Lethal Profit (2 page)

As Eva examined her face in the bathroom mirror the next day she felt pretty low. Overnight, the black eye that March had kindly given her had developed into a large purplish splat, with black bruising in the eye socket. When she had got back to the hotel she had spent several hours sitting bolt upright on the bed watching the chair she had propped up against the door. The sudden assault had shocked and shaken her; she had remained for a long time just sitting, staring at the door, catching each one of her thoughts when it came too close to out of control. She tried to work out what had happened; she briefly wondered whether she had done something to make it happen, but she quickly stifled those trains of thought as pointless and dangerous. Finally, her pulse had stopped thudding, her mind had stopped racing and she had passed out, exhausted, fully clothed in all her make-up. Now she looked like a police mug shot. Gently, she began to clean away mascara and eye-liner from the edges of her eyes. The make-up-removing wipes stung her black eye and she winced with each stroke. She stopped and looked at herself – dishevelled long dark hair, low fringe swept awkwardly to one side, face just a bit too thin.

‘What the hell are you doing?' she said out loud to herself. But there was no reply.

As she turned on the shower and stepped into the hot clouds of steam she wondered again what the hell she was doing. Three months ago her life had been relatively normal. She edited other people's words for a living – a dream job – she lived in London with her house-mate Isabella and she spent
most
of her time going from gig, to party, to shopping, to long lazy weekends. Her only real faults were an addiction to running and an inability to put the cap on the toothpaste. Then Jackson killed himself.

She heard her phone ringing as she stepped out of the shower but she let it ring, slowly dried herself and then sat down on the bed. She had just begun to get to know Jackson again – after ten years of thinking he had died in a car crash when she was sixteen. He'd promised to tell her exactly what had happened and where he had been all that time but after a year he still hadn't and Eva felt his presence in her life was too fragile to risk pushing him to open up. Now he never would. Eva sighed and pulled the small handset over to her and watched as the phone notified her of a missed call two minutes ago. She navigated her way through her phone records. And then she stopped. Suddenly she felt as if she had been punched in the stomach. There on the screen was the identity of the caller: ‘Jackson.'

As she continued to stare at the white display, suddenly the phone jumped into life and the name was large, filling the whole screen. ‘Jackson calling.' Eva dropped the phone and pushed herself away from it,as if she had been stung. What the…

He's alive.

Just before the ringing stopped, she made a grab for the phone.

‘Hello.' Her voice was tense and hard.

There was a crackle on the other end of the line. Eva had absolutely no idea what to do. ‘Jackson?'

It sounded crazy just saying his name. He was dead. But he was calling her…

‘Jackson…' Her voice was now almost a whisper. She pressed the phone closer to her ear listening for signs of anything on the other end and then she heard it. A breath. An exhalation. There was someone there.

‘Jackson, is that you?'

The connection cut and once again Eva dropped the phone. She stared at it. For one delirious moment she allowed herself to believe that the whole horrible nightmare of the past three months was just another bad dream. But every logical cell in her body told her that it couldn't be.

Jackson's death had been reported to the family by the French police. It had a stamp of official authenticity on it which meant that no matter how much Eva wanted to believe it had been a mistake, that it was someone else who had taken his own life in a squalid flat in a Parisian suburb, it was there in black and white that it was Jackson. The police said they had found him surrounded by the paraphernalia of a serious heroin session. There were puncture wounds in his skin. The area was notorious for drugs and violence, and drugs and violence were notorious for triggering depression and suicide. They suggested he had got himself in so deep there was no other way out. They intimated he was a coward whose life had become out of control and that he had just given up. But Eva had lived with him for sixteen years and even though he had badly let her down, she knew he had never given up on anything.

W
HEN
SHE
HAD
RECOVERED
HER
composure Eva suddenly knew that there was something very wrong with the situation she found herself in. From the evasive answers she and her father had been given by the French police three months ago, to the phone call she had just received, every one of the circumstances surrounding Jackson's death made her seriously uneasy. Her skin was still tingling with adrenaline after seeing Jackson's name appear on her phone like that; she was naturally sceptical as to whether or not it was really him, but who else would it be? Even if it wasn't him, it was someone who had his phone.

Briefly, she remembered the horrible encounter with March the night before. When she had awoken that morning her mind had once again begun to turn over everything that had happened but she had quickly decided not to think about it any more. March had the problem, not her, and she needed to be clear-headed. Still, she wondered if he had any involvement in what had happened to Jackson. As he himself had said, he had been in Paris the whole time Jackson had lived here and he had attacked her so savagely the night before for no apparent reason. But realistically, what motive did he have for murder? It was more likely that he was just a serial opportunist.

Still sitting on the bed with the phone beside her, wet hair dripping onto her shoulders, Eva realised she had a clear choice.

Either she took the advice of the friends who kept worriedly messaging her from home, headed back to London and tried to carry on with her life; or she followed her hunch that Jackson had not taken his own life and struck out on her own: Eva Scott, vigilante. She smiled resignedly to herself. In reality she knew that there was no choice for her. She was just a regular person who had taken a few self-defence classes – she was hardly prepared for even mild peril – but she couldn't live with the knowledge that she had done nothing to find out what happened to Jackson. That wouldn't be right. Especially after that, she thought, looking at her phone.

She pulled on a pair of tight, black jeans, a wide-necked, cable-knit jumper and some leather ankle boots and combed out her long dark hair. Then she walked over to the curtains, drawing them back and letting the weak, milky light filter into the room. She threw open the window and was met with a bracing gust of Parisian air – coffee-edged with a slight hint of drains.

Coffee
. She needed coffee.

Eva was eternally grateful for the fact that Paris was a city of pavement cafés and bars serving a universally high standard of coffee. She sat in the corner of a small establishment near her hotel, hunched over an English newspaper she'd bought on the way. In front of her, a black coffee, a glass of water, an untouched croissant and a small red plastic bowl containing a printed receipt. She added another sachet of sugar to the thick, dark liquid, stirred it slowly with a spoon and then placed the spoon carefully on the side of the saucer. She turned the page of the paper and took a slow sip of the strong coffee.

In front of her, the world's current affairs were laid out like a depressing comic. Pictures of politicians showing off their veneers, footballers in thousands of pounds worth of designer clothes cheating on their wives, and financiers striking deals that would benefit only the 1 per cent. This was the first recession she had really experienced and she had never imagined how much it would change the country she had lived in all her life. In the past few months the news had seemed even more unbelievable – banks manipulating exchange rates for their own profits, political figures making decisions against public interests motivated by big business and the destruction of seemingly permanent institutions like the National Health Service. It shocked and surprised her that – on the whole – whilst all this damage was being done to their society most Britons did nothing. But then neither did she. At the tender age of twenty-eight she had become utterly apathetic; too concerned with her own survival to put time and effort into holding anyone else to account. Jackson had left her money – an unexpectedly large amount of money – and that gave her the luxury of inaction. Without that her life right now would be very difficult.

Eva finished her coffee and signalled to the waiter for another. She took an unenthusiastic bite of her croissant. Jackson. All her thoughts came back to Jackson. Even now there was another memory, waiting at the edge of her consciousness to be let in. This was one of the fights they'd had as teenagers, often about politics – she blinkeredly left-wing and he already a staunch capitalist. Their father, a journalist for a big daily, had encouraged them to debate and question from an early age, to speak out when they felt they saw injustice. Of course, that had massively backfired on him when his affair had been uncovered. She had no doubt he had wished then that he had raised his kids to be seen and not heard.

Jackson, especially, had been unable even to look his father in the eye when that happened. At eighteen he still looked up to Paul Scott with childishly adoring eyes, but his father's affair with Irene Hunt – cheating on their mother after twenty years of marriage – enraged Jackson. When he crashed his car several weeks later he simply walked away, leaving the family to believe he had died. In recent months Eva had realised that she never really grieved for Jackson in the ten years that followed. Not like she was now. Perhaps somewhere deep down she had known he wasn't actually dead. She checked the display on her phone and saw she had been sitting there for half an hour. Throwing a note and a few coins into the red plastic bowl, she zipped up her leather jacket, jammed a Russian hat down over her ears and headed for the door.

The train to the suburb where Shaun Thompson lived took less than half an hour, but getting off at the station was like stepping into another world. Whilst Eva was used to the dirty, occasionally mean streets of London, by comparison Shaun lived in a very rough suburb. The area was populated with low, square blocks of flats up to four storeys high, either dirtily whitewashed or preserved in their original grey concrete. Other than the flats and the graffiti that decorated them, the area didn't seem to have much else to offer. Gangs of kids of all origins hung around, hands in pockets, kicking balls at passers-by or listening to music pumping out from the tinny speakers on their phones.

Eva felt the heaviness of being a fish out of water. She wondered why Shaun, as a foreigner, and therefore presumably a natural outsider, had made his home somewhere like this. She pulled the post-it note she had written his address on out of her bag and looked at it again: 134 Rue des Villiers. According to the very old map she had managed to acquire from her hotel – the only one they had that went out as far as this suburb – the flat was on the same road as the station.

When she reached it, she found that Shaun's block of flats was one of the nicest on the street, although that wasn't saying much. Running to four storeys, the whitewash had retained a little of its gleam and someone had planted flowerbeds either side of the path leading from the road to the front door. There was a small, white-haired man standing outside with a brush, repeatedly sweeping the same spot of concrete.

‘Hello.' Eva smiled directly at him, choosing to speak English to try and discover straight away whether she could avoid having a whole conversation in painful broken French. The man continued to sweep his spot and totally ignored her.

‘Hello?'

As she leaned in a little closer, Eva noticed he was singing to himself and smelled quite badly of urine.

‘Oh, I'm sorry, don't mind my father.'

She jumped as a younger woman appeared from the ground floor flat and placed her hands around the old man's shoulders. He stopped rocking and looked at her.

‘Can I help at all?

‘You speak English,' Eva smiled, unable to contain her relief.

‘Yes, I learned from my father, he used to be very good at it.' She stopped and gazed at the vacant old man.

‘I'm sorry,' said Eva awkwardly.

‘It will happen to us all someday!' the woman said cheerfully and rearranged her long, dark hair into a tortoiseshell comb that sat just above her left ear. ‘Did you want something?'

‘Yes, I'm looking for someone called Shaun Thompson. Apparently he lives here.'

‘Shawan…?' The woman frowned.

‘Thompson.'

The woman thought for a second. ‘You know, I know everyone in this block – there are only sixteen flats – and there is no one by that name.'

‘I was given this as his address.' Eva handed over the post-it note.

‘Well, this is the same address. Are you sure they have the right person?'

‘Yes, I think so. He's English?'

‘But, of course, that's Shoon!'

Eva stared at the woman nonplussed, wondering if she was as mad as her father.

‘Yes, he's the only English person for miles around. Yes, Shoon,' she said again, saying the name so that it sounded nothing like Eva's pronunciation – the English pronunciation.

‘He lives at number nine – third floor, second door on the right. You'll have to take the stairs, I'm afraid, as the lift is broken.' She smiled apologetically and put her hands back on the old man's shoulders, gently drawing him back to the flat. ‘Nice to meet you.'

‘Thanks very much.'

Eva followed the couple in through the front door and then started up the first set of concrete stairs that, like all stairwells, seemed to smell of smoke and urine. When she reached the third floor, she followed the woman's instructions and went to Shaun's door. His name was scrawled neatly in a small plastic box on the right but there didn't appear to be a bell. She took her hat off and shoved it into her bag, knocked quickly at the scuffed surface of the wooden door and waited. No answer. She waited a couple of minutes and then knocked again but there was still no response. Glancing around to make sure no one was looking she pressed her left ear up against the door to try and detect signs of movement. The door creaked open. Eva stepped back. She looked around again to see if any of the other residents in the housing block had noticed her, but there didn't seem to be anyone around. Gently, she pushed the door so that it was fully open and took several steps inside.