The Beautiful Dead Read online

  Corrupted by money and fame and ego, they all lost sight of what they were meant to be doing and the reason they’d started doing it in the first place.

  And now Stan feared it might be happening to Liam too. The Big Man. The brooding, quiet Irishman, whose intellect had always wrestled with his physique, was making the same movie over and over again, but worse each time, in a depressing inverse of the creative progress.

  Stan thought it was a terrible shame.

  Whatever happened to retiring gracefully and playing golf?

  Or dying of cancer?

  Time was, all the greats died of cancer – Bogie and Gary Cooper and Steve McQueen. Maybe that was what was wrong with Hollywood now – no bastard died of cancer any more.

  Stan sighed. He’d depressed himself now. He really should go home. What was the point of queuing in the snow to see a movie he’d probably hate? He glanced at his watch. If he left now he could still have a pint or two at the Archers before they shut up shop. Maybe find someone who fancied a game of backgammon. Stan played in a league and could usually win enough in casual pub games to cover his drinks for the night.

  Sometimes even a pie.

  Just as he’d almost made up his mind to do just that, the queue started to move, so he moved with it, but had to stop almost immediately because the man in front of him was playing Candy Crush on his phone and hadn’t noticed.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ said Stan, and when there was no response, he tapped the fellow on the shoulder.

  ‘What?’ The man glared round at him in crew-cut aggression.

  ‘The queue’s moving,’ said Stan.

  ‘Keep your fucking hair on, mate.’

  Stan was taken aback. ‘No need to be rude,’ he said.

  ‘Well, keep your hands to yourself, wanker!’

  Stan was stunned. He glanced over his shoulder but the couple behind him looked straight through him, while the people behind them were pretending they hadn’t even noticed that the line was moving up ahead. They weren’t going to be any help if anything kicked off. And there wasn’t much more Stan could do alone. He had dodgy knees, which was why he was a paramedic and not a fireman. And although this man was much shorter than he was, he also looked fitter, twenty years younger and, most dangerously, as if he were spoiling for a fight.

  Which Stan definitely was not.

  It was only Stan’s fond memories of Liam Neeson’s noble early work that gave him the courage to say anything at all.

  ‘Some of us are here to see a film,’ he said – reaching for superior but achieving only prissy.

  ‘So who’s stopping you?’ said the man. ‘Hey? Who’s fucking stopping you?’

  ‘Well,’ said Stan, and then chickened out of saying you are, and instead finished weakly, ‘Everyone’s going in.’

  ‘I’m going in,’ said the man. ‘We’re all going in. Jesus Christ. Don’t fucking panic.’

  ‘I’m not panicking,’ said Stan and the man feinted at him, making him recoil, blinking, across the pavement to the kerb.

  ‘Yeah you are,’ sneered the man, and addressed the remainder of the queue. ‘Look at him fucking panicking!’ Then he laughed and sauntered to the box office. The rest of the line followed him meekly, passing Stan without looking at him.

  A car sped by and a bow-wave of slush shot up the back of Stan’s legs. He sighed. He should just go straight home. Forget the Archers. Forget the backgammon. Just hang his trousers over the gas fire and watch that thing he’d recorded about classic British cars, back when the British knew how to make cars. Bristols and Jags and all the Triumphs before the TR7. At least the past couldn’t disappoint him.

  But why should he go home?

  The thought brought a frown to Stan’s brow.

  Would Liam Neeson go home just because some idiot – some knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing punk – had been rude to him?

  No, thought Stan, Liam Neeson certainly would not.

  So, although his trousers were wet and cold against his backside, Stan bought his ticket on principle and then spent ten minutes trying to dry his arse in a Dyson Airblade, before taking his seat in the sparsely populated auditorium.

  He wished he hadn’t bothered. The film was over-loud and filled with brute violence and what-the-hell plot holes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, two idiots in hoodies across the aisle laughed loudly at every gory death, and somebody kicked Stan’s seat – twice and hard – which made him tense, waiting for a third time.

  The final straw was the tell-tale glow of a mobile phone being used by an idiot behind him, whose attention span was apparently so short that it couldn’t even be held by mass murder.

  Under normal circumstances, Stan would have turned round and given the perpetrator a hard stare, at the very least. Maybe even said something.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight he’d made his stand just by sitting down.

  So Stan continued to sit, and stared straight ahead, and watched the film – nagged by cowardice and a damp backside.

  And behind him sat the killer …

  Kevin Barr had never got over being five foot five.

  Similarly short on good nature and wit, he made up for it by getting his defence in first.

  Barr had become so practised at defence that his whole life had become a litany of angry attacks. He couldn’t buy a newspaper without haranguing the seller over a disagreeable headline, or order a McBurger without challenging a teenage chip-seller to ‘take it outside’.

  Consequently, he rarely had to fight. Most people were so taken aback by his groundless fury that few but the very drunk ever took up his challenge, and the very drunk were easy to beat.

  Barr drew his confidence from the baffled fear in the eyes of the remainder.

  Like the old git in the queue. You couldn’t just let people put their hands on you like they had a fucking right. You had to let them know you weren’t going to be pushed around, right from the off. Nip it in the fucking bud.

  He’d come in late, the git, stumbling along the row in front of him in the dark, a big fat silhouette on the screen like a shooting-range target, with a Ben & Jerry’s tub in one hand and his torn ticket in the other.

  Fucking twat.

  Barr hoped the man would want to carry on the argument, because being behind him in the tiered auditorium would give him an extra six inches in height …

  But the twat didn’t turn around. He just sat there and watched Liam Neeson kick arse, eating his fucking Phish Food, too scared to say a fucking thing.

  Stan got up as soon as the credits started to roll on what he reckoned must be the worst cinema-going experience anyone had ever had. His bum was still damp but it was warm now, which made it feel as if he’d peed himself. He sighed and picked up his ice-cream tub and turned to go.

  He flinched.

  The moron from the queue was in the row behind, arms outstretched, one dirty boot hooked rudely over the back of the seat in front of him – his eyes half-closed, regarding him with a fixed grin.

  Stan looked quickly away.

  If the man said anything, Stan was going to pretend he hadn’t heard him. The last thing he wanted to do was start things up again.

  But the man didn’t start things up. He didn’t move at all. Stan risked another glance as he passed. He looked to be asleep.

  Exhausted from being an arsehole.

  But there was something not quite right about him, and Stan slowed and took a longer look.

  The man’s splayed posture was almost too casual, too abandoned, and the blurred light of the credits rolling up his form made the pugnacious little shit into something more compelling, and Stan paused, oddly arrested by the image.

  The eyes between the narrowed lids were dull, and the grin was fixed and gap-toothed – and Stan felt his stomach flutter a warning.

  Cautiously, he nudged the man’s boot with his knuckles and said, ‘Hey, film’s over.’

  The boot rolled sideways off the back of the seat and the leg dr
opped heavily to the floor.

  The man was unconscious.

  Stan was instantly in work mode. He clambered awkwardly over the seats, shouting for help even as he checked the carotid pulse.

  Nothing.

  Shit!

  This was wrong. The man’s head did not loll properly on the seat back. It seemed somehow stiff. His chin was on his chest, as if forced there. And now Stan could see that the gap in the teeth was not a gap but rather a thing – some black thing protruding from the man’s mouth, clamped between his teeth. Had he choked? But on what?

  Stan touched the black thing and winced.

  Sharp!

  Steel.

  ‘What the hell—’

  He reached gingerly around the man’s head and found that the only thing holding him upright was the butt of a knife that had been driven into the back of his neck.

  And suddenly Stan was clammy with sweat, because he understood what had happened. Not how it had happened or why, but he understood the mechanics: the route that the knife must have taken through the man on its way to murder. He knew that the knife must be very sharp, and with a narrow, double-edged blade. He knew it had been inserted at the base of the skull with great force and great precision, into the narrowest of gaps between the occipital condyles. On its way it would have sliced through the spinal cord, and then punched so fast through the back of the throat and out of the mouth that it got there before the teeth had snapped together in death.

  Around Stan, people were gathering – a few patrons and ushers. He was dimly aware that someone was filming on a phone. He used to go ballistic at that; now it happened all the time, sick clips popping up on YouTube. He had other stuff to think about.

  He pressed the butt of the knife with a single finger. It was jammed solid within its human sheath, and when he took his finger away it was slick with cerebrospinal fluid.

  The arsehole was irreversibly dead.

  Stan couldn’t pretend he was sorry. If anything, it gave him a guilty little lift. He was only human, after all.

  He wiped his hand on the dead man’s jeans.

  ‘He’s been murdered,’ he announced solemnly to a wide-eyed usherette who was holding a black bin liner and a litter grabber.

  ‘Murdered?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Stan. ‘He’s been stabbed.’

  ‘Stabbed?’ said the girl.

  ‘Yes,’ said Stan patiently. ‘Somebody needs to call the police.’

  The girl didn’t move. She’d come for tubs and Pepsi cups, and couldn’t adjust to a corpse.

  So half a dozen other gawpers rushed to be the first to make the call, while Stan took out his own phone and walked up the dark carpeted steps to the fancy seats he couldn’t afford.

  Then he sat down and called Eve Singer.

  Duncan picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  It rang again, deep in his ear. He frowned at the screen, then, in the space between rings, put it to his ear again.

  ‘Hello?’

  It rang once more, making him wince, so he switched it off and put it under the sofa cushion. Then he picked up the remote control and went on watching How It’s Made. This episode was bentwood chairs, crisps and baseball mitts – all burping from a range of chutes and lathes and belts and spindles that chuntered and hammered and rolled.

  There was a lot of work in a bentwood chair.

  ‘For something so shit,’ he scoffed, then laughed at himself.

  ‘Who was on the phone?’

  Duncan lifted the remote to his ear. ‘Hello?’

  But nobody answered. He glared at it. ‘Someone playing silly buggers!’ He hung up and How It’s Made changed to The Great British Bake Off.

  ‘Dad, it’s me. I’m right here. Who was on the phone?’

  He looked up. There was a young woman standing in the doorway. Not the fat woman, but a slim woman in a bathrobe.

  ‘Someone was on the phone,’ he told her.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said each piece of wood is steamed and bent at a hundred and seventy degrees for twenty-four hours. Have you had a bath?’

  ‘Yes. Where’s the phone?’

  ‘Did you pay the bill?’

  ‘The phone bill?’

  ‘The water bill.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I paid the water bill.’

  Duncan was stumped. It was his house and his bath and he didn’t want any old Tom, Dick or Harry just waltzing in and thinking they could jump in whenever they felt like it, even if they did pay the bill.

  ‘Where’s the phone, Dad?’

  ‘Why are you paying my bills?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go home and pay your own bills? And who’s this Dad person?’

  She sighed again. ‘You are. You’re Dad and I’m Eve, your daughter.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, affronted. ‘I didn’t know I had a daughter.’

  ‘A daughter and a son. Eve and Stuart.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘Well, it’s nice to meet you.’

  ‘Nice to meet you too,’ she said. ‘Where did you put the phone?’

  ‘Here.’ He handed her the remote. ‘Call the BBC,’ he said, gesturing at the TV. ‘And let’s have no more lesbians.’

  10

  5 December

  EVE DIDN’T FIND her phone until the next morning, and by the time she did, and heard Stan’s message, their edge on the story had gone.

  By the time she and Joe finally made it to the cinema on Baker Street, three other news crews were already there.

  ‘Shit,’ said Eve as they pulled up. ‘Shit and bollocks.’

  Joe said nothing. He wasn’t the type to rub it in. But Eve wasn’t the type who needed to have it rubbed in. She knew that they should have been way out in front on this story, instead of running to catch up.

  Still, Stan Reddy gave them an exclusive interview that was so good they wouldn’t be able to use half of it because it was just too graphic – even after Eve had asked him to rephrase certain bits for public consumption.

  Bits like ‘cerebrospinal fluid leaking on to my fingers’.

  Yum.

  But there were other details, like the kicking of the seats and the light of a mobile phone, that painted a vivid picture of the life-and-death struggle that had unfolded behind the paramedic’s right shoulder as mock violence played out on the screen.

  When they didn’t have pictures, it was Eve’s job to create one in the minds of her audience, and she did it with practised ghoulishness.

  Had the kicking been the death throes of the victim?

  Had the killer filmed his own macabre handiwork?

  And, best of all, Do you know who’s sitting behind you?

  It was all designed to strike fear into the heart of every viewer, because fear was a sure-fire ratings winner.

  Stan assured her he hadn’t spoken to any other news outlet – presumably in the expectation of a bigger bottle this Christmas – so they were still ahead of the game. But only just.

  They were barred from going into the cinema, even if it was only to film general shots of the lobby and box office. And more and more TV crews arrived while she wasted precious time arguing the toss with the cinema manager – a sapling of a man-child who appeared to have outgrown everything but his own acne.

  Eve felt like screaming.

  They should have been here last night. They could have beaten even the police to the scene. They could have caught the manager or ticket girl so stunned that they’d have been able to gain access. Instead they were left with generic shots of the outside of the building, and a few close-ups of film posters. Stuff everybody could get. And now everybody was going to be there for the body bag too. Even Guy Smith, Eve noted with an exasperated puff of her cheeks as the News 24/7 car parked rudely on the pavement.

  Guy got out and straightened his tie in the passenger window before joining the media circus on the pavement.

  ‘Been sick ye
t?’ he asked Eve.

  ‘Find Mark Franco yet?’ she threw back at him.

  ‘Touché,’ said Guy. ‘Although I did find an old boy who claimed to have been Napoleon’s food taster in a previous life.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Eve. ‘So the day wasn’t wasted then.’

  Joe snorted and Guy shot him a withering look, then he plucked at the fringe of Eve’s woollen scarf in that way that he obviously thought of as playful, instead of irritating as hell.

  ‘What were you in a previous life, Eve?’

  ‘Still tetchy, Guy.’ She tugged her scarf away from his hand sharply and tucked the ends into her coat.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Calm down.’

  Eve bridled. She hated being told to calm down when she was already calm. Guy might as well have patted her on the bum and told her not to worry her pretty little head about it.

  Joe said suddenly, ‘Ross called. We’ve got to go.’

  Reluctantly, Eve followed him back towards the iWitness Volvo.

  For some reason, Guy fell into step beside them, as if he were part of their crew, not a rival one. As if he weren’t in danger of a thick lip.

  ‘C’mon, Eve,’ he whined. ‘Let me take you out for a drink.’

  She didn’t look at him. ‘Sure. Can my boyfriend come too?’

  ‘You don’t have a boyfriend. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Really?’ she said, ‘Mike will be disappointed to find out that he’s a figment of my imagination.’

  ‘Mike bollocks,’ said Guy. ‘What’s his star sign?’

  ‘Capricorn.’

  ‘What’s his mother’s name?’

  ‘Sylvia.’

  ‘What did he get you last Christmas?’

  Eve fingered the heart-shaped locket on a slim gold chain around her neck. Her father had bought it for her twenty-seventh birthday. The last time he’d remembered a birthday.

  Now he couldn’t remember a daughter.

  Guy was rebuffed.

  But only for a second; he caught her up at the car.