The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  At first she was halting, but it got easier. The viewfinder brought welcome detachment. She even remembered to press the selfie icon that enabled her to be in shot – mentally editing as she went. She found the professional presence of mind to wonder how she looked – and then the cynicism not to give a shit. The worse she looked, the better.

  On her way up the escalator, she filmed a team of men coming down. They were dressed in orange and carried bin bags and shovels.

  Come to clean up the mess.

  With shovels.

  Eve’s stomach clenched again but was mercifully empty.

  19

  EVE DIDN’T SLEEP that night. Not even fitfully.

  It was shocking how long an hour could be, when your only companion was a young girl pin-wheeling into the path of a train, over and over like a viral GIF. So when her phone rang at two a.m., she grabbed it before the second trill.

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was an awkward silence. She checked the number but it was withheld.

  Then he spoke. ‘I’m glad you came today.’

  A chill passed through her. A goose on her grave. A killer on the line.

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘But I saw you. In the flesh.’ Then he laughed. ‘Or at least, very near to the flesh.’

  Eve’s mind turned over slowly. Not quite catching, like a cold-morning car.

  ‘W-what do you mean?’ Damn her stammer!

  ‘Well, I enjoyed your show. Did you enjoy mine?’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My show.’

  ‘Your show?’ She wracked her brain. There had been a busker, ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ …

  ‘Our show,’ he said, as if correcting himself.

  ‘I-I-I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘The girl in pink,’ he said impatiently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  Eve blinked. It took a thousand years.

  The warm rush of the approaching train …

  Eve!

  Her name in the air. Her mind playing tricks.

  His voice. This voice. He had called out her name.

  ‘The girl who fell?’ she breathed.

  He laughed. ‘Did she fall or was she pushed? What do you think, Eve?’

  ‘I don’t … I don’t know,’ she said haltingly.

  ‘I didn’t want you to miss it. I knew you’d show it to best advantage. And you did. Your review was … visceral – even better than the Coldharbour girl.’

  Eve caught her breath. The Coldharbour girl. Layla Martin.

  Loops of gore …

  Her mind bubbled and spat like panicky soup. What was he saying? That he’d killed Layla Martin? And Kevin Barr? And the girl at the station?

  ‘You’re lying,’ she said with a shaking voice. ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘You know that’s not true, Eve. We’re in the same line of work, you and I. I need people to die in order to live – and so do you. We’re the same. We want the same things.’

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me we’re the same!’ Her voice shook, but her stammer was gone. ‘I’m not the same as you! You’re a fucking murderer!’

  ‘I have good reason to do what I do,’ he said mildly, as if to a child. ‘You’re only in it for the money.’

  Eve’s self-righteous anger caught in her throat.

  ‘Be honest, Eve,’ he went on. ‘We both crave death. And an audience.’

  There was a yawning silence where she almost denied it.

  But she couldn’t.

  Because it was true.

  She had cheerfully stoked the fires of fear in the wake of the Coldharbour murder; she’d given Ross the video of Kevin Barr, even though she knew he would use it; she had accepted the killer’s invitation to his ‘show’, and then – instead of running from the scene the way four hundred ordinary, decent people had – she had taken out her phone and filmed herself reporting on the brutal death. Of a child …

  What was wrong with her? Every step of the way she had given him what he wanted.

  Not even unwittingly.

  Selfishly.

  Eve saw it now for the first time. Her whole career was built on the bones of the dead and the tears of the bereaved. Had she encouraged this? Had she enabled him? Had she followed his lead?

  Or had he followed hers?

  She couldn’t breathe.

  She really couldn’t breathe.

  ‘I give you the art,’ he said, as if he’d read her mind. ‘And you put on the exhibition.’

  ‘N-no,’ she whispered. ‘No.’

  But his low voice wormed into her ear and wound its thorny way around her guilty heart.

  ‘We’re in it together now, Eve.’

  PART TWO

  20

  11 December

  DUST TO DUST.

  The killer watched the dust dance in the shards of sunlight that sliced between the heavy velvet curtains. Each speck had once been part of something else. The eye of a woodworm, a shaving off the leg of a Chippendale chest, a flake of his own pale skin. Each fragment was fallen from a whole and reduced and reduced and reduced, until it was anonymous and uniform, and so tiny that it could be supported by the thickness of air, as it sought the light that would lend its existence beauty beyond the darkness.

  He moved the curtains a few inches one way, then a few inches the other. The sharper and thinner the beam, the more intensely the swirling motes fought for their moment in the sun – showing off in the spotlight like ballet-school brats. But as the curtain was opened, so the light seemed to weaken as it shared itself around the room, and the dust got sulky and withdrew to the corners and the floor – because how could any individual speck shine among such multitudes?

  It was top billing or nothing for dust, and the killer respected that ambition.

  Could relate to it.

  He drew back the curtain with a flourish and stood for a moment, framed by the window, glorying in the weak warmth of the winter rays that made his pubic hair into whorls of raw gold.

  His scar dribbled down the middle of his chest like grease.

  In the house across the road, the dumpy woman with the bucket and sprays flapped an angry duster at him, and he tingled as her gaze fell upon him. She shouted something soundless and then hurried into the dark interior of the house.

  They’d had people like her when he was a boy. Women who did – that’s what his mother had called them. Cooked and cleaned and shopped and made the beds.

  But he’d never had a woman who did. Not personally. He wondered what a woman might do for him.

  He could only think of one thing.

  He turned away from the window and watched his own shadow ripple across the Belgian lace counterpane.

  The time he had spent in this room.

  The hours. The days.

  The life.

  At this bed he had cared for his mother, even though he barely knew her.

  Two years of cold, creeping misery. Hell in a glass of water, purgatory in an egg sandwich. Dirty sheets.

  That infernal bedpan.

  More dirty sheets.

  And more.

  And more.

  Fed repeatedly into the hungry maw of the washing machine he grew to hate. But it was never enough to cover the stench of urine and shit, or that strange, sour rot that made him gag every time he’d returned to the house with supplies.

  The tyrannical machine had watched and waited, greedy for more filth and fever, not wanting it to end, however bad it got. Until it had seemed to him that his mother only lingered in order to feed it.

  And how she had lingered!

  Breathing his air, while he appraised her with cold, glue-factory eyes.

  Finally he had gone downstairs and beaten the washing machine to death with a sledgehammer in the echoing ballroom, watched only by dust and the spidery wires where the crystal chandeliers had once been.

  The Hotp
oint had been transformed from a squat white cube into a jagged collection of disparate parts that, once separated, could barely be credited with having once belonged to the same cohesive whole.

  And never would again.

  The killer had started on the machine in a rage, but the smaller it got, the less angry he’d become.

  Eventually he had stopped and leaned on the sledgehammer, sweaty and gasping, but with the same joyous pounding in his chest that he hadn’t felt for years.

  Not since he’d cut Mr Treadwell.

  It had taken him days to separate the ugly white outer properly from its internal organs. As each new wonder appeared – the motor, the pump, the fan – he’d taken them apart too, to discover hidden gems of washers and seals and valves and switches and neat bundles of vivid veins.

  It was a Russian doll of discovery.

  Once the machine’s deconstruction was complete, he could hardly believe that he had hated it so much. It had been nothing but a greedy hole demanding to be fed with stinking sheets. Now that it was laid carefully out in a precise twenty-foot square in the middle of the ballroom floor, he could see how well it had been made. How much care and attention had gone into its manufacture. How every tiny component played its clever part in the whole.

  There was nothing wasted, nothing left over, nothing to add.

  So his final shred of hatred had been snuffed out. It had been replaced by an understanding of the machine’s complex new beauty.

  It was perfect.

  Only then had he gone back upstairs to find that, while he’d been gone, his mother had done the decent thing.

  He had sat at her bedside for days – moving only to relieve himself or to drink his neighbour’s water from the tap – and thought about his future.

  He had never had one before, but his bastard heart had reminded him that he might have one now. Like a Geiger counter, its crazed ticking had alerted him to new possibilities. The first time, when he’d cut open Mr Treadwell, he had been too young to understand. But its response to the death of the washing machine had been a timely reminder.

  So he had mapped out his own future.

  And that of others.

  His mother’s death had filled him to the brim with …

  Borrowed time.

  And he had spent it carefully, that bequest from the final member of his family. But it could not last for ever and the time had inevitably come when he’d needed to borrow from strangers.

  Strangers he repaid with the handsome interest of being immortalized by art.

  The low morning sun had moved around now, so that his lithe shadow fell across his mother’s face.

  It had sunk in on itself like a bad cake. The eyes had fallen back into deepening pits. The cheeks were sucked hollows, and the lips were as thin and black as a dog’s.

  The killer put out a gentle hand and touched his mother’s brow.

  She had been dead for two years now.

  And grew more beautiful every day.

  21

  HALFWAY THROUGH TAKING the fairy lights off the Christmas tree, Duncan Singer remembered who he was. It was like a flashbulb going off – a sudden brilliant illumination of everything, so clear and so bright that he gasped.

  In an instant he knew he was Duncan Singer, father to Stuart and Eve and husband to Maggie, who had been dead for more than twenty years. The shock of her death, and the shock of having forgotten her death, tore at his heart like a double-barbed fishhook.

  And then the flash was gone, but while its after-image faded, he stood transfixed in the gloom, beside the dark tree, and with constellations of lights bundled in his arms.

  By the time the fat woman came into the room and asked if he was all right, Duncan couldn’t remember why his heart ached so badly, or why he was crying.

  All he knew now was that it must have been something quite terrible, and that forgetting something that could make him feel so bad was even worse than remembering it.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not all right.’

  Then he stared down at the twinkling lights and sobbed, ‘All my stars fell out of the sky.’

  On her way to the station, Eve checked her phone. Still no word from Joe.

  Good.

  She didn’t know what to say to him. He’d told her not to give the clip to Ross. Joked about doing PR for Jack the Ripper.

  How she wished she’d listened to him.

  The man who’d called her might be a liar and a fantasist. But until she knew for sure, a yoke of guilt hung heavy on her shoulders.

  The Metro she picked up on the train had named the dead girl as thirteen-year-old Maddie Matthews from Hammersmith. The photo they were using was a selfie lifted from Facebook – the face slightly over-exposed, and showing random details of Maddie’s bedroom behind her. Posters and teddy bears and hair straighteners. Eve recognized the teenage trappings. Maddie’s identity expressed through Beyoncé and BaByliss.

  Eve looked up and saw that the Tube was stopped at Hammersmith. Without thinking it through, she got to her feet. The train doors closed buzzingly on her arm but she levered them aside and stepped down on to the platform.

  She called in sick to work.

  ‘Sick?’ Ross Tobin said. ‘You’re in the middle of the biggest story of your career. Maybe the biggest story of any career. And you’re fucking sick? What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I’ve got a cold.’

  She didn’t have a cold, but her swollen nose made it easy to fake one.

  ‘A cold? Jesus! It’s hardly death’s door, is it? More like death’s catflap.’

  ‘I feel like shit,’ she said, and she did.

  ‘Well, Katie Merino wouldn’t feel like shit,’ said Ross spitefully. ‘She’d do your job with one fucking leg!’

  Eve laughed. Ross couldn’t scare her with Katie Merino any more. She was so far beyond Katie Merino that it seemed ridiculous that she should ever have cared about anything Katie did, or might do.

  Ross snapped, ‘Just get well fucking soon!’ And cut her off.

  Eve sat down on a frigid metal bench and scrolled through Facebook.

  It only took two minutes of teenage gossip before she found the names of the girls who had been with Maddie the day before – and only another thirty seconds on Google before she had an address for the one with the more unusual name – Zoey Kihn.

  Time was, a journalist would have spent a day knocking on doors and making phone calls to arrive at the right address.

  Anybody could find anyone now.

  It was scary really, if you thought about it.

  But mostly it was just useful.

  Zoey Kihn’s mother’s face was swollen from crying at what might have been.

  ‘I just keep thinking,’ she said for the third time since they’d sat down at the kitchen table, ‘it could have been Zoey.’

  Eve nodded.

  Again.

  She didn’t have children, but she guessed that that kind of thinking could ruin your whole life if you weren’t careful.

  Zoey herself only tutted. ‘Don’t keep saying that, Mum. It wasn’t me. I’m fine.’

  ‘Thank God,’ said Mrs Kihn, although Eve had long suspected that God had very little to do with things like this. After all, if it was God’s doing that Zoey Kihn was alive, then it must also be God’s doing that Maddie Matthews wasn’t, which seemed perverse.

  She didn’t point that out though. It was usually best to let the bereaved and the nearly bereaved lead the way through these difficult conversations.

  She blushed hotly at her own guile. All these tricks she’d learned. All the ways she knew to pick and to pry and to peel back the flesh to expose the raw hurt so that her audience could gawp and tut – and then change the channel …

  But she needed to know. Not for ratings, but for her. She needed to know if the man on the phone was a killer or a liar.

  Mrs Kihn dabbed her eyes. ‘You let them go out. They want to go out. They want to be treated like adults, but the
y’re not adults, are they?’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Eve carefully. She didn’t want to alienate either Mrs Kihn or her daughter.

  ‘They don’t understand, do they?’ the woman went on. ‘They don’t know how dangerous things are, how quickly things can go wrong, you see?’

  Eve did see. If anyone could, she could. After all, if things didn’t go wrong so quickly and so often for so many people, she’d be out of a job.

  ‘I mean,’ said Zoey’s mother, ‘one minute they’re messing about on the platform …’

  ‘We weren’t messing about,’ said Zoey. ‘I told you.’

  ‘And the next – BOOM. Gone. Just like that. Poor Maddie. Her poor mother …’ Mrs Kihn pulled a tissue from the box on the table and blew her nose.

  Zoey rolled her eyes and looked at Eve. ‘We weren’t messing about. We’re not babies.’

  Eve suppressed a smile, because Zoey was wearing Hello Kitty pyjamas and large fluffy slippers with eyes and whiskers on them. She was a pretty girl in the way that all teenage girls seemed to be these days – with clear skin and straight teeth and long glossy brown hair. She was very pale, but Eve couldn’t tell whether that was shock or just fashion.

  ‘What did happen then?’ she asked.

  Zoey sighed and flapped a hand. ‘I don’t know.’ Her lip wobbled for a moment, making her look eight years old. Then she cleared her throat and went on, ‘We were just standing there, laughing …’

  ‘Messing about,’ said her mother.

  Zoey ignored her. ‘And Maddie kind of shouted …’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not shouted. More like “Eek!” Then she sort of tripped. Like, stumbled forward.’

  Eve said carefully, ‘Could she have been pushed?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Zoey stared blankly across the kitchen at the white sky beyond the windows. ‘It was crowded. I wasn’t looking at Maddie because I was talking to Carla, but I felt her bump my shoulder …’

  Zoey unconsciously touched her own shoulder at the memory, and her mother took another tissue from the box.

  ‘Did you actually see anyone who might have pushed her?’

  ‘I didn’t see anyone,’ said Zoey, ‘but she did eek. And she did bump me quite hard. So …’ She tailed off and opened her hands in a gesture of you decide.