Lethal Profit

by Alex Blackmore

  Eva raised her hand to shield her eyes as her pupils adjusted to the brightness. As soon as she was able to see again she dropped her arm. She squinted at the shadowed form in front of her. A man stepped fully into the room; he had broad and well-muscled shoulders that looked enormous, like a cartoon action hero. Eva tried to control her racing pulse. This was not a good situation. The man flicked on a bare light bulb above the bed and stared at her for several seconds. She stared back, counting each breath in and out for three to make sure they remained even and calm.

  ‘My name is Leon,’ said the man in English with a French accent, walking over towards her and holding out his hand. He had dark hair and dark eyes and he wore a pair of black jeans and a navy cargo sweater. Eva nodded at him. Was she supposed to shake his hand?

  ‘You’re probably wondering where you are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Eva realised her throat was painfully dry.

  ‘You had a car accident – well, you ran out in front of my car – and you passed out.’

  Suddenly Eva remembered running across the road away from the stranger she had thought was following her. She recalled the pain of being clipped by the car – that explained the leg at least.

  But why was she not in hospital?

  ‘Why am I…’

  ‘I brought you here because you were injured.’

  ‘I see. Well… thank you.’ She made a move to get up. ‘I should go…’

  ‘Eva…’

  She stopped and stared straight at him. The hairs began to stand up on the back of her neck.

  ‘You know my name.’

  He nodded. A silence descended on the room. The man looked at the floor. Eva tried to force herself to move but she seemed to be paralysed from the neck down.

  ‘I knew your brother,’ he said suddenly. ‘Jackson.’

  Eva felt her blood drain southwards.

  ‘You knew Jackson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How well did you know him?’

  ‘We were close.’

  Eva had never heard Jackson mention someone called Leon.

  ‘I can see you don’t believe me.’

  She said nothing in response. She was starting to feel very uncomfortable. What this man had done – bringing her to his flat – was not a normal thing to do. In fact, it was almost kidnapping.

  ‘Wait… let me show you something…’ Leon started for the door.

  Instantly, Eva was on her feet. As Leon turned right out of the door, she silently followed him to the edge of the room. She looked carefully around the door-frame, just in time to see him disappear through a door at the end of the corridor. She heard the click of a key turning in a lock in the room Leon had entered. The corridor was shabby, with a dated but clean carpet and old, well-preserved light fittings. On the opposite wall there was a photo of a family standing in front of a farmhouse. Leading off the corridor were two other rooms and then to her left… bingo… a front door.

  A quick appraisal of the door revealed a Chubb lock system and a manual key below that. She glanced once more towards the kitchen and then began to tiptoe across the thin carpet, her heart hammering in her ears. She flicked up the notch on the Chubb mechanism and quickly turned the key in the lower lock. Both movements were soundless. She heard a cupboard door close again at the end of the corridor and quickly she twisted the Chubb handle and smoothly pulled open the door in front of her.

  Outside was an unexpectedly twee doormat with a picture of kissing bees and beyond that a dark and cavernous unfurnished hallway decorated with graffiti and, from the smell that hung in the air, urine. Eva pulled the door closed behind her and then started to run. She ran across the concrete landing and down a stairwell, taking the stairs two at a time. She had no idea where she was and no idea where she was going to go when she reached the end of the stairs, but she trusted her own instincts more than she trusted this person. She would find a road, there had to be a road somewhere, and she would flag someone down. But the stairs just kept coming.

  ‘Eva!’

  Eva gasped out loud as she heard her name. ‘Shit,’ she muttered and tried to pick up her pace. She heard the ominous thundering of footsteps on the stairs above her and tried to remember how many flights she had put between the flat and where she was now. There had been at least four, surely he couldn’t catch her.

  ‘Eva, wait! You don’t understand!’ Leon’s voice echoed down the stairwell.

  Suddenly Eva pulled up short – she was at the bottom of the last flight of stairs and there were no more steps. And no door. Eva stopped, her heart thumping, and then realised she had come down a flight of stairs too far and was in a utility space with no exit. She was going to have to go back up towards him to get out. Panic singing in her ears, Eva started up the stairs two at a time, holding her breath and expecting at any minute to see those dark features appear around the corner. At the next break in the stairs she looked around her and after several seconds of rising anxiety realised she was standing right next to an emergency exit door. She threw herself against it and suddenly she was outside in the bitter night air, shivering. She looked over her shoulder but there was no sign of Leon. The door slammed behind her and she looked back again and took in the enormous tower block she had been inside. Then she turned, started to run and cried out as she hit what felt like a brick wall. Hard fingers gripped her, flipping her over onto her front, pushing her to the floor and a bag was whisked over her head. She tried to scream but the bag was pulled tight over her mouth as she felt someone trying to fasten her wrists together behind her back.

  She struggled hard and heard swearing as she succeeded in freeing one of her wrists.

  ‘Merde!’

  Then a huge hand grabbed both her wrists behind her back and held them together as hard plastic was wrapped around them and pulled tight. Before the plastic was fastened suddenly there was a noise like a basketball thudding against a wall, followed by the sound of splintering bone and a grunt in her ear as the weight of the person lifted from her. She lay on the ground trying to figure out what was going on as noises of a scuffle filtered through the bag. When she realised she was no longer the centre of attention, Eva tried to free her wrists from the unfastened plastic handcuffs, pulling and tugging as she felt them gradually become loose. Then a gunshot rang out. She lay face down, rigid, blindfolded, confused and disorientated.

  ‘Eva.’

  Leon’s voice. The bag was pulled off her head and Eva looked around her. Leon was behind her, pulling the last of the plastic handcuffs off her. He threw them away and then came to stand in front of her. In his right hand was the dark shape of a gun. Eva looked past him and saw a lumpen form on the ground behind the back tyre of a burned out car.

  FIVE

  WITH SOME HESITATION, A SHAKY Eva allowed Leon to shepherd her back into the tower block and up to the sixth floor where he poured her a shot of cognac. She lowered herself unsteadily onto a patched, brown suede sofa in a room that reeked of 1980s décor.

  ‘Do you understand what just happened?’ she asked, looking at him with large, round eyes.

  Leon nodded, screwed the top back on the cognac bottle and stowed it into a drinks cabinet with only one other bottle in it.

  ‘This is difficult to explain.’ His voice was gravelly and accented, he sounded like he never got much sleep.

  ‘Try.’

  Leon looked at Eva as he heard the hostile tone in her voice.

  ‘Wait there.’ He walked out of the room, glancing back at her as he went as if he was afraid that she might once again make a bolt for the door. Several seconds later he came back into the room carrying a brown paper file. He laid it down on the sofa beside her, moved over to the window and lit a cigarette.

  ‘Read it.’

  Eva put her empty glass down on the floor and picked up the file. She could feel Leon’s eyes watching every move she made. Inside the thin file were some photos. In one, Jackson and the flame-haired girl Eva recognised as his girlf
riend Valerie, and in another Jackson with a short-haired blonde whom Eva had never seen before.

  ‘I don’t understand…’

  ‘There’s more.’

  Eva turned over the two photos to reveal two more. This time Valerie was being photographed from a position across the street. Eva recognised the outside of Jackson’s office building. Valerie was standing several metres down the street from the entrance to Jackson’s office, pulled back into a doorway. She was on the phone but her attention was elsewhere. Eva looked at the focus of her gaze and recognised Shaun the bike courier standing next to Jackson smoking a cigarette.

  Eva tried to make sense of the picture. It was obviously taken moments before Jackson disappeared, but it changed nothing.

  ‘Who took this?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘So you saw what really happened to Jackson?’

  Leon shook his head. ‘I left almost as soon as I took the photo.’

  ‘I must be missing something. I don’t understand what you think this means, or how it’s relevant to what just happened.’

  Leon shook his head, frustrated, and stubbed his cigarette out in a Moroccan ashtray.

  ‘That guy in the photo – the bike courier,’ he said, moving over to where Eva sat and jabbing his finger in the direction of the photo.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  Eva put the photo back in the file. ‘I know.’

  ‘I didn’t take this photo because of him. I took it because of Valerie.’

  ‘Jackson’s girlfriend?’

  Leon nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  Leon began to pace the floor. He lit another cigarette and scratched distractedly at his hair.

  Suddenly he was still. ‘She’s involved.’

  ‘Involved in what?’

  ‘In what happened to Jackson. She has something to do with it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I just do!’

  Leon seemed anxious, almost manic. This is really not a good situation, Eva thought to herself once again.

  ‘What did you find at Shaun’s flat?’

  Eva almost answered and then stopped short. ‘The only way you could know that I went to his flat is if you followed me.’

  ‘I followed you.’

  Eva stood up. ‘Okay, I think I’d like to leave now.’

  ‘You can’t!’ said Leon, jittery and overexcited. ‘Didn’t you see what just happened outside?’

  Eva recalled the bag over her head, the prone man lying shot on the floor. He had certainly not been a rescuer. She sat down again, focusing hard on keeping her heartbeat below danger level.

  ‘OK, Leon, explain to me what happened outside and I will tell you what I found in Shaun’s flat.’

  Leon nodded. Clearly he liked the idea of a bargain.

  ‘He was one of them.’

  Eva sighed. ‘You’re going to have to be more specific than that.’

  ‘The Africans.’

  ‘The Africans,’ Eva repeated.

  ‘They appeared on the scene six months ago. They killed Jackson, I know they did.’

  Was this man completely crazy? He certainly looked pretty crazy. And yet he seemed to be the only person who thought Jackson had been killed like she did. What that said about her, she didn’t know.

  ‘You don’t believe Jackson committed suicide?’

  ‘Ha!’ Leon laughed. ‘I knew your brother for four years. He was happy, he was clean. Besides the police claimed it was heroin he was taking. Jackson didn’t do heroin.’

  ‘He didn’t.’ Eva’s voice was expressionless.

  ‘No. Coke, pills, weed, acid yes. Heroin, no. He hated needles.’

  God, thought Eva to herself, he’s right. She remembered what Jackson’s boss had told her – that he had even risked a work trip to the Sudan without his shots because he was so afraid of needles.

  ‘You can smoke heroin, can’t you?’

  Leon looked at her and laughed. ‘Of course. But didn’t you see the police “report”? Needle marks in his arms they said. Impossible!’

  Eva nodded slowly. She remembered reading that in the one page summary they had been sent. In fact, that part of the report had made her particularly sad. Heroin seemed such a sad drug to get addicted to, a drug people craved so much they would inject it into anywhere they could.

  ‘Why include that in the report you saw?’ Leon continued. ‘They fucked up there!’

  ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?’

  Leon thumbed open his pack of blue Gauloises and Eva took a white tab. She rolled it momentarily between two fingers and then took Leon’s proffered lighter and lit the cigarette.

  ‘How did you meet my brother?’ she said as she exhaled.

  Leon’s eyes sparkled. ‘Rehab.’

  ‘What were you there for?’

  ‘The same as him. I have trouble with drink though, too. The only alcohol I can’t drink more than three glasses of is cognac.’ He gestured at her empty glass. ‘Anything else and I get through a bottle in an hour.’

  It was hard to know what to say to that.

  ‘Did you know him in Paris?’

  ‘Yes. We left the UK together after rehab. He came to my parents’ farm and spent a year with me getting back on track. Then we moved to Paris together.’

  ‘Did you live together?’

  ‘No. That wouldn’t have been a good idea. I need my space. There’s little enough space in the city as it is.’

  ‘Look,’ Leon suddenly got up. He walked quickly over to a bookcase and returned with a handset in his left hand. ‘I got your phone.’

  He handed it over to Eva who looked at it in amazement.

  ‘But those kids…’

  ‘Estate scum.’

  She took the phone.

  ‘What exactly is it you do?’

  ‘If I told you that I’d have to kill you.’ He smiled at her but Eva had the chilling feeling that he was serious. She pressed the On button on her phone, entered her pass code and began going through the phone. Among spam emails, a large number of text messages from worried friends and several missed calls from her father she found a text from Valerie. After hesitating for a second, she showed it to Leon.

  ‘She wants to meet me on the 20th. That’s tomorrow.’

  ‘You have to go.’

  That wasn’t the response she had expected. ‘After everything you said?’

  ‘She’s the key to this, trust me.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Suggest that you meet at the Tuileries Gardens at 1pm. I’ll be there too.’

  ‘Right.’ Eva replied to the text. She felt uneasy about the idea of being shadowed by Leon.

  He picked up on it immediately. ‘It’s better than the alternative.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘More like him,’ he said and indicated towards the ground outside where they both knew the body lay. After several seconds of silence, Eva got up. ‘Don’t you think we should search him? Try and find out who he is – was?’

  Leon produced a small black wallet from his back pocket and tossed it to her. Inside she found a book of carnet travel tickets and forty Euros in cash.

  ‘Clean. Just like all the others,’ said Leon.

  ‘The others?’

  ‘Like I said, he’s not the only one.’

  ‘But who are they?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Are they something to do with his work?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Right.’

  An hour later and Eva was sitting in her hotel room. Leon had driven her back in a small, rickety Citroen and had seemed surprisingly willing to let her leave once he had returned her phone.

  Eva felt nervy. But she reasoned with herself that whoever it was that had been outside Leon’s tower block, they had not been there for her. She half-believed that.

  She closed and locked her hotel door and then, after some hesitation, dragged
the night stand over and pushed it up against the door frame. It took some effort as the table had a heavy metal base. But at least it would be more use than a chair for keeping intruders out. After a stiff drink from the bottle of Calvados she had bought from the supermarket on the day she arrived, she settled down on the bed with the sandwich she had bought before the accident and opened her laptop. Her left leg still ached mightily after the crash, but she was still walking and the pain had at least not spread to her back, which was her usual weak spot. She thought about the events of the last few hours as the heat of the Calvados dripped down her throat. She had absolutely no idea what she had stumbled across but she felt she had taken a step closer towards the truth. Leon’s revelation about the needle marks was important and she felt like this confirmed her fears that Jackson had indeed been murdered. By who and why, though, remained a total mystery.

  She still had Shaun’s phone and had not fulfilled her side of the bargain and told Leon about it during the encounter at his flat. In the end he seemed to have forgotten that he had asked her what she had found and she felt there was no need to share too much with him. It would be great to think she now had some kind of ally in Leon but he had also tailed her and possibly knocked her down with his car, and his jittery, manic behaviour didn’t encourage her to trust him.

  Out of habit, she navigated to Facebook and looked at her own page. Her profile picture was a shot taken on a night out. She had used a camera app with a flattering filter and she was sitting in the middle of two of her best friends, each of them brandishing a huge curved bowl of a cocktail glass filled with a red liquid. The snap had been taken way before Jackson’s death and looking at it made her feel sad. She scrolled down the page and on the left saw that Jackson was still listed as her brother. She clicked on his smiling face and opened the page. His ‘wall’ was full of messages in French that she didn’t understand. She recognised the sad face emoticons and realised the page had probably been turned into some kind of tribute. She looked at all the faces of his French friends, her mouse scrolling over each face in turn. Over one face she stopped. A short-haired woman with a nervous smile looking directly at the camera. She had seen her before. Eva opened up the woman’s main page and saw immediately that it was the woman from the photo Leon had shown her earlier that night. Her name was Sophie Vincent. The rest of her profile was restricted. Eva took out her Moleskine notebook and printed the name in black letters.