Looking Good Dead

29

By four o’clock Tom’s office was starting to empty. Typical for a Friday, he thought. It was a fine, sunny afternoon in London, and the weather forecast was good. One by one his staff were clearing their desks, saying their cheery goodbyes and heading for the door.

He envied them their carefree weekends, and tried to remember when he’d last had a weekend in which he had really relaxed and not thought about work, not sat at his computer, poring over a spreadsheet of his outgoings and income, not peeked anxiously over Kellie’s shoulder as she’d sat at her keyboard on the sitting room floor.

His window was open a little despite the roar of the traffic and he felt the air, balmy and warm. Maybe this weekend he would switch off a little, as much as the dark cloud of that damned CD would allow. It was good news that Kellie had a job. The money wasn’t great, but at least it would cover some of her spending extravaganzas – just as long as it did not encourage her to spend even more.

At four fifteen he decided, To hell with it. If he left now he might just make the next fast train, the 16.36, which would get him home comfortably in time for the barbecue he’d planned with Kellie, using the monster new piece of kit she had bought.

He shook his head at the thought of the barbecue. Insane. Yet he was curious to know what it looked like; curious to know how any barbecue could cost north of five hundred pounds.

In a fit of extravagance, minor compared to Kellie’s, he took a cab instead of the bus to Victoria station, arriving with just minutes to spare. He grabbed an Evening Standard from a vendor, and without bothering to wait for his change sprinted for the platform, clambering aboard the train just seconds before the wheels began to turn.

Out of sheer determination, he struggled down the aisle of every single one of the train’s crowded carriages, looking for the dickhead. But there was no sign of him. By the time he had finished, he had broken into a heavy sweat from the heat and from his exertion. He found one of the few empty seats, removed his laptop and his high-speed internet card from his bag, put the bag and his jacket up on the luggage rack, then sat down with his laptop on his knees and glanced at the front page of the newspaper.

Thirty Dead in Iraq Bomb Carnage.

He glanced through the article, about yet another suicide car bombing of police recruits, guiltily aware he had become almost numb to reports like these. There seemed to be so many, all the time. And he’d never really worked out where he stood on Iraq. He didn’t care for Bush or Blair and every successive outrage had made him increasingly doubtful the world was a safer place since the invasion. Sometimes when he popped his head around the bedroom doors of his sleeping children he stared at them with a guilty helplessness, knowing just how responsible he was for their safety, but in terms of the politics of the world into which he had brought them, he felt woefully inadequate.

Then he turned the page, and it felt like an unseen fist had reached out from some other dimension altogether and was gripping his innards like a vice.

He was staring at a photograph of a young woman, beneath a grisly headline running across the top of the third page: Headless Torso Victim Named.

Her face.

Reminding him again, just a little, of Gwyneth Paltrow, just as when he had first seen her, in his den, on Tuesday night.

It was her. For sure, for absolute certain.

His eyes jumped down to the words printed below.

Sussex Police confirmed today that the badly mutilated body of a young woman, found on farmland in Peacehaven, East Sussex, on Wednesday, is that of missing law student Janie Stretton, 23.

The Senior Investigating Officer leading the enquiry for Sussex CID, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, said, ‘This is one of the most brutal murders I have encountered in twenty years on the police force. Janie Stretton was a decent, hard-working and popular young woman. We are doing everything we can to apprehend her killer.’

Derek Stretton, Janie’s distraught father, issued this brief prepared statement from his £3m riverside mansion near Southampton. ‘Janie was the most wonderful daughter a father could wish for, and was a great strength to me when my wife – her mother – sadly died. I beg the police to find her killer swiftly, before he destroys another innocent life.’

Then Tom’s eyes jumped back up to Janie’s face. And as he did so, the words of the threatening email burned back into his brain.

If you inform the police about what you saw, or if you ever try to access this site again, what is about to happen to your computer will happen to your wife, Kellie, to your son, Max, and to your daughter, Jessica…

For a moment he glanced nervously around at his fellow passengers but no one was taking any notice of him. A youth opposite was sitting plugged into an iPod; he could hear the beat, an irritating raspy sound, too low to recognize the music but louder than the clackety-clack of the train. A couple of others were also reading newspapers, while a woman was reading a well-thumbed copy of The Da Vinci Code, and a man in a pin-striped suit was working on his laptop.

Tom stared back at the photograph. Was there any possibility he was mistaken? Any at all?

But there wasn’t. It was her.

So what the hell, he wondered, was he going to do?