Lethal Profit

by Alex Blackmore

  SIX

  THE NEXT DAY, EVA MADE HER WAY slowly along the crowded Parisian streets. She was finally on her way to meet with Jackson’s girlfriend Valerie for the first time, but she felt foggy and unfocused and her mouth was dry. Arriving at Exit 5 of the Tuileries Métro station precisely at 1pm, Eva scanned her immediate vicinity. No sign of Valerie. Whilst the two women had never met, Valerie’s flame-red hair and model-like poses had featured frequently on Jackson’s Facebook pages in the year before he died, and Eva felt familiar enough with that face to pick it out in a crowd. When she realised she had a few minutes to herself, she moved out of the flow of pedestrians to the back edge of the pavement. At her back a sandy stone wall topped with rusted black railings, behind which stretched the beautifully manicured grounds of the Tuileries Gardens. In front of her, a busy Parisian road bustling with cars, bikes and mopeds, bumpers glinting in the morning sun. Eva found a railing to lean against and rested the back of her head against the cold metal as her gaze drifted up towards the sky. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Eva.’

  Eva jumped, knocking her head against the railing. Valerie was standing directly in front of Eva, her auburn hair glinting in the winter sun. They shook hands awkwardly.

  ‘How are you?’

  Valerie hesitated before answering. ‘I am fine. You?’

  ‘Quite hungry. Shall we get lunch?’

  Valerie looked taken aback. ‘I had thought we were to have just coffee.’ She held up a take-away coffee cup.

  ‘I’m going to have to eat, or there’s a serious possibility I might pass out.’

  Valerie didn’t laugh at the joke. ‘OK.’

  They set off in silence at a brisk pace away from the gardens, through a covered walkway carved with arches and lined with shops selling postcards and painfully expensive coffee. As they walked, Eva looked for signs of Leon but as far as she could tell he was nowhere to be seen. But then that was probably exactly as he wanted it. They had made no arrangements before he dropped her at the hotel the night before, and as Eva had been keen to get back to an environment in which he wasn’t in control, she hadn’t pushed the issue. However, she did wonder what the next steps should be after what had happened that night – and deep down she knew the encounter had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. The fact that she seemed suddenly to have become his target made her feel unsure of her own ability to protect herself, something she had never considered before. He had seemed unstable, paranoid, and volatile, a combination she would usually swiftly distance herself from – but his conspiracy theories had somewhat chimed with her own. She would just have to wait to see what it was he really wanted from her and hope her nerves could stand it.

  Valerie led the way to a modern-looking local establishment with large windows and red velvet curtains. It was warm inside and there was a smell of toasted cheese. The waiter greeted them and put the menus down. Valerie immediately pushed hers away.

  ‘Why did you want so desperately to see me?’

  Eva looked up from the menu, surprised at all pleasantries being so swiftly dispensed with.

  ‘There are a few things I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘Well…,’ began Valerie but stopped as the waiter had arrived to take their order. After he left, an awkward silence persisted until the drinks were set down on the dark wood table. Valerie took a short sip of a thick black coffee and squared her narrow shoulders. ‘What are your questions?’

  ‘I think Jackson was murdered.’

  ‘What?’ Valerie’s hand flew to her rosebud mouth; her long-lashed eyes widened around each startling green iris.

  ‘No.’ Her voice was surprisingly firm. ‘He killed himself. Because of drugs, Eva. Why would you say that?’

  Eva was a little surprised by the ferocity of Valerie’s reaction. She decided to tread carefully. ‘Because I don’t believe that’s how he died. You identified the body?’

  ‘Yes. But he was disfigured, Eva. Beyond recognition. In the end they had to use dental records. He shot himself in the head.’

  Across from their table, Eva felt the gazes of a young couple and a dark skinned man in a black suede coat fall on them. ‘Doesn’t it seem strange to you that he did what he did?,’ she continued in a lower tone, moving away from the emotive topic. ‘I thought he was finally happy.’

  Valerie stared at her in silence, her gaze steady, and then looked away as the waiter arrived and set the plate of food down in the middle of the table. Eva started to eat, reluctant to allow Valerie time to think but keen to satisfy her hunger.

  ‘I didn’t know him.’ Valerie’s voice was so quiet Eva almost didn’t hear her. She looked directly into those big green eyes, tearing up slightly at the corners, and then took another bite of the cheese sandwich. ‘I did not want what happened to him,’ she continued, ‘but your brother was not all he seemed.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Valerie visibly swallowed hard and fiddled with an ashtray in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. ‘He was… he was… unpredictable.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He changed. In the last month. He became… ugly.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know all the English. My English is not that good.’ Valerie pushed the ashtray away in apparent frustration.

  ‘What kind of ugly?’

  ‘Mentally ugly. In his mind.’

  ‘Violent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Eva felt the colour slowly drain from her face as Valerie quietly finished her coffee.

  ‘Did he hurt you?’

  Valerie looked at Eva for a second and dropped her eyes. ‘No.’

  Well, at least that was something.

  ‘But I thought he might.’

  ‘When did he start to change?’

  ‘Maybe three weeks before he killed himself.’

  ‘Right.’ Suddenly Eva had lost her appetite. She pushed away the remainder of her food.

  ‘I did care for him, Eva.’

  They stared at each other and then Valerie looked away. Eva followed her gaze to the street outside and suddenly realised that, around the two women caught up in this tragedy, life just carried on. No one else felt the aching bruise of the loss, and no one cared. They all had their own problems.

  Suddenly Valerie began to speak again. ‘Just before he disappeared we had a lot of fights. I thought he had gone that day because of the fighting.’

  ‘What, just walked out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I searched his mobile phone a couple of times.’ Valerie looked down at the table. ‘I know it’s not… the right thing to do… but I was desperate. I had heard him on the telephone in our flat – we had two handsets and, when I picked the other up, it was always a woman’s voice. Each time I listened he would suddenly hang up as if he knew I was there. So I looked at his mobile.’

  ‘So he was cheating on you too?’ Eva remembered the photo Leon had shown her that seemed to show Valerie spying on Jackson. This could well explain her suspicious behaviour. She considered mentioning it but thought better of it.

  ‘I think he was. He wouldn’t tell me who it was on the phone. He said that I would have to trust him.’

  Eva raised an eyebrow. It still all sounded a bit cloak and dagger for Jackson.

  ‘I have seen men do this, Eva.’ Valerie’s voice suddenly became hard, her face almost flint-like. ‘When they cheat, they lie. They don’t care what the lie is that they tell, they just lie to save themselves. It has happened before. I can read the signs.’

  The waiter came and cleared the table and Eva watched Valerie who seemed to be unable to look her in the eye. She keenly remembered her own family’s shame when her father’s affair with Irene Hunt had been revealed. It was all a sixteen-year-old Eva could do to stop her mother hurling him down the stairs. She had never seen anger like that which she had witnessed in her mother’s bright blue eyes during that time. After that the light
had gone out of them altogether.

  ‘Did you confront him?’

  ‘Yes. He told me he wished I would just trust him and that I was making his life more difficult by asking so many questions. I tried to ignore it, but it was always there.’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘I looked through his phone numbers and texts and found a message from a French number – “Sophie”. No surname.’

  ‘What did the message say?’

  ‘3pm. Sacré Coeur. As usual.’

  ‘Did you go there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Didn’t you want to find out what was going on?’

  ‘No,’ Valerie repeated determinedly.

  Eva stared at her, nonplussed. Her mother had wanted to know everything about her father’s affair. Even though each word seemed to wound more, she wouldn’t let her father stop until she knew where, how long and why. Although he had never been able to answer the last question.

  ‘Do you know anything about Sophie?’ asked Valerie suddenly.

  Eva looked up, surprised, as Valerie asked the question. ‘No,’ she responded, puzzled. Was Valerie still looking for this woman? ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I want to know what she looks like. Whether she was…’ Valerie hesitated, as if trying to think of something to say. ‘Whether she was more beautiful than me.’

  Eva gazed at Valerie’s perfectly structured face; the high, strong cheekbones, the blazing green eyes, the full lips. Could anyone so attractive really be that insecure?

  ‘I…’ Eva opened her mouth to respond but Valerie didn’t let her finish.

  ‘I must go,’ she said as she got up and threw some coins onto the table. ‘I hope you have got what you need from me now.’ Without another word, she picked up her coat and walked out.

  The kissing couple opposite briefly observed Eva as she followed Valerie’s retreating figure with her eyes. When the waiter finally arrived with their bill they separated for just long enough to deposit a twenty Euro note and put on their coats to face the autumn cold before their lips locked again. The dark skinned man had paid his bill and left before Valerie. He waited outside the café, lighting a sweet-smelling cigarette and pulling his cheap overcoat tightly around his thick torso. As Valerie left the café he watched her walk determinedly across the small square on which the café stood. When she took the first right turning down a typically narrow Parisian street, away from the Métro and the hordes of tourists, he pulled the collar of his coat up high, stepped off the pavement and followed her.

  Eva paid the remainder of the bill and wondered why she had bothered trying to communicate with Valerie. Leon must have completely the wrong end of the stick to imagine that she was at the centre of it all. She was simply a vulnerable young woman who had been hurt. Jackson had been a passionate man who did nothing in moderation and this had been especially true when it came to Valerie. From what Eva could gather, Valerie had arrived in her brother’s life with a history of abusive relationships. A tragic, secretive beauty who needed to be saved. Of course, Jackson had saved her. Other than a weakness for beautiful women his downfall had always been that he wanted to be a hero; after what he had done as a teenager he had told Eva helping others fleetingly made him feel like a decent man. He had asked Valerie to move in with him just a month after they had met at the aid agency and then he had supported her with his modest wage, whilst she apparently spent her own on shoes and handbags. Eva had found the idea of their relationship uncomfortable. It had happened too quickly and it seemed just too reckless – too much too soon. But when it came to having any authority on relationships, Eva was on shaky ground.

  Walking back to the hotel, she gazed around at the beautiful city, with its wide boulevards, elegant vistas and cosy cafés. She felt unable to enjoy her surroundings, or really see what was around her; inside something just felt numb. Since Jackson’s second death, everything had fallen apart, she thought sadly. Or had she destroyed it? It was difficult to tell. As she approached the glass-fronted door of her hotel close to the Gare du Nord, Eva felt the vibration of her phone that Leon had returned to her. She stopped outside, pulled open the zip on her bag and leaned against the peeling orange-painted wall to read the text. As the screen came to life, revealing the sender beneath her fingertips, shock flooded through her body, inflaming every one of her nerve endings. Jackson.

  She opened the text, her fingers fumbling over the buttons to the point where she almost dropped the phone. The message contained a series of incomprehensible letters, numbers and symbols. She read it several times but it made no sense at all. Eva’s skin chilled. She had no idea what was going on, none at all. The powerlessness made her feel uncharacteristically panicky and out of control in a way she had not allowed herself to feel for many years. She thought about March. She wondered if he was playing games with her but how on earth could he have gotten hold of Jackson’s phone? She had thought again about their encounter – how he had called her to set it up; how he seemed already to know where she was staying. But these texts didn’t seem to match his bulldozer style. Other than March, Leon and Valerie she knew no one in this vast city. But then the texts could be coming from anywhere.

  SEVEN

  TERRY DOWLER SAID GOODBYE TO SOPHIE and climbed into the waiting taxi. He was a journalist who loved a good sensation. There had been a time in his life when he had wanted desperately to be a critical, intellectual success, to be able to produce highbrow, wordy pieces on politics, art and culture, but the opportunities had always passed him by. His parents owned a fish shop in Essex, he hadn’t been to a redbrick university and he’d never even had a whiff of the old boys’ network, let alone joined it. Although he’d certainly seen it in action – the upstarts fresh from their Oxbridge quads waltzing into the newspaper, bypassing the open-plan ‘pit’ where he and the other drones sat, ferreting out stories for a byline above a two-paragraph feature on one of the lost pages between the sport and the classifieds. If Terry and his ilk ever found a story really worth writing it was taken away from them and given to one of the office occupiers. Terry had grown more resentful as the years had gone by and he’d taken every opportunity to stick one to the posh boys and the intellectuals. When the offer of a move to a red top had come in, he’d jumped at the chance but it hadn’t eased the bitterness he felt at being kept so low by his old employers. Now he spent his days using his web of contacts to get him the latest dirt on footballers’ affairs, pop stars’ breakdowns and politicians’ dirty little secrets. And he’d made himself a good name. For a tabloid hack.

  That morning one of his sources had come to him with a story so unbelievable he’d told them to stop wasting his time. That was before they produced an eye-witness source of their own – a French woman named Sophie, who had a conspiracy theory about the death of a kid called Jackson Scott. Terry had jumped straight on a train to Paris and spent the afternoon getting the full story, including an interview with the woman in question. Not a bad-looking blonde as it happened, so it had been a pretty pleasant way to spend a couple of hours. Now, equipped with the sound recording on his iPhone as well as the photos he’d taken, he was on his way back to the Eurostar terminal to get everything to his editor to write up for the next day’s paper.

  ‘Geoff, it’s Terry.’

  ‘Where the hell are you, Terry? We’ve got two Premiership boys playing away from home again and we need someone on the story before the lawyers get an injunction.’

  ‘I’m in Paris.’

  ‘Paris? What the fuck are you doing there?’

  ‘I’ve got something, Geoff. It’s big. Really big. I’ve been doing an interview, I’ve got everything we need. No other paper has this story, we’ll be the first to break it.’

  Terry could hear the hesitation on the other end of the line. Geoff was clearly angry that he’d inexplicably disappeared abroad on the company’s time and expense account, but the temptation of the story was winning him over.

  ‘What have you got?’


  ‘I can’t say,’ Terry replied quickly into his phone as he climbed out of a taxi in front of the Gare du Nord. ‘I don’t know who might be listening. Honestly, Geoff, this is massive. It’s front page broadsheet, but these people don’t trust anyone they don’t know. I got this through a friend of a friend, so we’ll be the ones to break it first.’

  Like Terry, Geoff had always had aspirations above red top status that had been thwarted at an early point in his career because he didn’t have the right accent or well-connected parents. Terry could hear the anticipation in his boss’s voice as he told him to get back to the office with the story and fill him in right away. As he hung up his phone and shoved it into the pocket of his shiny suit, Terry Dowler’s jowled face was set in smug anticipation of the glory and recognition waiting for him back home. Finally, his time had come.

  When the smart but unremarkable dark-skinned man carrying a small leather briefcase hit him hard on the shoulder, spinning him so that their bodies met almost like lovers, he opened his mouth to spit a retaliatory curse but was distracted by a small stabbing pain in his right thigh. He dropped his bag in shock, bent down over his thigh and, by the time he looked up again, the man had disappeared. He rubbed his leg with his palm as the pain subsided and picked up his bag. It had felt as if the man had pinched him but it must just have been a muscle twinge from the impact – he was getting more of that as the years went on. Terry pulled himself together, cursing the rudeness of the damned Frogs and then treated himself to a Eurostar upgrade as a reward for the day’s efforts. On the train he noticed his iPhone was missing and realised the man at the station must have been a thief. Once again he cursed the damned Frogs and anyone else he could think of. When he calmed down he decided he’d report it the minute he arrived in London. He could claim it on insurance, get a knock off one from his brother then sell the new one on E-bay for a tidy profit. The theft of the phone might mean he had lost the sound recording, but he had Sophie’s number so he would just call her back and explain what had happened, maybe get her to email a quotable statement or something. Anyway, it wasn’t like he was going to forget the story in a hurry. He sat back in his seat with a beer and looked forward to getting back to London and breaking this thing wide open. By the time the Eurostar pulled into the terminal at St Pancras International Terry Dowler was dead.