The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘There’s no exhibition,’ Banks insisted. ‘And certainly not on any platform. We’ve got enough to worry about just keeping the bums and the buskers and the alkies from making exhibitions of themselves on a daily basis without holding formal events.’

  ‘There are flyers advertising an exhibition,’ Eve insisted. ‘They’re stuck over the large posters on the tunnel wall opposite the platform.’

  ‘Across the rails?’ said Banks, immediately bristling. ‘That’s not allowed.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t think the British Museum would be very happy about their posters being covered up.’

  ‘Not that!’ said Banks. ‘Someone must have crossed the tracks to put them there, and that’s absolutely not allowed.’

  Eve knew that – any fool would – but she was happy to let Craig Banks tell her stuff she already knew, if it smoothed her path to the answers she wanted.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ he said, and sat down at a monitor and started tapping keys with vigour. ‘Someone should have picked up on that. Someone wasn’t doing their job. As per bloody usual. When would they have been put up?’

  ‘I only noticed them yesterday. But I have no idea how long they’ve been there.’

  ‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’ said Banks, sounding like a Bond villain. ‘It’s all automatically recorded on the hard drive,’ he went on. ‘It used to be the case that you’d have to press Record on a video recorder like it was Cash in the bloody Attic or something. But now it’s all automated, thank God. You can’t trust anyone to do anything these days, can you?’

  ‘I agree,’ said Eve, although she didn’t. It was her business to be cynical and suspicious, but it was hard to get through life without trusting a few people. She trusted Joe. She trusted her brother. She trusted Mrs Solomon to look after her father, and now she supposed she trusted Mr Elias too. So far, none of them had let her down.

  Banks brought up the right date and hit Reverse, then stared intently at the screen while the recording raced back through time from midnight.

  It happened too fast to get details, but even so, Eve was nervous of watching Maddie Matthews’ death replayed on-screen.

  The platform was empty, then there were people. Only a few. Maybe that was her at the far end?

  There was the train, stationary for a long time. Then the platform turned from white to black in a second as four hundred people poured backwards on to it and took up their places—

  This was it.

  Eve closed her eyes briefly, and when she opened them again the train was yet to emerge from the gaping tunnel, and Maddie was still alive.

  If only it were that easy.

  Time continued to roll backwards so fast that Eve wondered how Banks could possibly be sure he wasn’t missing something. To her it was all just a blur of trains and people and empty platforms, in rhythmical rotation.

  Twenty-four hours passed in less than a minute and the counter ticked back to midnight on the previous day.

  ‘There,’ Banks said suddenly.

  ‘Where?’

  He tapped the screen with the point of a pen. ‘Right here.’

  The recording froze and ran forward again more slowly.

  The platform was almost empty. Two figures close to the camera, and that was all.

  A man emerged just under the camera and walked away from it, all the way to the far end of the platform.

  Eve’s heart pounded in her throat.

  She knew him!

  Immediately she dismissed the thought. It was ridiculous. She didn’t know him. Maybe she’d built a picture in her mind that matched the figure on the screen.

  Both indistinct.

  The man was thin, and dressed in jeans and a dark hoodie. He held something in the crook of his left elbow.

  Without hesitating or even glancing over his shoulder, he sat on the edge of the platform and dropped on to the tracks.

  Craig Banks hit Pause and rapped the screen again. ‘You see! Someone should have picked up on that!’ He tapped the time code and date into a box at the top right of the screen. ‘Whoever was on late duty.’

  He left the dark figure hanging in frustrating mid-step across a gleaming rail and spun across the floor on his castored chair.

  ‘Easy to find out,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all the time sheets right here.’ He reached across another counter for a ring binder.

  Eve and Joe exchanged impatient looks while Banks started flicking through the paperwork.

  ‘Ah,’ he said with great satisfaction. ‘Here we go!’

  Eve forced herself to smile at him. ‘Found it?’ she said.

  ‘Found it,’ he said. ‘Gary Bushman. I knew it would be him!’ He looked up at them triumphantly, as if they knew or cared who the hell he was talking about.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Eve enthusiastically, while she longed to slap Banks and hit Play.

  Banks hauled his way slowly back across the room like a baby in a walker. ‘London Underground doesn’t pay people to sit on their backsides and watch TV for the good of their health.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Eve said.

  ‘Not even Mr High and Mighty Gary Bushman.’

  ‘’Specially not him,’ murmured Joe, and Eve had to stifle a snort.

  Finally Banks made it back to the keyboard.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Might as well finish up.’

  It was obvious to Eve that, for Banks, the only issue was who had missed the man crossing the tracks. The man himself was irrelevant now.

  He finally hit Play and the man completed his grainy, high-stepping way across the rails, then placed his flyers on the wall. Eve couldn’t see how – he was too far away and the images were too poor – but the motions were unmistakeable.

  ‘One of these days,’ said Banks breezily, ‘I’d just love to see one of these idiots get mown down by a train.’

  Joe gave a nervous laugh, but the glance Banks threw his way said he wasn’t joking.

  On the screen, the man finished his work and stepped back across the rails. He pulled himself up on to the platform with relative ease. From this angle they could see he was pale-skinned and clean-shaven. But those were the only clues to his identity.

  He started to walk back towards the camera, and Eve and Joe both leaned in for the best view of his face. Then – instead of walking all the way back down the platform and leaving the way he’d come in – the man turned into the first exit he reached, and disappeared.

  ‘Shit!’ said Eve.

  ‘Hard luck,’ said Banks, and pushed his chair back a little to indicate that the session was at an end. He picked up the ring binder, obviously itching to track down, and probably fire, the hapless Gary Bushman.

  ‘Don’t you have other cameras that might have tracked him elsewhere in the station?’

  Banks pursed his lips and looked pointedly at his watch. When Eve didn’t withdraw her request, he dropped the ring binder on to the counter top and ran rapidly through several other commands and cameras. White-tiled tunnels running to the left and the right, vaulted ceilings and archways and odd-angled corners. There were people, but they blurred past too fast for Eve to identify anyone. Only Banks had that skill, and his mind was already elsewhere. She longed to slow him down, to make him methodical, but she could only watch him go through the motions.

  There were no other shots of the man. None that they could spot in the whistle-stop digital tour of the station, anyway. The screen froze once again on the last shot of the dark figure just before he ducked out of sight.

  ‘That’s all,’ said Banks, and picked up the binder again. This time he stood up as well.

  ‘Could we have a copy?’ Eve asked.

  ‘Not from me,’ said Banks. ‘You would have to submit a request through the British Transport Police.’

  ‘Of course,’ she nodded, but needed more. ‘Could you do me a huge favour, Mr Banks, and zoom in on his face?’

  Banks sighed loudly. And when that
didn’t put her off, he tutted petulantly and said, ‘I can, but it won’t do any good.’

  He did, and it didn’t.

  Eve strained close to the screen, searching desperately for clues in the blurred face, the dark clothing, the shape, the walk. That vague feeling of recognition nagged at her and she was desperate for the key that might help to identify the man.

  But there was nothing to see but low-resolution anonymity.

  They walked to the office in the bitter cold, snow flurries hurting their faces.

  ‘How many bodies have we covered in the last couple of weeks?’

  Joe shrugged. ‘Five or six?’

  ‘Maybe we should go back to each of the scenes and see if we can find any more of those flyers.’

  ‘OK then. Where first? The cinema?’

  ‘Portman Square’s closer, where they found Siobhan Mackie.’

  Joe nodded. ‘OK.’

  Eve was glad they had something to do. The last thing she needed was to sit around thinking about Maddie Matthews until the next job came in. She gnawed her thumbnail – a bad habit she couldn’t break.

  As they waited to cross at lights she asked neutrally, ‘Did you watch the bit where she was hit by the train?’

  ‘No,’ he said after a moment. ‘I closed my eyes.’

  24

  THE BODY OF Siobhan Mackie had been found in the railed garden of Portman Square.

  They looked everywhere a flyer might have been. On trees and in litter bins and on the wooden backs of park benches.

  Eve was glad she’d worn her yeti boots. Here in the garden, away from the traffic of cars and people, the snow had grown to a depth of about a foot and – apart from a couple of yellow dog-pee patches around the gates – was largely undisturbed, and rather lovely.

  The square itself was quiet, and the garden quieter still – as if the wrought-iron railings were a deceptively effective sound barrier. Soon the only noise was of their feet on the crunchy snow, and their breathing.

  Even when they spoke, the sound was deadened. Instead of making them raise their voices, it made them aware of how loud they usually were, and they spoke only when necessary, and at librarian levels.

  The garden had been cleverly designed to hide the fine Georgian buildings that surrounded it, even in winter – to give the impression of isolation where it was impossible to come by. Near the centre of the square, Eve stopped and turned a slow circle. Here and there were glimpses of a roof, a window, an angle of guttering. But mostly the view was of an intricate network of gnarled black branches above waves of evergreen shrubbery, dolloped with snow.

  Even though Joe was circling a waste bin just ahead of her, Eve felt alone.

  They were not far from the shrubs that had hidden the body. Eve walked over there, trying to breathe less noisily so that she could enjoy the creaking, squeaking sound of her own weight compressing the crystals underfoot.

  Here, she thought.

  She stopped and bent.

  Yes. Here was where the body had been. Naked and on its back, and so paled by death that several people had already walked their dogs before one of them had spotted Siobhan Mackie in the snow and the shadows.

  She had been strangled, so Eve hadn’t been sick, but she remembered feeling desperately sorry for the corpse, which had lain here for hours after discovery before being moved, with only a thin white sheet for cover.

  Now there was nothing to mark the spot where the young woman had died. Or been dumped. The police hadn’t decided yet.

  At the opening of the inquest, Siobhan’s uncle had sat silently and with a photo of his smiling niece pinned to his lapel – his face so stricken that it looked as if someone had wrung it dry of every last tear.

  Eve turned. Joe was between benches.

  ‘Anything?’ she said quietly.

  ‘No,’ he murmured.

  He kept going – moving away from her – so she dropped to her knees and crawled into the shrubbery.

  If the garden felt remote from the city of London, the cavern under the evergreen bushes was like being in outer space. Almost all light disappeared in an instant, and the silence pressed so hard about her that Eve actually touched a palm to one ear, in case it was blocked by something physical.

  There was hardly any snow under here and the ground was dry, and Eve stayed on all fours while her eyes adjusted to the grey-green darkness.

  Slow shapes took form on the ground and she picked each one up and held it close to her face for identification.

  A cigarette packet showing diseased lungs, a Tube ticket from Ealing Broadway and a balled-up scrap of paper which she unfolded carefully, but which contained only a scribbled column of numbers and workings-out in pencil. The sum was wrong; they hadn’t carried the one.

  There wasn’t much else. All this would have arrived since Siobhan’s death, because the police had done a fingertip search of the whole square.

  Eve shuffled around on her hands and knees to face the garden, but instead of crawling out of the shrubbery again, she sat down and peered through the dappled gaps in the leaf cover.

  It was a dull day, with more snow in the leaden sky, but it looked unbearably white and bright out there beyond the cover of the bushes. She watched Joe checking benches and peering up trees. Moving in and out of her patchwork vision.

  Although it was cold, Eve liked it here. Liked the feeling of being separated from the world and yet still able to see what was going on. It was like watching her parents through a crack in the door, or other children from a window.

  Observing without being observed.

  Uninvolved.

  Being involved was exhausting. Involved with work, involved with her father, involved with Mr Elias and Mrs Solomon; involved with having to buy Christmas presents, which she still hadn’t started to do, and today was the twelfth!

  Eve felt a great calm come over her. She could stay here. Just stay here. Not for ever, but for a good long while. Until everything was … over.

  Easier.

  Until she felt rested and more able to cope with it all. All of life and death and everything in between.

  Yes, she would just stay here.

  She felt warmer. And a weight that had been on her chest lifted and allowed her to breathe the way that she used to. She hadn’t felt safe for a long, long time, but being in the bushes felt safe. She was glad Joe was nearby; she didn’t want to be alone – just uncommitted to interaction – and having him within sight was oddly comforting, even though he was in a world of his own and hadn’t even noticed that she had disappeared.

  As if he’d felt her thoughts, Joe backed out of a sprawling rhododendron, looked around the garden and called her name.

  ‘Eve?’

  The sound was short and dead. Eve didn’t answer.

  ‘Eve?’ He said it more loudly.

  It was silly of her not to answer him. Childish. She knew that, but still said nothing, safe in her dark-green bubble.

  ‘EVE!’ he shouted. But the snow captured the sound and sucked it out of the air so that it fell to the ground like a rock. Eve would have bet that the people in the surrounding houses would never have heard it.

  Just like they wouldn’t have heard Siobhan Mackie …

  Suddenly she didn’t feel safe here any more, and crawled so quickly from under the bushes that snow dumped itself in cold lumps on her head and back.

  ‘Joe!’ she called, and he turned and saw her.

  Even from across the garden, she could tell he was relieved to see her, and for some reason that made her feel warm inside.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me calling you?’ he said as she clumped towards him through pristine snow.

  ‘No,’ she lied. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  Eve stopped, a little breathless from wading through the white, and waved a thumb over her shoulder at the shrubbery. ‘I wondered if the police had missed something around the body.’

  ‘Find anything?’

&nbs
p; ‘No.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  He leaned in and brushed snow off the shoulders of her coat.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Eve.

  ‘How are those boots working out for you?’

  ‘Embarrassing,’ she said, ‘but warm.’

  ‘I hate to say I told you so.’

  Eve smiled faintly. ‘You love to say I told you so.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s right.’

  Then they stood there for a moment, reluctant to admit defeat, and reluctant to move in the beautiful silence.

  Joe finally said, ‘What about on the outside of the railings?’

  They went back through the gate and walked slowly around the entire square, looking for a flyer – or even a place where a flyer had been ripped down. Bits of string knotted around the railings, perhaps, or a corner of paper left under sticky tape.

  There was nothing.

  Once Eve slipped on ice and Joe caught her.

  They came back to their starting point at the phone box. It was an old-fashioned red one, like the one outside her own home, and Eve wondered whether Portman Square had its own version of Mr Elias, seeking a sense of community through a common relic, like a saint’s finger in a box.

  She pulled open the door and knew that if there were a Mr Elias on Portman Square, he was failing miserably. This phone box smelled of piss, for a start. Like the damp humanity of the rush-hour Tube train, it was a smell that seemed to come from a different time – an old-fashioned doorway smell of stale urine – and Eve felt a tweak of groundless pride that her phone box smelled only of lavender air-freshener.

  Also, the money box of this phone had been scratched and hammered and there were business cards stuck all over the dialling-information wall – cards advertising cheap Viagra and cheap blow jobs – apparently presuming the cheap Viagra worked.

  But there was nothing advertising any kind of exhibition, unless you counted the countless little photos of medicine-ball tits and Kardashian arses.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Eve.

  Joe pointed at the cards and deadpanned, ‘So you don’t think any of these people could be the killer?’

  ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘And Siobhan Mackie’s probably not one of our killer’s victims.’