by Nicci French
At least it was more interesting than roadworks.
The cab driver had collected her from Saverton Waters, the lake a couple of miles outside town. People came from all over the area to partake in various water sports up there, or to enjoy the respectable panoramas over Saverton offered by the nearby hills, although its visitors rarely ended up in the town itself. Lucinda had made the most of the afternoon’s clear conditions by taking a raft of shots at both sites. Unfortunately, next to that, Saverton itself offered a poor selection of sights. The local church might provide some romantic shots at dusk, but in daylight it looked like a project for a primary school joinery class, and the town hall made the church look like an architectural triumph.
She thanked Milton and climbed out, watching the taxi pull away before turning to face the last point of interest on her very short list.
Saverton railway station.
Lucinda regarded the main building through the thick wire mesh surrounding the site. Above her, a large red and white sign shouted SAFETY RISK – DO NOT ENTER.
The station hadn’t seen passengers since it was decommissioned in the mid-nineties, due to a maintenance bill the local authority wasn’t prepared to swallow. But beneath the muck and decay, the structure retained its characterful design: pleasingly symmetrical, with a taller central atrium and lower extensions on either side. A section of rusty track still ran alongside, even though this part of the line had been bypassed years earlier. The council had even talked recently about restoring the place as part of a sightseeing railway for day-trippers, so maybe Lucinda was ahead of the game.
Renovation wasn’t likely to happen before the weekend, though, so she needed to capture its best side, which meant getting inside the fence.
She skirted one edge of the perimeter, looking for gaps and finding the fence disappointingly intact. She turned the corner and followed the boundary. Another undamaged run. Same story at the back. Lucinda was about to start climbing as she approached the end of the final side, but then she saw the opening. She hadn’t noticed it before, because the cuts in the mesh followed a neat vertical line, and the displaced section had been folded back into place, making the hole invisible till you got near.
Lucinda paused, looking up and down the street, but there was nobody about. Buildings had once lined both pavements, but most had been knocked down after this part of the railway closed, so these days the rubble-lined road was nothing more than a thoroughfare.
She turned back to the station house. Could there be squatters? There was no noise coming from inside, and there were no signs of litter. It wasn’t likely, anyway: Saverton was too small to attract many homeless people, and the community centre provided beds for those there were. Anyway, Lucinda reasoned as she pulled at the cut section, she’d be careful.
She squeezed through the gap and stood, assessing the light. The autumn sun was still pretty high and, if she backed up against the fence, she should be able to get the whole building in shot. She picked her way through the weeds to the south-west corner before snapping a few pictures, with the station’s portico nicely centred.
Lucinda was heading sensibly back towards the exit when curiosity struck. She veered towards the station house, peering in through the windows.
She found herself under the porch, staring through the hole where double doors had once hung. There was still no sign of other unauthorized visitors, but Lucinda was already more interested in the ornate stucco work around the interior window frames. Pete would definitely appreciate that.
Tentatively, she placed one python-skin cowboy boot over the threshold and put all her weight on it. The building didn’t fall down, so she followed up with the other foot.
From her new vantage point, Lucinda could see the small glass section set in the roof. It reminded her of Grand Central Station in New York; not on the same scale, of course, but beautiful nonetheless.
Suddenly more confident, she moved further inside, raising her camera to shoot some close-ups of the elaborate ceiling rose.
Then she tripped.
Stumbling sideways, Lucinda dropping the Nikon: ‘No!’
Fortunately habit saved her, as the strap round her neck caught the heavy camera and jerked it against her hip.
Lucinda righted herself, rubbing the top of her thigh and glancing down to see what she’d fallen over.
It was a bag.
She stared at the clean fabric sack, so at odds with the station’s grimy floor tiles. It couldn’t have been there long. But even stranger were its contents.
Now strewn across the floor were dozens of identical key rings. Lucinda crouched and picked one up, studying it. Attached to the ring itself was what looked like a tiny bicycle chain, with ten or so miniature links in a small loop.
She reached out to pick up the next key ring, but her hand froze in mid-air.
When she saw the face.
It took a moment for her mind to process what she was seeing: two lifeless pupils staring straight back at her like a trapped owl, only feet away. Then the image registered fully, and Lucinda shot backwards into the wall, not hearing herself scream.
She slumped, breathing heavily, as her brain decoded the whole image. The strands of auburn hair strung across the cheek; the black and purple skin on the neck. The young woman was clearly dead, the angle of her limbs somehow made that obvious. But Lucinda hadn’t seen her at first because the body had been sort of stuffed into the gap between a big old radiator and the corner of the building.
Lucinda edged sideways, only taking her eyes off the corpse when she was near enough to run for the door.
She struggled back through the fence and called the police.
‘So you’ll be OK, then?’ WPC Yates asked.
‘My boyfriend’s coming over,’ Lucinda lied, keen to be left alone, ‘he’ll look after me.’
She got out of the police car, hearing it drive away as she climbed the steps to her shared front door. There were four flats in the block, and unfortunately for Lucinda’s weary legs, hers was at the top.
She drifted up the first flight of stairs, reassuring herself that she’d told the police everything she’d seen at the station. They’d all been captivated by her story and hadn’t seemed bothered at all about her having trespassed. But that wasn’t surprising; it was unlikely anyone had ever been murdered in Saverton before. The resident police were more used to dealing with disputes over the heights of people’s garden hedges. Homicide was horrid, the officers had all agreed, but Lucinda recognized the excitement in everyone’s eyes.
Real police work for a change.
She reached the top landing and unlocked her front door. She stepped inside and was almost knocked over by her black Border Collie.
‘Bloody hell, Sam,’ she heaved the dog off her and bent down to give him a hug, ‘I’m soooo, sorry, darling. You must be starved.’
‘I can make it up to you, though,’ she walked through into the kitchen, with Sam close behind. She began searching her bag: ‘I bought you some of that yummy packet dog food today.’
At the mention of his favourite word, Sam immediately assumed the Crufts position: bolt upright, stock still, eyes on owner. He’d never been to a dog show, but Lucinda often wondered what would happen if she took him to one. Sam was mainly white, but the patches of black on his flanks and over one eye were unbroken and beautifully shaped, as if someone had designed him to look good. She really needed to get a house with a garden for him.
Lucinda’s attention was suddenly elsewhere, as her hand found something that certainly shouldn’t have been in her bag. Oblivious to Sam’s whimpering, she pulled the item out.
The key ring she’d picked up at the railway station; she still had it. Her mind flashed back to when the police had arrived at the scene. The female officer had prised it from her stupefied grasp and put it in her bag, obviously assuming that whatever it was belonged to her, and Lucinda had forgotten all about it until now.
She’d removed evidence from a cri
me scene.
Then she remembered there had been dozens of the things, so one less wouldn’t make any immediate difference. She’d return it with an apology when she had the chance.
She took a deep breath, fed her almost apoplectic dog, and made herself some dinner.
Thursday morning promised to turn into the brightest day of the week, with unseasonably warm sunlight streaming through Lucinda’s open window as she clattered around the bedroom, getting ready for work. At least the chaos kept images of the dead woman’s stare from her mind.
As usual, Sam watched the proceedings from the bed, while the television in the corner showed the breakfast news. The headlines were full of political nonsense and stuff about inflation, but Lucinda killed the hairdryer when the reporter handed over to Saverton’s regional news station.
The picture cut straight to Tim Donoghue, the local channel’s whitest-toothed frontman, who had obviously made an effort for national TV. His improbably abundant hair was quiffed even higher than usual, and he was obviously suppressing the irreverent style he got away with in front of a smaller audience. He stood outside the railings Lucinda had negotiated the previous afternoon.
She turned up the volume as Tim began talking.
‘Thanks, Kate. I’m at Saverton railway station. As you can see behind me, the station itself is now derelict, but detectives are currently in the main building because, yesterday afternoon, the body of a local woman was discovered here. Police have just confirmed the victim was twenty-seven-year-old Jo Kinnock, a mature student at Plymouth University. Jo had returned home for the summer break, but was about to go back for the new semester. Investigators say she was attacked right where I’m standing at some point on Tuesday evening, knocked unconscious and then dragged inside, where she was strangled to death.’
Donoghue concluded by saying that police were still looking into the murder, and then handed back to the studio. Lucinda shuddered as the victim’s eyes flashed through her mind again, and went back to drying her hair.
‘Hi,’ he held out a hand, ‘so you’re Lucinda?’
‘Yeah,’ she shook it, noting the coarseness of his skin. So this was Ian Beck, the boy from Saverton done good. Beck had been a local hero for as long as she could remember, but these days he was becoming an international superstar, who was increasingly referred to as ‘the new Bradley Wiggins’.
He was a little wiry for Lucinda’s taste, and not exactly tall, but he definitely had charisma, with sculpted shades perfectly placed in his spiky blonde hair, and expensive, sponsorship-peppered clothing. A gang of PR and security people hovered nearby.
Lucinda had arrived late that morning, just in time to catch the end of the editor’s announcement that Beck was coming in after lunch. The cyclist was in town on some sort of promotional drive, and had agreed to be interviewed by the Star’s editor in chief, Justin Wake. Normally a reporter would have gone to Beck, but apparently Justin had persuaded him to come in and meet his ‘very excited’ staff, although Lucinda suspected Justin’s motives were purely selfish. Perhaps with the exception of Pete, the rest of the office looked like they couldn’t have cared less.
Beck interrupted her thoughts, perching on the edge of her desk and lowering his tone, ‘Sorry to disturb your work, but I heard about what happened yesterday, and I just wanted to meet you and … offer my condolences. Did you know the victim?’
Lucinda shook her head.
‘I’m visiting the family later on,’ he volunteered. ‘They’re distraught, obviously, but it must have been terrible, finding the body like that.’
‘It isn’t something I’m keen to repeat.’
He nodded in deliberate fashion, then changed the subject, ‘So, what do you do here?’
‘Just freelance snapper work, but I’m actually a travel photographer.’
‘Right,’ his eyebrows raised. ‘What does that entail?’
‘Globetrotting, when I can afford it, taking beautiful pictures to sell when I get home.’
‘Sounds excellent.’ He smiled, just as they were interrupted by one of his entourage.
‘Come on, Ian.’ The suited young guy said in a soft London accent. ‘People to see, yeah?’
‘All right,’ Beck stood. ‘Lucinda, this is my publicist, Dean Bradstock.’
Bradstock gave her a derisive nod. ‘You found the dead girl, then?’
Lucinda nodded.
‘Bad luck,’ he said, already shepherding Beck away. ‘Sorry to drag him away, love, but we’re behind. I’ll sort you out a signed poster or something.’
And with that the two men retreated towards Beck’s management team, before they all disappeared into Justin’s office.
Lucinda sat for a moment, wondering if she’d be known for evermore as ‘the girl who found the body’. She removed her glasses and massaged her temples. She wasn’t a great sleeper at the best of times, but yesterday’s discovery had kept her awake half the night. She could have used a sympathetic ear, but she hadn’t been at the paper long enough to make any proper friends, and her three best mates were on holiday together in Corfu. They’d offered to club together to buy her a ticket, but she hadn’t let them. She couldn’t even afford the time off.
Her head shot up when the day’s second surprise visitor spoke.
‘You lucky cow. What did he say?
Pete.
She gazed up at Mr Right, ‘Er, he wanted to know about the body.’
‘Course.’ Pete looked mildly disappointed, ‘Are you OK?’
‘Oh yeah,’ she waved his question away. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m cool, except I have to write a follow-up piece on the murder for tomorrow’s front page, and I’ve got bugger all.’
He paused as Lucinda nodded, tongue-tied but willing him to stay.
Suddenly his face lit up, ‘Hey, what am I thinking … you were there, right? You must’ve seen something that wasn’t mentioned in the news today.’
Her mind went blank.
All she could think about was how nice his shoulders were and how good his aftershave smelled. The moment stretched, and Pete’s expression clouded as she stared blankly at him. He mumbled something about never minding and began to move away.
Suddenly Lucinda’s memory spurred itself and she blurted out the words, surprising them both. ‘Key rings.’
‘What?’ he turned back.
‘Key rings,’ she repeated. ‘There was a bag full of them near the body.’ Frantically searching her pockets.
Pete fetched a chair from the next desk and sat down. ‘What sort of key rings?’
‘They were all exactly like this.’ She found the one she still had and handed it to him. ‘Dozens of them in a bag on the floor of the station. I guess they were the victim’s.’
‘OK,’ Pete turned it over in his hands. ‘Why would she have loads of Ian Beck key rings?’
‘Ian Beck?’ Lucinda asked without thinking.
‘Blimey,’ Pete smirked. ‘You really aren’t a fan, are you? Beck won the Tour of Britain last month, so they’ve invited him to be guest of honour at the county fair this weekend.’ He held up the key ring, ‘Didn’t pick up on the bicycle-chain thing, then?
She blushed. ‘No.’
‘Fair enough.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a replica of the prototype chain Beck used when he won a couple of stages in the Tour de France. Thanks, Lucy; this might be exactly what I need.’
He settled back in his chair as Lucinda considered changing her name.
‘Pete.’ Susan Masters appeared, smashing their new-found rapport, ‘Why are you still here? You’re meeting the local MP at the town hall in ten minutes.’
Pete checked his watch and swore. ‘Sorry, boss. Leaving right now.’
They both watched Masters retreat huffily to her desk.
‘Look,’ Pete said when she was out of earshot, ‘I’ll be tied up for the rest of the afternoon with this rubbish, but I really want to hear about what happened yesterday. Why don’t you come to mine about ei
ght-ish and tell me the whole story? I’ll make you dinner.’
‘OK.’ Lucinda tried not to sound too eager. ‘Where do you live?’
He scribbled the address on a Post-it before heading for the stairs. Lucinda watched him all the way, already thinking about what she was going to wear.
For their date.
Lucinda’s selection turned out to be light blue jeans and her favourite paisley patterned shirt with the huge collar, topped off with a fake-fur body warmer and, of course, her python-skin boots. She’d even broken out her FCUK glasses with the red frames, which were reserved for properly special occasions.
It had been the first outfit she’d thought of, before trying five others and then reverting to her original choice. She might have looked a little quirky, but this was how she felt comfortable. And tonight was all about being herself.
It was already dark – the autumn nights were closing in – so she stuck to the main roads, where the lighting was better. It took fifteen minutes to walk from her place to Pete’s, which was in the newer part of town.
Kensington Street actually lived up to its rather grand name, with low manicured hedges lining fashionably tiny front gardens. There was no way Pete could have afforded one on whatever the paper paid him, which meant he either had another source of income or wealthy parents. As she arrived at the door of number eight, Lucinda decided she didn’t really mind either way.
Pete’s house was an end of terrace, with a front door set into the side wall, halfway between the front and rear gardens. She wandered up and rang the bell, hearing it ding dong from inside. She took a deep breath and let it out, jigging on the step to relax her nerves.
Had she made too much effort?
She began to panic, picturing Pete coming to the door in ripped jeans and a scruffy old T-shirt, and spent the next few seconds concocting a story about having a party to go to afterwards. Then she rejected the idea, realizing that if things went well, he might want to come with her.
