The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘Why not?’

  It started to snow again and they both shuffled into the shelter of the phone box, squashed in there, toe-to-toe. The smell of pee was even stronger now and Eve felt an unexpected surge of affection for Mr Elias. He was doing a grand job.

  Still, it was not unpleasant to be crammed into a tight space with Joe. He smelled good, at least. Faintly of leather and soap.

  ‘Why not?’ he said again.

  Eve remembered what she’d been talking about.

  ‘Siobhan was killed overnight. Nobody saw it and nobody heard it. And her body was hidden. Not well hidden, admittedly, but hidden anyway. It’s hardly a show, is it? I mean, if that’s what our lunatic likes.’

  Joe nodded and absently eyed the wall of boobs and booty over her head.

  ‘Like some people like having sex in public,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Eve, and glanced at the cards. ‘You ever done that?’

  Joe snorted. ‘I’ve barely had sex in private.’

  She laughed. ‘I find that hard to believe.’

  Joe just smiled and shrugged, and Eve turned to stare out of the dirty glass panels at the garden beyond the railings.

  ‘Could it have been a trial run?’ she said. ‘Like a warm-up murder?’

  Joe nodded. ‘Or something unintentional that became murder, so he wasn’t really prepared for it, but then he liked it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Eve. Then she shook her head and looked around the square. ‘It just doesn’t feel right that the body was hidden.’

  ‘And there’s no flyer.’

  Eve nodded, relieved. A flyer would have meant that the man on the phone was almost certainly the killer. A killer whose idea of a social overture was pushing a thirteen-year-old girl under a train. She hoped they never found another flyer, and not finding one here was a start.

  Using his back, Joe pushed open the phone-box door. ‘Next?’ he said.

  ‘Next,’ said Eve.

  As she left the box, she pulled one of the whores’ cards off the wall and handed it to Joe.

  ‘Don’t say I never give you nothin’.’

  The skinny, spotty boy-manager of the Everyman Cinema, who had baulked at helping them before, was called Charlie Mazurski, and he was a lot more accommodating now he was sure that a patron being slaughtered like a pig in Screen Two was not going to reflect badly on him.

  ‘I mean,’ he told them in the red-carpeted lobby, ‘you should see the paperwork we have to fill in for Health and Safety if someone even stubs their toe. When I found out someone had been stabbed I was like, Oh my God this is bad! And then when they were dead I was like, Oh my GOD I am so FIRED! But Head Office was OK about it. They said I didn’t even have to inform Health and Safety, only the police, thank God.’

  ‘You ever had anything like this happen before?’ Eve asked, more out of natural curiosity than any job-related interest.

  ‘Not murder,’ he said. ‘But we once had a very large lady fall on someone when she went out to get ice cream. She broke his arm and then got stuck under the seats.’ He giggled, then flapped a hand in front of his face. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, but it was funny. Because when the firemen finally picked her up, she had rum and raisin melted all down her front and the little wooden spoon – you know, the little ice-cream spoon? – was stuck to her face right here.’

  He poked a finger at his own eyebrow, then giggled and flapped again.

  Eve laughed with him, then said, ‘So could we have a quick look around then, Mr Mazurski?’

  ‘I suppose it can’t hurt,’ he said a little doubtfully. ‘But I’ll have to ask you to buy a ticket. That way you’re officially customers and we’re covered by insurance if something happens to you. If I just let you in for free and you slip on the toilet floor or get your hand stuck in a litter bin or something, then I’m personally responsible, you see?’

  ‘I see,’ said Eve. ‘I had no idea going to the cinema was so fraught with danger.’

  ‘Neither did that bloke who got a knife in the neck,’ he said sombrely.

  ‘Fair point,’ said Eve, and followed the young manager to the ticket counter and got out her purse.

  ‘Would you like premium seats?’

  Eve laughed, but he was being serious. She sighed and bought two premium tickets – £25 each – for seats they weren’t going to sit in and a movie they weren’t going to watch.

  ‘Which screen did it happen in?’

  ‘Screen Two,’ said Mazurski.

  Regardless of the macabre circumstances of their visit, Eve couldn’t help feeling a childlike excitement as they went up the escalator and into the lesser light of the area where the doors to the screens and toilets were. She hadn’t been to the cinema for ages, and the dimming light and the smell of stale popcorn was like time travel.

  ‘I haven’t been to the movies since Titanic,’ she muttered.

  ‘Nineteen-twelve?’ said Joe. ‘That is a long time.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  This second lobby was lined with lighted posters of coming attractions – none of them sullied by a flyer advertising an exhibition.

  They ventured into Screen Two. It was dark and noisy, and there was no point in stumbling about, so they just peered around the entryway for a white square on the black walls, and left again.

  ‘No wonder he chose this movie,’ said Joe, pointing at his ears. ‘Great cover for a killing.’

  ‘They should put that on the poster,’ said Eve. ‘Loud enough to kill by.’

  They stood for a moment, at a loss as to what to do next.

  ‘What about the loos?’ said Eve.

  ‘Might as well get our money’s worth,’ said Joe.

  Eve went into the Ladies, her eyes raking the tiled walls. She walked down between the cubicles, looking behind every door, not expecting to find anything more than adverts for rape helplines and bladder problems. This was the ladies’ loo, after all – she doubted a man would walk in here to put up a flyer when he could easily put one up in the Gents without attracting any attention.

  She and Joe emerged from the toilets at the same time, like wooden folk in a Bavarian clock.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nope.’ He looked down at his ticket. ‘Let’s watch a movie.’

  Eve gave him a sideways look. ‘After this, I don’t think I’ll ever go to the movies again!’

  He grinned. ‘We could always sit in the back row …’

  Eve cocked a sceptical eyebrow at him. ‘Nice try.’ Then she said, ‘Hey, did you look behind the cubicle doors?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Joe.

  ‘What were you doing in there?’ said Eve impatiently. ‘Come on.’

  She bustled him back into the men’s room.

  ‘Hey!’ Joe protested. ‘What if someone comes in?’

  ‘Well, hurry up and they won’t.’ She started down the row of toilet cubicles.

  ‘That makes no sense,’ said Joe, starting more slowly down the facing row.

  ‘Yes it does,’ said Eve. ‘The—Oh my God.’

  ‘What?’

  But Eve couldn’t speak. Suddenly she didn’t have the energy. Every bit of life seemed to have drained from her in an instant, and her throat clogged with guilt.

  All she could do was point to the back of the door.

  There, pasted over an erectile-dysfunction poster, was a cheap flyer:

  EXHIBITION

  Venue: Here

  Date: December 4

  Time: 21.30

  The same font. The same paper.

  They were the same …

  25

  13 December

  UNDER SCAFFOLDING POLES and the glare of portable halogen spotlights, a team of forensics officers scraped carefully at the hoarding alongside the building where Layla Martin had died.

  Bill-posters had made good use of the twenty yards of painted chipboard and there were hundreds of flyers stuck all over it, although – united in irony – they had left careful space around each
stencilled warning to POST NO BILLS HERE.

  The only other light now came from the shop windows and the Christmas decorations, and the street was packed with thousands of shoppers. The closer it got to Christmas, the more urgently they pushed past each other and the more panicked their expressions became. Watching from a café across the street, Eve’s view of the police operation at the hoarding was like watching a flicker book.

  She had told them everything. The flyers, the man calling her name at Piccadilly Underground, the phone call … Superintendent Huw Rees had listened, expressionless.

  ‘I should have told you sooner,’ Eve had admitted. ‘But it sounded unbelievable.’

  ‘It still does,’ Rees had shrugged. ‘But let’s see what we find.’

  And so this painstaking search had begun.

  ‘I got you a different cake.’

  Eve looked down at the cake Joe had brought her along with the coffees. It was the second cake he’d bought her since they’d sat down in the window of the café. The first was untouched, too. This fresh cake was chocolate, which was her favourite, but the thought of eating it made her mouth go dry. She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  She hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday. Not since they’d found the flyer in the cinema where Kevin Barr’s head had been separated from his spinal column with a deft knife. Not since she’d accepted that Maddie Matthews had died because of her …

  We’re in it together now, Eve.

  She thought she might never eat again. There didn’t seem to be anything left inside her to nourish. She sipped the coffee, and felt it drop into a cavity so large that it grumbled at the vast emptiness.

  Joe took her hand in both of his. ‘You going to be OK?’

  ‘I feel like shit,’ she said, and he nodded. Eve liked that about Joe. He never tried to cheer her up when there was no point. There was nothing more annoying than somebody trying to jolly you out of a justifiable slump.

  ‘You need to snap out of it,’ he said, and she barked a short laugh.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Seriously, Eve,’ he went on. ‘You fucked up, and nothing can change that—’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You’re helping.’

  ‘I am helping,’ he insisted. ‘And so are you. You’re helping by going to the police, so they can catch him before anybody else is killed. It’s the right thing to do. It could save other lives. But you’re the only person who’s had contact with the killer, and that’s critical. So you need to be thinking about what you might change, not what you can’t, and to do that you need to be thinking objectively, so you have to snap out of self-pity mode.’

  ‘It’s not self-pity!’ she bristled. ‘It’s just pity! For Maddie Matthews.’

  ‘Well, it’s not helping her family. It’s not helping the cops. It’s not even helping you. So just stop it.’

  Eve glared at him. ‘You’re always so bloody right,’ she said. ‘And I was enjoying a wallow.’

  ‘It doesn’t suit you,’ he shrugged. ‘Can I have your cake?’

  ‘Not the chocolate one.’

  He smiled and started on the lemon tart.

  Eve’s empty mind began to creak slowly back into action. Getting the story was no longer important. Joe was right – catching the killer was the priority now, and she needed to be sharp if she was going to be helpful – if she was going to make some small amends.

  She cut the nose off the chocolate cake.

  ‘What are we going to tell Ross?’ said Joe with his mouth full.

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Eve firmly – and felt better already.

  Her phone buzzed on the table between them and she picked it up.

  ‘Get over here,’ said DS Rees. ‘We found it.’

  ‘My God,’ breathed Eve.

  The three of them stood and looked at the flyer. Whatever had been pasted over it still clung to it in bitty red fragments, but there was no mistaking the remnants underneath:

  EXHIBITION

  Venue: Here

  Date: December 1

  Time: 10.00

  ‘The day Layla Martin died,’ Eve said softly.

  It shook her to think of how very un-random that murder seemed now. Not only had somebody planned it, but they had advertised it like a car-boot sale or a sideshow.

  Roll up, roll up! Come see the brutal slaying!

  Unexpected tears pricked her eyes. Layla Martin, who was twenty-four and would never be twenty-five. Eve wondered whether Layla had always been the target, or whether the killer simply knew how to get into the building and hoped to find somebody alone there. Maybe he had been there before – roaming the floors, riding the lifts, waiting for a victim to present herself.

  And if Layla Martin had been the intended target, how long had he watched her? Had she been aware of being watched? Had she been concerned? Had she told her girlfriends about it over a Pinot Grigio after work? Or had she never even noticed the man who watched her from across the road, across the Tube, across her own office? Could it have been someone she knew so well that such attention might have passed entirely under her radar?

  Eve wanted to slip her hand into Joe’s. To feel that she was safe and anchored to somebody sane. But of course she didn’t do it.

  Rees turned to her and said bluntly, ‘We want a news blackout on the flyers.’

  ‘By lunchtime every copper in London will be looking out for them, but if we publicize them there’ll be mayhem. Panic on the streets.’

  Eve gave him a sceptical look. ‘Give people credit for some intelligence, Huw.’

  Rees shook his head grimly. ‘I give people credit for no intelligence. Also, if this is the man who killed Layla Martin, I don’t want to give the bastard the publicity he wants, or risk a copycat muddying the waters.’

  Eve thought fast. Whatever Huw Rees said, the police could only ask for, not enforce, a news blackout – and that gave her leverage.

  ‘You’re asking us to give up an exclusive, Huw.’

  ‘In the interests of public safety,’ he said.

  Eve frowned at Joe.

  ‘Ross will never go for it,’ Joe said.

  ‘Not unless we can get guarantees,’ mused Eve.

  ‘What kind of guarantees?’ said Rees suspiciously.

  ‘Even if we can’t use them right now, the flyers are our exclusive and have to stay that way. They mustn’t be leaked to any other journalist.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And we get an exclusive call every time you find one.’

  ‘What’s the point of that if you’re not going to use them?’ said Rees suspiciously.

  ‘Backgrounder,’ said Eve. ‘When you catch and convict this bastard, we’ll have every cough and spit on camera. We’ll be miles ahead of the opposition.’

  Rees nodded reluctantly. ‘OK.’

  ‘And a credit.’

  ‘A credit?’

  ‘Yes. If you get a conviction because of the evidence we’ve brought you, we want a credit. A named credit.’

  ‘iWitness News?’ said Rees.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Me and Joe. We get a public thank-you for the part we played, right there outside the court.’

  Rees gave her a stony look and Eve knew she was pushing her luck. The police got so little credit that it was almost cruel to ask them to share it.

  ‘We want the same thing, Huw,’ she said, and shivered a little as she heard the killer’s words echo from her mouth.

  They didn’t want the same thing exactly. But they were over the same barrel, and Eve knew it. If Huw Rees wanted the blackout on the flyers, he would give her this. Because otherwise, the next time the killer called her, how could Rees be sure that Eve would call him …?

  He couldn’t.

  ‘This is all assuming we catch him,’ he said grumpily.

  ‘He tells you where and when he’s going to strike next,’ said Eve. ‘How hard can he be to catch?’

  ‘Ha ha
,’ he said mirthlessly. Then he sighed and said, ‘All right, you’ve got a deal.’

  ‘What deal?’ By horrible magic, Guy Smith appeared at Eve’s elbow. ‘What deal?’ he repeated. ‘How come she gets a deal and I don’t? What’s going on here? And ohmyGod, what the fuck happened to your face?’ Then he sneezed messily three times and wiped his nose on a coffee-shop napkin.

  ‘Fucking cold,’ he said, then repeated, ‘What deal?’

  Eve stared blankly at Huw Rees, unable to think further than the exhibition flyer behind his left shoulder. The flyer that was right in her eyeline – right in Guy’s eyeline. A police officer was starting to dig at its edges with a scraper.

  EXHIBITIO—

  ‘It’s not a deal you’d be interested in,’ said Rees smoothly.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Guy. ‘Try me.’

  Rees sighed and Eve wanted to shout and clap a hand over his mouth—

  ‘Royal baby,’ he said. ‘I got Alfred, she got Charles.’

  Eve was impressed. She’d had no idea the detective superintendent was such an accomplished liar.

  ‘I got Samuel,’ Joe piped up, and Guy pulled a face at him. ‘What? Samuel’s a Jewish name! They’re not going to call it something Jewish, are they? Bloody hell, have some sense!’

  ‘But I got a fiver on at 100–1,’ said Joe doubtfully.

  Guy snorted. ‘Idiot.’ Then he turned back to Huw Rees. Back to the flyer …

  ‘So what’s all this then, Huw? Bit of a community clean-up to keep the team busy?’

  Eve held her breath. The flyer was disappearing, but painfully slowly.

  EXHIBI—

  ‘There was an assault here this afternoon,’ lied Rees again. ‘Not much, but a knife was involved, so given the proximity to the crime scene we thought we’d check for DNA.’

  ‘With paint scrapers?’ said Guy. ‘Not exactly CSI Miami, is it?’

  ‘I didn’t realize you were an expert,’ said Rees sharply.

  ‘You want Veronica Creed on that,’ said Guy. ‘Not 60 Minute Makeover.’

  ‘Just fuck off,’ snapped Rees. ‘I’ve had a long day and you bloody people don’t make it any easier.’