Take My Breath Away (19 page)

This is my world, she thought as she stuffed the book back in its place. I belong in a freak show, just as much as bearded ladies and elephant men. My place is with the killers and the slain, trapped between the pages of a fingermarked paperback, ready to be gloated over by the innocent reading public. This is where Nic Gabriel will pigeonhole me and I shall never escape. I may not meet the same fate as Crippen, Ruth Ellis or Hanratty, but the Grant Dennis murder will be crawled over for fresh clues for as long as I live. Feminists will use my name as shorthand for the oppression of my sex. Armchair Freuds will speculate about my state of mind when I killed Grant: bad, mad or simply sad?

Suddenly she saw the name of Nic Gabriel. It was like a slap on the cheek, knocking all the melodrama and self-indulgence out of her. She was burning with curiosity as she lifted the book. The artwork was subdued. This wasn’t meant to be crime-as-porn, but a serious piece of writing. The quotes on the front were lavish in their praise of the author’s insight.
The Times Literary Supplement
raved about the way Nic Gabriel had woven familiar material into a new and striking fabric.
The Literary Review
said that he made Crippen seem like one of us: a man defeated not by his own evil act, but by the vagaries of fate.

On the back cover was a black and white photograph of the man she had confronted twice that day. He was staring over his shoulder, as though he had
heard someone call his name at a time when he thought himself to be alone. The lines of his face were straight, but she did not find them cruel. That might have been easier to cope with than what she saw in the picture, what disturbed her so much that it made her clutch at a shelf for support. She saw a man on an endless quest, a man who would never give it up, whatever the cost.

Moistening her lips, she began to turn the pages. As she read, she was startled to find herself appreciating the limpidity of the prose, the bleak sympathy with which the author traced his subject’s fate. Other shoppers passed to and fro, but she paid them no heed. She was hypnotised by the picture painted of the timid little American who fell for the girl who worked in his office. Perhaps it was true that he had not meant to murder his wife and that the prosecution case was built upon sand.

‘So that’s his angle,’ she murmured to herself. ‘I may end up not a monster but another victim.’

Scarcely a morsel of comfort. So Gabriel was a gifted writer, not a peep-show merchant, but in a way that made things worse. He wouldn’t focus on what she had done, she guessed, but on how she had felt. He would rob her of the last shreds of self-protection. Even in the darkest days, when she had felt like a beast in a zoo, she had at least been able to conceal her thoughts. She had talked to psychiatrists, chaplains, doctors, lawyers, a hundred and one experts in hearts and minds, but not one of them had penetrated her defences. She’d cut adrift from the rest of the world while she’d starved herself in a muddled attempt to find a kind of peace. Now she was fit and free, she was easy prey for Nic Gabriel.

He wanted to speak to her; she had read that in his face before the lift doors closed. He was fascinated, not repelled, and she guessed that he was already planning an approach to her. She wondered what he would say, how he would sell it to her. The prospect of collaboration, perhaps, a share in the proceeds. Distinguished writers did that sometimes, they made deals with murderers, all in the interest of understanding the evil that men do. Men and women, rather.

‘How long are you going to stand there, putting yourself through hell?’

Roxanne looked up and saw Chloe on the other side of a table stacked high with new paperbacks. She showed her the cover of the book. ‘Nic Gabriel.’

‘Uh-huh. I’ve been watching you for ages. I thought I’d do a bit of window-shopping before we met, then I caught sight of you, coming in here. Honestly, you looked as though you were in a world of your own. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were on something. I followed you, saw you checking the plan of the shop, scouring everywhere for his book. I guessed what you were after right away. I’ve worked out what you’re like, Roxanne. You simply can’t stop punishing yourself.’

‘It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.’

‘Let’s go home. We need to talk.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Roxanne fiddled in her bag, searching for her purse. ‘I need to make a purchase.’

‘Oh, Roxanne.’ There was no mistaking the alarm in Chloe’s eyes. ‘Don’t buy the book. Please. Don’t let him do this to you.’

‘Don’t you see?’ Roxanne asked. ‘If I’m to look after myself, I need to know what I’m up against.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘I’ve decided that you’re right,’ Roxanne said. ‘I can’t give everything up and run away. Even if I did, this man Gabriel would track me down anyway. It’s his will against mine.’

Chloe’s eyes had begun to gleam. ‘You mean…’

‘I mean,’ Roxanne said, ‘that Nic Gabriel is never going to write about me. I won’t let it happen.’

They were lying on the rug in the Leytonstone flat, Roxanne stroking Chloe’s breasts. As soon as they had arrived back home, they had undressed each other and made love hungrily. Afterwards, they sent for a takeaway and polished off a couple of bottles of wine before making love again, slowly this time, luxuriating in the intimacy.

Chloe traced a finger along her thigh, the tip of the nail scraping against the skin. ‘Roxanne, you’re gorgeous. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Chances are, Nic Gabriel wants to screw you. Any normal man would.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘It’s the truth. You know it, I know it. Why pretend? You’re so gorgeous, I can hardly believe we’ve finished up in bed together. I bet Gabriel would do anything to swap places with me. He’s not married and he’s a bit of a hunk himself. Face it, Roxanne, this is complicated. I bet he fancies the pants off you.’

A few minutes passed, with no sound but Chloe’s sighing whenever Roxanne’s fingertips touched her nipples. Eventually Roxanne said, ‘You’re not jealous, are you?’

After a pause, Chloe said, ‘So what if I am, a bit?’

‘No need.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

‘It’s true. This man scares the shit out of me. I’m not likely to drag him off to bed, am I?’

‘That’s the recommended course, when someone sexy turns your life upside down.’

‘I don’t find him sexy.’

Chloe hauled herself into a sitting position. ‘You bloody liar.’

‘You know what I mean. I’m serious, he terrifies the living daylights out of me. I wish he’d go to hell. I wish he didn’t exist.’

Chloe caught her breath. Her eyes were wide as she looked down at Roxanne. ‘Oh God, darling,’ she said. ‘Don’t even think about that.’

Nic walked through the door of the house in Narrow Court and dropped his briefcase on the hall carpet. He’d stuffed it with books and sheets of A4 that told the story of Cassandra Lee. Old news stories printed off from the internet, a couple of dog-eared paperbacks he’d picked up in a quick trawl of the second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road. He made himself a pizza and read as he ate.

The Press had taken against Cassandra from the first. It wasn’t simply what she done to Grant Dennis that outraged journalistic sensibilities. Far worse, she had offered no explanation for her crime, let alone an apology. The columnists who guarded public morals loved admissions of shame and promises of atonement; with luck, a five hundred word sermon would write itself. Cassandra hadn’t lifted a finger in her own defence and that kind of contempt for law and order was beyond the pale.

One news agency picture of her dominated the front pages. An anorexic, washed-out Cassandra, her cheeks hollow, her hair tangled and her eyelids drooping with fatigue. It had become the standard image, just as the mugshot of Myra Hindley in her peroxide phase demonised her for ever. The Cassandra in the photograph was a far cry from the temptress who had been Grant Dennis’s fashion accessory. A once beautiful young woman, made ugly by her own act of savagery. There was a lesson there and the pundits were eager to teach it.

Coverage of the appeal, years later, was subdued
and grudging. The Press resented being cheated of its hate-figures. Even the reports of her acquittal used the old photograph. She did not sell her story, so there wasn’t even one paper to take up the cudgels on her behalf. The solicitor who had fought for her refused to do more than make a terse public statement thanking the court and expressing the wish that Cassandra should be allowed to pick up the pieces of her life in private and without hindrance from the media. Talk about hope springing eternal. A couple of newspapers hinted that Hilary Metcalf’s interest in her client was more than purely professional.

After that, the media trail grew cold, but not because Cassandra had been content to settle down in decent obscurity and seek to rebuild her life. On the contrary. She had created a new identity for herself. New name, new career, new job. A murderer reinventing herself as an ethical employment lawyer. A woman who had listened to her lover’s screams as he burned was alive and well and advising blue-chip companies about how to sack staff and still keep on the straight and narrow. He had only to pick up the phone and half a dozen tabloid editors would be wetting themselves with excitement. Especially those who had been forced to settle Ali Khan’s libel claims and were itching to cut Will Janus down to size. Rehabilitating offenders was fine and dandy, but hiring a killer to help make hundreds of hard-working factory hands redundant was guaranteed to provoke well-chosen words of condemnation in the leader columns.

Nic stretched out on the sofa, clippings in his hand. Could there be a connection between her presence and the deaths of the people from Creed? The coincidence troubled him, but he couldn’t make sense of it.
He remembered Roxanne’s stunned look each time she’d seen him. She must be convinced he intended to give her game away. Either she had realised from the start who he was or had been responding to something in his own expression. What had that revealed?

He stared again at the old cruel photograph. Roxanne was so different, not just from the sick girl accused of murder but also from the slinky plaything pictured in some of the stories printed prior to the trial. She’d had her hair cut and dyed. Lipstick and mascara were things of the past. Even her eyes were a different colour. No wonder it had taken time to work out who she was. Yet some things did not change. Roxanne, he thought, was gorgeous.

The shattered face gazed back at him from the photograph. Her eyes were beseeching, as if pleading for rescue. How had he never noticed that before? She’d worn the same look today, as the lift doors closed on her. It was somehow irresistible.

‘So, Roxanne,’ he said to himself. ‘What do I do about you?’

Whilst he wondered about her, he made himself a coffee and started flicking through the
Evening Standard
he had picked up in town. Same old stories: hospital waiting lists up, crime detection down. He was about to toss the paper aside when a line tucked away in the stop press caught his eye.

The naked body of a woman of 47 had been found in her Oxford flat that morning. Foul play wasn’t suspected. Big deal: the piece was only a couple of sentences long and wouldn’t have made it into print had the tragic victim not worked for a famous London firm. She was an editor with the Aldwych Press, a tiny
but venerable publishing house, and tittle-tattle about Aldwych always made good copy.

Aldwych had a distinguished reputation for its backlist of legal and philosophical books, but it owed its high public profile to a recently developed niche in literary erotica. As Nic recalled, Will Janus had once written for Aldwych, although in recent years he had signed up with a mainstream publishing house and kept well clear of embarrassment by association with exquisitely phrased porn. But it wasn’t the Creed connection that caused Nic to sit up straight and read the story a couple more times.

It was the woman’s name: Jasmine Delahaye. That and the mention of Oxford. Nic forgot about Roxanne. What if she was the Jasmine who was called Jazz for short?

He called in half a dozen favours, ringing round everyone he could think of who might be able to tell him something about her. He’d guessed right: she was Jazz to everyone. Zack Flowers, an acquaintance he’d met through Dylan, had worked for Aldwych Press before moving to review rock music for
The London Lawyer
. He turned out to have known her for years.

‘Yeah, I only just heard. Hanged herself, hasn’t she? Fucking awful news.’

‘Tell me about her.’

A pause. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’

‘Jesus, where do I begin? At first glance, you’d say she was someone who’d spent too long at Glastonbury and Woodstock. A bit of a hippie. Long reddish hair, didn’t look her age, didn’t act it. I liked her a lot. Totally off her head, of course. But then
you’d have to be, wouldn’t you, working for old Mickey Aldwych?’

‘You met at Aldwych Press?’

‘A dozen years back, right. She lived in Oxford and travelled in. She was the legal series editor. Eventually Mickey realised that dirty stories in polished prose made even more money than ripping off legal authors and law library budgets. He started with unexpurgated translations of Catuallus and Aristophanes. You know that line in
The Acharnians
, ‘What tits! How firm, like quinces!’? That really tickled old Mickey, he had the quote framed and hung over his desk. Later on he moved into contemporary smut, stopped commissioning so many worthy monographs on judicial review. In the end Jazz went freelance. Money meant nothing to her. She wasn’t one for the real world, wasn’t Jazz.’ A pause. ‘Sounds as though that’s the conclusion she just came to herself. Shit, shit, shit.’

‘If she told what sounded like a tall story, would people take her seriously?’

‘Depends on who she told, I guess. What’s all this about, by the way?’

‘She knew Dylan, didn’t she? I heard he had a fling with her.’

‘Could be, it’s ages since I last saw either of them. If their paths crossed, they’d probably have hit it off. Are you suggesting she killed herself because her heart’s desire had been murdered?’

‘I’m not suggesting anything. Tell me, did you and she..?’

‘No, no.’ Zack sighed, perhaps remembering long ago opportunities, now lost forever. ‘We never did. Circumstances, you know. Besides, I was five years older and she had a yen for toy boys.’

Zack couldn’t tell him anything else except for the names of a few friends of Jazz Delahaye. Even with all the windows open, it was still hot and sticky and Nic took a midnight bath. As he soaked in the round tub, he was thinking of the man who had lived here. Dylan had been proved right in the end. Jazz was destined for sudden death. Pity Dylan hadn’t realised that he was ahead of her in the queue. Typical. He loved himself and supposed everyone else did the same. He’d probably forgotten all about Amy Vinton, never mind guessing that she hated him enough to kill first him and then herself.

As he dried himself, he glanced again at Dylan’s copy of Shakespeare, scanning the bookmarked final scene of the first act of
Othello
. Iago, now, there was a man. A skilled advocate, expert at manipulating others so that they did his bidding.

When Nic first trained in the law, his principal once asked him to name the most successful advocate of the twentieth century and when Nic offered a couple of wild guesses his boss had burst into laughter.

‘Not even close,’ he said. ‘How about Adolf Hitler?’

Advocacy was like heroin, and as dangerous as the drug that had destroyed Tara Glass. It was so easy to get hooked on the power of persuasion. The rush you got when the words came out right and you swayed a judge or jury – nothing like it. The case became your whole world. Everything. All you wanted was to win. It was so much more than an intellectual challenge. People talked about the logic of the law, but the best advocates knew they must conquer the heart and soul as well as the mind. Advocates were supposed to be actors, a trite metaphor, but the best were
story-tellers
. Yes, story-tellers as mesmeric as Bryn Gabriel. They
spun yarns with a difference. Rather than telling others what they wanted to hear, they urged their listeners to do what they themselves wanted. Which was not the same as encouraging them to believe in what the advocates believed. Belief simply didn’t come into it.

Wild ideas kept jumping around in Nic’s brain, but by a miracle he managed a couple of hours’ sleep. A good night, his best since Dylan’s murder. He was on the road early, heading for Oxford. Another hot day; he’d forgotten what clouds looked like.

Jazz Delahaye’s flat had occupied the second floor of a Victorian villa in a leafy crescent near the Parks. An elderly widower who lived below had been the one to find her. According to a pal of Zack’s, the old man fancied fifteen minutes of fame and had tipped off the Press the moment he’d hung up on the emergency services. He proved to be a diminutive halitosis sufferer with an accent straight out of
Coronation Street.
He wouldn’t have looked out of place wearing a flat cap and limping across a townscape by Lowry. He’d had no time for Jazz and wasn’t bothered about speaking ill of the dead.

‘Daft as a bloody brush, she was. Miss Floppy, I called her. Never wore a brassiere, y’know. My late wife would never have given a woman like that the time of day, and that’s a fact.’

They sat in a kitchen smelling of tobacco and burnt toast, on either side of a table with a chipped formica top. Nic remembered the frightened woman who had slammed the phone down on him. A short while later, she had been dead.

Brusquely, he said, ‘You said you overheard her on the telephone?’

‘It was a scorcher, yesterday,’ the old man said,
folding his arms as if to defy contradiction. ‘I opened that window as soon as I got up. She’d done the same upstairs. I wasn’t eavesdropping, I just couldn’t help hearing her.’

Of course not. ‘What did she say?’

‘There were two calls. The first on her mobile, I think. It didn’t last long. Then the phone in her room rang.’

Nic wanted to punch the air, but he’d told the old man he was a journalist undertaking background research on Jazz’s death for a piece in the
Oxford Mail
and he wasn’t ready for his cover to be blown.

‘What did she say?’

‘She was getting herself upset. Raising her voice. Like I said, I couldn’t help hearing. Obviously it was a boyfriend on the line, giving her the heave-ho. She kept saying she loved him, that she’d never let him down. Why didn’t he trust her? He ought to know she’d never betrayed him.’ A reminiscent chuckle. ‘Soft soap, it never works. He was on his way, all right, and there was nothing she could do to talk him out of it.’

‘What else was said?’

‘I got the feeling he was trying to calm her down. Saying they could still be friends, or summat like that, I suppose.’ The old man paused in theatrical style. ‘She said, “
I loved you and you destroyed my life
.” Then she banged the phone down and started banging about like a bull in a china shop, the way she always did when she was in a state. I heard her mobile go, it wasn’t a long conversation, maybe a wrong number, I dunno. Five minutes later I heard this crash. As if something had fallen over. After that, everything went quiet. For a change.’

Nic ground his teeth.
When she picked up the phone
and heard my voice, she was praying it was her lover. Instead, I gave her more to fear
. ‘What did you do?’

For the first time, the old man’s voice faltered. ‘I – I left it quarter of an hour. I hadn’t heard her go out. I wondered what was up. The silence was funny, like. She was a noisy woman, always had been. I decided I ought to take a gander, just in case. Her door was ajar. She never had the faintest idea about security. I looked inside…’

‘And you saw her hanging there,’ Nic finished. His stomach was churning.

‘In the buff,’ the old man said. ‘Not a bloody stitch on. What a way to go, eh?’

‘Jazz always put herself through hell,’ Misty Karl said. ‘As well as those of us who were fond of her. She fretted so much, it was tough to handle. Manic depression. Or bipolar disorder, should I say. You’d be amazed how many creative people have it. Most of the geniuses, actually. From the Hemingways to Tony Hancock, from Graham Greene to Edgar Allan Poe. The list is endless, Jazz used to say. Thinking that cheered her up at times. Years back, though, the bloody thing got the better of her. It was after an ex-boyfriend died. She shouldered all the blame. Poor Jazz, she always took everything so much to heart, sometimes she could be hard to take herself.’

She and Nic were sitting on a bench in the Parks, casting an occasional glance at the punts passing by. Zack Flowers had said Misty was Jazz Delahaye’s oldest friend, also Balliol College’s Senior Research Fellow in Genre Fiction Studies. She was wearing a short white tennis skirt and plimsolls. Nic’s call to her mobile number had caught her at the end of a tie-break. She’d
been playing a friend from another college, but had agreed to talk to him about Jazz. Her legs were sturdy and brown and she’d done nothing to hide the crinkles around her eyes and mouth or first streaks of grey in her hair. She smelled faintly of patchouli.