The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  Two policemen stood deep in conversation, reflected in the dark-red puddle where the victim had bled out. One of them was Detective Superintendent Huw Rees. He had no love for reporters, so they stayed close to the wall and left in practised silence.

  Once outside, Guy walked on, but Eve stopped to smile at the young officer who’d let her in. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I owe you a drink.’ She dug about in her bag. ‘I’m Eve,’ she said, although he probably knew that already. ‘Here’s my card.’

  It was a good card. She had designed it herself. Black, with white type and a single blood spatter in one corner.

  EVE SINGER

  iWITNESS NEWS

  CRIME CORRESPONDENT

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘My mobile number’s on the back,’ Eve pointed out. ‘So keep it just in case you ever come across anything interesting.’

  ‘OK,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘I will.’

  She knew he would. They always did. They always called her and she always took them for a drink to let them know they were all on the same side in the war on crime – and that was usually enough to make her the first civilian they called when something bloody happened. She couldn’t have done her job without this network of insiders she cultivated. Police and paramedics and firemen and coroners’ officers and court ushers. She thought of them as her safety net for all those times when she needed a free pass, a blind eye, a nod and a wink. Those times when she needed an edge. Last Christmas she’d bought an ambulance driver named Mandy Flynn a bottle of pink champagne, and today Mandy had told her the dead girl’s name. By tonight, iWitness News would have a photo of Layla Martin, while News 24/7 would still be calling her ‘a twenty-four-year-old woman’, and Eve’s job would be safe.

  For another few days, at least.

  Mentally, Eve flipped through the next few hours. What needed to be done, who needed to be called. Mrs Solomon was always first on the list. Eve wouldn’t be home before midnight and that meant paying the sitter double time.

  Couldn’t be helped. Murder was murder.

  Guy Smith fell into step beside her. ‘Do we know who she is yet?’ he asked, then corrected himself. ‘Was.’

  Eve only shrugged. For her to succeed, Guy Smith must fail. It wasn’t her nature, but it was the way her world worked, and they all understood.

  It was five thirty and already dark, and the Christmas lights that spanned Oxford Street made everything look like a film set. A carefully lit thriller, with crowds of curious shoppers and office-party drinkers craning for a glimpse of something they didn’t really want to see.

  ‘Want to share a cab?’ said Guy, waving his arm. ‘My bloody monkey’s buggered off.’

  He meant that his cameraman had left without him. Joe had left too, but that was fine. Eve always did her report before throwing up.

  ‘I’m not going your way,’ she said. It was true. She wanted to go back to the office to recut another Layla Martin package so it looked fresh for the breakfast bulletins.

  ‘Well, maybe I’m going yours,’ he said with a suggestive wink.

  Eve wasn’t flattered. Guy Smith’s flirting was indiscriminate. She wasn’t even his type. She’d seen him with his type at last year’s NTS awards – a giggling teenager who had left the after-party falling-down drunk and carrying her shoes.

  A black cab stopped and Guy held open the door invitingly.

  ‘Night,’ she said, and walked away under the lights of the Christmas-card street.

  3

  THE TWENTY-MINUTE WALK home from Osterley station led Eve down quiet streets hemmed by middle-class, semi-detached houses. It was the kind of place where the residents banded together to save their old red phone box but never went into each other’s homes. The pavements had been cleared of snow and salted. The front windows of the houses were framed by blinking fairy lights, and there were pinecone wreaths on the doors and signs on the gates that demanded ‘Santa Stop Here!’ At Easter there’d be bunnies and eggs; at Halloween, pumpkins.

  Half an hour on the Tube and she was in Narnia.

  Except for one thing. Every two minutes between dawn and eleven p.m. the Isleworth sky was ripped apart by the deafening roar of an airliner coming in to land at Heathrow – so low and so slow that Eve could see the tread on the landing-gear tyres. Between each plane, the silence healed itself so completely that the next flight was always a fresh shock to the senses. People who bought homes here got used to it fast, or moved on. Those who stayed learned to live to a rolling rhythm, like sailors at sea. They slept soundly through every shuddering fly-by, but would wake for a snuffling baby. They spoke in casual two-minute loops, not bothering to raise their voices to shout over the noise, but stopping mid-sentence, then picking up where they’d left off with perfect timing, or completing through mime and smiles. They no longer noticed the jumbo jets sailing calmly over their rooftops, barely higher than the trees and with their wings spanning three streets. If the planes had all fallen out of the sky miles short of their destination, the residents of Isleworth and Hounslow would have sensed that something fundamental was missing from their world – although it would probably have taken them a little while to identify just what that might be.

  But the Layla Martin murder had sucked up the rest of a long day, and now it was well after the Heathrow cut-off.

  Without the planes passing overhead it was eerily quiet. Eve found it a little disconcerting.

  Unnerving.

  Her ears, grown used to abuse in short, sharp bursts, twitched nervously in the silence.

  Which is why she heard the footsteps from a long way off.

  They were behind her, but not close, so she didn’t turn to see who was there. She was less than five minutes from home. She’d made this walk a thousand times. This was her street; these were her neighbours; not far up ahead would be her street lamp, her red phone box.

  Eve felt safe.

  Ish.

  She picked up her pace a bit, telling herself it was only because she wanted to be home and warm and out of the bitter night. That it was only the recent proximity of violent death that was making her jumpy.

  The footsteps behind her speeded up too.

  Louder. Grittier.

  Closer.

  Much closer.

  Too close for Eve to turn and look at the man (it had to be a man; it was always a man) without appearing to be afraid. She didn’t know why she didn’t want to look as nervous as she felt, but she didn’t. She wanted to seem as confident as she would if it were one o’clock in the afternoon, with traffic passing and young mums with buggies making their way to school to pick up their children … Not one in the morning, with everyone asleep and the street lamps casting strange shadows between the parked cars and behind the trees.

  She speeded up a bit more.

  And so did he.

  Eve’s heart bobbed at the base of her throat.

  If the man meant no harm then he wouldn’t do this, surely? Wouldn’t follow so closely behind a lone woman in the early hours unless he wanted to scare her, at the very least. Nobody could be that stupid, could they? That unaware.

  He knew what he was doing.

  A hundred yards away, illuminated by a street lamp, Eve could see her hedge. Unkempt, it bulged between its neat neighbours.

  She should get an electric trimmer. Or a man with an electric trimmer.

  She fixated on the rough privet. Mentally reached for it as her pounding heart swelled into her throat and her head.

  The footsteps were right behind her. He was closer than even a fool would be. Close enough to reach out and clutch the trailing ends of her woollen scarf and pull her backwards off her feet …

  Close enough to kill her.

  She wasn’t going to make it!

  In a horrible split second, the last shred of Eve’s rational mind worked out the angles and the distances and told her she wasn’t going to reach her hedge, her gate, her home, her future.

  She almost cried out with th
e terror of that certainty.

  But instead she turned to face her killer.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  The man stopped dead – otherwise they would have bumped. He wore a black jacket over a hoodie and a dark scarf. The scarf was wrapped around the lower half of his face, while the hood cast a shadow across his eyes.

  ‘Can I ask you a favour?’ said Eve.

  She hadn’t even known she was going to speak. Yet here were words! Coming out of her mouth! She was shocked by how calm they sounded. Inside she vibrated with fear, but her voice didn’t waver, didn’t crack. It was an afternoon voice, filled with passing mums and broad daylight.

  Somehow her mouth even smiled.

  ‘There are so many weirdos about …’ she said.

  The words hung there in the cold night air.

  A normal person would say something. Would smile or nod and agree with her: yes, there were so many weirdos …

  This man said nothing.

  It made Eve’s brain feel like lead, but her mouth was still thinking.

  ‘So,’ it went on, ‘would you mind walking me home?’

  The man flinched. And the light of the street lamp caught a glimmer in his eyes.

  ‘It’s only just up the road,’ she hurried on, ‘and I’d feel so much safer if I had you with me.’ She didn’t know where she’d got this stupid idea, but it was out there now and she couldn’t take it back.

  For a moment the man seemed to sway – first backward, and then forward – as if he might run away.

  Or launch an attack.

  Then he spoke, low and muffled by his scarf. ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eve.

  Every fibre in her body was screaming at her to kick him in the balls and run … But instead she turned sideways and inclined her head a little to invite him to fall into step beside her.

  And, after a moment’s hesitation, he did.

  They walked together in silence. Past her phone box, to her street lamp, to her unruly hedge, and – finally – to her little wooden gate. As if by magic.

  Eve opened the gate and slipped inside and pivoted to close it, all in one rapid movement.

  She clicked the latch shut and turned to face him, breathless with fear.

  He was just … there. Not moving at all.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re very kind.’

  He hesitated. And then he gave a small nod and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good night then,’ she said.

  He said nothing.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ she said.

  He said nothing.

  Eve took a deep breath and forced herself to turn her back on the man like a normal, un-scared person.

  Her skin crawled as she hurried up the path to the aeroplane roar of her own fear, and she made a fist around the keys in her pocket – the Yale protruding from between her first two knuckles, ready to puncture and rip.

  She heard the gate squeal, sensed him barge through it, braced for the shove and the fall to the concrete path. She could already feel the crack of her forehead on the ground, the weight of a killer on her back, the smell of the hard earth and cold weeds under her cheek …

  She spun, key fixed in her fist.

  Terrified and murderous.

  The man was gone.

  4

  EVE SLID INTO the house and turned and pressed herself against the front door like a gecko, as if the key and the deadbolt were not enough to keep it closed. Her breath came in short, shaky bursts against the wood, and she couldn’t feel her legs.

  From the front room came the sound of the television. Goofy music that encouraged a sitcom laugh.

  For a long minute she just listened to her heart bumping in her chest. Then, slowly, she pushed herself away from the door. She was home. She was safe.

  And there were her legs …

  Now that it was over, she felt pretty silly.

  She giggled.

  That poor man! She must have scared the shit out of him, turning on him and demanding that he walk her home! No wonder he’d taken off so fast. She was a crazy person!

  Eve giggled again – still shaky, but recovering.

  She took off her scarf, gloves and coat, while the terror dissipated slowly into the recesses of her being, then she went into the front room.

  Mrs Solomon was on the sofa, knitting something blue and shapeless. She was a large woman with the beginnings of a Fu Manchu and big arms covered in soft white skin, as if she were made of raw dough and ready to roll.

  ‘Hi,’ said Eve quietly. ‘Is he asleep?’

  ‘He is now,’ said Mrs Solomon with meaning. That meaning being that she’d earned every penny of her money and so Eve mustn’t quibble about paying for the whole hour after midnight – even though it was only five past now.

  Eve didn’t quibble. She was far too tired to quibble. She just thanked Mrs Solomon and paid her – and opened the door for her. She took a cautious step back as she did, but there was nobody there. No mad axeman waiting to cleave Mrs Solomon in two and then rampage through the house.

  Of course there wasn’t. The man who’d walked her home had been perfectly innocent. Perfectly ordinary. She was the one who’d behaved like a nut!

  The Layla Martin murder had really shaken her.

  Still, she deadbolted the door behind Mrs Solomon. Then she turned down the thermostat, and drank a glass of water so cold that it made her fingers tingle.

  She lifted her hamster, Munchkin, out of his cage in the front room to say goodnight. His whiskers quivered against her cheek, and as soon as she put him back he rushed into his wheel as if it were a getaway car. Eve switched off the lights and went upstairs to the tiny squeak of frantic non-escape.

  She went into her father’s room and looked down at him.

  He was getting so small.

  Duncan Singer had been a big man. Not fat, but full. Full of life and generosity and funny stories.

  But now he was shrinking. His old clothes swamped him, and his new ones were boys’ Large.

  He lay on his back with his mouth a little open, although he did not snore.

  Just breathed deeply in.

  And deeply out.

  Wrinkles were cutting vertical paths down his face, slowly usurping the happy crows’ feet around his eyes. His hair was thinning and greying, along with his skin.

  He was fifty-five and looked seventy.

  The rails on his bed were up. He’d never fallen out, but he had started to wander at night. The raised sides were a discouragement, no more, but so far they had proved effective.

  Eve sat.

  Although she didn’t want to wake her father, she took his hand.

  His hands hadn’t shrunk. They felt as they always had – big and rough and workmanlike. They were hands that had rewired houses and dabbed bloody knees and lifted pints and thrown sticks for dogs. Now they were hands that dropped spoons, and couldn’t button trousers.

  Eve could never look at his hands without thinking of them pushing her hair from her eyes when she was seven years old and so worried about the bean-bag race on school sports day. Worried about running too slowly and coming last; about running too fast and falling; about missing the bucket with the bean bag; worried about everything, but especially about dying, because that’s what her mother had done just a few months before, leaving all of them shell-shocked by sudden mortality …

  By the time the bean-bag race had been announced over the windy PA system, Eve had worked herself up to tense tears.

  Her father’s hands had cleared her vision and wiped her nose and then he’d said, You don’t have to win, Evie. Just keep going all the way to the end.

  It was a revelation. He wasn’t expecting her to win, and he didn’t care if she lost. For the first time Eve had understood that the outcome couldn’t change his love for her, or her fundamental worth. And she had nodded – calmed by the simplicity of the task at hand.

  Anyone could just keep going – even her!


  Then she’d run so fast and hadn’t tripped, and the blue bean bag had dropped perfectly into the red bucket, and she’d turned on a sixpence and headed for home, and had been running in silence, with only her ragged breath to keep her company.

  She dared not look behind – afraid she’d see the other kids closing her down.

  Instead she’d kept going – kept heading straight for her father’s open arms – until she had won, and Duncan Singer had lifted her into the sunshine above the daisies in the grass and the straight white lines of chalk. Lifted her in these same big, rough hands.

  It had become their family motto.

  Just keep going.

  That’s what they had all done in the months after Maggie Singer had died. And for all the years after that. Not because they knew where they were going or why, but because the only alternative was to—

  Stop.

  Duncan had kept working, kept providing, kept making a home and a life for them. Her younger brother, Stuart, had just kept going so well that Eve hadn’t seen him for two years. He lived in Aberdeen and worked on the rigs and had a girlfriend she’d never met. Rachel or Ruby or something else with an R.

  Eve had just kept going until she’d landed the iWitness News job, when most of her contemporaries were still toiling in local radio. When she’d told her father, he had picked her up in a bear hug, just like he had on that long-ago sports day, and said, ‘Noddy and Big Ears!’

  Eve had laughed and asked what he meant. When he’d only looked blank, she’d repeated what he’d said, and he’d laughed too and said, ‘No bloody idea!’

  Back then it had seemed funny.

  Back then was another country …

  Within the year she’d given up her flat in Camden, with its canal views and ironic décor, to return to the family home she thought she’d left for ever. At first she’d been resentful, but now – three years on – she was resigned to it. Occasionally even comforted. Sometimes, when she woke to pop stars and teddy bears, she was fourteen again.

  But by the time she went to bed she was always old.