Don't Fear the Reaper

by A. S. French

  ‘Does anybody want a drink?’

  Astrid helped Laurel inside, the younger woman unsteady on her feet. She put her arm around Lee’s waist and guided her towards a brown-coloured sofa.

  ‘How long is it since anybody lived here?’ she shouted towards Delaney in the kitchen. He returned, carrying a dirty glass and a half-full bottle of whisky.

  ‘Cara lived here, on and off before she went to Europe. This was our parents’ home before they died.’ He poured himself a full glass before downing most of it in one go.

  Laurel shook her head. ‘Isn’t it a bit early for that?’

  ‘It helps me sleep.’ He refilled his glass.

  Astrid scanned the room. ‘Do you have a laptop I can use?’

  He pointed over her shoulder. ‘There’s one on the table behind you.’

  ‘Why was Cara in Europe?’ she asked him while holding onto Laurel’s waist.

  He took a large drink from the glass, eyes pointing to a picture on the wall of a burly man on a fishing boat. The man in the photograph was an older black-and-white version of Frank, and she guessed he was the Delaney father.

  ‘She’d met somebody new, and they were going on holiday together.’ Astrid wanted to ask him if it was only a coincidence his sister was in Berlin while she was there. ‘She needed rest and recuperation.’

  ‘Which is what we need now,’ Astrid said to him.

  He slumped into a chair opposite a TV from the 1970s and finished his second drink. ‘You can take the large room at the top of the stairs. Agent Lee can have the one next to it.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘One more drink and I’ll be snoring in this chair. I need to get to work in three hours, or they’ll wonder where I am. There’s food in the kitchen, and I’ll bring some more when I return tonight. You need to stay inside and keep out of sight.’ His face looked about to collapse at any second.

  ‘And what happens then?’ Laurel kept on with the questions.

  ‘Then we start working out who’s behind all this.’

  He propped the bottle on his corpulent stomach and closed his eyes. Astrid helped Laurel to stand and grabbed the computer from the table.

  ‘Come on; let’s see what luxury awaits us above.’

  The stairs were to the left of the main room, short and narrow. She guided Laurel up, holding on to the rail and finding dust clinging to her skin. Laurel relaxed in her arm as they moved beyond the first bedroom and towards the one Delaney had described. She kicked the door open and sat Laurel onto a bed which didn’t appear to have been slept in for quite some time. It was the only piece of furniture there.

  ‘This must be Frank’s childhood room.’ Faded Nirvana and Blur posters hung from the walls, while stacked up in every corner were towers of collected memorabilia: records, CDs, videotapes, books and magazines. The layers of dust made Laurel sneeze loudly. ‘Do you want to get undressed?’

  Laurel said no before lying down and pulling the covers up to her chin. ‘I’m fine.’

  Astrid doubted it. ‘Try and get some sleep.’

  She closed the door behind her. Down below, Frank Delaney’s snoring shook the dust from the ceiling. She headed into the bedroom, which was a kitsch nightmare of pink flamingo wallpaper, with paintings of cats knitting and dogs playing cards, and a carpet containing hundreds of small images of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s blue-faced Chinese Girl.

  On the wall were a few framed family photos. She moved towards one, peering through the glass at a middle-aged couple and their two children: Cara and Frank and their parents. Cara must have only been five or six in the photo. She stood to one side as if placed there as an afterthought, peering from a sepia-toned past. Astrid turned her gaze to Cara’s mother in the photo, struck by how much the older woman resembled the grown-up daughter Astrid had pretended to love. Then she looked at the image of the young Cara. How responsible was she for her murder? Was faking an emotion the same as lying? Had Astrid’s deceit ruined Cara’s life?

  She turned from the photo, her mind an explosive mixture of ideas falling into each other. The neon clock to her right said six-thirty in the morning. Her body demanded rest, but her mind requested sharpness while Delaney was downstairs. She’d only close her eyes once he’d left. If he was returning to the Agency, he’d have to leave by seven-thirty to beat the traffic and get to his desk before the working day started. She wouldn’t get any sleep before he left. He may have rescued her from Agency custody, but she didn’t trust him.

  Astrid opened the laptop, glad the internet worked without any prompting for a password. The first thing she did was check the news sites for updates on the Reaper case, which all said the same: ongoing with no new leads. She touched her face, running fingers over her lips. Did she really want to do the next bit?

  Of course, she did. She closed the news sites and brought up the most popular social media pages. It wasn’t hard to find her sister’s profile on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Courtney was married, but she’d kept her family name.

  Was it because she loved Lawrence so much?

  She stared at a recent photo of her older sibling; Courtney had his eyes and their mother’s face. In the image, she had the same grin Astrid remembered from when Courtney watched him beating her sister. Looking at the photo stabbed at her gut, a chunk of bile swirling around her like soap suds inside a hyperactive dishwasher. She forced her nails into her skin to stop her punching that irritating digital grin from the screen. Her head throbbed as if a thousand tiny Irish dancers were jigging inside her brain.

  Contrary to popular belief, ADHD didn’t mean she couldn’t focus on things, but it meant she had a compulsion to gather up as much information as she could inside her head as a way of concentrating on specific issues. It was like piling wood on top of more wood to flatten the piece at the bottom; the more details in her head, the easier it became for her to isolate what was most important to her. She’d once described it to Cara as having a never-ending jigsaw inside her mind where, when she focused fully, the pieces would come together at some point, and everything would stretch out before her in perfect illumination.

  Astrid returned to the computer screen, jagging her finger into Courtney’s pixelated head and flicking it to one side, moving through her sister’s interminable selfies. She couldn’t find any images of the mysterious husband or Olivia.

  She was disappointed not to find any photos of her niece, but at least there weren’t any of her parents either. Courtney’s Twitter account was a banal litany of posts about trashy TV shows and D-list celebrities. Perhaps it was a good thing Olivia wasn’t on Courtney’s timeline. It was better not to have any pictures of the kid online, not with all the perverts lurking on the internet. Astrid had worked enough child abuse cases to recognise where the dangers lay. She pictured Olivia’s smiling face running around the playground once again.

  I could hide in the shadows outside the nursery and get a glimpse of Olivia there tomorrow.

  Large bellows rising like ash spewed from a petulant volcano erupted from downstairs and ripped that crazy idea from her head. Their host had awakened like the Kraken.

  Astrid dragged herself from the bed. She crept towards the door, pressing her ear against the flaking wood and listened to Delaney moving around, hoping his noise wouldn’t wake Laurel. He spluttered and spewed for a bit longer, talking to himself, before she heard the unmistakable sound of him grasping his keys and leaving through the front door. She walked to the window, pulled back the chintzy orange-coloured curtains and peered through the glass, watching him get into the car and drive away.

  She flopped onto the bed, finding respite in the comforting grip of the darkness. She formed an idea as to what she’d do next with Laurel and Frank.

  But could she trust either of them to help her?

  16 Food for Thought

  When Astrid woke, the neon numbers to her side flashed seven o’clock in the evening. She was stunned she’d slept for twelve hours, unable to remember the last tim
e she’d spent so much time asleep. Her body was much better for it, but her bones creaked because of the contours of an unfamiliar bed. She got up and strode towards the door. A delicious aroma drifted up from the kitchen, the smell of fried food which triggered rumbling inside her stomach.

  The thought of hot greasy sustenance made her smile as she went to check on Laurel, unsurprised to find her room empty. Astrid slipped into the bathroom and peered at her face in the mirror. The blue of her eyes had lost some of its sparkle, her hair was unwashed and unkempt, with a passing likeness to something a murder of crows would design to inhabit. She threw hot water over her skin, burning her senses awake, before running her fingers through her twisted strands and shaping it into a facsimile of respectability.

  Behind the bathroom mirror was a cabinet. She was reluctant to open it in case she found something of Cara’s, but she was in desperate need of deodorant. Astrid dragged it open, finding it empty and appreciating that was one reason Frank Delaney emitted a particularly pungent masculine odour. She grabbed hold of the soap, ran her fingers under the tap, and scrubbed under her armpits hoping it would do the trick. She dried herself and strode downstairs. In the kitchen, she was greeted by the sight of perfect domestic bliss, Delaney with a frying pan in hand while Lee was busy mixing eggs and onions into an omelette.

  Laurel grinned at her. ‘Hello, sleepyhead.’

  It seemed as if they were living everyday suburban lives and weren’t on the run from some secret conspiracy. Astrid ignored her and stared at the food: bacon, eggs, toast and mushrooms so large, a family of gnomes could live inside them.

  ‘It smells good.’

  ‘He’s even made me some veggie sausages.’

  Laurel thrust the plate of pale-looking fake meat underneath Astrid’s grimace. She laughed at her as Astrid grabbed a seat at the table. Her senses told her to concentrate on the food, but the analytical part of her brain overrode those and stared at Delaney as he placed a fresh orange juice next to her.

  ‘What happened when you returned to the Agency?’

  He joined her at the table. ‘Food first, then we’ll talk.’

  The first taste to hit the back of her throat was heavenly, the crispness of the bacon crunching between her teeth and crumbling down her throat. She plucked a piece of toast from Laurel’s fingers and pushed it into the bright yellow of the egg gazing at her. She ignored Laurel’s complaint and washed the food down with a slurp of juice.

  ‘You’ll make somebody an excellent husband, Frank.’ Astrid regretted the awful things she’d said to him earlier. It was another new emotion to add to her resurrected list. She was undecided if she liked the person she was becoming. She noticed the large plaster over Laurel’s cut. ‘How’s your head?’

  ‘It’s fine; just a scratch. Frank patched me up.’

  Astrid sat back and shovelled the eggs into her mouth. It didn’t take long for all three of them to finish, Delaney announcing the end of the meal with a large burp which sent Astrid and Laurel scampering into the living room.

  ‘Nice,’ Astrid said to him as she searched for the TV remote, wanting to check the news for any mention of last night’s activities. She was also interested in the media reports about the search for the Reaper, wondering if the Agency had already provided a scapegoat and the case was over; they’d done similar things before.

  She found the device stuck down the side of the sofa as she slumped into it. The furniture had seen better days, with washed-out flowers growing out of a design worn thin. The ugly green border around the cushions reminded her of a vomit-inducing dress an ex-paramour had presented to her as a belated birthday present.

  Astrid turned on the TV, amazed to see it start without being wound up from the back, and then sprinted through the news channels. There was nothing about the collision with the van and very little about the Reaper case, apart from a rolling ticker-tape style news announcement on one station saying it was ongoing. Delaney came into the room and stared at the screen. She turned towards their rescuer and host. She should have been grateful, but couldn’t be when the trust wasn’t there. After all, he did say he hated her. She muted the sound, but left the TV on the news channel.

  ‘What happened when you got to headquarters?’

  ‘I went to work. I have cases to work on.’

  He stood in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, the extra layers of flesh around his stomach hanging over the top of his trousers like drunken sailors preparing to abandon ship. His indifference annoyed her, and she resisted the temptation to get off the sofa and wring his neck.

  ‘If you broke me out of the van to help you track down your sister’s killer, you better start telling me something useful, or I’ll be out of here, and you’ll be back on your own. Or did you get the two of us here so you could play at happy families?’

  Delaney glared at her with no attempt to hide his resentment, his face all twisted and stern; the frivolity of the kitchen had withered away. She was in no doubt he hated her, but he’d said he needed her, and she chose to believe that for now.

  ‘They don’t know who attacked the van, but they were in the process of formulating a theory you had a partner before the escape. Now they’re convinced of it.’

  ‘Apparently, I have two partners.’

  She stared at them as if they were a tiny angel and devil she’d once seen in a cartoon when she was a kid, one to sit on each shoulder. She buried the memory swiftly, keen to push back any childhood recollections.

  ‘They’re going to let the Reaper investigation continue while they search for you, before pinning it on some unfortunate who’ll kill themselves. Some killer they already have in custody. They can’t have you or anything to do with you appearing in the media.’

  ‘What about me?’ Laurel asked.

  ‘They believe she kidnapped you. Some of the security witnessed Snow dragging you out the van, so your innocence is guaranteed for now.’

  ‘I am innocent.’ A fire burnt behind her resentful eyes.

  ‘How many do they have searching for us?’

  ‘Everybody,’ Delaney said. ‘And that includes me.’

  ‘Excellent. That’s our first bit of good news.’

  Laurel narrowed her eyes. ‘Why?’

  ‘Full mobilisation won’t last for long; it can’t. They have too many other things to do. If we can stay out of their reaches for a week, they’ll pull people from the search, sooner rather than later. The longer Frank can get access to the investigation, the better for us.’

  Delaney gave Astrid a crooked smile, reminding her of a drug dealer she’d once busted; he would give you just enough to get you hooked, and then when you least expected it, you’d be sucked so far down into the darkness, you’d never get out.

  ‘Tell me what you have, Frank.’

  She crossed her legs, relaxing after the food. Delaney dropped his shoulders, choking a cough in his chest before it was born.

  ‘The crime scene evidence from Vienna and Budapest is in, being examined by Davis and a bucketful of assistants.’

  ‘Anything helpful in what they’ve gathered?’

  She wanted to hear if there were any more staged scenes or fake glasses.

  ‘So far, there’s nothing that ties you to those two murders. But none of them seems too worried about that.’

  ‘Why aren’t they concerned?’ Laurel asked.

  ‘Because, rookie,’ Astrid grinned to show she was being playful and not hurtful, ‘all they need is the glass with my fingerprints and DNA on it from Prague to make their case: a case they’re only making for themselves, remember. The glass connects me to Michelle Dark’s murder, which has an MO the same as the other four; that’s all they need to convict me in their private kangaroo court.’ There was no animosity in her voice, only recognition of how the Agency worked.

  Frank drifted back into the kitchen in an apparent attempt to avoid Astrid’s gaze. She glanced around the room, looking for any sign Cara Delany had once lived t
here. She’d been tempted to check on Cara’s room while Frank was at work, but her extended sleep had scuppered the idea. And she wasn’t sure why she wanted to look at a dead woman’s things.

  A notebook sat on the coffee table, casually open, with a set of names scribbled on one page. Astrid picked it up and recognised them. There were two dozen of them, names of the people she’d sketched on the walls of her cell at the Agency. Her eyebrows arched as she stared at Laurel.

  ‘I plucked them from memory, the ones we could identify from your artwork.’ There was no emotion in Lee’s face or voice.

  ‘That’s some memory you have.’ She was suitably impressed and understood why the Agency recruited Lee. Laurel nodded.

  ‘It’s not perfect, but I can remember an image in so much detail, clarity, and accuracy, it’s as though it’s still in front of me.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll come in handy when we track down the killer. Do you still have your pen?’ She scrunched up next to Laurel on the sofa, smiling inside when the younger woman didn’t object.

  ‘Sure.’ Laurel reached down the side of the sofa to rescue the pen.

  ‘What do you want me to write?’

  They gazed into each other’s eyes, distracting Astrid’s thoughts which should have f been ocused on discovering who was framing her. She stared at Laurel’s crucifix, and it jogged her back into the moment.

  ‘Cross out all the male names and add these three female ones.’ Astrid dictated the words to her.

  Frank Delaney entered the room, towel in hand as he dried one of the glasses. ‘Why remove those names?’

  Astrid settled into the sofa and allowed the tension to evaporate from her body.

  ‘Because whoever’s doing this is a woman.’

  17 Theoretical Girls

  Laurel and Frank's eyes glazed over in stereo, lips turned upwards in confusion.

  ‘What?’ Laurel said.

  Frank frowned at Astrid. ‘And how did you work that out?’