Dead Like You

50

Saturday 10 January

The words on the data unit’s screen in Yac’s taxi read:

China Garden rest. Preston St. 2 Pass. Starling. Dest. Roedean Cresc.

It was 11.20 p.m. He had been parked up for some minutes now and had started the meter ru

Starling. Roedean Crescent.

He had picked these people up before. He never forgot a passenger and especially not these people. The address: 67 Roedean Crescent. He had memorized that. She wore Shalimar perfume. The same perfume as his mother. He had memorized that too. She had been wearing Bruno Magli shoes. Size four. His mother’s size.

He wondered what shoes she would be wearing tonight.

Excitement rose inside him as the restaurant door opened and he saw the couple emerge. The man was holding on to the woman and looked unsteady. She helped him negotiate the step down to the pavement, then he still clung to her as they walked the short distance, through the blustery wind, over to Yac.

But Yac wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at the woman’s shoes. They were nice. Tall heels. Straps. His kind of shoes.

Mr Starling peered in through the window, which Yac had opened.

‘Taaxish for Roedean Chresshent? Shtarling?’

He sounded as drunk as he looked.

The man who owned the taxi said he did not have to take drunk passengers, especially ones who might be likely to throw up. It cost a lot of money to clear vomit out of the taxi, because it went everywhere, into the vents, down the windows into the electric motors, into the cracks down the sides of the seats. People didn’t like getting into a taxi that smelt of stale sick. It wasn’t nice to drive one either.

But it had been a quiet night. The man who owned the taxi would be angry with the poor takings. He had already complained about how little Yac had taken since New Year and he’d told Yac that he’d never known any taxi driver take so little on New Year’s Eve itself.

He needed all the fares he could get, because he didn’t want to risk the man who owned the taxi firing him and having someone else drive. So he decided to take a risk.

And he wanted to smell her perfume. Wanted those shoes in the taxi with him!

The Starlings climbed into the back and he drove off. He adjusted the mirror so he could see Mrs Starling’s face, then he said, ‘Nice shoes! Alberta Ferretti, I’ll bet those are!’

‘You a fucking pervert or shomething?’ she said, sounding almost as sloshed as her husband. ‘I think you drove us before, didn’t you, quite recently? Last week? Yesh?’

‘You were wearing Bruno Maglis.’

‘You’re too fucking pershonal! None of your damned fucking business what shoes I’m wearing.’

‘Into shoes, are you?’ Yac asked.

‘Yesh, she is into fucking shoes,’ Garry Starling butted in. ‘Spends all my money on them. Every pe

‘That’s because, my darling, you can only get it up when – ouch!’ she cried out loudly.

Yac looked at her again in the mirror. Her face was contorted in pain. She’d been rude to him last time she had been in his taxi.

He liked seeing that pain.

1998

51

Saturday 10 January

He’d spent the whole of the past few days thinking about Rachael Ryan lying in his chest freezer in his lock-up. It was hard to avoid her. Her face stared out at him from every damned newspaper. Her tearful parents spoke to him personally, and to him alone, from every damned television news broadcast.

‘Please, whoever you are, if you have taken our daughter, give her back to us. She’s a sweet, i

‘It was your daughter’s damned fault!’ he whispered back at them. ‘If she hadn’t taken my mask off she’d be fine. Fine and dandy! She’d still be your loving daughter and not my damned problem.’

Slowly, steadily, the idea he had last night took hold more and more inside him. It could just be the perfect solution! He risk-assessed it over and over again. It stood up to each problem he tested it against. It would be riskier to delay than to act.

In almost every paper the white van was mentioned. It was referred to in big headlines on the front page of the Argus: DID ANYONE SEE THIS VAN? The caption beneath read: Similar to the one seen in Eastern Terrace.

The police said they had been overwhelmed with calls. How many of those calls were about white vans?

About his white van?

White Transit vans were a dime a dozen. But the police were not stupid. It was only a matter of time before a phone call led them to his lock-up. He had to get the girl out of there. And he had to do something about the van – they were getting smart with forensics these days. But deal with one problem at a time.

Outside, the rain was torrenting down. It was now 11 p.m. on Saturday. Party night in this city. But not so many people as usual would be out and about in this dreadful weather.

He made his decision and left the house, hurrying out to his old Ford Sierra runabout.

Ten minutes later, he pulled down the garage door behind the dripping-wet car, closing it with a quiet metallic clang, then switched on his torch, not wanting to risk putting on the overhead lights.

Inside the freezer, the young woman was completely frosted over, her face translucent in the harsh beam of light.

‘We’re going to take a little drive, Rachael. Hope you’re cool with that?’

Then he smirked at his joke. Yeah. Cool. He felt OK. This was going to work. He just had to stay cool too. How did that saying go that he had read somewhere: If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs…

He pulled out his packet of cigarettes and tried to light one. But his damned hand was shaking so much, first he couldn’t strike the wheel of the lighter, then he couldn’t get the flame near the tip of the cigarette. Cold sweat was pouring down his neck as if it was coming from a busted tap.

At a few minutes to midnight, with his toolkit clipped to his belt, he drove around the Lewes Road gyratory system, past the entrance to the Brighton and Hove Borough Mortuary, wipers clunk-clunking away the rain, and then turned left on to the hard driveway of his destination, J. Bund and Sons, funeral directors.

He was shaking, all knotted up inside and perspiring heavily. Stupid woman, stupid bloody Rachael, why the hell did you have to take my mask off?

Up on the wall, above the curtained shop window of the premises, he clocked the burglar alarm box. Sussex Security Systems. Not a problem, he thought, pulling up in front of the padlocked steel gates. The lock was also not a problem.

Directly across the road was a closed estate agent’s, with flats on the two storeys above. There was a light on in one of them. But they would be used to seeing vehicles come and go at a funeral parlour around the clock.

He switched the lights off, then climbed out of the Sierra into the rain to deal with the padlock. A trickle of cars and taxis drove past along the road. One of them was a police patrol car, its blue lights flashing and siren wailing. He held his breath, but its crew paid him no attention, just swishing straight past to some emergency or other. Moments later he drove through into the rear yard and parked between two hearses and a van. Then he hurried back through the rain and closed the gates, pulling the chain around them, but leaving the padlock dangling open. So long as no one came, all would be fine.