‘Police! Can I get on to the railway line through the back of the shop?’
A middle-aged man in whites – presumably Lou – peered over the stainless-steel counter and looked her up and down.
‘Police?’ he squinted.
‘Sir,’ said Aguda, holding up her ID, ‘I need to get up on the railway line. Fast.’
‘You’re too small to be police,’ said Lou.
‘Sir!’ Aguda put away her ID and held up her gun.
Lou dropped below the counter and croaked, ‘Out the back.’
Out the back was a small yard cluttered with pallets and white plastic boxes, and lethal with spilled ice. The back wall was brick, and bowed from years of keeping the embankment at bay.
Aguda tucked the pistol into its holster at the small of her back. She leapt nimbly on to the boxes and from there on to the wall, and started up the steep slope. Brambles didn’t want her there, and clutched at her sleeves like beggars. She fought them off, tearing her coat and her hands, spraying fresh snow as she pulled and punched her way to the top.
Finally she made it to the tracks.
Nobody was there.
Aguda switched on her torch and ran to the middle of the bridge – where she could see snow scraped off the parapet.
The spot from where the block had been dropped.
She stopped short, so as not to cover any footprints, and looked down at the road. She had a clear view of traffic coming down the hill. Flashing blue lights were her backup, wending their way slowly through the logjam of cars. The killer had tipped off Guy Smith – no doubt with a nearby location – then just waited for the TV crew car to come along.
It spoke of daring and meticulous planning.
It spoke of cold blood.
Aguda ran her torch across the ground. The snow here was patchy and dirty from the grime of passing trains, but the footprints were clear, leading to and from the parapet. She angled the beam against the best of them and quickly took a photo with her phone, just in case it started snowing again.
Then she crossed the tracks so as not to ruin the scene, and ran alongside them – her eyes scanning the shallow, dirty snow and the gravel rail-bed beneath for anything that might be a clue. Both were littered with plastic bottles, fast-food wrappers, old newspapers and disposable nappies.
Who the hell changed a baby on a train and tossed the dirty nappy from the window?
Everyone, apparently.
She pressed herself into the brick as a train clattered past, feeling the wind of it sucking her in.
When it had gone, she ran on.
Aguda followed the killer’s tracks a hundred yards to the point where she could see them veer off down the embankment. She slithered down the bank behind them. There were fewer brambles on this side of the bridge, and the fence at the bottom had stopped being railings and started being chain-link just beyond the stanchions.
She shinned up the fence, turned a neat tumble at the top, and dropped softly into a quiet street with cars parked solidly all along the kerb.
Her torch found the killer’s tracks again easily. And when it did, a shock ran through her.
They weren’t leading away from the scene of the crash.
They were leading straight back towards it.
39
EVE WATCHED GUY Smith with dull sympathy as he threw up into the gutter.
The darkness made everything more confusing. There were street lights and headlights and shop-window lights – but they only made the spaces in between the lights that much darker.
In the distance she could hear sirens, and hoped they were coming this way. In the absence of anyone to stop them, cars continued to crunch slowly around the debris.
Her mind slowly pieced things together. Something had fallen or been thrown off the bridge and had hit the News 24/7 car. She didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t care. Ricky the cameraman was dead. He must be, because otherwise Emily Aguda would not have left the scene and Guy would not be throwing up.
The woman in the blue coat was still with her. Still touching Eve’s arm now and then in a proprietorial way.
‘Are you all right? Can I get you something to drink? Are you injured? What’s your name?’
Eve answered, but couldn’t hear her own voice so didn’t know what she was saying.
Guy Smith sat on the kerb beside the Range Rover’s front wheel – his elbows on his knees, his head and his tie dangling between them, staring down at his personal puddle of recycled YO! Sushi.
Eve looked around at the gawpers gathering on the pavement. It was strange to be the object of interest, to be at the centre of that circle, instead of on the outside, trying to get in. She scanned the blur of faces, seeking Joe, but finding only strangers – most with their phones out, so not looking at her at all but at their little screens, so that later they could appal their friends with the carnage they’d stumbled upon on their way to McDonald’s or coming back from the pub.
One man was covered in blood and the woman was just standing there, like, Oh My God! …
A man stepped off the kerb and crossed the road towards her.
Not Joe.
An ordinary man.
He walked past the crew car without looking inside it, then he went up to Guy Smith and hit him once – hard – over the back of the head with something long and thin and black. Eve jerked with shock. There were gasps and stifled squeaks from onlookers, and the woman in the blue coat shrieked and clapped her hand over her mouth.
As Guy pitched forward soundlessly, the man hit him again in a vicious chopping arc, as if he were killing a snake with a golf club.
Guy’s dead face hit the road in a black splash.
The man dropped the bar with a casual iron clang and smiled at Eve. ‘You know what to do,’ he said. Then he walked away, under the railway bridge, and was swallowed by the dark between the dazzle of headlights.
In her mind, Eve ran. In her head she raced after him and grasped the back of his jacket and swung him around until he overbalanced on to the ground, and put her knee on his throat and gripped his hair and banged his head to pulp as she screamed in his face: Where is he? Where IS he, you fucking bastard? Where! Is! My! Father?
In reality, she took a single step and then buckled, and dropped clumsily to one knee.
‘Stop him!’ she croaked. ‘Stop him!’
Nobody stopped him. Although several people kept him in frame on their camera phones until he disappeared.
‘Oh my God!’ said the woman in the blue coat. ‘Oh my God!’
The killer was gone. He’d been here, but now he was gone. And so was her chance of catching him, holding him, making him tell …
Eve stumbled to her feet again, using the Range Rover for support.
She stared at Guy Smith’s lifeless body, and felt the brittle wings of madness fold slowly around her.
You know what to do.
She did.
She walked over to the body on unsteady legs.
She took out her phone and started to film.
She filmed the broken back of Guy’s blond head, his slack face against the tarmac, the bloody iron bar discarded nearby.
She squeezed her hand under his still-warm chest and pulled out the flyer from inside his jacket, and unfolded it flat on the road.
EXHIBITION
Venue: Westbourne Green
Date: December 17
Time: 23.00
She filmed it.
Then the graffiti.
Then a close-up of the crew car. She remembered a wide shot. Joe would have done a wide shot …
A police siren whooped half-heartedly and the last few cars in the jam started slowly to manoeuvre aside to let the law through.
Eve handed her phone to the woman in the blue coat, who was slumped against the Range Rover.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Film me.’
‘What?’ The woman’s eyes were cloudy with trauma, although her forehead was smooth and untroubled.
‘It’s already recording,’ said Eve. ‘You just have to hold it.’
‘But,’ said the woman. ‘But—’
‘Just hold the fucking phone!’
The woman held the phone.
‘Good,’ said Eve more calmly. ‘The police are here now and this will all be over soon. I am going to stand over there and all you have to do is hold the phone up and make sure I’m in that picture and so is the body, OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t worry about anything else.’
‘OK.’
‘Can you see me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you see the body?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ said Eve.
She smoothed her rumpled jacket, brushed the hair off her face with a bloody hand – then held up the flyer and did her piece to camera.
The killer could not have done a better job himself.
Everything was there. Everything. The mayhem of the car crash, the close-up of the concrete block in the smashed windscreen, the body behind the wheel covered with a blanket that failed to hide the fact that there was no head!
iWitness News had even bought or stolen a jerky iPhone clip of him, walking over to the reporter on the kerb and hitting him with the bar – although of course it was very dark and the moment of truth was deliberately blurred out, so that people had to go to YouTube to hunt for the good bit.
But the best part of the whole review was Eve Singer.
She looked like shit. Her hair was all over the place and there were dark rings around her eyes. There was blood on her cheek and her jacket, and a wobble on her lower lip which made her seem so affected by his work that it brought tears even to his eyes.
Her review wasn’t of her usual professional standard.
It was far, far better than that.
It was raw and immediate. A companion piece to a danse macabre that captured the wonderful essence of unscheduled death.
Unscheduled for those who had died, at least …
He smiled at the TV.
Eve Singer spoke in disjointed fragments that built a perfect crazy-paving picture of mayhem, shock and horror.
‘… we got a tip-off … smashed into the car from the bridge you can see. If you look, you can see … we thought we were safe …’
That made the killer laugh! People who thought they were safe! They made his life easier, certainly – but that was all that could be said for their foolishness.
Nobody was safe.
Immortality was a privilege, not a right – and alien to the billions who were just making up the numbers. It required great talent and had to be meticulously planned and perfectly executed.
And then, at the end of the report, Eve Singer held up the flyer he had sent to Guy Smith. Unfolded, and with blood staining its creases like the Shroud of Turin.
‘… a decoy,’ said Eve. ‘… deliberately misleading …’
He giggled. It had been a decoy. And it had misled!
And a perfect cut to the graffiti on the brick of the bridge:
EXHIBITION
Venue: Here
Date: December 17
Time: 23.00
Then Eve moved close to the camera. Too close, so that the auto-focus hastily adjusted.
It was all so real!
Better than real! It was like being there all over again, but with time to savour the moment.
Eve shook the flyer at the camera – peering around its edge, looking desperate and deranged and devastated.
‘Please look for a flyer like this. Exhibition. You could save the next life. If you find one or have any other information, please call the police so you can help to stop this ******* lunatic!’
The killer laughed again. Fucking had been beeped out, but everybody knew what it had been.
Only he understood the subtext of Eve Singer’s message. The bit that was only for him.
The bit that told him:
We’re in it together now.
40
18 December
HUW REES HAD been right about one thing. About two minutes after Eve Singer’s report had gone out, all hell had broken loose.
The Metropolitan Police social media team scrambled to catch up with the game started by Eve’s close-up of the bloody flyer, but as soon as their own photo of the Layla Martin flyer had gone up on the Met’s Facebook page, the internet wobbled under the weight of spurious comments and suggestions and photos of possible matches. A few were well meaning, some mischievous, many complaining, most self-serving.
None helpful.
First and foremost, there was outrage that nobody had warned the ten million inhabitants of London that there was a killer among them. Then, quickly afterwards – alerted to a guaranteed audience of fifty-five thousand curious Facebook friends on the Metropolitan Police page – anyone with anything to sell or to publicize rushed to leap aboard the bandwagon.
EXHIBITION
SQUARE ROOT
Tonite Rose and Crown Southwark
Admission £5 Be there or be SQUARED
EXHIBITION!
Local Arts and Crafts!
Trinkets and Gifts!
Buy Cheap for Christmas!
Hackney Community Centre!
Admission FREE!
EXHIBITION
Bengal Cat
Answers to the name of
JOANIE
Lost on Brompton Rd
REWARD and NO QUESTIONS ASKED
Eventually the police admins had had to delete the posts and request that anyone finding a genuine flyer simply call the police incident room.
By the next morning, calls were flooding in about what quickly became known as ‘flyer incidents’. Anyone trying to post a flyer was an immediate suspect. Police had to be called to a near-riot which started with a newsagent refusing to allow a woman to put up a notice in his window for an exhibition of cross-stitch in aid of Age Concern. A scuffle broke out at an arts centre in Golders Green when two amateur sleuths pulled down every notice on the community wall in an effort to find an exhibition poster. And in Regent Street, a student was chased and roughed up after tying a flyer for a Tinie Tempah gig to railings near the Apple Store. He was finally brought down by a mob, and when police arrived there was a Santa sitting on him with a sign reading GOLF SALE.
Huw Rees monitored the situation grimly and hoped that letting the cat out of the bag would somehow be good for the investigation. That they’d find the next flyer more quickly and be there in time to apprehend the killer, rather than hours – days – too late.
By the time the lunchtime news aired, the exhibition flyers were the talk of the town.
But soon that talk had turned to why the police couldn’t catch the killer, even when his last murder had now been witnessed by millions of people.
And even though he’d told them where and when he was going to strike next.
TrrrrrrT.
Eve Singer had gone mad.
Not permanently or showily. She wasn’t running round the house with her knickers on her head, being Nefertiti, but Detective Sergeant Aguda knew she was no longer completely sane.
No sane person could have done what she’d done, even if it was in an attempt to save her father.
They’d tried keeping her in at the hospital, but she’d insisted on coming home. Insisted, not in a normal way, but in a low, cold, scary way so that even the rather arrogant young doctor had faltered.
Now she was slumped on the sofa beside her cameraman, Joe, pale and bruised and playing with Aguda’s handcuffs.
TrrrrrrT.
She’d been doing it ever since they’d got back from the hospital. Although ‘playing’ was no real description of the hours that Eve had spent, trance-like, obsessively snapping the steel cuffs over her own wrists – first left, then right. She was so fixated on the activity that it made Aguda’s own considerable cuff skills look like the fumblings of a thumbless child.
TrrrrrrT.
Trrrrrr
T.
TrrrrrrT.
Huw Rees said, ‘Can you stop that?’ but Eve didn’t. She jerked Aguda’s cuffs open with a twist, then slapped them closed on her reddened wrist again with the harsh rattle of a metal snake.
TrrrrrrT.
TrrrrrrT.
Aguda deeply regretted leaving the cuffs on the coffee table. She sighed and glanced up through the front-room window as Mr Elias from next door walked carefully down his path with a bucket of steaming water and assorted sprays and cloths. Heading for the phone box, no doubt. While all this was happening, next door life went on.
Rees said firmly, ‘I’m getting you to a safe house.’
Eve shook her head. ‘You can’t make me.’
‘You’re a target here.’
‘If he kills people in public, then I’m a target anywhere but here.’
DS Rees started to say something, then had to stop while a plane passed low overhead. Instead he swapped a meaningful look with Emily Aguda.
Aguda had no desire to scare Eve Singer any more than she had already been scared. In fact, she wasn’t sure that that would be possible. But logic and experience dictated that Eve was a sitting duck in her own home.
Now she spoke gently but firmly. ‘We think it would be best if we moved you out of London entirely, Eve.’
‘I’m not leaving,’ said Eve. ‘My dad was born in this house. He knows it. What if he escapes? I have to be here when he comes home.’
TrrrrrrT.
Aguda swapped another look with DS Rees. They knew that Eve wasn’t thinking rationally. It wasn’t her fault, of course, but it made everything more difficult.
And more dangerous.
‘Eve,’ Aguda said gently, ‘if you stay here, it makes it much harder for me to protect you. Do you understand that?’
Eve nodded.
TrrrrrrT.
‘All I want is for you to be safe,’ said Aguda.
‘I know,’ said Eve.
‘Then let us get you out of here.’
The Beautiful Dead Page 21