The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  Now and then Huw Rees murmured into a concealed radio, but otherwise she would never have guessed that there were twenty-odd people in the audience who were there solely to catch a serial killer.

  She felt Rees tense beside her as Mercutio was killed, but the cast seemed unperturbed, and they got to the interval without incident.

  David Fallon was sweating like a warm choc-ice.

  He could barely believe what was happening, right here in the Barnstormer off Shaftesbury Avenue.

  Once the police had arrived and told him what was going on, he’d wanted to cancel the performance, but Detective Superintendent Rees had assured him that they were throwing everything at the operation to catch a killer and that his cooperation would be greatly appreciated.

  There’d been something in the man’s manner that had made David understand that while his cooperation would be greatly appreciated, it was by no means essential.

  ‘Well,’ he’d conceded at last, ‘I suppose the show must go on.’

  And it had.

  And was halfway through, without incident.

  The audience were doing what audiences normally did during any interval – queuing for the loo and for sweets, picking up the drinks they’d pre-ordered from the bar.

  Milling about.

  With any luck, if the man the police were seeking had come tonight, he would have caught wind of the police operation and left already, or put his plans on hold for another night. And another theatre, hopefully.

  David sighed. He assumed he would look back on all this and laugh. But right now, he felt like a cigarette, and he had not felt like a cigarette for nearly fifteen years.

  There was a small gaggle of people standing on the steps outside the front doors, all dressed up and smoking roll-ups like hoods. He wondered if he could cadge a smoke off one of them, like a fifteen-year-old kid outside a newsagent’s.

  The bell rang for the second half and he was grateful for the distraction from the growing need for a cigarette – even if that distraction was the possibility of murder.

  Nothing was going to happen.

  Eve felt herself relaxing as every familiar line of the play was delivered, and every twist twirled towards the foregone conclusion.

  Joe yawned audibly next to her and she jabbed him with her elbow, then yawned herself in sympathy.

  The climax of the play came with Romeo finding Juliet apparently dead on a slab, and drinking poison to join his love in the afterlife. Whereupon she would wake up and kill herself too.

  Of course she would, thought Eve tetchily. It was all so contrived and predictable. Although probably not quite so much when it was written, nearly five hundred years ago, she grudgingly conceded.

  But here and now she felt it was an embarrassing cliché to watch a grown man pretend to drink poison and pretend to choke and pretend to go blue.

  Actually, he was going blue.

  Even from here she could see that Romeo was quite the method actor.

  But when Juliet rose from the dead and started thumping his back—

  DS Rees was the first person to move. He said nothing. One moment he was standing beside her, and the next he was running full-pelt down the carpeted aisle and flying on to the stage like some kind of musketeer.

  Eve gasped and turned to Joe, who already had his camera out of his bag.

  ‘Hurry!’ she said.

  He did, and was filming even as he walked quickly and smoothly towards the action.

  On-stage, Juliet was saying, ‘There’s something wrong. That’s not supposed to happen,’ while Romeo clutched at his throat and croaked and choked. Huw Rees grabbed him from behind and DI Marr’s shiny head made a dramatic entrance, stage left, for a brief but dazzling moment in the West End spotlight.

  The audience sat, buzzing with concern, while several people stood and craned to see what was happening. Some – the police officers, Eve imagined – scanned the audience rather than the stage for clues and threats, while others stood tensely in front of each exit.

  She didn’t know where to go, so she stayed put, with apprehension rising in her gut. She was used to arriving at a crime scene after the crime had taken place. This was so different, and the excitement and fear were palpable. She had a good view of the whole auditorium from this little rise at the back. Ready to see the whole drama unfold.

  But instead of unfolding, it folded.

  Huw Rees embraced Romeo and performed the Heimlich manoeuvre and something hit the scenery with a plunk, followed by the sound of Romeo sucking in a huge breath.

  The audience sighed in loud relief and broke into warm applause, while Rees spoke quietly to the actor, and patted him on the back. Averting a crisis, even though it wasn’t the crisis they’d been expecting.

  Then he jumped off the stage – and made DI Marr get down too – leaving Romeo to explain to the audience that he’d been so keen to kill himself that he’d swallowed the cork.

  There was a ripple of laughter and another round of applause, and people slowly took their seats again for the two minutes of anti-climax that the play had left.

  Joe rolled his eyes at Eve as he approached.

  Before she could say anything to him, Mr Fallon rushed past them both, muttering, ‘I need a cigarette,’ then disappeared into the lobby.

  David Fallon really needed that cigarette now. For a moment he had truly believed he was watching a murder on-stage, and the relief that it had not been so had made him shake.

  He asked old Eric for a pack, but they didn’t sell cigarettes any more. Luckily Eric was a smoker himself, which was a hell of an advertisement for the vice, when you thought about it – an eighty-year-old smoker still in employment and compos mentis enough to be handling money.

  ‘Thirty a day for sixty-five years,’ Eric said proudly as he handed David a Lambert & Butler and a box of Swan Vestas.

  David stepped out of the glass lobby doors on to the steps of the theatre, only to find that the tramp was back.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he snapped. ‘What are you doing here?’

  He turned to call a copper to have the man removed for the second time that night.

  But as he did, an arm snaked around his neck, and squeezed.

  So tight and so perfectly positioned against the carotid sinuses that David Fallon never even raised his own dangling arms to try to break the hold.

  In a strange, calm kind of shock, he felt the cigarette and the matches fall from his hand, and in some distant universe he even heard them hit the steps. In the brightly lit lobby through the glass doors he could see old Eric restocking the sweets, as his knees folded slowly under his body, and a man of great strength laid him down tenderly on the cardboard floor – right there on the top step of the Barnstormer Theatre.

  Lips against his ear whispered, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

  Even through the cardboard, David Fallon felt the icy cold of granite and death, and he looked up dumbly – beautifully – into the face of the tramp. And finally, as his eyes rolled back, at the flyer somebody had stuck on the wall over his head.

  EXHIBITION …

  The press release went out in the early hours of the morning, too late for newspaper deadlines and so early that by the time the day shift started it was already falling down the electronic news queues.

  The release itself was so parched that it would have taken a psychic to guess that anything juicy lay behind the body found in an area swarming with the homeless, the addicted and the transient. Any half-decent reporter would have known at a glance that the victim was unlikely to be anyone real …

  Metropolitan Police are investigating after a 47-year-old man was found dead outside the Barnstormer Theatre, off Shaftesbury Avenue, last night.

  They are appealing for witnesses.

  The police did not release a name. They did not say that the victim was the manager of the theatre. They did not say that he had been murdered under a flyer that advertised his death like a Coming Attraction. And they sure as shit did no
t say that the crime had been committed right under the noses of twenty-five supposedly crack murder-team officers who were in attendance specifically because they had been warned that someone would be murdered at the theatre that very night …

  But had missed it.

  And so the sad passing of David Fallon was barely and briefly reported, and by the morning bulletins he had been bumped out of the news completely by a cyclist under a bus in the City, and a drive-by shooting in Peckham.

  Nobody fed his cat.

  29

  DAVID FALLON’S EYES turned to heaven as he was laid down on the step. The man’s hand clutching his forearm loosened, and opened like a flower.

  The killer’s chest thumped, and he touched his scar and smiled.

  Only death made him feel alive.

  And how strange that the bastard heart that had threatened for so long to kill him had finally shown him the way to live.

  Selfishly.

  The fire dimmed and he got up to feed it. He was always surprised by how many paintings he’d done. And all of them pointless. He took one at random from a stack and shook his head. He must have been fourteen or fifteen when he’d copied it from a book. Caravaggio’s Thomas the Doubter: the wizened disciple with his finger in the side of Christ. Except in his version the wound was over Christ’s heart, and Thomas’s hand was in him up to the wrist …

  At some point he must have thought it meaningful.

  It was not meaningful. It was risible.

  The killer gave a short, dry bark of disdain and tossed the painting on to the fire.

  He had fancied himself a painter. Money didn’t matter to him, of course, but he’d understood that money was how his work would be gauged by generations to come, and had craved the recognition that would let him be lauded.

  Applauded.

  Barely afforded.

  But it hadn’t happened.

  At the time it had crushed him. Humiliated him. Nearly destroyed him. But now he knew that painting was a pitiful handmaiden to his real talent.

  The pioneers of art had stolen corpses for their anatomy lessons. They’d risked censure, heresy, prison, to learn about the beauty within. They’d known that the law was an ass – and a philistine to boot.

  And then they had flinched!

  They had closed up their corpses and continued to show only the surface of their fathomless subjects.

  Picasso and Da Vinci and Rembrandt had daubed a crude approximation of life.

  They were mere painters: he was an artist!

  Only he had ever dared to mould life into death – and back – in a transformation that was so fundamental that the world could not yet appreciate his genius.

  No wonder he was misunderstood! The law sought to protect its own petty boundaries. It took a visionary – a seer – to discover new worlds, to open eyes to extreme possibilities. Where he led, others would follow. All a master needed was disciples to spread his word.

  And Eve Singer was his disciple.

  From their very first meeting, he had known she was special. They had a connection. She understood him. And, more importantly, she understood his work, and had amply demonstrated her desire and ability to share it with the world.

  And that was how the generations would learn his name, and remember it long after he was gone.

  His victims bought him time.

  His art would bring him immortality …

  The killer halted the recording of the death of David Fallon and turned on iWitness News.

  But the midnight bulletin came and went without any mention of the performance at the Barnstormer Theatre.

  30

  15 December

  EVE STRETCHED.

  It was gone midnight and she hadn’t meant to stay so late, but she’d needed some privacy before running through the theatre footage on her computer. There were at least four members of the night news team around somewhere, but right now the big newsroom was empty, and she worked quickly.

  She could only hope that by the time he found out what was going on, Ross Tobin would be mollified by the spectacular background package she and Joe were putting together. It was so good that it could be more than just news. A chilling retrospective of a warped mind who had advertised his crimes and cut a bloody swathe through London. An hour-long documentary they could sell to Channel 4, maybe.

  Her ticket off the meat beat?

  Despite that sunny hope, reviewing the footage was a sad task. It seemed that Mr Fallon had lived alone and neither the police nor his colleagues at the theatre knew how to get in touch with any family he might have had. The only interview she’d got so far was from one of the ushers – a drama student who had shown off so appallingly at the sight of a TV camera that she’d had to tick him off like a mother.

  This is not about you, Rafael, so take it down a notch or ten.

  Even after her warning, Rafael had put on a scene-chewing performance that included everything but jazz hands.

  She sighed. Poor Mr Fallon. He’d seemed so nervous about everything – the police presence, the play starting on time, the dicky ice-cream freezer …

  Nervous about everything, in fact, except being murdered.

  That was a blessing, at least. Eve thought that knowing you were about to die must be the most paralysing, terrifying thing that could happen to a person. She wondered what thoughts had exploded in Mr Fallon’s head when he’d realized. Or Layla Martin’s, or Maddie Matthews’. The only victim who seemed to have escaped the foreknowledge of his own death was Kevin Barr, and Stan Reddy had told her that he was an arse, which didn’t seem fair.

  Maddie Matthews.

  Every time the name passed through Eve’s mind, it left a trail of images and horror and guilt behind it like bloody bunting. Eve had to keep working, had to keep moving, to avoid thinking of Maddie, and the man who had killed her.

  A man who had her phone number.

  I am a friend, and come not to punish.

  The words niggled at Eve. At the time she’d just snapped at the man. Tetchily. Intent on hiding the truth about her father. But the words were vaguely familiar and had stuck in her brain like a burr.

  She googled them.

  It was a poem. ‘Death and the Maiden’. She must have read it at school.

  Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender form!

  I am a friend, and come not to punish.

  Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,

  Softly shall you sleep in my arms!

  Softly shall you sleep in my arms. The words were a lure. It would be so nice to sleep softly in the arms of somebody who loved her.

  But there were pictures too – paintings and woodcuts of grinning Death seducing the Maiden.

  Eve shivered and stood up. She’d get a coffee. She’d walk down the corridor and get a coffee and think about walking and corridors and coffee, and not pink ski jackets and a hand in a glove under a splat of blood …

  Now she was standing, Eve could see that there was somebody else in the newsroom. Way off and nearly hidden by his computer screen.

  Gary Someone. He did something in Sport and Eve barely knew him.

  The newsroom was creepy at night. She’d never noticed that before. Suddenly, being in a vast, near-empty office made her think of Layla Martin. Was this how her end had begun? With a lone colleague across an empty room? Someone she thought she could trust, just because they got a pay cheque from the same organization?

  Eve picked up her purse and left the room.

  Then she stood outside the double doors for a moment, peering back through the small porthole to see whether he was getting up to follow her.

  He wasn’t.

  Of course he wasn’t. He was Gary Someone from Sport, not an insane murderer.

  ‘Idiot,’ she scolded herself, and went to get a coffee.

  For some reason nobody had ever explained, the closest coffee machine was in a dim alcove, three long corridors and two sets of fire doors away from the newsroom. They used to kee
p kettles on their desks, but the company had called down some Health and Safety bullshit and now if they wanted a coffee at work they had to pay iWitness News 50p a time for half a paper cupful of bitterness. The tea was marginally better, but only because tea was less interesting to start with, so there was commensurately less of a gulf between expectation and disappointment.

  Eve had never thought before about the distance between the newsroom and the coffee machine. Now – as she pushed through the second set of swing doors – she thought of little else.

  To take her mind off it, she thought of all the stuff she had to do before Christmas.

  Only everything!

  She still had to do the Christmas shopping – both gifts and food. And she hadn’t decorated the tree yet. The lights were in a bundle on the living-room floor where Duncan had left them, and the baubles and tinsel were still in the box in the front room, where she’d left it the other day.

  The day her father had punched her in the face.

  Mentally she glossed over that.

  She must sort out the tree. Christmas without a pretty tree was a miserable place to be. And she would buy chicken, not turkey, because her father was less likely to choke on it.

  She wondered whether she should ask Joe to Christmas lunch, but immediately discounted the idea. She wouldn’t inflict her father and her tension on anyone at any time, let alone Christmas Day.

  Maybe she’d buy another bottle of Advocaat to keep her company. Get pissed all by herself over the sprouts … Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas, Nobody!

  She sighed and wished it were January, then put 50p in the machine and asked for tea.

  It said it was out of tea, which was ridiculous, but she pressed ‘Tea’ three times and got the same dumb answer. So she pressed the button for what the machine grandly called ‘Cappuccino’, which was exactly the same as what it called ‘Americano with milk’ except that it looked as if someone had also spat in it.

  The machine rumbled like a bad day at Three Mile Island, and cappuccino sputtered angrily into the wobbly cup.