As she quietly opened the front door, she took a moment to listen out for the tell-tale sounds of Marie’s morning routine. Nothing. Nodding to herself, Violet made her way towards her bedroom. Fatigue fully caught up with her as she checked the blackout curtains and went through her bedtime routine. She loved this flat. She loved it in that hard, proud part of her that rejected the soft comforts of an easy life; that fragment of her soul that heard her friends complain of city life and secretly judged them weak. Nothing worth doing should be easy, she had always felt, and that included living.
‘He was there again yesterday.’
‘Who?’ Violet didn’t look up from her laptop.
‘That guy hanging around next door,’ Marie’s tone was low, conspiratorial, like it always was when she was gossiping.
‘I thought he lived there.’
‘No.’ Marie shook her head. ‘The woman who lives there, she must be in her eighties or something. This guy’s young.’
‘You do know grandchildren are a thing, right?’
‘Sure, but he’s been there three times over the last week. And I haven’t seen her at all.’
‘Well A, she was closer to fifty, and B, I’m pretty sure she moved out. I saw a bunch of boxes last month.’
‘Yeah, well I didn’t see any boxes. And I definitely didn’t see him move in.’
Violet put her laptop down and offered her a cup of coffee. Marie shook her head again, gesturing to her pyjamas.
‘So, you think he killed her.’ Violet smiled at her flatmate.
‘No, that’s not—’
‘You know what that sounds like to me?’
‘Don’t start.’
‘Hey.’ Violet’s grin widened. ‘You’re the one proposing our new neighbour murdered a harmless old lady and now lives there with her body, watching you, the sweet stench of decay still clinging to his clothes.’
Marie was unimpressed
‘It’s just he keeps hanging around outside the door. I don’t like it.’
‘Why don’t you just go over and knock? Ask him if he murdered her.’
‘I don’t even know her name!’ Marie’s feigned indignation didn’t quite cover up her genuine discomfort at the idea of actually speaking to a neighbour.
‘Well, that’s a perfect follow-up question, isn’t it?’ Violet said, eyes locked on their cheap Argos kettle as it gradually convinced itself to boil.
‘I just don’t like it,’ Marie repeated. ‘The hallway reeks of smoke every time he’s been there.’
‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘If she hasn’t moved out, then maybe he’s staying with his grandmother, or whatever, and she doesn’t like him smoking in the flat.’ The smell of the instant coffee hit Violet’s nostrils and she sighed happily, looking out the window at the evening lights below.
‘So, he does it in the corridor? Isn’t there, like, a fine for that? And what about the smoke alarms?’
‘What about them?’
‘What, you don’t think they work?’
‘About as well as anything else in this place.’ Violet tried a sip of coffee. Still too hot. There was silence for a moment.
‘We’re going to die in a fire, aren’t we?’ Marie said, the resignation in her voice only half-pretend.
‘What’s this “we” you’re talking about? I’m going to work.’
Marie gave Violet a withering look, but her flatmate didn’t notice.
The front door shut behind Violet with a weighty metal click. Marie had insisted they replace the flimsy lock with something a little more solid, and Violet couldn’t deny that there was a certain reassurance to the sound. Their door stood halfway down the blank and utilitarian corridor. To their right a few flats lay between them and the intersection that led to the staircase. To their left, three more led up to a window looking out over the urban patchwork below, with the lift opposite the furthest one.
There were technically two lifts beyond Resident Entrance B. One of them, the one she’d occasionally use, was a cramped and foul-smelling thing that seemed out of order as often as it was working. It listed the floors from G to eleven, missing out floor six as the button had fallen off some time ago and had never been replaced, no matter how often the lift was repaired. Violet had got used to using the stairs, something Marie begrudgingly referred to as her ‘cardio’, while Violet simply smiled a sweet, bitter grin and told her to think about how much worse that poor billionaire in the penthouse must have it.
It was the other lift that really captured Violet’s imagination. Through that dingy courtyard, past the rows of iron mailboxes, empty bike rails, and just enough snaking corridor to make a visitor doubt their way, there was a spiralling stairwell that stretched up through the back of Banyan Court. It was old, part of the original structure, with uneven tile steps that had clearly been resurfaced, but not repaired. At the centre of the curving steps was an ancient wrought-iron goods lift. Violet had no idea how old it was (turn of the century, maybe?) or why it had been left in place when the building was redeveloped. It should go all to the way to the penthouse. At least, it would if it worked, something she thought unlikely given the hazard tape, the warning signs, and the sturdy yellow padlock bigger than her hand. Marie swore that she’d seen the thing moving once or twice, but Marie swore a lot of things, and as far as Violet was concerned, it was nothing but a towering metal spine, a strange relic of iron vertebrae gradually falling to rust. One of the city’s hidden bones that she had lucked into living beside.
Violet checked down the corridor, over towards flat 116. There was nobody there. No mysterious smoking stranger hovering menacingly between her and the lift, waiting to catch her eye as prelude to murder. She stopped for just a moment as she passed the door, straining her ears for any sound from inside, but all was quiet. She wrinkled her nose as the lift arrived and headed down towards her commute.
Work passed slowly. She had managed to leave her headphones next to her bed and having to give her full attention to what actually amounted to eight hours of copying and pasting text left her feeling almost comatose. She always forgot how silent the office was. There must have been almost forty people there, just as bored and unchallenged as she was, but the quiet of the night shift was almost never broken, an unspoken rule that Violet had always been in favour of, at least when she had been able to listen to her music or the occasional podcast. But tonight it felt heavier than usual, and there were moments it seemed almost like a physical weight, pressing down on her. She kept realising that she was holding her breath.
It wasn’t just the dangers of the nocturnal streets her mother had warned her about. Working nights was top of the list of things to be dreaded, according to her. Burnout and suicide were the recurring conclusions of that strand of story, with one memorable tale of a man who had ‘gone mad from the quiet’, whatever that meant, and had burned down the office block with all his co-workers inside. The thought was enough to get her through the first few hours, as there was nothing more likely to inspire her to work harder than proving her mother wrong.