The Devil Upstairs Read online

  ‘You should join us sometime,’ Maxine said, grinning. ‘At the gym too. There’s a new place in Murrayfield. We do all sorts of classes there: high intensity, boxing, jazzercise. It’s great fun.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Cat, shifting uncomfortably. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

  She quickly steered the conversation on to some of the difficulties she’d encountered in the building, wanting in truth to talk about Moyle but hoping that they’d raise the subject first. She mentioned the stairwell light outside her door, which flashed like a strobe lamp (‘A maintenance fellow used to visit but he passed on,’ noted Michael). She spoke of the flies that frequently invaded her flat because there were no window screens (‘That’s only a problem in summer,’ Maxine assured her). She drew a laugh by imitating, with a creditable Scottish accent, the wayward delivery men who sometimes phoned up for directions: ‘Ah cannae foond the plais, ken ya gaid may un?’

  ‘And what about TurMoyle?’ Maxine asked.

  Cat was momentarily flummoxed. ‘Turmoil?’

  ‘Moyle, Mr Moyle – “TurMoyle”, as we call him. The guy in Number Six.’

  ‘Oh’ – Cat was surprised – ‘you mean you know all about him?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Maxine. ‘Oh yeah.’

  It turned out that Moyle – he was a bass player in a heavy metal band (‘a friend saw them in a Gorgie pub and said they were rank’) – had for years been the black sheep of the building, rarely doing his bit with clean-ups, or contributing to the maintenance fund, or being sociable in general. Sometimes he threw raucous parties and left stacks of empty beer cans at the bottom of the stairs; once Michael had tripped over them in the dark and dislocated a finger. Confronting him had made little difference, though; his usual response was to walk past as though he hadn’t heard.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t thrown any parties since I moved in,’ Cat said. ‘At least there’s that. But I can hear him clearly. Everything.’

  Maxine nodded. ‘The top flat wasn’t even an apartment until ten years ago.’

  ‘They were still converting it when we moved in,’ added Michael.

  ‘And apparently there’s nothing between your floor and his. It’s like a drum.’

  ‘It might not even be legal, you know,’ Michael noted. ‘There are regulations about separating floors, even in old buildings like this. I’ll look into it, if you like.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that,’ said Cat, adding, ‘My hairdresser suggested applying for something called an ASPO.’

  ‘ASBO,’ Michael corrected. ‘Anti-Social Behaviour Order. But you can’t apply for one of those yourself.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You have to lodge a complaint with the police, who in turn lobby the council. And unfortunately the council is so flooded with applications – particularly with all the new holiday lets around – that ASBOs take ages to process, when they’re processed at all.’

  ‘What about the former owner? Do you know if she tried?’

  ‘Connie?’ said Maxine. ‘She certainly mentioned it, but as for whether she ever did anything official—’

  Michael interrupted: ‘Wasn’t there that time when—’

  ‘Oh yeah, I forgot about that,’ said Maxine. ‘But that had nothing to do with noise. TurMoyle flooded his bathroom once and the water dripped through Connie’s ceiling onto some priceless maps she was storing in her box room. She asked TurMoyle about his insurance policy and he just laughed at her. So she demanded compensation from the landlord but things dragged on and on. I’m not sure what happened in the end.’

  ‘I think she gave up,’ said Michael, ‘and just repainted the ceiling.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Maxine, ‘there was a big brown stain for a while. Mind you, this was years ago now.’

  Cat tried to see a precedent she could strive for. ‘So she ended up adjusting to the problem? Just living with it?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Maxine said with a mirthless chuckle. ‘Oh no. Connie left the building a long time ago. Moved to Glasgow, I think. Then she rented your place out a dozen times, but no one lasted longer than a few months.’

  ‘The noise?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Maxine, frowning sympathetically. ‘I know this isn’t exactly what you want to hear . . .’

  It wasn’t, but Cat tried to be positive. ‘Oh well, Moyle himself might move out soon – I can always hope for that.’

  But now Maxine’s frown deepened. ‘I hate to disappoint you, but from what I understand his landlord is his aunt. He pays hardly any rent – a peppercorn. Maybe nothing at all. For him it’s a deal that’s just too good to be true. And he’s not likely to ever become famous, from what I hear, so the odds of him shifting anytime soon, I’m afraid to say, are pretty remote.’

  Cat felt her spirits drain. ‘You know, I’ve never met him,’ she said, still clutching at straws. ‘Never even seen him, not even from my window. He doesn’t look like George Clooney, does he?’

  ‘George Clooney?’ Maxine laughed. ‘More like Charles Manson.’

  ‘Eyes that are pure evil,’ Michael added, also chuckling.

  And Cat laughed too, though in truth she was finding it increasingly hard to see anything remotely amusing.

  She sipped some more liqueur.

  * * *

  Cat had been trained to deal with difficult people – to charm them, establish a rapport with them, manipulate them. She was proud of her record in doing so. And she backed herself to get results now.

  The following evening she raced home from work and changed into her running gear. She felt slightly out of shape – moving in, setting herself up, then adjusting to Moyle’s routines had all taken their toll – but she knew she still looked OK in Lycra pants. She tied her hair back in a swishy ponytail. Even considered stuffing her bra.

  Then she sat in her armchair, trying to read a book about Julius Caesar, and waited for Moyle to come home.

  Frustratingly, it wasn’t until ten p.m. But when she heard the kah-lunk of the building’s stair door and clap clap clap of his boots on the granite steps, she was ready. She took a deep breath and started down the stairs past the malfunctioning light.

  She met him for the first time outside the door to Number Three.

  ‘Hi,’ she said as brightly as possible, thrusting out a hand. ‘You must be Dylan.’

  He had unruly shoulder-length hair, a lank beard, a bloodless complexion and ruthless dark-brown eyes. He was wearing an inflexible scowl, a dog-collar tattoo and a leather jacket over a ragged T-shirt bearing the words HOUNDS OF HADES. He couldn’t have looked more like a hard rocker if he’d stepped off the cover of a death metal magazine.

  He accepted her hand with a desultory shake but was still giving her a million-mile stare.

  ‘I’m Cat, Cat Thomas,’ she went on, still smiling. ‘I’m living in Flat Five, right beneath you.’

  He continued looking at her blankly.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself earlier,’ she said. ‘But I think you were away for the first few weeks I was here. This is really some sort of place, huh? So atmospheric – I love it.’

  He finally seemed to have realised she was talking to him. ‘Cat,’ he said. ‘Thomas Cat. Tom Cat.’

  ‘Yeah!’ She laughed, as though nobody had ever made that joke before. ‘Catriona actually, in the Scottish style, but where I grew up no one knew how to pronounce it, so I shortened it to Cat. Tom Cat, yeah.’ Another pointless chuckle.

  Moyle continued staring at her. His eyes roamed her body, but he didn’t look impressed.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Cat, ‘better be on my way. It was great to meet you.’

  She turned away and started down the steps. But almost immediately turned back. Because now came the ‘afterthought’.

  ‘Oh – Dylan?’ And when he slowly rotated back in her direction: ‘I don’t know if you’re aware, but apparently there’s nothing insulating the space between our two apartments – just empty air. So I can hear everything. Everything. And, you know, I
’d really appreciate it if you could be mindful of that. At night, I mean. The boards in your place creak. The pipes clang. The doors bang. And sometimes I find it a little hard to sleep. Which is a problem because I’m settling into a new job and . . . well, you understand.’

  She’d said it all with upraised eyebrows and the sweetest of smiles – completely unthreatening and non-aggressive, just a new friend asking for a favour.

  But in response Moyle’s forehead furrowed, as if he was struggling to work out why she was bothering him with such trivia. And finally:

  ‘American.’

  He said it as though he’d belatedly recognised her accent. As though it explained everything. As if her nationality were some sort of disease.

  Cat could only laugh politely, treating the reaction as a joke, then turn around, head down the stairs again, and go out for her run.

  But as she scaled the hills of Ravelston – half-heartedly, and absurdly late at night – she had a terrible feeling in her gut. A sense that her charm, her wiles, all her strategic manipulations, had come to naught.

  And so it turned out to be.

  That night she lay awake in bed, hearing the klunks, the creaks, the kee-wahs, and the shhhhhhhhhhhh of the hissing pipes. If anything, the noises were more insistent than ever. She slept in fits and starts, drifting in and out of psychedelic dreams, her solutions becoming ever more biblical.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  The following week cat and agnes were in the pretty town of Callander, ‘gateway to the Highlands’ – the sort of place where the ageing demographic doesn’t understand the intricacies of online banking and has no desire to learn them. Consequently there were more tellers at the local branch than ABC usually considered necessary; there was even talk of shutting the place altogether and forcing the locals to make do with a basic-services outlet at the post office.

  When two elderly customers – so set in their ways that they insisted on filling out withdrawal forms – complained that their printed statements registered debit amounts well in excess of what they’d received, the internal fraud team – Cat and Agnes, in this case – were called in to investigate. And it immediately became obvious they had their work cut out for them. The internal CCTV cameras at the branch had been switched off. The branch manager stored the key to the cameras in an easily accessible office drawer. And all three tellers – and some of the senior staff – sometimes shared the cash desk without officially logging on.

  Nevertheless one staff member in particular – a locum teller called Connor Bailey – ticked all the boxes. He was male. He was twenty-four to thirty-two. His body language was defensive. His responses during initial interviews were self-contradictory. Most significantly, he had been at other branches in the Stirling region when similar activity had occurred.

  But he was proving a tough nut to crack. He denied everything. He claimed to be wounded by their suspicions. He insisted repeatedly that he was ‘a good man’.

  Cat and Agnes were wearily familiar with such tactics but that didn’t mean they were on firm ground. The department had earlier conducted a misconduct test – they sent in two ‘customers’ who drew out hundreds of pounds while feigning general forgetfulness and distraction – and Connor had passed with flying colours. There was no indication he’d altered any withdrawal forms or stolen cash for himself. His own accounts, including those he held with other banks, showed no signs of unusual activity. Nor did he appear to be living above his means.

  But Agnes – with just a couple of hours to wrap up the investigation – thought she had him.

  ‘Listen here, young fellow’ – an amusing way to address him, Cat thought, since Agnes herself was scarcely older – ‘we know you did it. We know you’re lying. And we know all the nuances, trust me. This isn’t just instinct, it’s everything. You’re giving off so much radiation you’d make a Geiger counter click. You’re swinging this way and that in that chair. Your voice is low and tight. Your eye contact is irregular. Hell, even the tip of your nose is red – what we call “the Pinocchio effect”. You’re embarrassing yourself, fella.’

  Connor, whose eyes had flickered at the mention of eye contact, shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I know nothing about that. If I’m nervous it’s because I don’t like being here. Because I don’t like being suspected of anything. But I’m a good man.’

  ‘Aye right,’ said Agnes, with a jaded glance at Cat. ‘Well, we’ve asked around, you see. We know your mother has gambling problems. We know she spends most of her day at the betting shops. And we know you’ve been supplementing her pension most of your adult life. So how about admitting the truth, Connor? She was in a spot of bother – maybe about to lose her home, eh? – and you needed to cover her debts. But you didn’t have the cash so you had to make do with someone else’s. You fiddled with the cameras and put the sting on some wealthy old geezers – no real harm done, right? You gave old Mrs MacAskill a few hundred less than it said on the withdrawal form. You altered the withdrawal form of old Mr Mitchell so it looked like he took out £1,500, not five hundred. A wee bit here, a wee bit there, but it all adds up. You knew the old fossils wouldn’t notice immediately – in fact, you were hoping they wouldn’t notice at all. Not only do they rarely check their statements, most of them can’t even read their fuckin’ statements. So as far as you were concerned it was worth the risk. No one would ever find out. Yet here we are.’

  Connor responded with another head shake. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but that’s not true. My mother has nothing to do with this. My mother raised me good and proper. She’d be horrified if she thought I’d done anything like what you’re saying.’

  ‘But you did it anyway, didn’t you!’ Agnes barked, slapping the table so hard that Connor – and Cat – flinched. ‘You did it because you love the old dear, right? Who cares! You talk about good and proper, for Christ’s sake. What about the other staff here we’ve put through the griller? You ever think about them? You do know that if we don’t get this sorted HR is gonna have to assign you all to different branches, right? Just to break you up? So why not own the hell up to your misdeeds like a proud Scot?’

  They were in the bank’s tiny lunchroom and Agnes, in full bad cop mode, was speaking louder than strictly necessary – itself a form of humiliation. But Connor, though clearly discomfited, wasn’t buckling.

  ‘I am a proud Scot,’ he protested. A vein in his temple was pulsing and there was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead. ‘And I’d own up if that was the right thing to do. I’ve always been honest. I’m proud of my record. If I’d really done those things you’re talking about, I’d never be able to look anyone in the face.’

  But at just that moment he wasn’t looking anyone in the face. And he must have realised it, belatedly, because he tore his eyes off the table and stared at Agnes again.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Connor!’ she said. ‘Have you not heard a word I’ve said? This case is what we in the trade call a walk-up start. It should be done and dusted already. Now, you can choose to make it easy for us or you can choose to prolong the suffering. But we’ll get you in the end because we always do. And the longer it takes the more annoyed we’ll get. So own up now or kick the can down the road and face the consequences. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Connor tried appealing to Cat instead. ‘I’m a good man,’ he said hoarsely.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Agnes said to Cat. ‘Did you see that? The Balkan Shake? Shaking his head while claiming he’s a good man! This guy might as well be wearing a guilty sign around his neck!’

  It was at this point that Cat chose to intervene. While technically there chiefly to observe – and to disconcert suspects with her cool demeanour and the occasional injection of a legal technicality – she had also, by pre-arrangement with Agnes, assumed the role of the good cop, the sympathetic voice that nevertheless lures the victim to the same destination. But what she did now, sighing, was very much off script.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ sh
e said, ‘you’re a good person, Connor. You can say that a thousand times and maybe you even believe it. But it’s a defence mechanism. It’s something the guilty say to reassure themselves. Because no one is a good person all the time. And you need to face the truth – you need to immerse yourself in reality for a change.’

  She registered Agnes’s surprise – not to mention Connor’s – and felt a brief stab of shame. This was not her way. But it was getting late and they needed to get back to Edinburgh. She was fatigued from lack of sleep. She was fatigued in general. So she ploughed on.

  ‘Everyone, if the circumstances are right, is capable of bad things. Everyone certainly contemplates bad things. And everyone, when backed into a corner, is liable to criminal actions. Look at me, for instance. Three months ago I moved from Florida into this idyllic flat in Edinburgh. It’s everything I ever dreamed of. And yet there’s this guy upstairs, this heavy-metal musician, who seems hellbent on turning my life into a nightmare. He makes noise constantly – day and night, every night. He doesn’t respond to polite requests or threats. He doesn’t respond to anything at all. He just goes on being the way he is. And you know what? I sometimes lie awake thinking of ways to kill him. Actually kill him. I wonder if I can drill a hole in my ceiling, feed a rubber hose through his floor and fill his place with carbon monoxide. I wonder if I can set fire to the building at night and burn him to a crisp. I wonder if I can loosen a step, or set up a tripwire, so that he goes tumbling down the stairs and cracks his skull open. I wonder if I can attach something to his car so that it blows up when he turns on the ignition – that sounds ridiculous but I know how it’s done. And it goes without saying that if you could kill someone by pressing a button – just pressing a button and leaving no forensic evidence whatsoever – I would’ve finished him off a hundred times, a thousand times, by now.’

  Cat could hear her own voice in her ears – with a sort of disembodied horror – but she couldn’t stop.