Brandon never wanted to be there, but Josh assured him the old man was loaded. The moment the lock clicked open, his eyes narrowed and he whispered, “This is a mistake.”
Josh shushed him with a grin. “Bloody virgin.”
He had experience, but it was served with a level of incompetence that made barristers choke. The large thumb marked “Time served at HM Pleasure” on the scales of his chaotic life bore solid testimony to that.
“Piece of cake. Easy compared to a real blag,” he concluded.
The living room was cluttered with bric-a-brac and smelled of cabbage and ammonia. In one corner sat an antique bureau that screamed “valuables in here”.
Josh pointed. Brandon nodded and prised the lid with a screwdriver. With shaking hands, he rifled the drawers, while Josh hummed an Ed Sheeran tune, as if this was just another shift at Lidl.
No trumpets heralded their doom, just a shuffle of slippers.
An old man stood in the doorway, wielding a skillet. “Oi! What d’yer fink you’re…”
Josh lunged, Brandon yelped, the old man swung, and in the tangle of limbs and panic, the man tripped backwards. His skull hit the coffee table with a sound like a dropped melon.
The silence afterwards was unbearable.
Brandon whispered. “He’s dead.”
“Not if we don’t say it,” Josh said, his bravado crumbling like his Aunty Joan’s apple pie. But it was already said.
Brandon fumbled for his phone. “We need an ambulance.”
“Want to serve time, yer daft twat?” Josh hissed. “We clean up, take the body, and go.”
So, they tried.
Under-sink bleach splashed, leaving a pale, sickly halo around a dark stain. They tried the vacuum. It clogged. They wrestled the body into a rug, but it slid free halfway, leaving a grotesque smear.
“It looks worse,” Brandon gasped.
“It’s fine,” Josh panted. “We just need…”
The doorbell rang.
They froze.
Through the window: a neighbour, holding a Tupperware tub.
Josh pasted on a sheepish grin and cracked the door. “Evening! Just, err, house-sitting.”
The neighbour leaned, peering past his shoulder. Brandon crouched desperately, throwing a blanket over the body, but the blood had already soaked through, blooming like roses across the fabric.
“Everything all right?” the neighbour asked, voice tight.
“Perfectly fine,” Josh said too quickly.
She frowned, eyes flicking once more to the floor. Pressing the Tupperware into Josh’s hands, she backed away down the path. Moments later, the faint wail of sirens drifted closer.
Brandon sank onto the sofa, head in his hands. “We should’ve just legged it. First thing. Just gone.”
Josh stared at the stain spreading wider across the carpet, engulfing their clumsy attempts to erase it. The whole room seemed to tilt toward it.
Blue lights flashed against the curtains, and the door burst open.
He sighed, thinking of the riches he’d dreamed of, and the gambling debts that clung like a monkey on his back. “Fuck me. This was supposed to be the easy way out.”
