by Zoe Caldwell
The street’s quiet. Bizarrely quiet for London. Some of the houses are probably second homes. London dwellings of Russian billionaires. Or family homes that have passed through generations of old money. The downstairs curtains are drawn in quite a few of the houses, no doubt hiding expensive furniture from prying eyes. I wander over to Miles’s place. His curtains are drawn too. I wonder if he lives alone. I suspect so. Who in their right mind would want to live with that creep? But what if he has an ageing mother or something? Someone old and senile who’s stuck with him?
I press the bell. It bleats through the house. I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to achieve. I’m not going to kill him, and yet something compels me to investigate. Maybe it’s just because I’m bored, a little restless.
No one answers. I hear nothing. No stirring inside.
I try again. Wait.
Nothing.
I glance around for a security system, CCTV, but Miles doesn’t strike me as organised or modern enough for that. He probably thinks he’s fine, safe, cruising along in his Belgravia bubble.
I know I shouldn’t… I should turn around and head home, enjoy a quiet night in, put my feet up, lay low, and yet, I can’t. I can’t let Miles go. I need to hunt. I root around, find my lock-picking tools. It’s not ideal to pick a lock at this time of day, when it’s not quite dark yet, but the street is quiet, the houses sleepy and subdued and Miles’s lock looks like a fairly simple one. It shouldn’t be too hard.
I pull on a pair of latex gloves from my bag, take out my tools and look over my shoulder a few times, before standing close to the door and sliding my tension wrench and lock pick inside. I rattle around, loosening the pins. I get the latch free in under a minute and push down on the handle.
I’m in.
12
I push the door open and step inside.
Immediately, I’m hit by the stench of Miles’s aftershave. Old Spice or something equally rank. I fan it away from my face as I take in his living room. It’s disconcertingly ordinary. Cosy even. Miles’s front room is nothing like the repulsive paedophile’s lair I’d imagined. There’s a grand piano, stylish, in polished mahogany. A few Chesterfield sofas, laden with cushions and throws. A soft carpet with a swirling pattern. A big flatscreen TV. A mantlepiece hosting framed pictures of family or friends. Tasteful art on the walls. Even a few pot plants and a vase of flowers on the coffee table.
What the hell?
For a moment, I wonder if I could be wrong about him. Could Briony have picked up on a false rumour? But no… I read the articles. I saw the picture of him in the papers. And anyway, I should know more than anyone that appearances can be deceptive. No one seeing my flashy, beautiful, sophisticated apartment would assume I’m a serial killer. I just need to dig a little deeper.
I wander into the adjoining kitchen. Miles has left a plate on the breakfast bar, scattered with toast crumbs and smeared with jam. There’s a half-drunk mug of tea next to it. The kitchen has a window overlooking the garden. I peer out. There’s not much to see. Unsurprisingly, Miles isn’t the green-fingered type and the garden is an uninspiring sight: a patio with uneven, loose paving stones and a grassy expanse, overgrown with weeds.
I turn away. There’s a door leading off from the kitchen. I pull it open to discover a downstairs toilet. A small narrow room with a loo and a sink. Not much to see.
I head upstairs. There must be something else up here. Something troubling. There must be. I refuse to believe that a long-term predator like Miles Brady has simply been reformed during a two-year stint in prison. I refuse to believe it. I can’t believe it. If shit like that’s true, and prison does work, then how am I justified in my kills? How is it okay that I murder guys like him when they can become new men after only a few years in a cell?
I open a door on the landing. Miles’s bedroom. It’s just as fucking normal-looking as the rest of the house. A king-sized bed, perfectly made up. Bedside tables with matching lamps on each side. On one of the tables there’s a glass of water and a pair of glasses. I walk over to it and pull open the drawers, expecting to find a stash of child porn or something equally vile, but it’s filled with normal stuff: a couple of trashy novels, tweezers, medication, sleeping pills, a few pairs of thermal socks. The kind of stuff you’d expect to find in any old guy’s bedside table.
I close the drawers and look around for some other clues, but anyone checking out this room, and this house, would truly believe that Miles Brady is completely respectable. He even has pictures on his bedroom walls of him playing the piano at various concerts, including a shot of him performing for the Queen, the occasion marked in gold lettering underneath.
I go over to his wardrobe and pull open the doors, but there’s nothing weird in there either. Just shirts, jackets. I root around, but it’s clothes, shoes, normal stuff. I walk over to his chest of drawers. Open them. I root around among socks, pants, vests, jumpers until my fingers land on something flat. I pull it out: a notepad. Scrawled on lined paper are the words, echatgroup.com, @tomhughes. Hmm. I take my phone from my bag and take a photo of the paper, before placing it back in the drawer, feeling uneasy. Miles is clearly reeling kids in online as well and not just through his piano lessons. I rifle through the rest of his drawers, searching for more damning scraps of information, but I can’t find anything.
I check out his en suite, but there’s nothing of note there either.
Maybe I should head home. But I can’t quite bring myself to leave. I feel like I’m missing something. There must be something here. There must be.
I cross the hall. There’s another door. A spare room? I press down on the handle, but the door doesn’t budge. It’s locked. Interesting…
I retrieve my lock-picking set from my bag and kneel down, setting to work on the lock. I’m not as experienced at opening household mortise locks as I am at picking locks with pins, but I have the tools to do it. After five or so minutes of twisting and turning, I feel the lock loosen. I pull down on the handle and the door opens.
The room is dark, shadowy. Windowless.
I step inside. It smells chemically and strange. I feel around on the wall for a light switch. My fingers land upon one and I flick it on.
A darkroom. Miles Brady has a darkroom. There’s a camera on the counter. An enlarger. A tray of developing fluid.
My stomach starts to fizz with anxiety, my heart growing tight. I have a horrible feeling I know exactly what I’m about to discover.
I peer into the enlarger, trying to view film, but none has been loaded.
I look in the trays of developing fluid for pictures, but there aren’t any.
I pull open a drawer and rummage under a few packets of photo paper, spotting something underneath. I lift them out of the drawer and find a dozen or so pictures. The first one, on top of the pile, shows the face of a little boy. Maybe five or six. He’s cute, with long eyelashes. An innocent face.
I know I’m not going to like what I’m about to see as I pull the picture aside. There it is: the little boy, lying on a bed, naked, confused. Another, in which he’s in a strange sexualised pose, the look on his face tragic. He looks scared. Lost.
Rage floods through me. It makes my fingertips sweat. I’m going to destroy Miles. I knew he was rotten. I knew it. Someone needs to stop him and it’s going to be me.
I don’t want to see any more, but as I rearrange the pictures to how they were, I get a glimpse of the next shot in the pile. The boy’s body, battered. I take a closer look at the picture. The boy looks dead. Bruised. Rotting. His small naked body is in an unmistakable state of decay. Bile rises in my throat. The boy is on the floor of Miles’s front room, I recognise the swirling pattern of his carpet. Miles is even worse than I could have possibly imagined.
I check out the next picture. Another shot of the boy’s body. Decomposing. Taken from a different angle this time. Miles was clearly getting off on it when he took these pictures.
My heart burns with fury. I feel sick
with it.
I look at another picture. A close-up of the boy’s face. His cheeks are hollow, rotting.
I’m shaking, the pictures fluttering in my hands.
A cry pierces my shock.
I freeze, terrified. But of course, it’s not Miles. The sound is from outside. There’s another cry. A few yelps. Giggles. I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s just children, playing. A neighbour’s kids.
I need to get out of here though. Miles is not someone whose path I want to cross unprepared. I put the pictures back in order. I need to know who this boy is. He must have gone missing. His parents are probably beside themselves with worry. Presuming these pictures are recent. I take my phone out of my bag and take a few shots of the first picture – the one that clearly shows the boy’s face. I’ll google missing persons stories later and see if any of the descriptions or photos match up. I check the pictures on my phone. Sharp. Clear. I put my phone back in my bag and put the photos back in the drawer, placing the packets of paper on top, where I found them. I glance around the room, checking it all looks the same. Then I head back into the hall, closing the door behind me.
I left my lock-picking tools in the door and I rattle around with them, heart thumping, until I manage to turn the lock, leaving the darkroom as I found it. I take my tools and stash them back in my bag.
Scanning the hallway and glancing into Miles’s bedroom, I make sure nothing’s out of place, then I hurry down the stairs, pull the curtains ever so slightly aside in the living room, and check the coast is clear on the street. The children have gone. It’s empty.
I slip out of the house, the door locking automatically behind me.
Heart slamming in my chest, I walk away.
13
I grab a copy of the Metro as I cross the pavement towards my waiting car. Julian isn’t on the front page today, it’s just Trump. Warmongering. Climate catastrophe.
‘Morning,’ my driver says, as he walks around the car, opening the door for me.
It’s a different driver to the one I had the other day, but I vaguely recognise him. A mild-mannered dark-haired guy who listens to the radio quietly up front and rarely bothers with conversation. I like him.
‘Morning,’ I reply, smiling politely, as I get in.
I skim-read the front page and flick through, but it’s just storms, migrant crossings, a movie mogul on trial for rape and sexual assault. Julian’s face is nowhere in sight. He’s gone. Old news. History. Like all my victims. Idly, pausing between pages, I wonder what his family will do with his body. Will they bury him or cremate him? They’d probably rather cremate him than preserve my handiwork any longer. I wonder what they’ll do with his ashes. Will they be kept in an urn on the mantlepiece? Or scattered in an ocean somewhere? I prefer the urn idea. I like the thought of Julian in an urn in a suburban house, out of harm’s way, a relic his mum can cry sad, self-pitying tears about over tea with her friends, rather than turning a blind eye to how her son behaved when he was alive – beating, raping and abusing women. No, a sad little urn is where Julian belongs.
‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ My driver pipes up.
I’ve been so lost in my daydream about Julian’s ashes that I’ve barely noticed the weather. The sky is bright, azure blue, gleaming. Too bright for me, but cool slate-grey skies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.
‘Gorgeous,’ I reply, smiling tightly, hoping that’s the end of the exchange.
Fortunately, my driver smiles politely back before returning his attention to the road. We lapse into silence as Lady Gaga pours from the car radio.
‘Turn it up if you like,’ I suggest.
My driver nods enthusiastically and twists the dial.
‘Stupid Love’ plays as we leave central London. He’s taking me to an industrial estate in Zone Four where we’re shooting a spread for the magazine. The theme of the shoot is romantic – ethereal floaty dresses, gentle dreamy colours, decadent hair and makeup, that kind of thing. Content for our Valentine’s issue. Bit nauseating really, but I put my own Camilla spin on it and decided we’d contrast all the soft loveliness with something bleak. I wanted the models to be shot somewhere run-down, drab, rotting, and chose a derelict old warehouse with soaring ceilings, tall windows and pitted walls. It’s been vacant for over a year since the company went bust. Maybe it’s a bit cruel of me, to make the models pose in a dump full of cobwebs and spiders, but I thought it would look good. And they’re being paid a lot. Lady Gaga bleeds into Mabel as the car hurtles down a throbbing dual carriageway away from the city and into the outskirts. We shoot past ugly office blocks and nasty, commuter-belt new-build flats.
Eventually, the driver pulls off the main road into the industrial site. I take in the nondescript depots and warehouses, a couple of offices scattered about, offering services like B2B marketing, printing, and low-rate litigation. I feel sorry for the people who work there. Their workplaces couldn’t be any more different to Couture, with its imposing entrance, its plate glass windows, and central London location surrounded by hustle and bustle.
We approach the warehouse. I recognise it instantly, having seen pictures after I got one of my assistants to scout locations. It’s huge – tall, red-bricked, and yet dilapidated and almost fragile-looking. Some of the windows are smashed. They’re dusty. The bricks are crumbling. It’ll be demolished soon, replaced with a fancy new office block. But for now, it’s in its final chapter of existence, an empty vessel. Air rattling through its deserted rooms. Undisturbed.
The driver pulls up outside the warehouse. A fully made-up model with a flawless, doll-like face and wild curly hair is having an animated phone conversation by the entrance, a few feet from a massive silver SUV that belongs to Philippe, the photographer. The driver parks and moves to get out of the car to open my door, but I tell him it’s okay, and step out of the car, thanking him.
The model clocks me, and immediately starts wrapping up her conversation. She’s unnerved, a little intimidated, like a lot of the models tend to be by me. They’re young and they see me as a scary magazine editor, someone they need to impress. They don’t realise that not so long ago, I was a nobody.
‘Hi, I’m Olivia,’ the model says, stowing her phone in her jacket pocket.
Her eyes are framed with long feathery lashes, her skin dusted with pearlescent highlighter.
‘Hi,’ I reply.
I push the door of the warehouse open. ‘Come on,’ I say, holding it for her.
She reaches for the door and smiles politely, as she follows me inside.
The warehouse is as vast and gloomy as I’d hoped. It smells musty, damp. It reminds me of my garage. Old pallet boxes, stacking shelves and moving trolleys have been left behind. There are a couple of rails of clothes by one of the walls. A hair and makeup station’s been set up, where a couple of makeup artists diligently powder models’ faces, applying mascara, smoothing their hair. Philippe is setting up his lights. I spot Jess. She’s sitting with a model who has a copy of what looks like her contract on her lap, which Jess appears to be patiently explaining. I head over to Philippe.
‘Hi, darling,’ he says, leaning in to kiss me on the cheek. He smells minty, of chewing gum.
He smiles, but it’s a strained kind of smile, and even though on the best of days Philippe isn’t exactly a ray of sunshine, I get the feeling something’s up.
‘Hey,’ I reply. ‘How’s everything going?’
Philippe swallows a mouthful of instant coffee from a plastic cup. He winces.
‘This stuff tastes like shit.’
He places the cup down and flicks a switch on his studio light. Nothing happens.
‘My light isn’t working,’ he grumbles.
He frowns at the light through the heavy-framed specs he always wears and flicks another switch. Suddenly, light beams across the derelict space.
‘Looks like it’s working to me!’ I laugh.
‘It wasn’t working before,’ Philippe huffs.
A lot of people wou
ld probably find Philippe’s downbeat, miserable manner unappealing, but I quite like it. Maybe because it means I don’t have to pretend so much around him.
Olivia’s up first. She’s wearing a plunging, pale-blue Oscar de la Renta gown embroidered with winding metallic leaves. She’s perfect for this shoot, with her oceanic eyes and killer bone structure. She drapes herself against a stacking rack and works the camera. The shoot is a bit self-consciously edgy, but the effect is good nonetheless.
The images start to appear on Philippe’s monitor. I highlight the ones I like, discussing them with Jess as Philippe snaps away.
Eventually, Olivia starts to run out of poses and we all agree we’ve got the shots we need. Philippe and his assistant, Wendy, begin moving their equipment to another part of the warehouse, while the makeup artists apply the finishing touches to the next model’s look. Jess is hanging around by the makeup station, chatting to one of the makeup artists. I’m at a bit of a loose end so decide to head outside for a moment and have a cigarette.
I don’t smoke too often. I’m not addicted, but I quite like the ritual. I smoke Treasurer cigarettes and I like withdrawing their long slender stems from my packet, pressing them between my lips as I flick my lighter and feel the golden flame, warm and bright near my face. I like the excuse smoking gives you to step away for a moment. I wander through the warehouse, towards the hallway. The owner of the company that used to run their business here knows we’re shooting today. They provided us with keys and we paid them a fee, but they haven’t cleaned the site, leaving it laden with cobwebs, squalid – just the way I wanted it. The hallway is thick with dust. I walk along, leaving footprints, and discover a flight of stairs at the end of the corridor, also dusty, with cobwebs between the railings. I head up three or four flights of stairs and wander down another corridor until I find an abandoned office with a cheap desk and swivel chair. I spot an invoice on the table, with numbers in black ink fading to grey.