The Beautiful Dead Page 3
Eve got up, unfolded the old tartan rug from the foot of the bed and pulled it up so that her father’s arms were not cold.
The rug was a family heirloom. They’d had it for years. Just the smell of it recalled sunny childhood.
They’d had a very old Triumph with tan leather seats that sloped gently backwards so that she felt safe and comfortable laid out under the rug, while her father sang ‘their’ song. She remembered it only vaguely:
There were birds in the sky …
Eve wished she were a child again, asleep on the back seat, with the cracked leather against her cheek, her mother’s hand on her shoulder, and her father driving where? Who knew? It didn’t matter. He was in charge and would keep them all safe until they got there.
She hadn’t felt safe since he’d got sick, and she missed it like a limb.
‘Love you, Dad,’ she whispered.
Her father’s eyes flickered and opened and, just for a moment, he smiled at her.
As if he knew who she was.
5
THE KILLER REELED away from the bulging hedge on College Road.
What was he doing?
He almost went back. Almost turned around and opened her gate and followed her up the icy path and finished the job.
But he didn’t.
Why?
Instead he walked on, not seeing where he was or where he might be going. Not caring. Confused and bemused.
What had just happened? He didn’t know. He didn’t know!
He had seen her in Oxford Street, as he stood with the throng of shoppers and gawpers, rubbing shoulders with their awe, revelling in their hushed tones, adoring their shock.
But there was something about her – the reporter. Some connection. He did not know what it was – only that it gave him a frisson of pleasure.
And anticipation.
So he had followed her to an office block.
Then he had waited and waited, the knife sticky in his pocket.
Then he had followed her again, nearly all the way home. Nearly all the way! Until she had turned—
Can I ask you a favour?
As if she knew him! As if he were an ordinary man! As if she trusted him.
The killer stopped dead in his snowy tracks under a street light and panted surprised fog into the air.
She’d trusted him.
She’d trusted him!
In the cone of white light, the killer put a hand to his numb heart, as snow crystals, too tiny to fall, spun around him like stardust.
Nobody had ever trusted him – not even his mother. But this woman had trusted him with all that she had – with her very life. One moment it had been his for the taking, and the next it was in his gift to bestow.
She had placed her life in his hands.
And instead of taking it, he had given it back to her!
He had shown mercy that he’d never known he possessed.
The only question was why?
6
2 December
‘I HEARD YOU pebble-dashed the porcelain.’
Ross Tobin leaned against the door of Edit 1 and grinned, showing teeth that were browned by the forty cigarettes he insisted on smoking every day. He was militant about it, and had upped his daily consumption from thirty in defiance of the ban on smoking in the workplace. Because he could no longer smoke in the office, Ross spent about nine hours of every ten-hour day going up or down the four flights of stairs from the newsroom to the street and back. That and the smoking kept him thin, despite his diet of Big Macs and late-night kebabs. Eve liked to imagine that his body was planning a sneak heart attack, and evidently she wasn’t the only one. Felt-tipped graffiti in the ladies’ loo said Ross Tobin = Rottin Boss – and not even the cleaners had erased it.
‘Who told you?’ she said. She doubted it was Joe, but if it was, she’d make him pay.
‘Guy Smith told his cameraman and he told Gareth in Sports and Gareth told Terry downstairs.’
Radio Terry. Eve sighed. That was the trouble with working in a newsroom. Even the men were gossips.
‘This the Oxford Street stuff?’ said Ross, nodding at the screen.
‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Just brushing it up and then we’ll go back.’ Her initial report had gone out live, but they needed a fresh report they could play until the next live.
‘Police have not released the name of the victim, but iWitness News can reveal that she was twenty-four-year-old Layla Martin, who worked for Launchtime Advertising on the eighth floor of the brand-new Coldharbour building here in Oxford Street.’
The festive lights twinkled behind Eve; with the sound down she might have been doing a piece on Christmas shopping.
It reminded her that she needed to do her Christmas shopping.
‘Get some blood this time, will you?’ said Ross. ‘That’s what people want to see. Not this snow-globe fairy-light Santa’s-grotto bollocks.’
She snorted. ‘You know what tight-arses the Met are. No cameras at the scene.’
‘So what? You’ve got a phone, haven’t you?’
Eve sighed. They couldn’t have broadcast bloody footage of the murder scene and they both knew it.
‘Tired?’ he said.
She smiled at his kindness and shrugged. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Katie can always take over if you’re not up to it.’
Ross wasn’t being kind: he was poking the bear.
Katie Merino had arrived eight months ago – five years Eve’s junior, smart and hard-working … and blonde. Hers was the kind of foot Eve didn’t need in the door of her career.
‘Piss off.’
Ross laughed and they watched the package play out.
‘Miss Martin went into work to do some overtime. Overtime that cost her her life.’
Right on cue, the body bag was wheeled out of the doors behind Eve and into a waiting ambulance.
‘You always had good timing,’ said Ross grudgingly. Then, as the ambulance doors closed, he added, ‘You get any shots of the body before the bag?’
‘No, Ross,’ she explained patiently, ‘because we’re not in Mexico.’
‘You’re going soft in your old age,’ he said. And when she looked at him, expecting a grin or a wink, he gave her neither.
She pursed her lips.
‘Oh, get off your high horse,’ he said, rolling a cigarette as he headed off for a smoke. ‘Our job is to give the public what they want.’
It wasn’t clear whether he meant more gore, or younger, prettier reporters.
Either way, Eve knew he was probably right.
‘Do a vox pop today,’ he told her, turning in the doorway. ‘Girls saying how scared they are. Murder in the city. The London Ripper.’
‘Right.’ Eve nodded, and mentally rolled her eyes.
‘Pretty girls,’ Ross went on.
Then – in case she didn’t understand English words – he explained, ‘No dogs.’
So here she was, waiting for Joe to set up the shot in front of the glass-walled office block, blowing into her cupped hands and stamping her feet to keep them from freezing clean off her legs, now unable to glance at passing women without an automatic, albeit shameful, evaluation of their dogginess.
‘How much longer?’
‘Ju-u-u-ust a second.’
The exchange was meaningless. Eve asked him the same question half a dozen times on every job – and got the same answer every time.
‘I can’t feel my feet,’ she stated.
Joe glanced at her. ‘I told you to wear those yeti boots.’
‘With this coat?’ She pulled a face and he smiled without looking up. Joe was cute when he smiled, in a National Geographic kind of way. In a six-three, bearded, chunky-jumper kind of way. He had very white teeth, serious eyes, and the tattoo of a vine on his shoulder that sometimes peeked out of his T-shirt in summer. She’d never seen all of it, of course, because Joe was far too young for her. She liked mature men, although when she’d told her best friend that, C
harlotte had rolled her eyes and said that ‘mature men’ was an oxymoron.
Eve thought she might have a point. Her last boyfriend had been thirty-four, but he’d still thought a bottle of red and an Xbox was an acceptable date. He’d drifted away after she’d moved back to Isleworth, vaguely citing work commitments, but Eve guessed that it was her commitments that had been too much for him.
She couldn’t blame him, she supposed; sometimes they felt like becoming too much for her.
‘How old are you, Joe?’
‘Twenty-six,’ he said. ‘Why? How old are you?’
‘Today?’ she sighed. ‘A hundred and three.’
Joe searched her face carefully, then shrugged as if it really might be so.
Eve laughed. ‘Bastard!’
He smiled and fiddled with his light meter some more.
As he did, Eve wondered what it would be like to be thirty, which she would be in July. In principle, she didn’t mind thirty. She and Charlotte laughed in the face of thirty. Laughed at the inevitability of it, and laughed at the women who were pumped so full of Botox by the time they hit that mark that, if they ever stopped, they’d look like disappointed scrotums.
But if she didn’t care about thirty, then why not just tell Joe she was twenty-nine?
Eve knew she’d got the iWitness job partly because she’d been young and reasonably attractive. That didn’t mean she didn’t have talent – just that she’d leap-frogged over older, plainer journalists who might have had more. When she’d been at college there’d still been a few women on camera in their forties and even well-preserved fifties.
No longer.
Apparently, men grew wiser with every grey hair, while women just grew invisible.
Eve was good at her job, but she knew she needed to get the hell off the meat beat – or to make such a blistering mark on it that she was headhunted by Newsnight.
She’d once had such ambitions …
But when she’d moved back in with her father, Eve had clung to her job like a child to a sucky blanket, suddenly nervous of upping the pressure at work while she was adjusting to a whole new pressure at home. So she’d missed her chance to jump. And now she had the uneasy sense that it was only a matter of time before she was pushed.
So every time some fresh ingénue appeared at a crime scene on the coat-tails of a cameraman from another channel, Eve redoubled her efforts to make the best of her job – even as she worked to escape its brutal confines.
Soon, she used to tell herself. Soon.
But soon had become sometime, and sometime had become never.
And she just kept going.
Every day she pushed the envelope, but had never opened an invitation to another life …
‘It gives me the creeps,’ Joe said out of nowhere.
Eve blinked back to Oxford Street.
‘What?’
‘This murder,’ said Joe.
‘Gives you the creeps?’ Eve snorted. ‘Look at you! You’re built like a brick shithouse.’
‘Seriously,’ he said while he checked the light. ‘Imagine all those people right there, half an inch away through a pane of glass, Christmas shopping. While some sicko is gutting you like a fish.’
Eve had imagined it. How could anyone not? It made her feel … like not imagining it. She shivered, but not from the cold, and changed the subject. ‘Have you done your Christmas shopping?’
Joe checked the light for the millionth time. ‘Yep.’
‘Everything?’
‘Yep. You?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not all of it.’
She hadn’t even started. She had to buy for her father and her brother – even though she probably wouldn’t see him until July – and for Charlotte and for Joe, of course. Joe always bought her something thoughtful.
‘What have you got me?’ she asked, although she knew he wouldn’t tell her.
‘Nothing,’ he said without looking up.
‘Liar.’
He looked up and cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘Then why’d you ask?’
Eve didn’t know when she was going to have time to go shopping. She thought she might have to buy everyone a charity goat. She’d got a charity goat from Charlotte a few years back, in the form of a thank-you email from Oxfam and a photo of a goat that looked like a piebald sock puppet. They’d both agreed it was a fine and altruistic idea, and never to do it again.
She couldn’t get Joe a goat. Or anyone a goat, really.
‘Shit,’ she said under her breath.
Joe looked up at her, then realized what she meant as Guy Smith appeared at his shoulder.
Guy frowned in fake puzzlement and pointed a finger at Eve. ‘Hey! Didn’t I see you in The Exorcist?’
‘Hilarious, Guy. And topical, too. Oh, and by the way, thanks for your professional discretion.’
‘Remarkable,’ he snorted. ‘You are always this tetchy. Can’t you take a joke?’
She ignored him. ‘How much longer, Joe?’
‘Ju-u-u-ust a second.’
‘I’ve done my bit already,’ Guy went on. ‘And got some great follow-up stuff on the dead girl. Neighbours, friends.’
Eve doubted whether that was true. Guy Smith wasn’t the world’s brightest or most hard-working reporter. If he really did have anything good, she imagined it must have fallen into his lap. Some Facebook so-called friend calling the newsroom, selling pictures under the guise of a tribute.
The jammy bastard.
‘Do you have her address?’ Guy said. He was fishing. But he wasn’t reeling her in.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Oh. Good.’ He looked confused, then disappointed. Then he said, ‘There’s a nice little café a few doors up. Fancy a coffee when you’re finished? By way of an apology?’
‘Whose apology?’ she said suspiciously.
‘Mine, of course.’
‘OK. Thanks. I’ll have an Americano.’
‘Great,’ said Guy cheerfully.
‘And Joe will have a hot chocolate.’
‘Right,’ said Guy, less cheerfully, and trudged off.
Joe showed Eve all his teeth in a dazzling display. ‘You’re mean.’
She grinned back. ‘I’m mean, he’s sneaky, and so the world turns.’
He shook his head and said, ‘Ready?’
But suddenly Eve wasn’t, quite …
‘Hey, Guy!’ Her rival turned to look at her over the heads of passers-by. ‘Did you mention the boyfriend?’
A quick cloud crossed Guy’s face and he took a few faltering steps back towards her so they were close enough not to shout.
‘The boyfriend?’
‘Yeah. I don’t want our reports to sound the same. I mean, it’s a cliché, isn’t it? But I suppose the cops have to go through the motions on these things – examine every possible suspect.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Guy, closing the distance between them all the time. ‘What was his name again?’ He snapped his fingers as if he could pluck it out of thin air.
‘Mark Franco.’
‘Of course,’ said Guy. ‘One of her friends gave me his name. He comes from … Ealing, right?’
Eve pulled out her notebook and flicked through the pages. ‘A flat near Blackfriars Bridge, apparently. He’s not listed, but two of us working together could find him in half the time. What do you think?’
‘Good idea,’ said Guy.
‘After our coffee?’ said Eve, and he raised a hand in acknowledgement before hurrying through the snow in the direction of the café.
Joe put his eye to the viewfinder and Eve cleared her throat and glanced behind her. ‘I’m not blocking the shot of the door, am I?’
‘No, you’re good right there,’ said Joe. ‘Ready when you are.’
She did her piece to camera in one perfect take.
Then they did another take, out of habit, for insurance.
Then they vox-popped some young women who were not dogs, who said how frightened they all were.
Guy Smith was nowhere to be seen.
They looked all the way to the back. Joe even went into the Gents to check he wasn’t there.
He snapped his fingers. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I bet that bastard’s gone to Blackfriars by himself to beat us to the boyfriend! You shouldn’t have told him, Eve. I knew he’d screw us over.’
‘I told you he was sneaky,’ said Eve. ‘Don’t worry, Joe. I’ll get your hot chocolate to go and then we’ll doorstep Layla Martin’s parents again.’
But Joe was still fuming. ‘That lying, cheating little shit.’
‘You left out predictable,’ she said.
‘Maybe we could—’
Joe stopped with a frown and gave Eve a quizzical look. ‘You never mentioned the boyfriend to me.’
She turned to him in wide-eyed innocence. ‘Didn’t I?’
‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘Who is Mark Franco?’
Eve winked at him. ‘First boy I ever kissed.’
Guy Smith didn’t make it back from Blackfriars in time for that afternoon’s press conference, where Layla Martin’s mother cried so hard that her younger daughter had to interpret for her. The whole time, Mrs Martin wrung a soft grey toy rabbit between her hands without ever referring to it, which made asking its name and provenance so awkward that nobody did.
Detective Superintendent Huw Rees presided. He was a lilting Welshman, whose soft voice belied his hard nose.
He sang all the usual songs – the tragedy, the brutality, the appeal for witnesses – none of which could hide the fact that he had no idea who the hell had killed Layla Martin.
Eve stifled a yawn and gazed around the room.
Today it was Layla Martin. Tomorrow it would be another corpse, another weeping family, another helpless police officer.
The names changed, but the appetite of the audience never wavered.
And Eve was grateful.
Nothing sold like murder, and death was how she paid the mortgage.
7
THE KILLER WATCHED Eve Singer on a loop.
His chair was old and French and covered in gold brocade that was silken against his naked thighs, and with castors made of bone.