Dead Pretty (2 page)

Chapter Two

That voice on the phone. Mark could hear it echoing in his head.
They'll think it was you
. The accent was Dutch, maybe Slav, one of those bandit territory places, but he'd never had contact with anyone like that, and Lena, what connection could she possibly have, for Christ sake? Lena, a full-time model and part-time student. Her never-ending Open University degree, women's studies, which had gone on for as long as he'd known her. Mark had made no real enemies in London, as far as he knew, or anywhere else, for that matter. The childhood stuff in Wales was of no interest to anyone here. Yes, his two-year-old brother Shane had gone missing from the garden of their council house, yes it had fucked his mother up, it had fucked him up, and the fact Shane had never been found had kept it fresh but no one else cared about that. It was the Richards family tragedy, history he had to live with. And he had, in his way, keeping out of trouble, doing bailiff work, sometimes providing protection for Z-list celebs, and lately private dick stuff. Checking out on a few missing people, and the odd shagging-away husband for an agency up town.

Mark had met Lena on a celeb minder job. She'd just finished a photo shoot and noticed him hanging around on the fringes of a function, looking tough and uncomfortable in his suit. She'd picked him up, at least that was how it seemed at the time. He'd been flattered enough to ignore his usual suspicion, though he did think she might have been a high-class call girl. She wasn't and it had worked, and lasted, until a few hours ago. None of it made any sense, but he'd have to make sense of it. For Lena, and himself.

Mark hadn't thought of Shane for some time, but finding your girlfriend butchered focused the mind on such things. Mark saw his mother Julie's face that day when Shane didn't turn up. The way she looked at him. The way she accused. He was on the phone, talking to his fence, Shane was in the garden playing, then gone. For good. A disappearance to end all others. The locals gorged on it, everyone had a take on what happened to Shane, every talking head wanker the media could dig up had its say, and most of the talk involved Mark. Julie no longer thought he'd had anything to do with it, they'd come that far at least, but in the pit of his guts Mark could never really be sure.

Tragedy had created space, and this had stretched to distance between them. When Julie heard about Lena all the pain would sharpen up again, and old doubts flood through her mind. The police would be down to see her pretty soon, sniffing around for him. Valley Boy running home. At least Julie wasn't on that estate any more, she was twenty miles away, down on the coast, in a flat, and working in a TV factory. A new start, away from the tongues and the looks, and the awful celebrity. The media would bring Shane up again, of course they would. He could hear the voices getting into their stride again  
ripped his girlfriend open did he, that proves it must have been him with the kid. Aye, I remember Mark Richards, a crazy bastard, Psycho Eyes we used to call him around here. I'd bring back the rope, I would.
Then the nationals would piece it together and he'd be famous once more, for another long fifteen minutes.

Mark walked around until six, keeping off the main streets, going into a few parks, watching all the people going home, like he had only a few days ago. Like him, Lena hadn't had much of a start in the world. Her father was just a yellowed black and white photograph, and she had never bothered with her mother as soon as she was old enough to get away. Lena had a brother somewhere in the Midlands – Tony, he'd have his address in the small book he always carried. Thank Christ he did, for everything else was in the flat. Mark had only met Tony a few times. The man was nothing like Lena, Tony was a man in his mid-thirties with big hair from another age, who looked like a cross between a pimp and a hairdresser, complete with rings and false tan. Lena never said much about him, which was one of the things Mark liked most about her. They shared a mutual reticence about the past, it had helped draw them together. They were a new beginning for each other and it had worked, in its way. When she went off on modelling jobs Mark never asked too much.

Mark felt his eyes becoming wet
again and brushed them with the back of a hand. It was the first time in years they'd performed like this. The last time was on that beach in Shetland. He'd been sent there as the final part of his young offenders' stint. They did things like that then, gave twisted kids the chance to try the life of the rich, as if a new way of life could be caught, like a disease. It was an outward bound course, a problem, one-parent, shattered family kid mixing with public school boys, crazy, but it took him to a beach near Lerwick, which was fresh, open, and empty. Flat sand and shingle stretching up to a big sky which might have been another planet for him. He'd learned to row and had seen whales, seen them swimming around the boat, seen them dead on the beach, washed up for no apparent reason. He'd cried then, for himself, and his whole cracked upbringing, he'd cried about the state of the world, and his own dark place in it, which also seemed to have no apparent reason. He cried for his missing baby brother, that more than anything. Now he did so for a woman, dabbing at his eyes and wondered if it had been love.

If Kelly cocked up there was no plan B. Mark's mind was in no state to think of one. It was hard enough keeping that image of Lena out of it, he wanted to see her laughing in the park over the road, trying to brain him with a frisbee, he wanted to see her the only time they been on holiday; Paris, a place she knew well, which enveloped him in winter chill, strange light and long nights. He wanted to see her like this, but shades of red cut into him whenever he tried.

Mark stood in the alley behind Kelly's place. All seemed quiet. Kelly had a bed-sit, on the second floor, not much more than a rancid squat. Downstairs was a boarded-up shop. Mark went up the back stairs and knocked his door lightly, thinking how easy it would be for Kelly to grass him up, for the Old Bill to open, and the rest of them rush up the stairs. Would he resist? He wasn't sure, but old habits died hard.

There were no police. Kelly opened the door to a crack and squinted through with his stubbly, weasel-like face. Mark pushed past him.

‘Did you get it?' Mark asked.

Kelly nodded towards the window with his head. In the street, amongst the bent and busted bangers was a Mondeo, not too old.

‘What do you think I am, a fucking rep?' Mark said.

‘I know, Mr Richards, but I used my head, see. Millions of these buggers about, you won't stick out, like, and I had some ‘Y' plates that are the right year for it. It's a good car that is, a good workhorse and it's gotta full tank.'

‘Where are the real ones? I don't want you keeping them.'

‘In the river.'

Mark doubted that they were. Number plates were collateral for Kelly.

‘Key?'

‘These will be OK. Got a good collection of Ford.'

Mark scoured the street. It was full of crap and a few people coming home from work but empty of police. Not much action at all, really. A few Rasta sweating and smoking on the corner, and a fat git slouched against the doorway of his video shop, probably wishing it was winter and pissing down, so that he might get a bit more trade. Kelly's room stank. It had been innocent of a real clean since Kelly had moved in. Mark knew the smell, he'd been in so many places like this, they permeated his life from its earliest days. It was the smell of failure, that ‘going nowhere' sourness that was so hard to get rid of once it attached itself to you. It was the deadliest virus he knew.

‘My money, Mr Richards?'

Mark took the notes from his inside pocket but stayed Kelly's reaching hand. It seemed pathetically small inside his own.

‘Don't go blowing this like a fool, I'll know if you do.'

‘I won't, I didn't get where I am doing anything stupid like that.'

Mark's eyes swept past him to Kelly's few square feet of nothing and would have laughed if it wasn't so tragic, if his girlfriend had not been cut up that morning. She'd be on some slab somewhere now, a bored pathologist going about his business one more time. Not that he felt any better than Kelly, not this day. Kelly would never have a killing pinned on him.

‘What will you say, Kelly, if anyone comes asking about me?'

Kelly jumped to his cue.

‘Nothing, Mr Richards, you know I'm good for that. Always good for that.'

‘And if someone says they saw us in the Queen's Head?'

‘Not much chance of that, but if they did, well, I always drink there. We was just passing the time of day, like.'

‘Good.'

Kelly squirmed under Mark's stare. He let him take the money. As Kelly pocketed it Mark wondered who else would be coming around, and what tactics they would use. Was anyone after him, too? How could he know? Lena was dead and he didn't know why. He had no motive, no names, nothing was taken from the flat. He felt his body tense as he thought of catching up with her killer. Muscles were tightening, his hands flexed, six foot two and fourteen seven of perfect shape wanted a result. Kelly edged away from him, five foot four of hopelessness in piss-stained trousers, but Mark felt more kinship with the man than anything else.

‘It's OK, Kelly,' Mark said softly, ‘nothing's going to happen to you, as long as you keep it shut.'

Mark took the keys and went out quickly. It wouldn't do to keep the car long, but it should get him to Coventry, to Tony. It was all he could think to do. Lena had seen her brother quite recently, when she'd been working in Birmingham. As he thought of it now he remembered her quietness that following week, almost introverted, which wasn't like her. That was his show.

The Mondeo had a full tank, and an air freshener hanging on the dash that immediately activated his hay fever. It was a two-litre job, its interior pretending to be something grand but it went well enough, which was all that interested him. Mark drove off, imagining eyes everywhere. He threw the air freshener out of the window and headed into the tail-end of the London rush hour. He was on the M1 in half an hour and drove at a careful seventy, keeping the windows shut despite the heat. He passed fields with crops the colour of Lena's hair, lush with summer growth. He'd only been this way once before, when he'd driven up with Lena to be introduced to Tony. Mark hadn't really been interested but it had seemed important to her at the time.

Mark tried to fix Tony's location in his head; it was a terrace in one of the Coventry suburbs, not unlike the ones of his Welsh valley, but on the flat in the middle of a city, not stuck at crazy angles on hillsides. He was tired, so tired it didn't so much creep up on him as zap him. If there was an opposite to an adrenaline rush he was feeling it now. Every sense told him to pull over and sleep but he couldn't afford to. He turned on the radio, and searched for news. Nothing yet. He kept it on, enduring the useless music until the next newscast.

The sun was lowering in the western sky. Mark headed towards a deepening red, cut with the odd feathery vapour trail of a plane. He was one of thousands of cars heading home for the weekend, but maybe he'd be unique on this motorway, the only one running from a killing. He had a sudden flashback to the flat and blinked it out quickly, but not before the car swerved a little and someone behind honked. There were sunglasses in the glove compartment, amongst a few CDs by people he'd never heard of and a photograph of a couple with two kids. Everyone looked happy. How had one of Lena's favourite songs gone  
happy, shiny people
? He put the glasses on and felt calmer as he turned onto the M6. Coventry wasn't far away now.

Again nothing on the radio. The news was full of vile stuff, but not his vile stuff. Iraq was kicking off again, a kid had been found dead in Yorkshire, some football star was being paid too much attention, all the things that usually passed him by. Now they were more real. Lena was part of the game now, tomorrow she'd be added to the mix, just one more statistic, but one that belonged to him. Every one of the news items shattered lives somewhere but it wasn't yours so you glossed over it, dismissed it in seconds before re-engaging with your life, the one that could never be touched by anything like that. Lena was officially part of the world's mess, as Shane had been.

Iraq made Mark think of his last job. It had involved a guy who'd been working there. One of many picking over the corpse, looking for a quick return. Some sort of important engineer. He'd been cheating on his wife, and had set up a girl in a flat not far from Lena's, so the agency had asked him to do surveillance. It was a poor job and he'd used Kelly to do most of the watching. He'd just taken a few photos at appropriate times. The man's wife was a looker, more so than the mistress, but Mark had realised some time ago that these affairs had many dimensions, power, excitement, thrill, doing it because one could. They rarely made any sense. The wife sobbed in the office and told him she'd never really believed it, until he spread the photographs out on the desk. They always used black and white for this work. Cutting out colour seemed to tell the truth more. The woman had a kid away in a boarding school somewhere who loved his dad. Each time Mark did a job like this he wanted out.

Cloud was building up around the sun as it made its farewell, yellow on red. As Mark passed a place called Harborough Magna the nine o'clock news came on. Again nothing on Lena. It had been half a day now, this lack of news didn't add up. He couldn't think why this should be, but then it was hard to think at all. At least the need to sleep had gone. Energy had kicked in again but he needed to eat. He pulled off into a services. He was only miles away from Tony now but he had to take time out, to try and get some thought processes going. The guy might not be there anyway.

Mark sat in the car park for a while.
Try to think, you stupid bastard.
He hadn't seen Lena much in the last few weeks. She'd been in Amsterdam, he'd been busy helping to destroy a marriage. He tracked back, to last Christmas, when they had gone to that cottage in the Cotswolds. Her idea. It was like on a postcard, she'd said, but it had been cold, cold enough for a dusting of snow. It was the kind of England she was always searching for, log fires, hearty people, polite people, no crime, no filth, the kind of world he had no experience of, maybe the kind that had never existed, but if it was an illusion, he'd enjoyed it. They'd walked back from a pub, Lena's face radiant in the cold, his own happy, shiny person. We'll have all this, one day, she said, waving a hand over the cottage and its large garden. I know we'll have the money. He'd smiled, and let her dream. Then Mark moved on, month by month, looking for anything unusual, anything different in her behaviour. There was nothing. No reason and no sense to this, yet what she'd said about having money stuck in his mind.