As far he was concerned, it was just another routine callout. But unbeknownst to him, he was actually walking into a crime scene.
The only thing on his mind as he rapped the tenant’s door was finishing the task in hand as soon as possible so he could squeeze in a quick afternoon van nap. It was one of those typically designed council houses that had been built up and down the UK throughout the 1950s: one structure, four properties, two upstairs with two downstairs.
The tenant in one of the lower properties had called for the repair. All the information the plumber had been given was that there had been an issue with their kitchen sink.
The moment the woman in her seventies opened her front door, she appeared relieved to see him. She explained to the council plumber that she had been waiting for him in complete silence due to her hearing not being as good as it used to be.
He failed to get a word in as she made him wait at the door. She started off by giving him her life story. She had two grown-up sons, one living in London and the other in Melbourne. The one in Melbourne was married with two little girls, while the other was gay, so she wasn’t expecting any grandkids from him.
She finally invited him in before offering him tea or coffee, to which he declined. His plan was to sort her kitchen, and then he would take a fake phone call before excusing himself so he could get out of there as quickly as possible. He knew her type, lonely and talkative. But as soon as he entered the kitchen, the woman’s demeanour took a swift change.
‘Look at the state of the place!’ she shouted in disgust as she gestured to the mess around her kitchen sink. The slimy waste had piled up inside her sink and splattered over onto her counters and the walls. She opened the cupboard under the sink and proceeded to show him further gunk that had stained the shelf below the trap.
‘Come on, don’t tell me that this isn’t the council’s fault?’ she asked him with a stern look on her face.
He didn’t respond. It never made his job any easier arguing with tenants, while at the same time, he could just apologise and roll his eyes behind her back. Instead, he knelt down to inspect the trap. She continued to moan over his shoulder, but he managed to drown her out as he began to work out the source of the problem.
‘How do I go about getting a brand new kitchen then? Whatever that is that’s coming out of the drain has most likely stained my worktops, where I make my dinner every night!’
He stood up and faced the elderly woman. ‘Just call it into the call centre, and they’ll look into it. I’m going to head out back to have a look at your soil stack.’ He never gave her a second to respond as he let himself out her front door.
The shared back garden was an absolute mess. There were broken plastic boxes lying around with very little inside of them. At the far end of the garden were piles of wooden pallets with a bunch of unused wood sitting next to them. There was even an Asda trolley half stuffed inside an overgrown bush. One of the heavy-duty clothesline posts lay on the grass on its side with the hardened concrete still attached to the bottom of it.
Then, there was the decaying shed at the side of the long garden; the door had been left open, and the only thing that remained inside was a black suitcase. At first glance, the plumber thought he could see blood on it. He squinted his eyes before walking towards it to gain a better look.
‘You might as well clear this mess while you’re here,’ a voice bellowed from behind the plumber. Upon hearing the shout, he immediately stopped still. ‘I’ve only been calling your call centre for six months for someone to come and sort it!’ said the same tenant, who had followed him outside.
He gave her a look before turning his attention back to the suitcase in the shed.
‘That suitcase wasn’t there yesterday,’ the elderly tenant declared. ‘The young girl upstairs must have put it there.’
The plumber glanced at the tenant again before deciding that the suitcase wasn’t as important compared to the waste stack, so he got back to solving the problem. The problem with the soil stack was that it was shared between the upper and lower properties, so whoever lived upstairs could have caused the issue.
The tenant had been watching the plumber this entire time when she caught him looking up towards her neighbour’s home.
‘She’s not in!’ the woman told him.
‘Who?’
‘The girl upstairs. She isn’t home,’ she explained.
He never responded. He was too busy thinking about his next move. Her constant yapping had been slowly giving him a headache, making it harder for him to concentrate.
‘She’s also council, which is odd because she lives there all by herself. Well, she did for the first month or so when things were nice and quiet before her boyfriend moved in. I don’t like the look of him or the sound of him. I think he likes the sound of his own voice. I can hear him shouting through the floorboards. They argue a lot. I also think he hits her, which is a shame. She’s only sixteen, poor girl. Her parents must have disowned her. I heard her and the boyfriend leave last night. They’re forever slamming that front door. I then watched them both leave in his car. Neither of them has been back since. I don’t know how she managed to get a council house so quickly, especially when she doesn’t have any kids. Very sketchy indeed. She’s a good-looking girl, a little big, though. I reckon if she lost some of that weight, she could easily find a nice guy who could provide for her. Definitely not this guy she’s with. I tried to get involved in one of their fights a few weeks ago, but he told me to leave my big nose out of their business, or I’ll regret it.’ She paused momentarily, hoping the plumber would say something encouraging, but he wasn’t listening.
‘I need to get some tools from the van.’
She watched as he walked past her, purposely avoiding eye contact. As he headed towards the van, she stared up at her neighbour’s property, and then she shivered. It wasn’t that cold out. She just had a bad feeling.
She stared at the suitcase. She, too, thought she saw blood on it. She slowly began walking towards it when she was interrupted.
‘I’m going to have to break into your soil stack,’ the plumber stated as he re-entered her garden. ‘There’s a good chance it’s blocked.’
She continued to stare at the suitcase while in deep thought. It wasn’t until she heard the sound of hammering that she finally turned her attention back to the man.
‘What are you doing now?’ she asked, surprised as she rushed over towards him.
He had a chisel in one hand with a hammer in the other. ‘I just told you,’ he said before pausing to stare at her. ‘I think your mutual stack is blocked, so I need to create a hole to unblock it.’
She stepped back, allowing him to continue to smash his hammer against the chisel as it slowly penetrated the cast iron pipe.
‘You don’t think he’s done something to her, do you?’ she hesitantly voiced. ‘I mean, I definitely saw them leave together last night. One minute, they were fighting, then the next, they were in a hurry to leave.’ She paused in order to recall the same vision in her head. ‘I had nearly drank a whole bottle of red wine by that point,’ she stated out loud. She had somehow managed to disorientate herself by questioning her own recollection.
‘It’s physically impossible to flush a sixteen-year-old’s body down a toilet,’ he firmly advised her.
‘What if he chopped her up into small pieces?’ she questioned while tilting her head to the side.
The plumber’s attention slowly veered past the tenant in the direction of the shed. She knew right away that he was just as curious as she was. He then released the hammer and chisel, one by one, from each hand before dropping them to the ground. He gave the old woman a quick gaze before he wandered over towards the opened shed. Right behind him was the tenant.
Inside the shed, they stood in silence at each end of the suitcase while observing the spots of stained blood. This was the quietest the tenant had been since she opened the door to the plumber. Neither person was in any hurry to open it, while they each hoped the other would put an end to the suspense and do the honours.
The plumber looked at his watch and realised his lunch break was fast approaching. He gave the old lady a quick glance while he knelt down to find the zipper. He did his best not to touch the bloodstains on the fabric in the likelihood of later being accused of tampering with police evidence. This only made it harder for him to unzip the cheap, rigid suitcase. It took longer than it should have for him to finally make his way around to the other side. He took a long, deep breath before he slowly flipped the suitcase lid open.
As soon as he saw the empty suitcase, he looked up at the tenant and shook his head at her in disgust. He was annoyed at himself for letting her get into his head. An old woman with nothing better to do than make her boring life more exciting, no wonder both her kids moved to different countries. He then recalled the first thing she had told him when he first arrived, that her hearing wasn’t that good. So, in that case, how could she have heard two people arguing through a ceiling? It was now clear to him that she had made everything up just for some companionship.
The plumber stormed out of the shed in a huff before returning to his day job, where he continued his attempts to open the blocked stack.
Meanwhile, the tenant, not long later, had done the same, except she had chosen to walk slowly in the direction of her front door while keeping her head down low. She seemed embarrassed by her actions, and she thought it would be wise to go wait inside.
Although, as soon as she got to the corner of her house, she heard the plumber make an uncomfortable yelping sound. She slowly raised her head and watched as he covered his nose with his hand. But within a second later, he had carried on bashing the pipe with that same repulsed expression on his face. The tenant suddenly had second thoughts about going back inside.
The plumber gave it one last hit before something finally dropped from the soil stack, and then he watched on as it fell to the concrete slab below. He then quickly covered his nose once again. He had a confused look on his face just as the woman reappeared next to him. She took it upon herself to bend over to get a closer look at what it was on the slab.
‘Is that a…?’ she asked as she turned to the man with a dismayed look on her face. ‘A dead fetus?’