. “The walls, not the ceiling. Nobody’s touched the ceiling.”

The flat was one room with a kitchen along one side and a bathroom the size of a wardrobe, bare boards, and the window at the end with a crack of grey London in it. A blue plastic cup stood on the sill. The radiator under the window ticked as it warmed. The walls were clean magnolia now and smelled of new paint.

And above all of it, the ceiling. White, plain, flat from wall to wall, and as smooth after 11 years as the day Deniz finished it.

Danny stood in the middle of the floor and looked up.

I lay under that the first night on a mattress with my hands behind my head and couldn’t sleep for how white it was. Did anybody stand here before me and check it was done?

“Same rent as you paid me,” Adaeze said. “I’ve not put it up. 12 months, in your own name. Your solicitor reads it before you sign it. I’ll want it signed by the end of next week, or I’ll let it to somebody who hasn’t got their name on a list in Kensington.”

“Priya wants to read it Friday.”

“Then I’ll have it in her hands Thursday night.” Adaeze held the key out to him on her flat palm. “Stay as long as you want. Lock it after you and bring me that key back tonight. I’m going back to Clapton to shout at a wall.”

She went. They heard her heels go down the 3 flights and the street door bang at the bottom.

Jodie walked to the window and tried to open it. It went 4 inches and caught on the frame.

“Is that how it’s always been?”

“11 years. I never got it fixed.”

“I’m fixing it.” She moved the boy’s blue cup carefully to the end of the sill and turned round and put her back against the window, and looked at him across the empty room. “You lived here from 17. On your own. In this.”

“With a mattress, and a kettle off the market on Mare Street.”

“Come here.”

He went to her across the bare boards.

I put my hands on her waist and she pulled me in by the front of my coat and kissed me hard, with her back against the window and the cold coming off the glass behind her. She tasted of the mint she’d had on the stairs.

“I want you to have something good in this room,” she said against my mouth. “Something that’s yours.”

I got my hand up under her jumper and inside her bra and found her tit, warm and heavy, and rolled the nipple till she bit her lip. Then I undid her jeans and pushed my hand down the front of them, inside her knickers, and she was soaking.

“In here?” she said. “In a flat you’ve not even signed for?”

“It’s my ceiling.”

I rubbed her pussy with my fingers, slow at first and then quicker, 2 fingers flat on her clit, and then pushed them into her and curled them, and she grabbed the window frame behind her with both hands. The radiator ticked against her legs. Down in the street a bus went past and the window rattled in its 4 inches.

“Danny. Fuck. Don’t stop, don’t you stop…”

She came standing against the glass with my fingers deep in her and her forehead on my shoulder, her thighs shaking round my wrist and her cunt clenching on my fingers.

She got her breath back slowly. Then she pushed me by the chest across the bare boards until my back met the clean magnolia wall opposite the window, and pushed again, down, till I slid and sat on the floor against it.

She took her coat off and dropped it on the boards between my legs. Then she pulled her jumper and her bra off over her head together, and knelt on the coat in front of me in just her open jeans, with her tits bare and freckled in the grey window light, and her nipples tight from the cold room.

“Open your jeans,” she said. “I want to watch you do it.”

I opened them. She pulled them down my thighs and took my dick in her hand, and stroked it, slow, from the root to the head, her eyes on my face.

“Look up,” she said. “At your ceiling.”

I looked up. She bent and licked me, once, the whole length, and then took just the head in her mouth and sucked it while her hand kept working the shaft, and her other hand cupped my balls and squeezed, and I banged my head back on the wall.

“Keep looking at it,” she said, with her lips still on me.

She played with me. She went from her mouth to her hand and back again, never long enough, her tongue circling the head, her fist slick and tight, until I was pushing up off the floor into her hand and swearing at the ceiling.

“Jodie, I’m…”

She sat up on her knees, kept her fist on my cock and leaned in close, and I came over her bare tits in hot spurts while she watched me do it with her lips parted. She didn’t let go until I’d finished. Then she looked down at herself, and rubbed it into her skin with her palm, slowly, over one nipple and the other.

“There,” she said. “Now this room’s had something good in it.”

I pulled her down onto my lap on the coat, and she sat across my thighs in her open jeans with her bare back against my chest and her head on my shoulder, and we sat under the ceiling till the radiator stopped ticking.

At 10 past 4 they were dressed and Jodie was measuring the window frame with her tape measure, writing the numbers on her palm next to the faded plate number from Monday. Danny went to the door to turn the light off.

There was a card on the boards.

It lay just inside the door, face up, square to the boards, the same thick cream card as Friday’s. It hadn’t been there when Adaeze let them in. He’d stood on that exact spot when they came in.

He picked it up. Typed, dead centre.

The host is recorded at Pembury House. Top flat, end.

He pulled the door open. The landing was empty. The stairwell was quiet all the way down to the street door, with the cold coming up it and the smell of onions and somebody’s telly going 2 floors below.

Jodie came and stood beside him and read it in his hand.

“When?” she said. “We’ve been in here an hour. I’d have heard somebody on that landing.”

“Under the door. It’s an inch off the boards.” He turned the card over. Nothing on the back. “Adaeze knew I was coming at 3. Priya knew I’d be here today. You knew. Pat had gone with Ray before I rang anybody.”

“And Pettit.”

“Pettit drove off towards the lights at 5 past 9. Unless he came back and sat on us.” Danny went to the window and looked down at the street, up and down it, and there was a man walking a dog and a parked van and no grey Skoda anywhere. “He’s never put a card under anybody’s door in his life. He’d have knocked and asked me for my licence.”

Jodie took the card out of his hand and held it up to the grey light from the 4 inches of window.

“Then one of them told the house you’d be here,” she said. “Or the house didn’t need telling.”