The Facts of Life and Death

by Belinda Bauer

  She knew exactly what he meant.

  Not robbery. Not rape. She felt hollow and disbelieving. Not ten minutes ago she’d picked up her wages and told her boss she’d see him tomorrow, and now here she was, with a gun in her back and being prodded towards what the Gazette promised was ‘unspeakable horror’.

  She also couldn’t believe she’d kept walking along the sea front as if everything was normal. She should have just run. That was an escape plan. That’s what might have saved her. But she’d thought too hard about it.

  Thinking hard was natural to Steffi. Putting sweets in bags and scooping ice cream at Paul’s was just a casual job for her. Her real life was studying for a B.Sc. in computer science. She was in her second year at Bristol, absolutely nailing modules in ethical hacking and counter-measures.

  Counter-measures. The word mocked her now as she stumbled in the soft sand and hauled herself up the slope by a tuft of tough beachgrass. She’d never taken self-defence classes; never watched a Jackie Chan film. Not even ironically. And she’d refused a ride all the way home when she was offered one – out of sheer complacency. She could kick herself. Her whole future was about outsmarting the opposition and yet here she was, on a dark and deserted dune with what was probably a murderer.

  If he wasn’t a murderer, she’d be fucking furious. If this was some sick ruse to get her to a beach party with her friends, then this guy was a dead man. The second he pulled off that silly balaclava and said ‘Surprise’ she’d punch his bloody lights out.

  Scream.

  That was another thing she could’ve done while she was still close to the houses, Steffi realized too late.

  Run. Scream. Both required instinct, not logic.

  Her logic might cost her her life, and Steffi filled up momentarily at the unfairness of that.

  Then she got a grip. She mustn’t stop thinking, just because she was playing catch-up on her animal instincts. Logic dictated that she could still find a way out of this. They were almost at the top of the dune. Steffi knew these dunes like the back of her hand. She’d played here as a child, walked the family dog here, had her first kiss here. It was with Barry Stoodley. He’d been too spitty, and she’d been too worried about being seen.

  Another five or six awkward strides and she’d be at the top.

  That would be the time to run. When she could get up some instant acceleration down the other side, while the arsehole behind her was still struggling on the ascent. Steffi felt excitement confirm that it was the right thing to do. She visualized it, the way she did with her tennis serve. That was the secret to sporting success – visualization. So she knew the exact moment when she would attain the peak of the dune. At that very second she would run down the slope of sand. She would have thirty feet on him before he could even reach the ridge and start down after her. That would be enough. Even if he did have a gun. It was dark and the sand gave no good footing, and she recalled reading somewhere that most people couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces with a handgun; it was harder than it looked, apparently.

  If she could just get that first run down the dune …

  She knew all the paths and shortcuts – the sharp right turn and then the little dogleg that would look as though she was heading back to safety – back to the lights of the Boat House. But then there was the clever little loop that would let her double back through a narrow gorge in the dunes and come out a hundred yards away on flat, hard sand, which was so good for running.

  And this time she would run—

  ‘Stop here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said stop.’

  Steffi stopped, staring up at the dune’s dark horizon, jagged with grass and tantalizingly close.

  He wasn’t going to let her reach the top.

  ‘Take off your clothes.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Take off your clothes.’

  Steffi’s fear made her angry and her anger made her brave. She decided to take control and put a stop to this before she became inert with terror. It wasn’t nipping it in the bud – the bud had already opened so it was too late for that – but calling a halt could be done at any time, and she needed to use her calm, scientific brain if she was going to change this situation to her advantage. She needed to act like a B.Sc. undergrad, not some disposable extra in a murderous teen flick.

  She mustered all the calm confidence that she could.

  ‘I’m just going to turn round, OK?’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘I’m going to do it very, very slowly,’ she said reassuringly.

  She started to turn and he hit her hard in the face.

  Steffi fell down, although because the slope was so steep, she didn’t have far to go, and landed sitting in soft sand, facing the man.

  ‘Now give me your phone and take off your clothes.’

  She looked up at him in a weird, jerky daze. He did have a gun – he hadn’t lied about that. But was this the same man who had killed that Frannie girl? She hadn’t been shot. She’d been strangled or something like that, hadn’t she? Something manual. Through the pain in her cheek and nose, Steffi wondered which was worse – to be shot or to be strangled. Logically, she’d rather be shot because it was over in a second and there was a quick end to the fear – but with manual there was always a chance you’d find a way out of it. Something might happen to come and rescue you. There was more chance of rescue or a miracle.

  Manual must be better.

  Steffi was starting to realize that logic had no place when it came to murder.

  It was too late now anyway. The gun was what had kept her walking like a sheep when she should have been running and screaming and getting away. And that was all that mattered.

  She gave him her phone and she took off her clothes. As she folded her green and white striped blouse, she wondered whether someone would soon be identifying her by that awful photo on her Students’ Union card. That would be as humiliating in death as it was in life.

  Taking off her jeans in front of a stranger felt like a point of no return. There was no miracle: no knight in shining armour; no swooping Hollywood rescue; no beach-bum wino stumbling into view to scare the man away. Nothing happened to stop Steffi sliding the rough denim down her thighs and wobbling as she stood on one leg to step out of them.

  Nothing to stop her crying.

  She tried to stop stripping at her knickers, but the man stared at her until she was naked. She shivered and sobbed and tried to cover her privates and her breasts, but he didn’t seem that interested in them anyway, so she hugged her arms instead.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she whispered.

  He laughed. ‘Not as cold as you’re going to be.’

  Steffi felt a whirring panic in her head and belly. She still didn’t believe that this was how her life was going to end, but she needed to do something fast and she didn’t know what. She had a future. She had plans. She was only twenty. She had a sister called Maggie, and a cat called Mouse, and she hadn’t bought her father a birthday present yet. She’d been a bit short last month and had put an IOU in a card.

  IOU One Birthday Pressie (when I get my student loan). Kiss Kiss Kiss.

  She’d thought it was cute. He’d thought it was cute. It wasn’t cute, she realized now; it was selfish. She had money for cigarettes, didn’t she? She had money for a bus to Barnstaple to see the latest Johnny Depp film. But she didn’t have money for a birthday present for her own father.

  Where was the logic in that? There was none. She sobbed harder.

  He made Steffi sit down.

  He made her call her mother.

  It was a blur. A numb blur of horror. Her mother was so close. If Steffi hadn’t been crying so hard, she could have picked out the porch light from the electric kaleidoscope that Instow had become. Steffi could barely speak; she was one big shake. Her teeth chattered and her hands trembled so badly that the man had to hold the phone.

  ‘Say goodbye now,’ he said.

&
nbsp; Steffi’s mother was pixellated by hysterics. Steffi tried to calm her. Tried to calm herself. Still thinking there would be a way out. Still not believing.

  But then the man gripped her hair in his left hand and started to force her face down towards the sand.

  Frannie Hatton had been suffocated. It came back to Steffi in a jagged flash. The word conjured a pillow, but it could have been anything; it could have been sand.

  This was the man. This was the killer.

  She stuck out her arms and tried to brace herself away from the beach, but the man kicked the inside of her elbow and it collapsed like a hinge.

  He bent her almost double, pressing her nose and mouth into the choking sand, his knee in her back, one relentless hand in her hair, the other holding the phone so her mother could see what she’d done.

  ‘You see?’ he kept saying. ‘You see?’

  Steffi finally believed it was possible for her to die here in the dunes, with the beach in her teeth, not a hundred yards from her home.

  Her bladder surrendered, and so did she.

  With the last strength she had left, she twisted her head so that her mouth could draw one final breath …

  ‘Tell Daddy I’m sorry about the present.’

  Then she drowned in the sand.

  And nobody would ever find her.

  33

  STEFFI COLE WAS lighter than Jody Reeves, but not as light as Frannie Hatton.

  For the hundredth time, John Trick was grateful that he hadn’t killed that first girl on the beach. He’d never been a big man, and the thought of picking his way across the precarious pebbles with Kelly Bradley’s fat arse slung over his shoulder was comical to him now.

  A stone shifted under his left foot and he stopped and adjusted his balance. It was hard enough to walk across the beach in the daylight. At night and with a weight, it required great care and patience.

  He’d learned patience. His lack of it had almost blown it for him right at the start …

  He’d stopped the car beside Frannie Hatton on the road between Bideford and Westward Ho! At first she’d been grateful to him for the offer of a ride. And then, for some reason he couldn’t work out, she’d changed her mind. Just straightened up and backed away and said, ‘Actually, thanks, but I think I’ll walk.’

  Cheeky little slut. With her stringy junkie arms and her nose ring and her tattoos. Saying no – like she was better than him.

  Like she was calling the shots.

  So he’d got out to show her who was really in charge. Right there under the streetlights that made everything orange and weird.

  Frannie Hatton had just stood there, watching him come around the front of the car, with her mouth open like a fish. She couldn’t believe what was happening. He could hardly believe it himself.

  Too late, she’d turned to run . . . And he’d grabbed her arm.

  The moment his fingers had closed on her bicep, John Trick had known he was going to kill her. There was no going back, even if he’d wanted to go back. Which he didn’t.

  So he’d gone on.

  He’d gone too far and it had felt so good.

  She had fought him, mind. She was only a skinny little thing, but Frannie had fought like two rats in a bag. She’d even bitten his hand as he’d bundled her into the car. If another car had passed it would all have been over. He’d just got lucky. He’d learn from that, too.

  He’d driven erratically to the Burrows. He’d forced her out of the car at gunpoint. What choice did she have? And then he’d led her away from the car and over the golf course to a shallow bunker of mud.

  It hadn’t stopped raining all summer and mud was easy to come by.

  She’d had a phone, of course. Everybody had a phone nowadays, even if they didn’t have a job.

  ‘Call your mother.’

  Her mother had hung up the phone before he’d got started, which was gutting, and then had ignored the second call – the uncaring whore. But when he’d finally got Frannie Hatton facedown, and his fingers had got a good grip on her hair, and he’d pressed down, down, down …

  He’d felt all the control leave her body and pass up his arm to his own. Filling him with power, making him mighty.

  Just thinking of it now made him feel like a man.

  John Trick put Steffi down with a grunt, and looked at the naked bodies already laid out at his feet. A rat ran out of the stinking darkness and between Jody Reeves’ small, firm breasts.

  Trick hadn’t felt this good about himself since he’d started work at the shipyard when he was sixteen years old. Something inside him swelled a little. If he remembered correctly, it felt a lot like pride. Pride in himself and pride in Ruby. He’d been wary about taking her with him, but it had paid off in spades. Killing was much easier when his daughter was with him.

  It was his little cowboy who’d shown him how it should be done in the first place. Picking up her teacher at the bus stop was a stroke of genius. The way the woman’s suspicion had changed to grateful acceptance as soon as she saw a little girl out for a drive with her daddy.

  Who wouldn’t get into the car?

  It’d be rude not to.

  The wind snatched the laugh from John Trick’s mouth.

  Ruby was the key. Sometimes he wondered whether she knew all along what she was doing. How she was teaching him, just as he taught her.

  Like tonight – he should have made sure Steffi was dead in the dunes – but the terror in Ruby’s voice had been like an alarm going off inside him. She was in danger. His own flesh and blood needed him. He didn’t want to make excuses, but it was biological.

  As long as he learned from his mistakes – that was the important thing. It was like starting a new job. Nobody could be expected to know everything to begin with, but when you got it right – when it was textbook – the sense of achievement was overwhelming.

  Addictive.

  Murder was a learning curve. But he was getting better at it all the time.

  34

  MARK SPADE HAD sworn off heroin the day his girlfriend Frannie had been found murdered, so it was no surprise to find him serenely high when Calvin and King arrived with a search warrant.

  They didn’t even need to show him the warrant; he was totally cool with anything they wanted to do. He let them into the dingy, cluttered bedsit and then stood with his back to the door while Calvin and King stared around at the clothing and garbage, scattered knee-deep in places, and hoped they could avoid an actual search with a simple question.

  ‘We’re looking for Frannie’s nose ring, Mark,’ said DCI King. ‘Have you come across it?’

  Mark Spade didn’t answer, and when Calvin looked more closely he realized why.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ he said.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ said King. ‘He’s standing up!’

  ‘Oi, Mark,’ said Calvin. He tapped the man’s shoulder and Spade opened his eyes and said, ‘Ask my probation officer if you don’t believe me.’

  King and Calvin both laughed and Spade’s eyes cleared a tiny bit and he said, ‘What?’

  ‘We’re looking for Frannie’s nose ring, Mark,’ King tried again. ‘Remember? The ring she always had in her nose?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Her nose ring.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ said King. ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘In her nose.’

  ‘No it’s not, Mark. Remember? It wasn’t in her nose when we found her.’

  ‘She never takes it out.’

  ‘Well, she took it out this time, Mark. Or someone else did. Or maybe she took it out here, so that’s what we want to make sure of. If it’s not here then it might be a good clue for us, see? To try and find the man who killed her.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘So can we look around then?’

  ‘Her nose?’

  ‘The flat. Can we look round the flat?’

  ‘This flat?’

  ‘Yes, this one.’

  ‘OK.’

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sp; ‘Thanks,’ said King. ‘Can you remember what it looks like, Mark?’

  ‘The flat?’

  ‘The nose ring.’

  ‘It’s a ring. In her nose.’

  ‘OK, good. What colour?’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘Was it silver or gold?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which one?’

  Mark Spade frowned and closed his eyes in an effort to recall the nose ring.

  After a minute, Calvin nudged him again and he woke up and said, ‘Silver.’

  ‘Do you use needles, Mark?’

  ‘No needles,’ he said. ‘Spoons.’

  ‘So we’re not going to get stuck, are we? Because if DC Bridge or I get stuck, we’re going to be very pissed off.’

  ‘No no no,’ he insisted, shoving up his sleeves to show off his arms. ‘Only spoons.’

  Calvin opened a drawer in the ramshackle area that looked most like a kitchen, and held up a bent and buckled spoon, scraps of foil and a selection of Bic lighters.

  ‘He’s a smoker, not a poker.’

  ‘Right then,’ sighed King, snapping on a latex glove. ‘I suppose we’ll get started.’

  They spent all day in the bedsit. Mark Spade slept on the sofa throughout, and so they decided to simply pile everything they’d searched on one side of the room, and then move it all back again and do the same to the other half.

  It was disgusting, even with the gloves.

  Among the clothing and debris on the floor they uncovered a selection of paper plates covered in what looked like bean juice, dozens of unopened packets of supernoodles and the various scattered components of what looked like a hamster cage, including a broken plastic wheel and wood shavings. Everything in the room was sprinkled with small pellets of shit, as if someone had spilled a big carton of chocolate Tic-Tacs.

  Around lunchtime, Mark Spade woke up and demanded spaghetti hoops on toast. There was no bread or spaghetti, or even a pan that Calvin could see, so he went out and got three portions of fish and chips. But by the time he got back, Mark was asleep again.

  King and Calvin ate standing up. Mark was on the sofa, and the only other chair was piled high with egg cartons and three Jack Daniels bottles filled with urine.