It had two windows, one up, one down, and the brown front door still bore the scars of where it had been kicked in by the police after the foul smell had been reported by the neighbours some months earlier.‘It doesn’t look much, but it’s better inside,’ Frankie said. He double-checked that he’d locked the car as Johnny used the key he’d given them to open up the house. Casting a hooded glance around, to make sure there were no shady fuckers watching, Frankie followed the kids inside.The living room was immediately behind the front door, and it was dark, even though there was only an old grey net curtain covering the narrow, filthy window. The walls were covered in wallpaper that had probably once been bright and cheerful but was now the colour of a heavy smoker’s lungs and teeth. An ancient dust-coated corporation gas fire hung at an angle off the wall, and the floorboards were heavily stained. But one big patch under the window was particularly ominous, because that was where the previous owner’s fluids had leaked through his chair before his badly decomposed body had been found a month after he’d died.That was why the place had been so cheap – because nobody had wanted to touch it, knowing its history.
