The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re going Christmas shopping.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He stepped again into his own print, then carefully placed his other foot down in the fresh snow in front of it and stood there as if stuck. Planted like an Egyptian.

  ‘The taxi’s coming.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s safe,’ he said. ‘You go on without me.’

  ‘Don’t you want to go shopping?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m only outside because I’m wearing this coat.’

  Eve didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. At this rate she’d end up buying Christmas presents from the one-stop shop at the station. Bad wine and Cup-a-Soup and a bumper box of tampons. Woohoo!

  She looked at her father teetering nervously in the snow, and sighed. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back indoors.’

  Duncan picked up his front foot and stepped carefully backwards on to the doormat, and from there he reversed into the house.

  Eve closed the door and slowly pulled off her hat, gloves and scarf and dropped them on the hall table with a sigh. No shopping, no Charlotte, no eggnog latte, no lights and carols and mince pies.

  Shit. And she’d have to pay for the taxi …

  ‘Have you been Christmas shopping?’ Duncan asked brightly.

  Eve hesitated and then said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you get me?’ he said.

  ‘What did you want?’ she said.

  ‘A glass eye,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Eve wearily, ‘that’s what I got you.’

  12

  ALL OF HIS life, the killer had been waiting to die.

  His earliest memory was of waking in a hospital with a stranger’s heart in his chest, and a doctor murmuring nearby, ‘He’s living on borrowed time …’

  The soft, overheard words confused him, and haunted him from that moment on.

  How much time had he borrowed? A week? A year? Ten years? From whom had his time been borrowed? Would he have to pay it back? And what would happen when his time ran out?

  Could he borrow more?

  He fretted constantly about the heart. Sometimes it didn’t even work! If he sat very still in a quiet room, he could hear it not beating. He had to press his palm hard against his chest to feel even the faintest flutter. It made him worry that there was nothing inside him but a hole filled with surgical wadding. Only if he ran up and down stairs until he felt light-headed did the sluggish organ bother to stir – and then sometimes it got away from him and beat so hard and so fast that he became all sweaty and panicky. Once he’d fainted and an ambulance had to be called, and a doctor had told him off angrily – as if the heart were not his, but only on loan, and to be returned when he’d done with it.

  Or when it had done with him …

  After that he wasn’t allowed to run.

  Whenever he dressed for the day or undressed for the bath, the boy fingered the thick red ridge of tissue that ran down the middle of his chest, sometimes picking at its edges until it bled. Nannies slapped him if they caught him. Grabbed his wrist and yanked his arm and shook him like a doll. Leave it alone! What’s wrong with you? But he didn’t know what was wrong with him. How could he, when he couldn’t trust the heart in his own chest? Was it a shiny pink pump? Or a slack fist of rancid muscle that would soon fail? How could he tell what was true? Doctors said all was well, but doctors were liars. He had only his parents’ vague eyes to gauge what was amiss, and they told another – much more frightening – story.

  Once when he was six, he’d asked his mother to tell him that story, but she’d become tearful, and his father had told him sharply not to upset her, so he’d never asked again.

  His parents had always been distant – as if they knew they would lose him, and didn’t want to be too close when it happened.

  That distance grew along with him. He never understood them, and they never understood him.

  Always wan and weak, he had no friends. He was bullied at school, in the park, and even in his own room on the one occasion another boy came home for tea.

  ‘Cut open a bully and you’ll find a coward inside,’ his father told him afterwards, with the brisk confidence of someone who had never been bullied.

  But instead the boy simply stopped going out to play.

  At eight he stopped going to school too, and nobody seemed to care. What was the point in preparing him for a future he did not have?

  He spent the days reading, or wandering through the echoing house, his only companions the paintings that had been in his family for generations. There was a minor Tintoretto in the opulent hallway, scenes of love and lingering death on every wall, and a crop of delicate miniatures on the piano – all in black velvet frames, so as not to damage the Bechstein’s mirrored gleam.

  He started to copy the paintings. Idly at first, in biro in schoolbooks, but quickly he developed a young draughtsman’s eye, and was soon demanding sketchbooks and charcoal, then canvases, paints, brushes. An easel.

  Copying became too small a word. He ingested the art. Gulped it through his eyes as he consumed food and water through his mouth, and it nourished him likewise. He gobbled the Masters from walls and from books like a starving man, pursuing the elusive alchemy that turned brute charcoal and oils into divine depictions of death.

  So Death and the Maiden was his elevenses – the beautiful girl whose modesty could not hide her desire for her skeletal suitor, and The Martyrdom of St Sebastian was tea – the beautiful boy bound and pricked like a bun, leaking red rivulets, his eyes turned to heaven where he would dwell for ever …

  But dinner was the gruesome Danse Macabre that wound its wooden way around the walls of his father’s study. People going about their everyday lives were waylaid and dragged off by cunning Death in an orgy of mortality. A gambler unwittingly dealt crooked cards to the Grim Reaper, an ignorant knight was impaled on his own lance, a mourner was so distracted by one corpse that he couldn’t see he was about to become another.

  By day its joyous cruelty excited the boy, but his nightmares were plagued by bony fingers gripping his wrist, or reaching into his chest to take back what rightly belonged to another. Often he was woken, shrieking and sweating, by the tug of veins still attached to his innards …

  He barely saw his parents. He was supervised by transient nannies, and tutored by a loop of misfitting, misfiring teachers who were either uninterested in life as a whole or uninterested only in him.

  Still, better that than the sweaty, grunting Mr Treadwell, who’d been too interested in him …

  The boy had tried cutting Mr Treadwell open to find the promised coward, but there was only blood inside him – and a lot of shouting and threats outside – and his parents decided that their son had had as much schooling as he’d ever need in a world where he already had money and a name, and didn’t engage another teacher. They had to sell the Tintoretto to get rid of that one, leaving a pale square on the wall as a constant reminder of how much their son had cost them.

  But he hadn’t cared.

  Because while Mr Treadwell had dripped and raged downstairs, the boy’s reluctant heart had finally caught up with his daring – and hammered like Thor.

  He had sat on his bed of shame and laughed and laughed and laughed with the pleasure of knowing that – at last – he was truly alive.

  A few months after Mr Treadwell left, a curious thing happened.

  The boy’s grandmother died.

  And then his grandfather died. And then his other grandmother died too.

  While he outlived them all!

  At first he was confused: there was no logic to it. He was the one living on borrowed time. But then, slowly, the theory started to grow in his mind that somehow those people were taking his place. That the time he was borrowing could be borrowed from them. That they had stepped between him and the Reaper. By the time he entered his teens, he’d begun to anticipate the death of others with something lik
e pleasure.

  So he was not sorry to hear that a second cousin once removed had been permanently removed by lightning on a Berkshire golf course. And he was also not sorry when a distant aunt was crushed by a taxi near Hyde Park Corner.

  He was not even sorry when a sudden embolism claimed his own father.

  Eventually he was only sorry that he hadn’t done a better job with Mr Treadwell …

  13

  8 December

  JOE WAS SITTING on Eve’s desk when she got in, and it lifted her spirits to see him there.

  More than was usual.

  Don’t be such a schoolgirl! she told herself firmly. It was a peck on the cheek.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Get your shopping done?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Got busy with other stuff.’

  She sat down and while her laptop fired up she sifted through her in-tray. There wasn’t much – most communications now came via email.

  But there were a few bits of junk and subscriptions, and a small white envelope, addressed in copperplate handwriting.

  Joe picked it up. ‘Fan mail?’

  ‘Probably from Ross,’ she snorted.

  She liked fan mail. There would be a letter inside. Most likely from an old lady, if the writing was anything to go by. Saying how Eve reminded her of her granddaughter, and didn’t she have lovely hair? She got at least one of those a month. Most fan mail was sweet. Letters and teddy bears holding hearts, and the occasional bouquet.

  Although once she’d received a doctored photo of herself – naked and spread-eagled – wrapped tightly around a matchbox filled with what looked horribly like semen.

  There was no business like show business …

  Joe ripped open the envelope, unfolded a single sheet of paper and read out loud.

  ‘Dear Miss Singer. I’m a great admirer of your work—’

  He stopped and raised a mock-petulant eyebrow. ‘I think he means our work.’

  Eve gave a dismissive flap of her hand. ‘Well, I think he sounds charming and intelligent.’

  ‘Yeah, well hold your horses,’ said Joe. ‘I haven’t got to the bit yet where he wants a photocopy of your nipples.’

  Eve tapped her watch. ‘Then get there fast, monkey-boy. You know there’s always a queue in the copy room.’

  Joe grinned and read on.

  ‘But I believe that on this occasion you may have missed something.’

  ‘Missed something?’ frowned Eve. ‘Are you sure it’s not addressed to you?’

  ‘Ha ha.’ Joe turned the paper over, but there was nothing on the reverse. ‘That’s all there is.’

  Eve peered into the envelope, then tipped a little micro-SD memory card into her palm.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You missed it.’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Joe.

  There was only one file on the card. Eve opened it and a window flickered briefly then consumed the screen in black.

  For a single sick second, she thought she’d opened a virus that would bring down the whole channel, but then a video clip started to play. A vertical window of darkness, and the vague shape of a man lounging in a seat.

  In a row of seats?

  In the background was the sound of shouting and screeching tyres.

  And then a flickering light illuminated the scene.

  Eve’s heart jolted and she slapped her laptop shut with a bang.

  ‘Shit,’ she hissed. ‘That’s Kevin Barr.’

  They went to Regazzoni’s, the little coffee shop they preferred to the big chains. Regazzoni’s had chaotic service, bad lighting and hard chairs, but the coffee was great, and the gloom allowed the privacy they needed to watch the clip in full.

  Kevin Barr was dead, but he was also strangely beautiful. The flickering light of the movie screen cast him into a startling relief of a human being, floating against the dark velvet seats. With one boot on the seat in front of him, his arms outstretched and his head curiously cocked, he had the bacchanalian air of a man who had died drunk and laughing.

  Whatever the truth, the image was compelling.

  They watched it again.

  ‘Who the hell sent this?’ she whispered. ‘You think they’re trying to sell it?’

  ‘If they are, they have a lot to learn about the art of negotiation,’ said Joe wryly. He picked up the envelope and examined it closely. ‘No contact details, no demand for payment. Nothing.’

  They kept watching – morbidly fascinated.

  ‘Stan said at least one person had their phone out in the cinema,’ Joe remembered. ‘It must have been one of them.’

  Eve shook her head. ‘But he said he turned and saw the body as he was leaving. So the film was over by then. In this clip, it’s still playing. You can hear it.’

  They watched it again, the teaspoon clatter and steamer hiss of Regazzoni’s fading beyond gunfire and the throbbing sound-track.

  ‘I think the killer filmed this,’ said Eve.

  Joe frowned. ‘If he did, why would he send it to you?’

  Eve shrugged. ‘Why does anyone send anything to a TV reporter?’

  ‘Because they want to see it on TV.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Sick,’ muttered Joe.

  ‘What are we going to do with it?’ said Eve carefully.

  She didn’t feel careful; she felt excited. This clip could secure her whole future. She knew that with an unerring instinct that made it a certainty. A cold-blooded killer had reached out to her. Wanted to share his crime with her. Had sent her a video of his still-warm victim …

  This was the break she’d been desperate for. This was her chance to move on to bigger and better things. With more money. More money would mean better care for Duncan, a stair-lift so he didn’t fall on top of her, days out in the countryside, respite care so she could go to the spa, or just sit in a coffee shop with a good book and – for once – not worry about Mrs Solomon’s overtime …

  In the split second when all this rushed through her mind, Eve could feel her iron self-control relaxing, could almost smell the salt on the shingle, and turn the rough-smooth pages of a new book—

  ‘We can’t use it,’ said Joe.

  It was like a reality slap.

  Of course they couldn’t. She knew that.

  ‘Shouldn’t we let Ross decide?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘We can’t give it to him. If he sees it, he’ll use it.’

  Eve knew that too. Because journalistically it made perfect sense. But the moral buck stopped with her.

  ‘If Ross finds out we’re holding out on him, we could both lose our jobs.’

  ‘How’s he going to find out?’ shrugged Joe. ‘We’re the only two people who know about it.’

  ‘Not true,’ she said. ‘Whoever sent the clip knows it too. And if we don’t broadcast the video, what’s to stop him sending it to somebody who will?’

  Joe nodded, then said, ‘The clip was sent to you, Eve, so the decision is yours. I just don’t want to end up doing PR for Jack the Ripper.’

  He smiled, but his eyes were deadly serious.

  Eve knew he was right. She closed her laptop with a soft click that sounded to her like the death knell of all her hopes for a better life.

  Stupid moral buck!

  14

  EVE WAS HOME early and tried to watch every news bulletin on every channel every hour, although her father got crabby every time she switched over from How It’s Made.

  No other channel showed the clip. That didn’t mean nobody else had received it – just that, if they had, they’d made the same moral decision as she and Joe had.

  The relief was intoxicating, by her pretty low standards, and when the video wasn’t on the nine o’clock news, she decided to celebrate by putting up the Christmas tree. She hadn’t bothered last year, and had been surprised by how much she’d missed it.

  The attic was a minefield of memories and mouse shit. Carefully she picked her way through it, catching torch-lit glimpses of the past. Ne
ddy, her rocking horse, on rusted springs; Stuart’s football boots and broken goalposts; a box of her mother’s eclectic reading – Collette and Betty MacDonald and Kazuo Ishiguro.

  Her father’s guitar.

  It gave her a pang to see it. Duncan should be strumming old Beatles songs, or out on the lake in his dinghy, or downing a pint in the Black Sheep with his best mate, Colin. The two of them had worked together for years and together they’d been a riot – so sharp and funny that she could have sold tickets. Stories of ceilings collapsing and fingers in sockets and carpets on fire and narrow escapes from randy housewives … No story was worth telling unless it was funny at the end – however painful it might be along the way.

  Colin had visited for a good while after Duncan got sick, but he didn’t come round any more, and Eve didn’t blame him. Nobody wanted to be reminded of his own tenuous grasp on sanity. There was no funny ending in that.

  The Christmas tree was wedged between a joist and the roughly pointed brickwork that separated their attic from Mr Elias’s. There was a separate bag containing the baubles and a bird’s nest of fairy lights.

  Eve manhandled them to the hatch, then came down the ladder slowly.

  In the front room, her father watched her with slit-eyed suspicion as she unpacked the tree from its cardboard box.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The Christmas tree, Dad. Remember?’

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t remember a box of trees. Why don’t you try remembering some time? See how you like it.’

  Eve ignored him and concentrated on the tree. They’d had it for years and years. Since she was five or six. She used to watch her father do this, thinking it impossibly complicated. It wasn’t, of course. The stand, the trunk, the little holders for each of the stiff, prickly branches, each one colour coded and slotting into place. She found a hypnotic rhythm to the resumed drone of How It’s Made and the roar of unseen jets tearing holes in the sky.

  The tree grew in her hands until it was six feet tall, draped with twinkling fairy lights and ripe for baubles and tinsel.

  ‘There!’ she said. ‘Shall we decorate it together?’