The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  She started to feel stupid. What had she thought she was going to do? She hadn’t found the killer in the phone box, and thank God for that.

  Now that her brain had caught up with her legs, she couldn’t think of anything good that might have come from her mindless dash into the snow.

  The payphone rang and she jumped. She stared at the big black receiver, hanging there like a club.

  The phone rang again.

  Let it ring. It wouldn’t be for her; it wouldn’t be for anybody. Calls to payphones were always wrong numbers – always mistakes.

  The phone rang and rang and rang and rang.

  And rang.

  She answered it.

  The killer laughed. ‘This is so you, Eve!’

  ‘W-what?’

  But he was gone.

  She replaced the receiver with a clatter, and stood, staring at it, feeling the cold from the concrete floor seeping up her legs and making them ache.

  What was so her? What did he mean? Standing in a phone box in her pyjamas in the snow was so her? She was confused.

  ‘Hello!’

  The shout was tiny. Eve realized that she still had her mobile in her other hand, and was still connected to Detective Superintendent Rees.

  ‘I’m in the phone box,’ she said. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Rees. ‘What the hell are you doing? Get back to your house and wait there until you see my officers!’

  ‘He just called me on the payphone.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘This is so you.’

  ‘Well, he’s right!’ barked Rees. ‘And he could be anywhere. Get back in the house and lock the doors!’

  ‘OK,’ she nodded.

  ‘And stay on the phone while you do.’

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  Eve had run out into the night so fast that she hadn’t had time to be scared.

  Now she was scared. Rees wanted her to stay on the phone so that he could hear it if the killer attacked her between the phone box and her house.

  She checked the street through the small, scratched panes of glass that surrounded her on three sides. Her ragged breath steamed the little glass panes, so she held her breath and rubbed them clear.

  College Road was Christmas-card quiet.

  The fourth wall of the call box was solid. It could hide anything. She couldn’t know what might be on the other side of it, mere inches away. Waiting for her.

  She would have to step out of the box and circle it to find out.

  Or she could just open the door and run.

  Suddenly the phone box felt like a little red trap.

  Adrenaline galvanized her and, before she could change her mind, Eve shoved the door open and ran. Back across the road, past her own freezing footprints, between the cars. She tripped on the invisible kerb, fell on to her elbow and side, and was up before she’d even registered the fall. Through the gate, up the path, into the house, and slammed the front door.

  She locked it and panted into the phone: ‘I’m safe!’

  ‘OK. What number are you?’

  ‘Four twenty-two.’

  ‘Don’t open the door to anyone but the police. They will use the code word Victory.’

  ‘Victory,’ she said. ‘OK.’

  Eve hung up as she ran up the stairs, slapping on lights as she went.

  On the landing she stopped and took stock. There was no point in alarming her father. He’d already had an interrupted night. She would watch the street from her bedroom window and then head the police off at the front door before they could knock. Take them into the kitchen and speak to them there. Quietly.

  Eve peered round the bedroom door. Duncan wasn’t there.

  ‘Dad?’

  She turned on the light.

  He still wasn’t there.

  Shit.

  She checked the other bedrooms and the bathroom and then hurried downstairs.

  He wasn’t there either.

  She double-checked – this time calling his name. The sandwich was still in its box on the kitchen table. The back door was locked, but Duncan Singer was not in the house.

  Eve stood in the hallway and thought. Hard.

  A sense of unease came slowly over her.

  Had she locked the front door behind her when she’d run outside?

  She didn’t think so …

  Had she even closed it?

  Prickles ran up the back of her neck. She’d thrown the door open and run out so fast, she’d wanted to catch the killer so badly.

  And it was still open when she’d come back.

  Oh God.

  Duncan could have wandered through it without even registering that he was outside.

  And gone anywhere …

  Eve hurried to the front door and reached for the latch, then snatched her hand back as if burned.

  Don’t answer the door.

  The killer could be anywhere outside. Even Huw Rees thought so. But she had to find her father! He was outside in the snow. In pyjamas!

  She jogged to the kitchen and fetched the torch, then pulled on her coat and wellingtons. The boots were cold inside – colder even than her feet – but she didn’t want to waste time getting socks. She dropped her phone into her coat pocket and picked up the tennis racquet that still leaned against the wall.

  She put her hand on the latch, ready to twist it open.

  Then she took a deep breath and—

  Didn’t open the door.

  Instead she frowned, unseeing, at the back of her own hand. Processing something subconscious. Something important. Something wrong.

  Her nose wrinkled as she sniffed something … different.

  What was it?

  Where was it?

  Slowly Eve turned her eyes to the right and felt her gut twist with movie-house horror.

  How could it be?

  There on the hall table burned a Yankee candle.

  34

  ‘IT’S MY FAULT,’ said Eve dully.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Joe.

  ‘He gave me the choice,’ she said. ‘Play along or provoke him.’

  ‘And you chose …?’

  ‘Take a wild guess.’ She blew her sore, swollen nose into a tissue.

  She and Joe were on the couch, while Superintendent Rees and DI Marr were in the scuffed easy chairs either side of the fireplace.

  Huw Rees had the rumpled, coffee-soaked air of an overworked man. The Layla Martin case had mushroomed from one brutal murder into something far more wide-ranging and he was at the heart of the investigation. He looked as if he hadn’t slept since November.

  He hadn’t told Eve that it wasn’t her fault, and she appreciated his honesty.

  Joe reached for her hand. ‘I wish you’d told me about your dad,’ he said quietly. ‘I could have helped.’

  Eve shook her head. ‘Nobody can help him.’

  ‘Not him,’ said Joe. ‘You.’

  Eve was surprised into silence. She’d thought it unlikely that anyone would tolerate her situation; it had never occurred to her that anyone might actually want to help.

  She squeezed Joe’s hand, but it was too late now.

  Now she was responsible for the murder of Maddie Matthews and for her father being abducted by a madman. It was her fault. All of it. And whatever happened next, she would have to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life.

  She cupped her hands around a mug. The tea was gone but the warmth lingered. It was almost eleven a.m. and the Yankee candle had long been extinguished and dusted for non-existent prints, but the air was still thick with sandalwood.

  Every so often a policeman passed the window, coming or going, in uniform or plainclothes or white paper suit and matching galoshes. They said they were keeping an open mind. They said Duncan Singer had wandered off before and might have done so again.

  Eve knew they were wrong, and watching their methodical, open-minded progress was driving her crazy.

&nbs
p; There was snow in the kitchen. Although by the time the forensics team had arrived it was no longer snow, of course – only cold, wet puddles. There were more up the stairs and down the landing and beside her father’s bed, where somebody had stood over him before they’d …

  Before they’d … what?

  Led him away through the snow? Hit him? Drugged him and dragged him down the garden path that had been so well cleared by Mr Elias that it no longer showed tracks that anyone could follow?

  ‘Let’s not jump to conclusions,’ said DI Marr, as if to an old, stupid person. ‘We’ve got a dozen officers searching the neighbourhood.’

  ‘If he’d just wandered off, he’d have been found by now,’ said Eve bluntly. ‘Alive or dead.’

  ‘He might be asleep in a shed,’ said Marr. ‘He might have got on a bus—’

  Eve hurled her mug across the living room. It exploded above the fireplace, leaving a Rorschach of dregs on the wallpaper.

  ‘He’s been watching me!’ she shouted furiously. ‘He’s been in my house! There was a fucking Yankee candle in my hall!’

  In the wake of her outburst there was a sudden, crunching silence. Activity in the house stopped, and the three men exchanged nervous glances, as if they all secretly knew that a woman was made of sugar and spice and all things nitroglycerine.

  DI Marr examined the remote control as if he’d never seen one before.

  Huw Rees stared across the room and said, ‘Is that a hamster?’

  Joe said, ‘Yes,’ gratefully. He got up and took Munchkin out of his cage and handed him carefully to Rees. Marr leaned forward to see, suddenly fascinated.

  Slowly, the hubbub of forensic operations started again in the house, but more softly this time.

  ‘My kids have hamsters,’ said Rees, and stroked Munchkin’s little head with a big rough thumb.

  Eve shivered. Despite the fire, she was cold to her core and wasn’t sure there was anything in the world that could warm her up again.

  ‘He knew what he was doing,’ she said miserably. ‘And what I would do. He knew I’d get you to trace the number. He knew I wouldn’t wait. He knew I’d run out there like a bloody idiot. When he called me in the phone box he was just making sure. That’s why he laughed and said it was very me. I didn’t understand then. Now I do.’

  There was a pregnant silence.

  This time even DI Marr didn’t try to jolly her out of her guilt.

  ‘Dad could already be dead!’ Eve’s voice broke and there was a sombre silence.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Huw Rees said carefully. ‘If he wanted your father dead, he could have killed him right here in the house. It would have been a lot easier than getting a confused adult male out in the night and through the snow while you were stuck in the phone box.

  Eve nodded. It made sense.

  ‘Can I ask a big favour?’ she said to Rees.

  He opened his hands and said, ‘You can ask.’

  ‘Can you please not release this to the press? I know it’s hypocritical, but the idea of people coming and knocking on my door – people like me …’ She reddened and tailed off.

  ‘Of course,’ said Rees, and she gave Joe a relieved look. ‘We have an ongoing security risk here anyway, so it would be counter-productive to the operation to keep you safe.’

  ‘What operation?’ she said.

  ‘He’s fixated on you, Eve. And for that reason, I’m assigning a close protection officer.’

  ‘A bodyguard?’ said Joe.

  ‘I think it’s wise.’

  Eve opened her mouth to protest, just because that was her default position, but then she closed it again. The thought of a muscular personal bodyguard – a giant wall of a man – between her and the killer was a comfort in this uncertain new world where she had found herself barefoot and stupid in the snow while a killer stole her father from his bed.

  So instead she nodded her assent and said, ‘Did you find anything in the phone box?’

  Marr shook his shiny head. ‘A few prints. Did you say there’s a neighbour who cleans it?’ He took out his notebook.

  ‘Mr Elias,’ nodded Eve. She had been round earlier to tell him Duncan was missing. She hadn’t said that he might have been kidnapped by a serial killer – partly because the police weren’t committing themselves to that scenario and partly because Eve was too ashamed to explain it. Even though there were no fresh prints around his house, he had insisted on pulling on his boots and going to search the back garden, just in case.

  ‘Elias, that’s him,’ said Marr. ‘Right oddball.’

  ‘He’s a nice man,’ she said defensively.

  ‘Well, we’ll take his prints for comparison. And we’ve got a micro-camera hidden in there now so that if the killer comes back we’ll get a free mugshot.’

  Then Marr sighed and said, ‘The bad news is, he’s getting bolder.’

  Rees gave a ghost of a smile. ‘But the good news is, he’s getting bolder.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Joe.

  ‘If he took Mr Singer, he’s escalating. Getting more reckless. We know he likes an audience so he needs to be in public, and getting reckless should make him a lot easier to catch. He’s done his business in my hand.’

  Eve nodded, and took a blank moment to connect Rees’s last few words to the fact that the hamster had shat in his hand. She quickly scooped Munchkin up and put him back in his cage, leaving Rees holding two tiny brown pellets in his cupped palm, like a wise man bearing dubious gifts.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Eve, and gave him a tissue.

  Rees tipped the pellets into the tissue with a grimace, and wiped his hand. ‘How does this man know where you live?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  Eve stopped. Her mouth dropped open. In a back room in her brain, some neural minion had been slaving away, and now presented her with its findings. A flashing collage of footsteps and street lights, and the bulging front-garden hedge.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said slowly. ‘I do know how! He’s the man who followed me home!’

  ‘What?’ said Joe. ‘When?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago,’ said Eve. ‘The night after Layla Martin was killed. It scared the hell out of me. It was about one in the morning and nobody was around and he got so close behind me …’ Eve stopped, suddenly gripped again by the fear of the footsteps behind her, of the certainty that she was never going to make it to her hedge and her home.

  ‘Close enough to just reach out and grab the ends of my scarf …’

  They were all silent, imagining the scene. The scarf grabbed, the woman yanked backwards off her feet, the pull on the wool, the bulging eyes, the puce face, the cold, quiet death …

  ‘What happened?’ said Joe.

  ‘Nothing,’ shrugged Eve. ‘I asked him to walk me home and he did.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I asked him if he would walk me to my house, and he said OK, and then he left me at the gate.’

  ‘You asked a killer to walk you home?’ said Marr.

  ‘I didn’t know he was a killer!’ Eve flushed. ‘I was alone. I was scared. I thought I was going to be attacked. Robbed. Raped. Murdered. My instincts took over.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Joe. ‘You really need to stop not telling me stuff!’

  ‘Could you describe the man?’ said Rees, and Marr opened his notebook.

  ‘Not very well. It was dark, and he wore a hood and had a scarf around the bottom of his face. Average height,’ she ventured. ‘Slim. White. Not old, I think …’

  ‘What about his hair? His eyes?’

  ‘It was dark,’ Eve repeated and frowned hard. ‘He just seemed … ordinary.’

  Marr wrote ‘ORDINARY’ in big letters, then tutted and crossed it out.

  Rees sighed. ‘This puts a different spin on things. You have a connection with him. Maybe taking your father makes him feel that he’s somehow closer to you.’

  ‘We don’t have a connection,’ said Eve sharply.

  ‘
But you do!’ insisted Rees. ‘And you created it when you asked him to walk you home. I’m sure of it – although I’m not sure how. Maybe you fed his ego. Or maybe you unconsciously invoked the social imperative that says you have to help somebody, just because they ask for it. You may have appealed to some sense of decency—’

  ‘Decency!’ snorted Joe.

  ‘Killers aren’t crazy all the time,’ Rees told him with a shrug. ‘If they were, they’d be easy to catch.’

  He turned back to Eve. ‘Whatever it was, Eve, you made a connection with this man that swayed him from his intended path. He saw you as a person, not a victim. If you hadn’t asked him to walk you home, I have no doubt he would have killed you.’

  Suddenly Eve had no doubt either.

  I should be dead.

  It was a dizzying thought. A shivery spiral of terror and lucky escape, and wonder at the fluid divide between life and death.

  And then the lurching certainty …

  If I were dead, then at least Dad would be safe.

  PART THREE

  35

  17 December

  A PETITE BLACK woman carrying a holdall stood on the doorstep.

  ‘Hi,’ said Eve brusquely. She hoped the woman wasn’t selling anything, or going to try to convert her.

  ‘Hi,’ said the woman, with a brief smile, ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Aguda, your close protection officer.’

  Eve blinked and tried not to show her surprise.

  Her bodyguard …

  Was a tiny.

  Little.

  Elf.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hello. Come in.’

  ‘No,’ said Aguda firmly. ‘That’s your first mistake. I’m not a police officer, I’m a hired assassin trained to kill you with my bare hands.’

  Eve frowned and glanced down at Aguda’s hands. They were tiny too.

  ‘Really?’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Could be,’ Aguda nodded defiantly. ‘And you just threw open the door to me, didn’t ask to see my ID, and invited me into your house. Doesn’t that seem a bit daft for someone who’s being stalked by a serial killer?’

  Eve bristled a little.

  ‘The killer’s not a woman,’ she said. ‘Or black.’

  ‘And this killer couldn’t have an accomplice? A girlfriend? A hired actress? Some poor stranger he’s plucked off the street and threatened with death if she doesn’t do exactly as he says?’