The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  Out of nowhere Eve sneezed four times, rapidly, then stood, nose tingling, waiting for a fifth. It didn’t come, but she cursed Guy Smith under her breath. All she needed was his stinking cold. She dabbed at her nose and winced at the pain. It was probably broken.

  The machine beeped to let her know her half-cup was ready. As she picked it up, there was the smallest squeak behind her.

  Unmistakeable.

  Shoe on linoleum—

  Eve jerked around and threw the coffee in Ross Tobin’s face.

  He yelped in pain.

  ‘Don’t sneak up on me!’ yelled Eve. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he said, dabbing his eyes with the tail of his shirt. ‘I think you stripped my corneas.’

  ‘Good!’ she shouted. ‘That’s fifty pence well spent!’

  Then she hurled the cup at the overflowing bin and stormed back to the newsroom, where her phone was vibrating slowly towards the edge of her desk.

  She snatched it up and snapped, ‘Yes? What?’

  ‘I’m disappointed in you, Eve.’

  She flinched and looked nervously up and down the newsroom, as if the killer might appear from any dim corner.

  She made an effort to breathe. Tried to calm her racing heart.

  ‘Why didn’t you review my performance tonight?’

  She hesitated. ‘There’s a news blackout. Nobody’s allowed to report your crimes.’

  She held her breath.

  ‘You don’t need police permission to do your job, Eve. I don’t like it when you lie to me.’ His voice was patient. It was the voice of a father, a teacher, a priest – and she blushed to have been caught lying.

  To a murderer!

  Ridiculous!

  ‘I don’t care what you like,’ she snapped. ‘Nobody gives a shit what you like when you murder people!’

  ‘What I do is not murder,’ he said calmly. ‘It is art! In life, my models are nothing. They’re nobodies. But in death, they’re photographed and documented and pampered like pharaohs; teams of detectives think about them day and night; their passing is reported on TV and in newspapers; their families are venerated; the nation awaits an outcome to their story; their unknown names are on a million lips—’

  ‘Models pose for artists,’ said Eve. ‘They don’t die for them.’

  ‘You’re right! They don’t die. My art makes them immortal!’ He laughed. ‘That is why the Mona Lisa smiles, Eve, because she knows that she will endure a hundred years, a thousand, a million. Would she not have been lucky to pay the Master’s price? A single piffling death, when death is where all the pain and the confusion of life simply stops … And all that is left is the calm embrace of inevitable fate.’

  His voice was hypnotic.

  Seductive.

  Eve felt light-headed.

  The calm embrace of inevitable fate.

  ‘There’s no shame in it, Eve,’ he said. ‘Where is the harm in wanting somebody dead, when dying is so beautiful?’

  Eve blinked. He sounded so …

  What?

  Had she been about to think, logical?

  ‘Fuck you!’ she shouted in shock. ‘FUCK YOU!’ Her heart pounded wildly, pumping guilt and fury. ‘If dying’s so wonderful, why don’t you kill yourself and do us all a favour? You want to murder people? Go right ahead! But don’t try to make me part of your sick mission!’

  She hung up.

  She didn’t know whether to panic or to laugh. She did a little of both.

  She had just hung up on a serial killer!

  She stared at the phone.

  Call ended.

  I did that, she thought. I did that, and it was EASY.

  Then she shivered. He’d almost had her. He’d almost seduced her into thinking like him. It made Eve feel ill to remember that warm, dizzy feeling of surrender. Of how sane his madness had sounded to her exhausted ears.

  But he hadn’t got her. This time she’d won. Tonight she had stolen the killer’s audience – and with it his power.

  Joe would be so proud of her!

  31

  THE KILLER HAD no table, so he wrote on his knees, a poor painting after Caravaggio serving as a desk.

  My Maiden has had a crisis of faith.

  It is in her nature to question, to explore.

  To doubt.

  The killer was not an angry person, but he underlined doubt. More than once. Thickly and with increasing intent, until the paper broke open and wounded the next page, and the page after that, and the page after that …

  So hard that his hand cramped.

  He relieved the pressure with an apt accompaniment of escaping air from between his clenched teeth, then turned the pages of the A4 notebook, one by careful one. By the fifth page there was no trace of the line. On each of the preceding four pages, he drew a careful box around the inky indentation so that he would not write over it in error, which might lead to a possible future misreading of his copperplate words. Any confusion of history would be a tragedy. Like Newton’s Principia Mathematica with a coffee ring hiding its most elegant equation; the Theory of Relativity, corner-chewed by a puppy.

  How perfectly she trusted me when I had come to claim her. Now she doubts like Thomas, who would not be convinced by the face or the form of the undead Christ, until he opened the Roman wound with his own finger, and touched the flesh that restored a ghost to a man.

  He laid down the pen and his hand moved to his chest without conscious thought.

  All was quiet there.

  One nail worried the edge of the scar, but it had become a stark white ridge that wormed down his chest like the Andes. It would take more than a fingernail now to open it to reveal the truth within: the traitorous heart ticking down the systolic seconds to his own death.

  He mustn’t think about it. He was doing all he could.

  He let his hand drop from his chest and looked across the ballroom.

  He had left the washing machine on the floor, and it was still there now, arranged in a careful square, twenty feet across.

  It always revived him, just as each death did.

  Often, he would pad carefully among its innards, its utilitarian splendour. Now and then he’d polish a casing or adjust the alignment of a motor.

  Nudge a bolt.

  He flexed his long white fingers, then bent once more over the stolen notebook.

  So let her worry her morals like Catholic beads.

  Let her demand a finger in the side of her master.

  Let her doubt.

  I will convince her.

  32

  16 December

  EVE WAS WOKEN by the bang of a kitchen cupboard. She knew what it was before her eyes even opened, and was out of bed in an instant.

  She glanced at her phone. 03.33.

  She crept downstairs, stepping over the creaks. There was a light in the kitchen.

  She hesitated, then detoured into the front room and picked up the poker from beside the fake-flame gas fire. Munchkin stood on his hind legs, gripping the bars of his cage in the excitement of watching another inmate making a break for it, even if it wasn’t him.

  Eve went gingerly back through the hallway, controlling her breathing, testing the weight of the poker in her hand. Terrified that her beating heart would give her away as it thundered in the darkness.

  Her father was in the kitchen, making a sandwich.

  Cheese and pickle.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  He looked up and smiled. ‘Hello, Evie,’ he said.

  Eve’s heart snagged on a happy nail.

  He knew her!

  He knew her and he knew her name!

  ‘Dad …’ She brushed sudden tears off her cheeks, but more came, and more, until she didn’t bother wiping them away any more – just pulled up a chair and sat down and watched him through a pretty salt kaleidoscope.

  Duncan Singer did everything right, knew where everything was. The bread, the butter, the cheese, the pickle. After three years of
putting the milk away outside the back door and stowing bread in the sink, each element of this sandwich was fetched quickly and efficiently from its rightful place and returned there after use.

  Duncan Singer even looked up now and then to smile at his daughter.

  Eve didn’t say a thing. Didn’t want to break whatever gossamer thread was tethering him to this brief reality.

  ‘Want one?’ he said as he cut his sandwich in half, and she said Yes, please just to have the pleasure of watching him do it all over again. Weeping and smiling at the thrill of normality.

  When he was finished, he put his sandwich in a Tupperware container and hers on a plate.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Right then,’ he said, ‘I’d better be off.’

  Eve’s chest twitched with foreboding. ‘Where are you off to?’

  ‘Work. We’ve got to finish Mrs Cole’s wiring.’

  Eve hesitated.

  If she pointed out that he wasn’t dressed, or that he hadn’t worked for years, then this bubble would burst.

  And she didn’t want it to end!

  The desire to see how long she could keep her father with her inside that precious moment was so deep she felt it in her core. But she couldn’t watch him walk out of the door and into the snow in his pyjamas.

  ‘You’re a bit early, Dad.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Duncan Singer looked at the watch he wasn’t wearing and frowned. ‘What time have you got?’

  ‘It’s not even four in the morning,’ said Eve.

  He looked up at the clock and frowned again. ‘It’s not even four in the morning,’ he said.

  He looked bemusedly at the butter. ‘What the hell am I doing making sandwiches?’

  ‘The clocks went back,’ Eve lied smoothly. ‘They fooled me too. I came down for breakfast.’

  Her father gave a short, confused laugh. ‘We must be mad,’ he said.

  ‘I think so,’ smiled Eve. ‘We should both go back to bed.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, and she got up. But he didn’t move when she did. Instead he stared down into the plastic box at his cheese-and-pickle sandwich. ‘But the clocks only go back an hour and I get up at six thirty.’

  Then he looked up at her, with scared, childlike eyes.

  Déjà vu.

  Duncan Singer had felt this way before, but couldn’t remember when.

  Or why it was so frightening.

  The sandwich was in the box and he was going to work. But he didn’t work any more! Hadn’t worked for years!

  Why didn’t he work any more?

  And if he didn’t work any more, why was he getting up to make a sandwich? In the middle of the night?

  And why was Eve awake?

  And why was she so old?

  He had missed something. Duncan knew he had definitely missed something, and went back to the beginning to retrace his steps.

  But where was the beginning? Was it when he’d come downstairs in the dark to make himself a sandwich? Was it when he’d woken and wondered why Maggie wasn’t in the bed beside him? And had come downstairs to look for her?

  But Maggie’s dead.

  He blinked at the sandwich as though it had spoken the flat, cruel words.

  His wife had been dead for years.

  He had forgotten.

  Duncan went weak. He had forgotten his own wife was dead. How could he do that? What kind of a person forgets something so … terrible? Somebody he loved so much. How? How?

  Because he was mad.

  Suddenly he remembered. He remembered the doctor, Dr Gupta, touching his hand and looking at him so kindly as she’d delivered the news that he was losing his mind, like something down the back of the sofa.

  He remembered Dr Gupta, but not the death of his own wife.

  Duncan stared at the sandwich in the Tupperware box and felt a huge bubble of fear expanding in his chest, pressing out all other feelings, all other cares, all other thoughts.

  He looked at Eve to see if she knew about her mother, and he saw that she did. She did – and hadn’t told him!

  Why?

  ‘Evie?’ His voice cracked. ‘What else have I forgotten?’

  He was going. He was going!

  Eve watched her father slipping away from reality as surely as if he were sliding off the wave-washed deck of a boat in high seas. She closed the distance between them in a flash and hugged him tightly, as if she could keep his mind with her, just by holding on to his body.

  But she couldn’t.

  ‘Have you been Christmas shopping?’ he said.

  For a moment she couldn’t speak. She just held him, her wet cheek on his warm shoulder.

  Finally she said, ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘What did you get me?’

  ‘A glass eye,’ she remembered.

  He patted her back gently and said, ‘That’s exactly what I wanted.’

  Eve helped Duncan upstairs and back into bed, and then sat slumped on the end of her own bed, with her hands twisted in her lap like a hopeless madwoman in an old painting.

  Her father was still in there.

  Somewhere.

  For a moment he’d been back with her, perfectly normal and gentle and present. Then he had disappeared again – dragged back into himself by some demon that had incubated in his brain, and now had the run of the place.

  And the worst thing about it was – he had known!

  Eve had always imagined Duncan existed in blissful ignorance of his own condition. But for a few horrific, nightmarish moments, he’d known exactly who he was, and what was happening to him … And yet had been no more able to hold on to reality than a feather on the wind could chart its own course through the skies.

  It was as if he were imprisoned, and desperate to get out, but unsure of how to find the door.

  Because there was no door.

  Her phone rang on the bedside table.

  She got up on old, creaking legs, refusing to hurry, and put the phone to her ear without even looking at it, unable to care who it was or why they were calling.

  ‘Hello, Eve.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘We had a deal.’

  ‘We didn’t have a deal.’

  He ignored her. ‘You broke the terms of that deal.’

  ‘We didn’t have a deal,’ she said flatly. ‘You’re a killer and I’m a reporter. We’re both doing our jobs, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I’m doing my job, Eve, but you’ll be very sorry if you don’t start doing yours.’

  A threat. Eve didn’t have the energy to care.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you calling me any more.’

  She hung up. This time she felt no triumph or panic. Out of habit, she hit Recent Calls.

  And gazed with slow astonishment at the top of the list.

  The killer hadn’t withheld his number!

  Adrenaline coursed through Eve like electricity. Her heart beat so fast and her hands shook so hard that it took her three attempts to call Huw Rees.

  ‘Hello?’ He sounded asleep.

  ‘DS Rees?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Eve Singer. He just called me again. And I’ve got his phone number!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it right here on my phone! And you won’t believe it – but it’s a bloody landline number! You can trace it right to his home! It’s 0208—’

  ‘Hold on.’

  There were sounds of mild activity – bodies moving, soft mumbles – the sounds of Huw Rees getting out of the marital bed.

  Slowly.

  Eve wanted to reach down the line, yank him to his feet and press a pencil into his hand so he could write the number down and have it traced and send a squad car and haul the killer out of his bed and put a knee in his back and twist his wrists into cuffs and end all this now.

  ‘Give me the number,’ said Rees.

  She did.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ he said.
/>
  ‘OK.’

  Eve hung up. Once again, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She felt fear and excitement in equal measure and she didn’t know which one to vent. Instead they roiled inside her, making her shake so hard that it was comical.

  She sat there and tried to be calm. Her feet grew cold and she started to shiver, but she couldn’t get back into bed – not while she was waiting for the police to tell her they’d traced the call and were on their way to take the bastard down.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Got it,’ said Huw Rees, but she could hear something was wrong. He sounded oddly deflated. ‘The call came from a public phone.’

  ‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Shitshitshit!’

  ‘We’ve got a car on the way, but no doubt he’ll be long gone.’

  Eve was crushed. The killer could have called from anywhere – and never be there again. They had nothing. The gulf between hope and reality was gaping.

  ‘Where was he?’ she asked.

  ‘Somewhere in Isleworth,’ he said, and Eve heard a notebook page being turned.

  ‘College Road.’

  33

  BUT THAT’S WHERE I live.

  Eve’s mind slowed stupidly.

  ‘That’s my number,’ she said. ‘That’s where I live. I’m sorry. I think I gave you my number by mistake.’

  ‘What?’ said Huw Rees.

  ‘I live in College Road.’

  There was a brief silence. And then he said, ‘But this call came from a payphone,’ and read the number she’d given him.

  It wasn’t her number.

  Eve stood up. She walked to the window without using her legs.

  ‘Eve?’

  Across the road, the red phone box shone like dark blood under the street light.

  ‘Eve? Are you there?’

  ‘That’s my phone box,’ she whispered.

  And then she ran.

  In her bare feet and pink pyjamas. Down the stairs and out of the front door and into the night and down the path and through the gate and between the cars and across the road to the red phone box.

  She yanked open the door.

  It was empty. The receiver nestled on the hook, and there was the faint smell of lavender air-freshener.

  Her feet were cold.

  Her feet were freezing.