Lia could scarcely breathe as she watched Sarah talking to the cameras, seeming as though she had been practising for this moment her entire life. And yet none of it sounded memorised.
Sarah was serious, calm and sincere. Only in her eyes could you see the emotion that relating her past suffering evoked.
‘How did the abuse start?’
‘I remember the first time, of course. You never forget things like that. It was a Friday night at home in Shoreditch. He had been drinking and wanted sex. He was groping me and it hurt. Our relationship had started out of love, but little by little a more aggressive side had been coming out in Arthur. I didn’t like it. I told him I didn’t want to. And he just knocked me to the ground with his fist, onto our kitchen floor. Then he took his belt and tied one of my arms to the handle of the fridge so I couldn’t get away. Then he started beating me.’
The silence of the industrial hall swallowed individually each of Sarah’s words. Lia, Rico, Berg and Maggie looked on in shock.
Sarah told how Arthur Fried liked to hit her, and showed the places on her body where he aimed his blows. She spoke about the trip to Tuscany and her visits to the women’s refuges. She described how problems and struggles for power at Fair Rule had made Fried vent his frustration on her at home.
The time came for Lia’s final question: ‘Do you have anything you would like to say directly to Arthur Fried?’
‘Arthur, I don’t think you ever regretted for a moment what you did to me. You begged me to forgive you often enough. You tried to smooth things over with flowers and buying me things, but you just kept hitting me. I don’t know what you’re like now, since we haven’t seen each other in years. I don’t want to see you. I’ve never been able to get over what you did to me. I’m still afraid of a lot of things, like loud noises and people arguing. You beat that fear into me. When I see you on the telly, to me it looks like you haven’t changed. During our marriage you enjoyed hitting me. But you’re never going to do that to anyone again. Arthur, our marriage stole my life from me. Now I’m going to go looking for a new life to live. This video is my first step.’
They recorded Sarah’s story in one take. Only the last part, where she recited lines she had written up beforehand, did they have to film twice. She repeated the expert estimates Maggie had gathered about how much violence occurred against women in Britain, and gave the contact information for two long-established support centres. Finally she encouraged everyone suffering from domestic violence to ask for help.
Berg switched off the camera and the bright tungsten lights.
Remaining seated, Sarah asked with some relief, ‘How did it look?’
‘Good. Really good. We’ll show you the finished video in a couple of days,’ Lia said.
Maggie walked over to Sarah and wrapped her in her arms. The hug lasted a long time, and neither of them spoke.
Once everything was done, Berg drove Sarah directly to her hotel, where she would stay for the next several weeks. Lia, Rico and Maggie stayed behind to watch the recorded interview.
‘This is going to go viral instantly,’ Rico said. ‘Sarah’s face says so much. I have a hard time imagining anyone voting for Arthur Fried after this.’
Lia watched as Rico and Maggie deftly edited the video. Maggie was the more skilful of the two at seeing where they should cut Sarah’s answers and which camera angles they should choose.
‘Instinct, dear, instinct,’ Maggie said to Lia in her make-up artist voice.
Instinct coming from the years Maggie had spent making adverts and more artistic cinematic fare.
When Berg came back, he brought Mari along as well. The video made a profound impression on her, gluing her to her chair even in its incomplete state.
The video was done by that night. They were exhausted but satisfied with the end result. It was four minutes, six seconds long in all, and even after viewing it so many times, the effect was hypnotic.
People can tell when someone is telling the truth straight from the heart.
Berg drove them to the Studio. The others scattered towards their homes, but Lia and Mari stayed and sat together.
‘Tomorrow it starts,’ Mari said.
This would be the first time Lia had been on board during the execution phase of a long-term operation. She should enjoy it.
‘I’m sure I will,’ Lia replied.
Lia went to fetch drinks and snacks from the kitchen. When she returned, she found Mari standing in front of the sofa, her face drained of blood. On the television was a news report.
Together they watched the live broadcast from Ludgate Hill in the City of London. On the screen was a blue car parked on the pavement. Around the car, police officers busied themselves cordoning off the area.
Mutilated body found in car boot in central London, said the news ticker at the bottom of the screen. Similarities with victim found in the spring. Crime scenes in close proximity.
For a while they sat watching as the news report repeated the few available details.
‘That’s quite close to here,’ Mari said. ‘Do you want to go and have a look?’
‘No. Or, yes. I don’t know.’ Lia thought for a moment. ‘Let’s go.’
Mari shook her head.
‘Not me. I’m pretty sure the police take pictures of crowds gathering around crime scenes. And besides, the Arthur Fried countdown starts tomorrow.’
The street corner on Ludgate Hill looked like the set of a disaster film. Bustling, uniformed officials, large vehicles, floodlights.
Traffic had been rerouted. The police had sealed off the area with tape, behind which even at this late hour gawked a hundred-strong crowd of onlookers and several TV crews.
Inside the barrier, officers were searching the vehicle and nearby ground. Three enormous lights on telescoping stands had been positioned around the car. The strobes of the crime scene investigation team’s cameras flashed. Only a few detectives and other police personnel were within the roped-off area, but more were in two large vehicles that looked like crosses between a camper van and an ambulance.
The area was filled with noise: hooting car horns, traffic police whistles, commands from the detectives, TV broadcast commentaries and the hum of the gathered crowd.
The strangest thing was the fear hovering over it all focused on the blue car, with its boot gaping open menacingly. Everyone stared at the car, even though no one could see in from so far away.
An unexpected evil had appeared before their eyes. Proof that anyone’s life could be taken at any time.
Lia watched the incident unfold on this cheerless corner – Pageant-master Court. And a pageant it was indeed. Fear really had made the slumbering street a stage, she thought. Everyone there knew they were watching something they would never be able to forget.
One police officer after another shook his head after looking in the car’s boot. The faces of the investigators were set, gravely determined to work with speed and accuracy.
Lia recognised one of them. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Gerrish wore a translucent white protective suit and sterile gloves like all the rest. Gerrish was too far away for Lia to speak to him.
But after a few moments, Gerrish approached the police officers waiting behind the tape. As he scanned the crowd, he noticed her and for a moment pulled up. Then he walked over. The rest of the crowd stared at the detective and his examination gloves. They bore smears of red.
Ducking under the tape, Gerrish motioned for Lia to follow him. He found them a quieter place behind the throng.
‘Why am I not surprised to see you here?’ Gerrish asked.
Lia did not know how to answer, so she told him the simple truth.
‘I saw the news and came to see if there was anything here connected to the Latvian woman’s death.’
Gerrish nodded.
‘I may have some information that will help you soon,’ Lia said.
‘Playing amateur detective, are we?’ Gerrish asked.
That fa
miliar crooked smile flashed across his lips but quickly disappeared.
‘When you visited the police station, you lied to me. You denied being a reporter. But you work for Level.’
Lia was taken aback.
‘That’s true. But I didn’t come to talk to you as a representative of the press, and I haven’t written a single line about what we talked about. I’m not even a reporter. I’m a graphic designer.’
Gerrish’s gaze was penetrating.
‘I’m a bit busy now. What information do you have that could help us?’
Lia weighed what she could reveal.
‘I can’t say yet,’ she said. ‘All I have so far are guesses that still need looking into.’
‘You do that then,’ Gerrish said and turned to leave.
‘Is this case the same?’ Lia asked quickly.
Gerrish snorted.
‘The next press release will be out soon. And I’m sure Level will get it too. But yes, it’s very similar. The remains of an adult female in the boot of a car. This body is more intact though. She was shot, but more brutally than I’ve ever seen.’
Gerrish walked briskly back to the investigation area. Lia stayed to watch for a few more minutes. The police detectives’ overalls shone in the glare of the lights.
Something horrible had happened, and now they had begun to pick up the pieces, laboriously, one by one.
The blue car was a Hyundai, and so the media called it the Hyundai Murder.
Lia watched the news until long into the night.
The police announced that the victim was approximately thirty years old, but positive identification had not yet been made. She had been shot extremely savagely, with a large-calibre automatic weapon. Simply killing her had not been enough. Parts of the body had come loose due to the force of the blasts, and it was clear that this had been the perpetrator’s intent.
‘I’m hard-pressed to think of any previous cases like this in Britain,’ a tired-looking DCI Gerrish said in a BBC interview around midnight. ‘Except one.’
The victim’s head had been separated from her body by shooting her neck at close range with an automatic weapon for so long that the neck tissues and cervical spine had broken down. The murder had been loud and bloody.
Lia felt the same wave of nausea as she had in the spring.
The media quickly dug up their footage from the case of the Woman Without a Face.
How long will it take for the Sun to give this victim a crass name too?
It only took a moment. The first story to refer to her as the Headless Woman appeared online at 12.36.
Lia went to sleep at 3 a.m. when she couldn’t stand to watch one more news report from Ludgate Hill.
In the morning all of London seemed to be thinking of only two things: the Headless Woman and the Woman Without a Face. Two murdered women, both left in the boot of a car in the City. The crimes were so unusual that they made the reporters resort to ever stronger metaphors. On the BBC morning news, a newsreader spoke of a ‘new era of brutality’, a phrase which was then repeated on show after show throughout the day.
In their reports, presenters considered it obvious that a serial killer was behind the crimes because the police had already found connections between the cases. What those connections were, the police did not wish to say since the investigation was ongoing.
‘I have a hard time believing it’s a serial killer,’ Mari said to Lia on the phone.
The perpetrator was probably the same, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he would follow a serial killer’s logic, fulfilling some inner appetite.
‘This is someone who kills for a living. He’s probably killed many more people than these two. Dumping the victims in a public place is a message. The cars and the locations. They’re supposed to tell someone something.’
They were still mulling over whether Lia should tell DCI Gerrish about the prostitutes on Vassall Road and Daiga Vītola. They didn’t have any actual evidence to back up their suspicions.
‘And besides, Gerrish has plenty of other work to do,’ Lia said.
The media had started pointing out how little progress the police had made in the case of the Woman Without a Face. The lead editorial in the Daily Star said the situation was embarrassing: a victim had been found in the middle of the Square Mile, within spitting distance of the Old Bailey, but the police could not track down the murderer.
In one interesting way the Hyundai Murder differed from the Holborn Circus case. No one knew who the first person had been to see the victim in the white Volvo that spring. This, even though the police had interviewed more than 160 eyewitnesses.
But in the Hyundai Murder, they knew who had been first on the scene, a seventy-one-year-old maintenance man who had been on an evening shift monitoring the mechanical systems of a nearby shopping centre. He noticed the blue car parked carelessly on the pavement and went to look. When there was no sign of the car’s owner, he tried the doors and found them unlocked.
‘The car was empty. That was strange too. Usually people have things in their cars. I even looked in the glove compartment, because that’s where people keep log books and other papers, but nothing,’ the maintenance man told the BBC news when interviewed.
He happened to try the boot as well. It had opened, releasing a nauseating stench.
‘I had to hold my hand over my mouth and nose. It was wrapped in plastic. A big… figure. So much blood. Straight away I remembered the Woman Without a Face…’
The man had slammed the boot shut and rung the police immediately. No one else had had to see the body.
Hauling the corpses into the City must have been a brazen operation, Mari said. The perpetrator had to drive the car onto a pavement in the middle of London, park it there and leave. Someone must have seen the driver, but without realising what they were seeing. People were constantly parking cars illegally as they ran quick errands.
But what did the discovery of the second body mean for Lia and Mari? And for the prostitutes in the flat on Vassall Road? Lia had her meeting arranged with Elza, but anything could happen before then.
‘Perhaps the police will discover something before Monday,’ Mari said.
They had to be extremely careful, she added. One murder might be a single, brutal act. The second victim made it clear that they were dealing with hardened criminals.
Lia had to hurry back to Level, and she knew that Mari’s mind was on other things apart from this new murder case: the first revelation about Arthur Fried was set to be made today. Lia had no intention of attending the press conference herself. She planned to watch the event on her phone. She and Mari agreed to return to the murders as soon as possible.
‘Fingers crossed for a good start to our political campaign,’ Lia said.
‘I’m sure it will be fine,’ Mari said. ‘It won’t be as big a story as the Hyundai Murder, but it will be plenty big enough.’
In spite of how busy she was, Lia kept an eye on the news at work. Deep down, underneath it all, was the same sorrow and shock as the previous time, but now she evaluated what she heard as an investigator as well.
At 11.05 a.m., her mobile began to ring. It was Maggie. The Fair Rule press conference had just begun.
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The sound was tinny and the picture was small, but the connection through her phone over the office WiFi was good. Lia watched the press conference sitting at her desk, listening through earphones. She knew that Mari, Rico and Berg were watching at the Studio and Paddy from somewhere else.
In the briefing at Westminster’s Broadway House sat more than forty representatives of the media, even though the announced topic was something as dry as Fair Rule’s new social programme. There were more reporters than at any of the party’s previous news event, a result of the latest opinion poll numbers, which showed Fair Rule breaking six per cent.
A small lure had also been thrown to the media in the form of an announcement that the party would proclaim its opposition to the governm
ent’s current income tax policy and propose a tax relief initiative. That bore Gallagher’s trademark, Lia thought. Taking a stand on the tax burden was a tool for bolstering the party’s position in the eyes of journalists, commentators and other political professionals.
Looking at the audience in the hall, Lia remembered something she had heard Fried say in Epping at the party headquarters.
‘Reporters hunt in packs,’ Fried had said. ‘They think they’re independent, autonomous defenders of truth and justice, but in reality they always just follow whoever happens to be winning.’ Now the pack had started to realise that Fried was a rising star in the upcoming elections, and the pack wanted to get a piece.
Two TV news crews were also in attendance, Sky News and ITV. So far Fair Rule policy statements had failed to make the TV news, but that situation might be changing.
In amongst the reporters sat Maggie, who had gained entrance using a bogus press card. She was Susannah Thurman, from a paper named The Public, and if anyone had decided to check on her background or the paper she purported to represent, they would have found online every indication of a long and distinguished career for Thurman along with several of her articles.
The paper actually existed, but Susannah Thurman did not.
Maggie focused her smartphone’s video camera on Arthur Fried, who had just stepped up to the podium.
‘Dear friends, a lot has been written about Fair Rule in recent months. We’ve begun rising fast because we’ve been a real challenge to the status quo from the very start. We’ve challenged the politics of cowardice and cover-ups. We’ve shown the public what isn’t working under the current leadership and dared to say out loud what the majority thinks but does not express to avoid being unfairly labelled politically incorrect. We don’t think any of this is politically incorrect. What is incorrect is the collection of crushing taxes from British entrepreneurs who work tirelessly in service of their country…’
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