The Beautiful Dead

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘Jesus!’ said Eve. ‘That’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?’

  Aguda shrugged. ‘So is severing a man’s spinal cord in the middle of a Liam Neeson film.’

  ‘Touché,’ said Eve. ‘In that case, can I see some ID, please?’

  Aguda smiled her approval and showed her ID. ‘I’m here to protect you, Miss Singer, but you can do an awful lot to protect yourself.’

  ‘Please call me Eve.’

  ‘OK,’ said Aguda. But she didn’t say that Eve could call her anything.

  Eve opened the door more widely and DS Aguda came into the hallway and glanced around with a professional eye.

  ‘DS Rees tells me you already have good instincts, so that should make my job a lot easier.’

  ‘Good,’ said Eve.

  ‘Got a cold?’ said Aguda.

  ‘Think so. I hope I don’t give it to you.’

  ‘I don’t get sick,’ said the officer proudly. ‘I haven’t been sick for seven years. Not even a sniffle.’

  Eve said, ‘Wow,’ even though she thought that never being sick was probably not healthy. Then, while Aguda installed phone-recording and tracing equipment on the landline, she made them both tea.

  They both liked builder’s tea. Strong and sweet. As common ground went, it was shaky, and there was an awkward silence as they sat at the kitchen table and sipped.

  ‘I know having a stranger in your home might be awkward,’ said Aguda, ‘but I hope it won’t feel too intrusive.’

  You’re going to be living in my HOUSE, thought Eve. How could it not be intrusive? But she went for a diplomatic: ‘I’m sure it won’t be for long.’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Aguda.

  Then Eve couldn’t think of a single thing to say – although there were plenty of things she couldn’t say.

  Over the brim of her mug, she examined Sergeant Aguda’s little hands and slim wrists.

  Slim didn’t really cover it.

  ‘Frail’ was a word that sprang more quickly to mind.

  The officer got up and wandered slowly around the room.

  And she’s so short, too! thought Eve. She couldn’t be more than five foot tall. Any serial killer confronted by Sergeant Aguda would only have to pick her up and set her to one side in order to continue his murderous rampage.

  Aguda opened the back door and examined the locks. ‘Yale and deadbolts,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eve.

  ‘But no chain.’

  ‘No,’ said Eve. ‘Nobody comes to the back door.’

  ‘Serial killers do,’ said Aguda. ‘We’ll get a chain.’

  The little woman carried on her circuit of inspection. As she did, she unclipped the gleaming handcuffs from the clip on the back of her jeans and toyed with them. A repeated flick of her wrist that opened them and closed them in one deft, well-practised move.

  TrrrrrrT.

  TrrrrrrT.

  The sound was like something from a thousand prison movies and oddly hypnotic.

  Eve wondered whether Aguda was trying to intimidate her, and set her jaw.

  I could take her, she thought.

  It sounded pretty stupid, even in her head. Eve had never had a girl-fight and could hardly believe she was thinking now of how she might fare in one. But she was so irritated, goddammit! If Aguda was the sum total of her so-called police protection, then Huw Rees must want her dead! Eve towered over her – and must also outweigh her by at least thirty pounds.

  Sergeant Aguda made Eve feel like a giant.

  Not to mention fat …

  Aguda opened a window and a lump of frigid air slid into the kitchen like coal.

  ‘No locks?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘On any of the windows?’

  ‘No,’ Eve said again. It made her seem stupid, and she longed to turn the tables. OK, so she didn’t have window locks. Big effing deal! She wasn’t supposed to be an expert in home security and serial killers. DS Aguda was supposed to be the expert. She was the person sent to protect Eve from possible attack by a psychopathic nutcase, and here she was, examining the locks as if she were a Neighbourhood Watch volunteer and Eve were a gormless pensioner. Shouldn’t Aguda be talking her through worst-case scenarios? Establishing a panic room? An escape route?

  She decided Aguda was both tiny and shit at her job. What were her qualifications anyway? What was her experience?

  She was going to ask her. What the hell! She had a right to know how many people Aguda had protected and how many she had failed to protect. How many had been snatched or killed while in her tiny care. She wanted percentages. She wanted stats. She needed to do a risk assessment. It might hurt the officer’s feelings, but it was her life on the line. Eve decided she’d use all her journalistic skills to get the information she needed. She’d start softly and then ambush Aguda with the tough questions when she least expected it.

  She cleared her throat and chose her words carefully, keeping her tone light. ‘How did you get into this line of work, Sergeant Aguda?’

  Aguda smiled. ‘You mean, when I’m so small?’

  ‘Are you?’ Eve blushed.

  ‘I don’t want you to worry about it,’ said Aguda. ‘I have black belts in kickboxing and judo, qualifications and field experience in evasive driving, counter-terrorism, close protection, abnormal psychology, home security, surveillance and counter-surveillance, search and rescue, field medicine and resuscitation, as well as successful outcomes in hostage negotiation and conflict resolution.’

  ‘Oh I’m not worried,’ Eve insisted. ‘At all.’

  ‘Good,’ said Aguda. ‘But if my size ever does bother you—’

  ‘Which it absolutely does not!’

  ‘Then you should also know that I do carry an enormous gun.’

  ‘Really?’ said Eve doubtfully. ‘Where?’

  Aguda reached behind her and her hand emerged as if by magic, holding a gun. ‘There.’

  She laid it on the table between them. It was sleek and matt black, and heavy with menace.

  Eve stared at the real gun for real killing for a long, surreal, moment. Then she put her tea down with a clunk and said, ‘Thank God for that.’

  They both started to laugh.

  When they’d finished, Aguda put the kettle on again, and told Eve her name was Emily.

  Emily Aguda had taken far longer than she should have done to become a detective.

  It was because she was black.

  But not in a bad way, she always reminded herself – only misguided.

  Although she’d been a police community service volunteer while at university, and had graduated with a first in Law from Reading, her early years in the Metropolitan Police had seen her stuck behind a station reception window like a zoo exhibit, loudly labelled with her race and sex, so that everybody could see that the Met was definitely not institutionally racist or sexist.

  It was both, of course, which was why the powers-that-be had been so keen to keep Emily Aguda in that highly visible front-desk role – because it killed two birds with one stone.

  God forbid they should find another stone.

  While she’d enjoyed being the first point of police–public contact – and had had her share of bizarre and exciting moments – Emily Aguda had always itched to move on and move up, into a role where her intelligence could be sharpened by challenge, rather than dulled by the daily grind of only peripheral involvement with the investigative process.

  Even so, she might have been doomed to sit at that window until her pension kicked in, if she hadn’t been recommended for promotion by a senior officer she’d never even liked, exactly because of his racism, sexism and general misanthropy.

  It was funny how life worked out.

  So, thanks to a bastard, Emily Aguda had finally made it into plainclothes, and her intelligence and calmness under pressure had quickly seen her promoted to detective sergeant. But she’d recognized that her late start would always dog her career prospec
ts. Why promote a thirty-year-old woman to inspector when you could promote a twenty-five-year-old man instead? And a twenty-five-year-old man who was never going to get pregnant? Not that Emily ever planned to get pregnant, but nowadays promotions were as much about the statistics as about the people. It was all about getting the biggest possible bang out of the public buck before the public had to start paying a comfy pension out of that same squeezed fund.

  Ever the pragmatist, Emily Aguda had decided that, rather than battling against the numbers to make it to the top, she would carve out a niche for herself closer to the middle. She’d always been athletic and strong for her size, which was five-one and a hundred pounds soaking wet. She’d been kickboxing since she was seven and had played football since she was ten. She was good, too; she’d once been scouted by Arsenal Ladies, and had spent the summer of her fourteenth year drinking milk and lifting weights, as if her lazy little bones might be fooled into thinking they still had some growing to do.

  Which they didn’t.

  But in her long, symbolic years at Lewisham police station, Emily had noticed that there was a dire lack of sufficiently qualified female plainclothes officers available for the close protection of witnesses, or visiting celebrities, or members of the public under threat. Even though women were so often the ones under threat.

  Once she had identified a gap in the market, Emily underwent every bit of extra training the Met had to offer – and some that it did not – in order to plug it. Her fitness and martial arts experience had stood her in good stead, her driving was fast and fierce, and she’d turned out to be a crack shot too. In fact, Emily had been slightly disturbed by how much she grew to like guns, when she’d always been a vehement opponent of an armed police force.

  But it was all part of the job now.

  Luckily for gun-happy her!

  Aguda had never fired a shot in the line of duty, and hoped she’d never have to, but she practised diligently because lives might depend on it, and her skill on the trigger was another string to her longbow of accomplishments.

  In less than three years, Emily Aguda had stopped up that gap in the market so firmly that she’d become the go-to officer for the personal protection of vulnerable or high-profile women. Within five years, she was also helping to coordinate the recruitment of other female officers to fulfil similar roles across Britain.

  But nothing gave her more job satisfaction than hands-on assignments, where her intellectual, interpersonal and physical gifts could be seamlessly coordinated to outwit and outflank any threat.

  Since she’d been a close protection officer, she’d foiled a kidnap attempt on a cabinet minister, she’d taken down a man armed with a machete who was intent on beheading his estranged wife, and she’d single-handedly disarmed and arrested two assailants who had broken into the home of a controversial TV chat-show host with knives and zip ties. When backup arrived they’d discovered the more fractious of the two men under a sofa. Not a small sofa either: a huge leather three-seater with built-in footrests. Later the man had tried unsuccessfully to sue the Met. In court, Aguda – who’d had to stand on a box so that the jury had a good view of her – would admit dropping the sofa on him, but insist that it was ‘not from a height’.

  The day after foiling the kidnap attempt – before she’d even gone home after the longest shift of her life – DS Frank Sallis had escorted her into the men’s toilets on the third floor at HQ to show her that someone had scrawled ‘Aguda kicks ASS’ on the wall of a cubicle, and she had shed a rare tear of victory.

  So Emily Aguda didn’t worry about Eve Singer’s evident lack of faith.

  She was used to being underestimated.

  It was her greatest strength.

  36

  DUNCAN SINGER WOKE in a cold, dark place that was not his bedroom. His head ached inside a soft cloth bag, and there was an odd chemical taste in his mouth. His hands were bound behind his back, which made his shoulders ache.

  ‘Maggie?’

  The cotton of the bag touched his face gently, and moved in and out against his lips with every breath. It was damp there, because of condensation. Condensation was hell to electrics. Mrs Cole had a problem with condensation. Hence the rewiring.

  ‘Maggie?’

  He turned from his side on to his back, but that hurt his hands, and he rolled over the other way, and bumped his nose on the skirting. The hard floor was wood; the wall was plastered and there was a deep skirting board. He felt it with his nose. It wasn’t his skirting. His skirting was plain; this was fancy.

  Duncan drew his head back and waited for something to happen.

  He wiggled his fingers because they were going to sleep.

  He was hungry.

  ‘Maggie?’ he called. ‘Where are you?’

  She didn’t hear him.

  ‘Maggie!’ he called more loudly. ‘Any chance of a sandwich?’

  ‘Who’s Maggie?’

  ‘My wife,’ said Duncan. He hadn’t heard anyone approaching, but there somebody was. A man who now put hands under his arms and lifted him into a sitting position.

  He didn’t know how far behind him the wall was, so didn’t lean backwards. Instead he crossed his legs like a Cub Scout. It felt like years since he’d done that, and it must have been easier then. But he got there in the end.

  ‘Got a splitting headache,’ said Duncan.

  ‘Ketamine,’ said the man. ‘Vets use it.’

  ‘For headaches?’

  ‘For dogs.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Duncan. ‘We’ve got a dog. Awful farts.’

  ‘I’m freeing your hands,’ said the man. ‘Don’t remove your blindfold.’

  ‘All right,’ said Duncan.

  There was a small snip and Duncan’s hands dropped apart from each other and fell slackly against the floor on their knuckles, so numb that at first he couldn’t move them at all.

  ‘Ow,’ he said.

  ‘Ow indeed,’ said the man, and walked away. A long way away. The footsteps faded while the echo grew.

  The room must be very big.

  ‘Where are you?’

  The man didn’t answer.

  Duncan brought his hands slowly around to in front of his body, and rubbed his wrists. ‘Maggie?’

  There was the small sound of something being moved on the wooden floor. A short scrape. And then the footsteps came back towards Duncan, but heavier this time. Slower.

  Duncan felt the man walk behind him.

  ‘OK,’ said the man. ‘You can take your blindfold off now.’

  Slowly Duncan lifted the bag up at the front so he could peer out from underneath it.

  He was in a vast room.

  Cavernous.

  Dawn was breaking through towering windows, draping a soft orange glow across the dusty cherry-wood floor, and Duncan blinked in the light, and then grunted in surprise.

  In the middle of the room there was a whole city.

  Around a majestic modern stadium lay skyscrapers and tenements and gasworks and playgrounds and terraces, and sheets of snow and tufts of wild undergrowth – all silhouetted by the rising sun, which threw fabulous shadows down streets and across parklands, where people hurried to work and walked their dogs, or gathered in groups to chat and drink coffee.

  And all in miniature.

  Like the miniature villages he’d visited as a child. He and Maggie had taken Eve and Stuart to one somewhere on the south coast. Hip-high churches topped by tiny tin weathercocks; mini-farmers tending toy-sized cows. A bandstand in the park – a tuba the size of his thumb.

  It was wonderful.

  But it was impossible.

  Duncan closed his eyes, then opened them again.

  As they adjusted to the space and the light, he saw he had indeed been mistaken. It was not a city before him, but a jumble of disparate parts – white casings, plastic hoses, switches and relays and bundles of wires that had doubled as hedges and trees.

  The giant stadium at the city’s centre was a metal
lic cylinder with a thousand round windows …

  ‘Is that—’ he started, then stopped and frowned. ‘Is that a washing machine?’

  The man behind him shifted his feet.

  ‘Yes!’ He sounded surprised.

  The light was changing all the time and it was more obvious now, but Duncan could see how he had thought it was a city. A little city with a silver-drum stadium and copper-wire shrubbery, and nut-and-bolt people with their little screw dogs. His initial vision was fading with the sunrise, like Brigadoon, but he could see how tomorrow it might be recaptured, and the day after that, and the day after that.

  ‘I could fix it for you,’ he said. ‘If you have all the parts.’ His eyes swept the components. He frowned a little, seeking something. Something obvious – to him, at least.

  Something big …

  Then he realized. ‘Where’s the counterweight?’

  ‘Here,’ said the man.

  Duncan looked up.

  The man was holding a forty-pound concrete block … directly over his head.

  ‘Ah.’ Duncan smiled wistfully. ‘Hotpoint.’

  37

  EVE AND AGUDA watched Real Housewives of Orange County together after a supper of fish fingers and white wine. It made Eve realize two things: first, that How It’s Made wasn’t so terrible after all, and second, that she hadn’t cooked proper food for two years, and that wherever her father was, he could probably add rickets to his list of daughter-inflicted woes. When he came home she would buy fresh vegetables every day, and red meat for iron. When he came home she’d take her days off in lieu and spend quality time with him at the park or the seaside. When he came home she’d never wish him dead again …

  When he came home.

  She gulped the last of the glass of white wine and said, ‘Hey! Show me that thing with your cuffs.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘That thing you do. That trick.’

  Aguda smiled and drew her cuffs from the clip on her jeans. ‘You mean this?’

  A dextrous flick and the cuffs were open. Another and they closed with a satisfying click.