The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  It made him feel doomed.

  He had been getting heat from the Commissioner’s office before Eve Singer had gone rogue with her iPhone and flyer. Now he felt like a man being force-fed face-first into a furnace. He didn’t blame Eve for publicizing the flyer. She was desperate to find her father, and desperation did strange things to people. But it had made everything a lot more complicated.

  Rees picked up Vandenberg’s mugshot. For two days now, it had stared off the front of every newspaper and from TV screens, but nobody had seen him. At least, nobody remembered seeing him. Maybe it was just that nobody had noticed him in the first place. The man had a Teflon face; there was nowhere for the eyes to stick and fix the image in the memory.

  The incident room had had a hundred calls a day about flyers that turned out to be for carpet sales and doll’s-house fairs, fifty calls a day reporting men sticking flyers on bus shelters and lamp posts – every one of which had to be checked out – but not one single call claiming a sighting of William Stafford Vandenberg.

  The system wasn’t working.

  Everything was shit.

  All Rees knew was that he was desperate for a break he couldn’t take and a sleep that wouldn’t come. He worried not only that Vandenberg would carry on with his festive killing spree, but that his own capacity to hunt him down was diminishing exponentially with every day that passed. He dreaded every new dawn while the threat of another public murder hung over his head like a sword.

  Huw Rees finally went to bed, but not to sleep.

  The phone vibrated silently under Eve’s pillow and she answered it before the second buzz.

  Number withheld.

  ‘I got your message, Eve. Very clever.’

  She got up and gently clicked the bedroom door shut, then walked silently to the window – missing the creaking floorboards without even thinking about it. The cool air seeping through the glass caressed her bare legs.

  The street outside had been softened by fresh snow. Under the lamp post the phone box was blood red with a thick marshmallow cap.

  Was the killer in there?

  He could be calling from anywhere; the interior of the phone box was dark. Impenetrable.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  ‘My father,’ she said. ‘Alive.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he teased. ‘The monkey’s paw?’

  Her gut lurched. She knew the ghost story. Everyone knew it. A bad bargain, and a dead son returned to his parents – but still horribly mangled by the accident that had killed him.

  For a moment Eve was angry that he would joke about it, but she let it go. She drew a deep breath. She had to play along, not provoke him. If she took it personally then she wouldn’t be able to think like a killer.

  ‘And what do you want?’ She did not stammer – and wondered fleetingly whether that was a good thing.

  Or very, very bad.

  In the phone box: a movement. Eve flinched as a single pale palm pressed against the glass.

  Splayed.

  ‘Death wants his Maiden.’

  Eve went liquid with horror. She put her own hand on the window to steady herself, and it was a long, long time before she could find enough breath to make any sound.

  Then she whispered, ‘We have a deal.’

  She hung up, and stepped unsteadily away from the window and back into the shadows.

  He’s going to kill me, she thought numbly.

  And I probably deserve it.

  45

  22 December

  MR ELIAS NEVER swore, but when he found that the phone box had been defaced, he said something, very forcefully, under cover of an Air France jet, and then strode briskly back to the house to fetch a bucket of hot water and a scrubbing brush.

  He was angry, but he was also hurt.

  More hurt than he’d ever have believed possible.

  Surprising tears welled in his eyes. First Phoebe, then Jennifer, and now this.

  He knew in his head that the first two things were unconnected to the third, but in his heart they were still open wounds, and this felt like salt.

  He blew his nose into his handkerchief as the water beat noisily into the bucket.

  Who could have done it? He hoped it was a stranger. If it were a stranger it wouldn’t feel so bloody personal!

  He trudged back out to the phone box and started to scrub the flyer off the wall.

  He’d almost removed the bottom left corner before the red mist cleared and he actually read what it said.

  EXHIBITION

  nue: Madame Tussaud’s

  Date: Christmas Eve

  e: 14.00

  Mr Elias dropped his bucket, hurried back across the snowy road and banged hard on Eve Singer’s door.

  It was night. The door of the phone box opened, showing a brief flash of greenish night-vision snow. A dark figure entered, hood up, face wrapped in a scarf.

  Only the eyes glittered, like a fox in headlights.

  There was a brief glimpse of the flyer being unfurled, and then gloved hands raised it and pasted it over the lens …

  ‘You think it’s real?’ said Joe.

  ‘I think we have to take this one seriously,’ said Huw Rees. ‘There’s no way we can ID Vandenberg from this footage, but his prints are all over the door.’ He held up a copy of the flyer. ‘At least now we know where and when to find him.’

  ‘You knew where and when to find him last time, too,’ said Eve.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Rees grimly, ‘this time we’ll have everything covered.’ He paused and glanced at Aguda. ‘We just need to swing the odds in our favour …’

  They both looked at Eve. There was a pregnant silence.

  TrrrrrrT.

  Then Joe said with dawning anger, ‘They want to use you as bait!’

  Rees winced. ‘Not bait,’ he said. ‘As a distraction.’ He spoke to Eve. ‘Vandenberg is obsessed with you. Obsessed with you showing the world his work. You’re the person he most wants to impress—’

  ‘Or murder!’ said Joe.

  Rees ignored him. ‘This is different from the raid on his house. This time we know exactly where he’s going to be and when. We’ve got forty-eight clear hours to secure that scene. We can get in there and control it, Eve. For the first time we’ll have the upper hand. You’ll be surrounded by police. Emily will be right there and we’ll have a team of twenty armed undercover officers, who can be so tight on you that, trust me, this maniac will never get within ten feet of you. The moment we spot him, we’ll take him down.’

  Eve held the handcuffs still for a moment.

  Aguda glanced at her and said carefully, ‘It seems like a good plan.’

  ‘But it’s not a good plan,’ Joe snapped. ‘It’s a fucking terrible plan. What if you don’t spot him? What if you spot him, but you screw up somehow? Like you screwed up at the Barnstormer Theatre? What if this nut doesn’t need to get within ten feet of Eve? What if he’s in the rafters with a fucking rifle? What then?’

  ‘Joe …’ Eve put a hand on his arm. They all looked at her. She spoke carefully. ‘I know you’re only trying to protect me. But I just want this to be over. I’m the one who screwed up. I made a connection with the killer; I showed the Kevin Barr clip; I went to his fucking exhibition at Piccadilly Circus; I let this bastard into this house and he stole my dad!—’

  She stopped before she could cry. A plane passed, giving her the moment she needed to go on. ‘And if this is the only way to get him back, I have to try it. I just have to.’

  Rees said, ‘So you’ll do it?’

  Eve gave a half-shrug. ‘The killer wants me,’ she said. ‘We have to give him what he wants.’

  ‘This is bullshit!’ said Joe, and stood up and stormed out.

  Eve went after him. She caught him at the gate, shrugging on his jacket. ‘Joe …’

  He turned to face her, but didn’t return her smile. ‘These bastards don’t give a shit about you or your dad. All they want is to take down a serial
killer.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we want too?’ said Eve. ‘Whatever they’re planning, it makes no difference to us.’

  ‘It’s the principle.’

  ‘It’s their job. And it’s the obvious move. You can’t blame them.’

  ‘Yeah I can,’ he said angrily. ‘Fuck ’em. And fuck their job.’

  He looked close to tears.

  Eve put her hand over his on top of the gate. ‘What’s really wrong?’

  Joe looked around him as if the answer were to be found hanging on a snowy hedge. ‘I just want you to be safe.’

  ‘Everything will be OK.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  She nodded. ‘You’re right. But none of us knows that. Every day we get out of bed and assume we’ll climb into it again that night. Some of us are wrong. But Joe – most of us are right.’

  ‘Most of us aren’t trying to outwit a serial killer.’

  Eve smiled. ‘How can I fail? I’ll have you there to protect me.’

  Joe didn’t smile. ‘This is not a game, Eve. This is serious shit.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that? You think I want to take this kind of risk? I’m shaking in my boots here, Joe, but there’s no other option. Whatever Huw Rees says, if the killer makes one wrong move, they’re going in with all guns blazing. And if he dies I’ll never find my dad. And that’s all I care about. That’s all that matters.’

  Joe squinted at the snow and shook his head.

  ‘I want to do this with you,’ she said. ‘But I will do it alone.’

  He slid his hand from under hers and opened the gate. ‘I know you will.’

  He got into the crew car and revved the nuts off it before pulling into the road, narrowly missing a UPS delivery van.

  Eve walked slowly back inside.

  46

  MR ELIAS OPENED the door to a UPS driver.

  ‘Mr Elias?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Parcel for you. Sign here, please.’

  ‘For what?’

  The man stepped aside so Mr Elias could see a large box on a trolley. On the side it said Hotpoint.

  ‘I didn’t order a washing machine.’

  ‘Surprise,’ said the man with a shrug.

  That was true, thought Mr Elias. It was Christmas, after all. But he checked that the box was properly addressed to him before signing a poor approximation of his name on a screen with a stylus.

  The box was big – nearly waist-high – and looked heavy.

  ‘Is it heavy?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, pretty heavy.’

  ‘In that case, would you mind bringing it in for me?’

  ‘Not really my job,’ said the driver, and looked at his watch. Then he sighed and manoeuvred the trolley around, and tilted and pulled and levered it up the doorstep and over the threshold with a grunt of effort that made Mr Elias glad he’d asked for help.

  He peered into the front room but realized there wouldn’t be enough space to open the box without disrupting his own neat life, so he led the driver towards the second room at the back of the house, with Jennifer’s piano and all the bits and bobs he’d packed up after she’d died, but still hadn’t taken to the charity shop.

  ‘In here will be fine, thanks,’ he said.

  Then he thought he’d better tip the man, so he dug about in his pocket for a pound. He knew a pound wasn’t a lot, but he had no idea of how much one tipped a deliveryman these days, if at all.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And this is for you.’

  He looked up from his palmful of change, too late to see what hit him.

  The UPS driver’s name was Tyson Reid. He had been named for his father’s boxer dog. For a short while they had overlapped, he and the dog, but then the first Tyson had been hit by a delivery van outside the flats one summer evening, and after that their household was a lot less confusing.

  It wasn’t a UPS van.

  Young Tyson had been destined for great things. That’s what his mother always told him, anyway. And for a while it seemed that that might actually be the case. At school he was as smart as his friends would allow him to be while still remaining friends, and he had a knack for football that might have become a gift if he’d kept working at it. He played for the school and for a local youth-club team – Hackney Hunters – and was once invited to a training camp at West Ham. It came to nothing though, and after a while he’d started to lose interest in hard work without tangible reward.

  His mother gave him her stock lecture on instant gratification, but she wasn’t the one who had to run three miles in the rain four times a week for fuck all. So he’d stopped playing football, apart from against the wall by the garages where all the kids hung out, and by the time he was sixteen, Tyson wasn’t smart any more.

  He had dribbled out of school, rather than graduated, and had a brief brush with the law when he’d attempted to make money by selling a little dope. Nothing much – just baggies to friends and acquaintances – but you’d have thought he was Breaking Bad, the way his mother raged and ranted at him as the police slowly piled everything he’d ever owned in a jumble on the landing outside his bedroom door.

  One of them had trodden on his Millennium Falcon.

  He’d said, ‘Oops, sorry,’ – but with a dead look that had made Tyson realize that he wasn’t sorry at all, and that Tyson could expect more of the same if he chose to go down the path of more of the same.

  It was that, rather than his mother’s fury, that had saved him. Reminded him of how much easier his life had been when he’d been smart.

  It wasn’t too late for Tyson. Football and university were no longer on the table, but – because the police had decided on a warning and a broken Star Wars toy rather than an arrest – an honest job was still an option, and Tyson took it.

  He’d got a crappy nightshift in a petrol station, but it had paid for driving lessons, and then he’d started at UPS. Sorting and labelling for the first two years, then finally on the vans. He liked being out on the road all day long, with people always happy to see him, and only his ugly brown uniform to remind him that he wasn’t his own boss.

  It wasn’t the life Tyson had imagined for himself, but it wasn’t bad. He started playing football again – just a Sunday-morning league, but he’d forgotten how much he loved it, and had retained enough skill to shine.

  He had a girlfriend, Rose, and a baby on the way. They were going to call her Brady or Fern. They were on a list for a flat, and must be getting near the top. Tyson’s mother was knitting up a stocking-stitch storm, and his father had popped up from God knows where to put £50 in an account for the baby. He made a great show of it and said he was going to put in £50 a month to pay for her education, and then they never saw him again. But it was something to laugh about, and – because he’d opened the account and given them the book – Tyson figured it was a good idea anyway, and so, whenever he could, he put £50 a month into it instead. Brady or Fern had £300 to her name already, and she wasn’t even born!

  Plus Christmas was only a few days away and he’d be getting a good bonus because work was crazy busy from all the people buying stuff online instead of getting off their arses to go shopping.

  Tyson was grateful for their sloth.

  Happy with his lot.

  He sang under his breath as he drove. Mashed-up snatches of childhood songs and raps, about bare necessities and drunken sailors and bitch-slapping hoes.

  ‘Ear-lie in the morning …’

  On December the nineteenth, Tyson was despatched to pick up a parcel in west London. It was a big heavy box, but luckily the guy had it on the kerb for him already on a sack trolley. He even helped Tyson to manoeuvre it on to the hydraulic ramp of his van, even though he was dressed in loafers and a golf jumper.

  Tyson got him to sign the paperwork, then raised the ramp and closed the door and jumped into his cab.

  The guy was in the passenger seat.

  ‘Hey, man,’ said Tyson. ‘Get out!’
>
  But the guy wouldn’t get out.

  The guy had a knife and a cold look in his little black eyes.

  He made Tyson drive to somewhere out near Heathrow – a broad flat field where hungry gypsy ponies were tethered by long blue ropes in the snow.

  He made him take off his ugly brown uniform.

  Tyson stood shivering and embarrassed in his underwear, watching the man put on his clothes and wondering whether he would still get his Christmas bonus.

  He knew he was being robbed.

  But it wasn’t until it happened that he knew he was being murdered.

  Mr Elias opened the big box cautiously while the UPS driver sat on the sofa, oozing anticipation in a repulsive parody of Christmas.

  They were in the front room, but the room had been so vandalized that opening the box would no longer make any difference one way or another. Mr Elias imagined that the rest of the house must be in a similar state, and was almost grateful that he hadn’t seen it. He had come round, tied and gagged on the sofa, listening to the sound of his home being destroyed around him.

  UPS would be hearing from him.

  He had been scared. He was still scared, but that was fading to a fatalistic numbness, coupled with discomfort and growing irritation.

  The driver seemed to have no interest in him whatsoever. He hadn’t hit him since that first time, or even looked at him, until he had pulled him into a sitting position, pushed the box in front of him, laughed and said, ‘Open it.’

  He hadn’t untied Mr Elias’s hands, but after he finally got a fingernail under the brown tape on one side, the whole thing opened quite easily to reveal those little foam peanuts that protect the contents.

  ‘Take them out,’ said the deliveryman.

  Mr Elias scooped up a double handful and looked for somewhere to place them, but the deliveryman slapped his hands from underneath, knocking the whole lot into the air and scattering them all over the carpet and the coffee table.