The Beautiful Dead
Page 23
The man said nothing, and Dougie suddenly felt very self-conscious. Somehow he felt he’d said too much, and to the wrong person. Some rich bloke in a snobby jumper and a ten-million-quid house. What would he know about the beauty of an engine? What would he care about clip-springs and washers? It made him feel exposed and a bit angry, the way he had when he was a kid. Made him feel like stupid little Dougie, brother of Skew Ronnie the car thief, instead of PC Doug Trewell, Guardian of the Galaxy, which was how he liked to think of himself nowadays, in the privacy of his own head.
Embarrassed and a little cross, he abruptly turned his back on the man, hoping he’d get the message and go back indoors. But he didn’t. Dougie could feel him, just standing there behind him. It made his neck itch …
So he stepped up to the threshold and pretended that he’d heard something inside the house. It was good timing, because just as he reached the door, he did hear a shout of excitement from inside.
Fuck!
Adrenaline shot through his body as he waited for gunfire. His finger tightened on his trigger and his heart pounded, because if the killer made a run for it now, he was the last line of defence, and wouldn’t that be fucking ace? If the killer gave everybody the slip but Dougie the Dunce standing guard outside the house?
But nothing happened.
There was some more shouting, but not of alarm. Whatever they had found, it wasn’t making a run for it.
Shit.
Dougie relaxed a little. Not too much though. SCO19 was an elite unit, and relaxing could get you killed. And Dougie had worked too hard and come too far to get himself killed now.
A rattling noise made him turn around.
The man had gone down the stone steps, and was now pushing the big box briskly away through the snow, in his indoor shoes.
The shout of discovery had come from an officer called Rollins, who’d found a trapdoor to the attic inside a built-in cupboard in the smallest bedroom in the house.
The operation came to a halt while they checked for booby traps. Rees was impatient – and then chastened when they actually found one just inside the attic. It was a small device contained in an old Quality Street tin. The tin took him back. It was huge! He remembered his father having a tin like that one Christmas, and it had seemed a bottomless treasure chest of chocolate jewels. Quality Street tins were tiny now. No value. This one even had a Half Price! sticker on it.
Bargain!
A small, blond officer with a pair of needle-nose pliers declared the device safe. ‘Wire’s come loose,’ he said, holding up a spike of glimmering copper. ‘Otherwise you’d have got a hundred three-inch nails right in the fucking face, Rollins, you muppet.’
Finally in the attic, they cautiously followed a cable stuffed with stolen electricity through the man-sized hole that had been knocked in the brick wall between the two properties.
Then they dropped through another hatch into the house next door.
There were lights in this house, and warmth, and the décor was sumptuous. There were ornate vases and French-polished tables and Japanese lacquered cabinets.
There was also a broken mirror on the landing, a single pile of dirty clothing on the floor of the master bedroom, and – oblivious in the en-suite shower – an elderly man crooning ‘Love Me Tender’.
42
20 December
WHEN AGUDA FIRST told her that the killer had escaped and that they hadn’t found her father, Eve had the sickening sensation that she was falling, out of control, backwards through time, spinning and breathless and seven years old again, skinny and chilly, with the smell of fresh-mown grass in her nose and panic-stricken over the bean-bag race.
Those same frantic tears welled inside her once more, like a geyser about to blow.
Only her father wasn’t around any more to push her hair aside and dry her tears, and tell her to just keep going.
And never would be again.
So why the hell do you keep waiting for it to happen?
The voice in her head surprised Eve so much that she straightened in her chair.
She wasn’t a child any more.
Her father’s kind advice to get her through the bean-bag race had become a motto, a mantra, and – finally – a way of life that was all about moving on and leaving difficult things behind.
But there were some things that couldn’t be left behind.
Some things you just had to turn and face …
And with that simple clarity, the crazed carapace that had enfolded Eve as she’d stood over Guy Smith’s battered body released her like a dove.
While Emily Aguda told her what had happened during the raid, and what would happen next, her mind was off somewhere else, seeing things clearly, and making other plans.
Eve had handed over all her control – first to the killer and then to the police.
But the police couldn’t keep her safe.
And they couldn’t catch the killer.
And they couldn’t find her father.
For the first time in her life, Eve realized that nobody was going to ride into town on a white horse and end this nightmare.
She would just have to do it herself.
43
THREE DAYS AFTER Guy Smith was beaten to death in front of her, Eve Singer announced that she was going back to work.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Aguda said warily, over breakfast of toast and Marmite.
‘I have to be busy,’ Eve said. ‘If I sit and wait I’ll go mad.’
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Joe said when she called him and told him her plan.
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Will you help me?’
There was a long pause at the other end of the line and fear flared in Eve’s heart. In that moment she realized that Joe was the only person she trusted in the whole wide world, and that if he said he would not help her then she truly was alone.
So when he said yes, her throat tightened with an overload of emotion.
Even so, leaving the house was harder than she thought it would be. Joe had offered to pick her up, but she knew she needed to get back into a normal rhythm if she was to maintain her tenuous grip on some appearance of normality – even if she did now have her own personal bodyguard in tow.
At least Aguda didn’t look like a bodyguard.
Eve stood behind the front door for an age, trying to remember how to breathe in a rhythm, while she grew hotter and hotter in her hat and gloves and scarf.
Then she opened the door to find Mr Elias standing there with a spadeful of salt.
‘Are you going to work?’ he said in surprise.
‘Yes,’ said Eve. ‘I need to keep busy.’
Mr Elias scattered the salt on the icy pathway, then leaned on his shovel.
‘I saw your … report on the news, Eve. Are you sure you’re all right?’
Eve’s smile faltered a little. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘And thank you for all your kindness and help. It means a lot to me.’
Mr Elias waved it away. ‘Any news of Duncan?’
Eve shook her head and pointed at Aguda. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Aguda,’ she said. ‘She’s part of the search team.’
Eve thought she’d keep things simple. She didn’t want to worry Mr Elias with kidnapping and killings.
Mr Elias nodded and shook Aguda’s hand. ‘Good luck,’ he said.
By the time they closed the little wooden gate behind them, he had bent to his task once again.
‘Shit,’ said Eve as they headed for the station. ‘I still have to buy him a Christmas present. I still have to buy everyone a Christmas present!’
Eve took a deep breath and opened the newsroom door.
‘Fuck yes!’ Ross Tobin shouted. ‘That’s what I call a fucking reporter!’
Everybody looked at Eve and she reddened. It felt like for ever since she had been here. She felt like a stranger – and people treated her that way.
Because she was.
Strange
r than she had been the last time they’d seen her.
They had all reported crimes and tragedies and shocking events – but none of them had straightened their hair and done a piece to camera as a murdered colleague bled out behind them.
After a few wan smiles, people sidled past her nervously, or pretended not to see her sitting at her desk.
Eve had planned to introduce Aguda as a contact, but nobody asked who she was.
Joe arrived and gave Eve a quick, reassuring hug and Katie Merino came over to say a rather stiff Welcome back, but Ross dismissed her with a flap of his hand. ‘Not half the journalist you are,’ he told Eve as Katie disappeared. ‘I’m not even sure she’s a natural blonde.’
Eve turned to Ross Tobin, all business. ‘So what have you got for us?’
‘Take your pick,’ said Tobin. ‘Man’s decapitated body found in Camden Lock; woman eaten by two dachshunds in Belsize Park; and what looks like a double suicide in a car park off Edgware Road.’
Eve and Joe exchanged glances. Any one of the deaths might turn out to be the work of their killer – or none – but they both knew which was guaranteed to make the evening news.
‘We’ll take the dogs,’ said Eve.
The guilty dachshunds had been taken away by the time they got to the upmarket address in Belsize Park, and the police on the scene weren’t saying where. Aguda wasn’t sorry – she wasn’t crazy about dogs at the best of times, and thought that two dogs who had eaten their owner – even post-mortem – would be particularly creepy.
Eve and Joe were inexplicably gutted.
‘Why?’ Aguda asked. ‘People know what dachshunds look like.’
‘Not these dachshunds,’ Eve said. ‘Not dachshunds that have eaten their wealthy owner in Belsize Park.’
But Aguda was confused. Police had already said that Katinka Nasarenko had apparently fallen downstairs and died at least a week before her body was discovered. The dogs had only chewed on her thighs a bit, not brought her down in a pack.
‘It’s not Watergate, is it?’ she said.
Eve shrugged. ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But it’s the best story of the day and guaranteed airtime.’
Aguda still didn’t see the point. She didn’t say so, but to her the whole job of TV crime reporter seemed faintly ridiculous– a foolish retelling of life and death in the midst of the real thing. She was all in favour of a free press, but couldn’t be doing with all this petty prurience.
She stood on the corner of the street, stamping her feet to keep warm, while Eve and Joe wandered about looking at angles and stepping backwards into the road between cars to stare up at the relevant address. It had been a grand row of old houses; some had already been made into flats, others were still undergoing the change. Aguda was starting to wonder whether there was a street anywhere in London that was unsullied by scaffolding and eight-foot hoardings smothered in peeling flyers.
Eve and Joe rejoined her at the end of their discussion. ‘We need the dogs,’ Joe said ruefully. ‘Otherwise it’s never going to make the news.’
He gave Eve a meaningful look and there was a brief silence. Aguda knew something was afoot.
‘You couldn’t help us out, could you?’ Eve said.
‘In what way?’ said Aguda suspiciously.
‘Find out where the dogs are and put in a good word for us? Ask if we could get a quick shot of them? Then we could do a piece here and go straight to the kennels or wherever and get a shot of the killer dogs, and then we’re done.’
Aguda smiled at killer dogs, then realized that Eve was deadly serious.
She hesitated. It wasn’t her job. Her job was to keep Eve Singer from being killed, no more, no less. But she liked Eve, and Joe seemed like a nice enough bloke, and it wouldn’t be hard to help them, so she would have felt churlish saying no.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘I’ll ask for you, but I’m not begging. Not for dogs.’
‘Thanks,’ said Eve. ‘We’ll do a few shots here and then go wherever, if you manage to find out.’
Aguda detached herself from them and spoke to the officer at the scene, who gave her a number. She pulled out her phone and called it, while Joe and Eve messed about with light meters and microphones. They kept looking over to see how she was getting on, so she moved a little distance from them so that they couldn’t hear her appeal on their behalf. Emily Aguda was used to getting what she wanted because she’d worked hard enough to deserve it, and hated asking for favours.
But it wasn’t a big favour and the officer who was the last line of resistance said he had no problem if Aguda wanted to send someone along to take a picture of the dogs.
‘Lovely little things, they are,’ he told her. ‘If the family don’t want you I’ll have you myself, won’t I, sweetheart?’
Aguda realized he was talking to the killer dogs, not being a sexist pig, so she thanked him and hung up and walked back towards the hoardings where Eve was finishing her report.
‘… Eve Singer in Belsize Park for iWitness News.’ She continued to look into the camera with a bright-yet-sympathetic look on her face.
Only when Joe said, ‘OK,’ did Eve’s face crimp again into real concern.
Aguda had to hand it to her – she must be sick with worry, but on camera she was a complete professional.
‘Did you get it?’ Eve said grimly.
‘I got it,’ said Joe.
They both turned to look at Aguda and she couldn’t help a triumphant little smile. ‘I got it too.’
They ate leftovers. That’s what the label on the packet in the freezer said in Eve’s hasty scrawl. Leftover what it didn’t say.
It had turned out to be some kind of chicken risotto, which was bland to the point of tastelessness.
Emily Aguda glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘Are we going to watch the news?’
‘Why?’
‘Your report on the dogs.’
Eve waved it away with a little smile. ‘It’s not Watergate, is it?’
Aguda reckoned she probably deserved that – but she’d done her bit for the story, and couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.
44
Humanity enjoys only two states of truth and beauty: the newborn and the corpse …
HUW REES PUT down the book and rubbed his red eyes.
It was two a.m. He had been at this for hours now. This notebook was one of sixty-six. He’d had them transported to his office, and from there to his home, in the hope that they would give him some insight into the killer’s current state of mind, but so far it had been little other than ramblings – some esoteric, some religious, all egotistical. All nutty as hell.
He picked up another book and opened it at random.
Immortality must be the artist’s goal.
A true artist must seek to reveal everything EVERYTHING about his subject – not only the outer shell but the inner workings.
The Cubists tried but failed. They reveal their subjects from multiple perspectives but all is exterior. If I want to see every angle of the Nude Descending, can I not simply walk around her? And from every angle she is still only two-dimensional. He shows me her backside, but it is very like her frontside! To understand her we must show her INSIDE!!!
Art was not Huw Rees’s strong point. He knew what he liked – which was paintings of Spitfires and Messerschmitts duelling in the summery skies over Kent – but he would never have called himself a lover of art.
He didn’t know Nude Descending a Staircase, so he didn’t get the killer’s joke – although he recognized that a joke must have been made by the thick and repeated exclamation points at the end of the sentence.
They had gone through three pages.
DI Marr was cultural. He might get the Nude joke. Huw Rees made a mental note to ask him if it had any relevance, then flicked forward a few pages.
Jack the Ripper had some insight, although he lacked control. He sensed that truth was to be found within, and should be exposed and shared with others …
How perfectly she trusted me when I had come to claim her. Now she doubts like Thomas, who would not be convinced by the face or the form of the undead Christ, until he opened the Roman wound with his own finger, and touched the flesh that restored a ghost to a man.
Now that Rees recognized. Vague memories of school religious instruction, and an illustration in the little Bible his grandmother had given him on his tenth birthday: a watercolour plate of a confused old man sticking his finger into Jesus’s ribs. Thank God his father had bought him a Wales rugby shirt on the same day or his birthday would have been a right downer. He had never read the Bible, but he’d looked at the pictures, because they’d been as gory as hell. Beheadings and beatings and the bloody crucifixion … Happy birthday, little boy! Hip-hip-hooray!
Rees sighed and dropped the notebook on to his desk. He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d slept without waking at least once – his brain was working too hard to give itself over to slumber.
After they’d linked the first three murders, he’d moved to the spare room so that he could switch on the light and go over the files without waking Maureen. It hadn’t really worked. Often he would look up from photos of Layla Martin’s drained body, or the bloody cab of the Piccadilly Line Tube, to find his wife at the door, offering coffee or a sandwich.
At three in the morning.
Thinking about it now, Huw Rees almost cried at her kindness. Actually got a lump in his throat! He snorted. He was emotional only because he was exhausted. He had pinned all of his hopes on the raid, without realizing that they were the last hopes he had. And when that effort had failed to yield a killer or a hostage, Huw Rees had felt his mental and physical resources implode with a weedy pfff. Since then he’d been running on empty, propping up his mind and his body with false hope and Jelly Babies. Someone had once told him you could ride the Tour de France on nothing but water and Jelly Babies, and so far, so good. But he’d be a toothless diabetic if they didn’t catch this bastard soon.