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  DEADLINE

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  DEADLINE

  © 2018 Dean Crawford

  Published: 26th January 2018

  ASIN: B0797YHNBZ

  Publisher: Fictum Ltd

  The right of Dean Crawford to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  Dean Crawford Books

  The cell in which Kelly Lawson sat was cold and bare, just a bed and an aluminium sink that had been polished but still somehow managed to look grubby. The door was unmarked but for remedial etchings scratched into the metal by countless drunks, thugs and outcasts who had been incarcerated here in years gone by. She imagined the thieves and brawlers, wife–beaters and con–men occupying this very space and she shivered. Felix should be here, not her, and yet here she was, a victim once again.

  Her head throbbed from where she had been struck, her face and throat sore from the injuries inflicted by Felix. She had been discharged from the hospital and into the care of the police after an hour, once it had been determined that she was in no immediate danger.

  The door to her cell clicked, and a female officer opened it and beckoned Kelly to follow her. They walked through the police station to an interview room, and inside Detectives Emma Stone and Michael Burgess awaited. Stone was petite but enshrouded with an aura of competence, her bobbed auburn hair curling neatly behind her small ears and her eyes as sharp as a hawk’s. Burgess sat with his arms folded across a broad chest, partly balding and with a dark moustache that seemed as wide as a canoe adorning his upper lip.

  ‘Thank god,’ Kelly rolled her eyes in relief and hurried inside. ‘What’s going on? What happened?’

  ‘Take a seat please,’ Emma gestured to a chair opposite herself and Burgess at the table.

  Kelly did as she was told, the female officer leaving the interview room. She spotted a recording device beside the table, the camera unit up on the wall, and she immediately understood Emma’s slightly brisk tone: this was official.

  ‘Detectives Burgess and Stone,’ Emma said as she started the recording, ‘Eight forty–three am on the twelfth, with Kelly Lawson. Miss Lawson, can you tell me the events from when we last spoke please?’

  Kelly gathered her thoughts.

  ‘Before we spoke,’ Kelly said, careful not to drop any hint that Emma had visited her in an unofficial capacity, ‘I got a call from Tara Levitt–Hugh.’

  ‘She called you?’ Burgess asked, an eyebrow raised. The moustache twitched.

  ‘Yes,’ Kelly nodded, ‘I was as surprised as you are. She wanted to meet and said that she had an offer.’

  ‘An offer?’ Emma echoed.

  ‘She said that she and Felix wanted an end to all the problems we’ve been having. Tara said that he was willing to offer me fifty thousand pounds and a home, to which he would sign over the deeds, if in return I would sign a legal document to the effect that I would never bother them again in any way and would not reveal the video that I had of them together.’

  Emma stared at her for a long moment. ‘And that happened when?’

  ‘About seven thirty in the evening.’

  ‘And you agreed to meet them?’ Burgess asked.

  ‘I wasn’t sure what to think,’ Kelly admitted, ‘but they’d ruined my life and I figured that if there was one thing I could take from Felix it was his money. That always hurts him the most. Well, that and any threat to his ego. Anyway, I agreed to meet her to thrash it all out.’

  ‘Tara suggested the common as a place to meet?’ Emma asked.

  ‘She said that she couldn’t afford to be seen in public with me, for obvious reasons, and the media follow her about a bit so it had to be somewhere reasonably discreet. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  Emma frowned.

  ‘We spoke only a half hour or so before this meeting took place,’ Emma said. ‘Why didn’t you say anything to me then?’

  Kelly sighed. ‘I’m tired, of fighting for every day of my life. I just wanted it all to end. If they felt the same way, then I wanted to try to take advantage of that. You told me to try to move on and get past this, right? What better way to do that than in a new home somewhere else, with money in the bank?’

  Emma acknowledged this with a nod. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I got to the park,’ Kelly said, ‘walked across to the memorial, and Tara showed up a few minutes later. We talked, she seemed genuine about the plan and I thought that there might actually be something to it. I began to wonder if maybe she ought to know what I know about Felix Levitt–Hugh, and then she said something about my boyfriend leaving me. She couldn’t have known about that as you’re the only person I told about it. I began to realise something was off and decided to show Tara what Felix had really been up to behind her back, when she screamed and I think I was hit on the head.’

  Emma and Burgess sat opposite Kelly in silence for a few moments.

  ‘You don’t recall anything else? No sounds, no other people, no warning that you were about to be struck?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Kelly admitted. ‘I didn’t hear anyone creep up on me, if that’s what happened. I don’t even know for sure if they hit me. I woke up lying on the grass, covered in blood and with a crowbar in my hand. Tara was…’

  Emma glanced at Burgess before she spoke.

  ‘Kelly, Tara was beaten to death with an iron crowbar that we found, covered in blood, at the scene of the crime. You’re telling us that you woke up with the crowbar in your hand.’

  Kelly stared at Emma in shocked silence, unable to move once again as the detective went on.

  ‘You were also splattered with blood in a manner consistent with you facing Tara Levitt–Hugh at the time of her death,’ Burgess added. ‘We tested blood residue on your coat, which we found at your apartment, and it matched Tara’s. We also found Tara’s blood in your bathroom.’

  Kelly knew that her jaw was gaping open as though she were a beached fish gasping for air. She tried to make her voice work but it came out as a sort of pathetic squeak.

  ‘I didn’t kill Tara.’

  Burgess leaned closer, playing a little hard ball with her.

  ‘There is no evidence of anyone else at the scene,’ he pointed out. ‘There is every bit of evidence that you fought with Mrs Levitt–Hugh. There are scratch marks on her face consistent with residue from beneath your fingertips taken at the hospital.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Kelly gasped. ‘We didn’t fight at all!’

  ‘Over the past two days you have been involved in several involving incidents with Mrs Levitt–Hugh, including a brawl in a restaurant and trespassing,’ Burgess went on, ‘and we have it on good authority that you were drinking heavily at the time of the murder. Were you drinking last night, Miss Lawson?’

  Kelly gaped in horror, the breath seeming to have been sucked from her lungs. ‘Well, yes, but I…’

  Burgess spoke without letting her finish.

  ‘We’re questioning both Felix and others in custody right now, but as of this moment, unless you’re the victim of the best–staged deception in the history of crime, you’re under arrest for the murder of Tara Levitt–Hugh. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?’

  Kelly stared at him for what felt like an age.

  ‘Yes,’ was all that she could say.

  ***

  1

  Forty–eight hours earlier

  Kelly Lawson awoke to the incessant beeping of her alarm clock and slumped beneath the sheets, her head seeming as heavy as a mountain. She didn’t reach out to shut the alarm off, despite the temptation to hurl it out of the bedroom window.

  Reluctantly she opened her eyes and saw pale light leaking through the blinds, the meagre low–watt glow of an autumnal morning. Kelly sighed and kicked the sheets off, crawled out of bed and dropped one hand on the alarm to silence it as she padded off into the bathroom.

  Her apartment was sufficiently small that she could cross its entirety in twelve paces. A tiny bedroom and bathroom adjoined a living room with scarcely enough space for a small sofa and television, while the galley kitchen had clearly been designed for women with impossibly small arses. Not that Kelly’s was particularly big, but since everything that had happened she had been unable to motivate herself to get down the gym. In fact, some days she could barely be motivated to breathe.
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  The shower cubicle afforded her enough room to turn and only lightly scuff her elbows, and within ten minutes she was dressed and stuffing down low–calorie biscuits and a coffee strong enough to strip paint. Such was her morning routine and it hadn’t changed in the two years since she had left Felix. The very thought of the name made her want to drag her nails down her own face at her stupidity in ever getting involved with a man like him. With a name like that. Felix. It always made her think of cat food, tins of chumped meat scoffed only by animals. She had lain awake on many a night wondering what it would be like seeing Felix fed to packs of wild dogs or ravaged by sharks, but none of it did any good. He had taken her into his life, and then taken everything from her.

  She checked her hair in a hall so narrow that her nose virtually touched the mirror. Long, wavy brown hair, green eyes and a slight tan that was fading faster than she would have liked stared back at her, her eyes clouded with shadows of pain and regret. Kelly grabbed her bag and keys and was about to open the front door when she saw the envelope at her feet. The postman never normally got this far through his round the apartment blocks until the afternoon, a fact that she knew due to the occasional sicky she threw when showing up at work was just the last thing that she wanted to do.

  Kelly picked up the envelope. There was no post–mark, so it must have been delivered personally. Kelly ripped it open and pulled out a note that had been typed and folded up. She unfolded it and scanned the lines printed on the page:

  I know what happened. It won’t go away on its own.

  Kelly frowned for a moment and then she realised what the note referred to and her heart skipped a beat. She closed her eyes for a moment as her balance was lost and she leaned out to hold herself up against the wall.

  Breathe.

  The panic attacks were not as bad now as they had used to be, debilitating episodes where she had crawled under her duvet and remained there for hours on end, sleeping or just pretending that the rest of the world wasn’t really out there at all.

  The words on the note stared back at her and she slowly crushed the note in her hand, turned and tossed it into the bin inside the kitchen. She could get over this, she knew that she could, and if she did then a new life would open up before her. She wouldn’t have to struggle to survive in this crummy little apartment any longer, wouldn’t have to work in the advertising office, wouldn’t have to pretend that her life had not been utterly destroyed by Felix and his preening bloody wife.

  Kelly stepped out of her apartment and locked the door behind her, breathing gently in an attempt to reduce the odour of urine wafting up the stairwell as she navigated her way down between broken bottles and patches of what could be blood that stained the steps here and there. It didn’t surprise her that none of the major perfume manufacturers had attempted to capture the heady scent of old piss and damp concrete, an odour that encapsulated her moment in life perfectly: Eau de la Shafted. It had something of a ring to it, but the tag–line wouldn’t bring her any accolades at work.

  She couldn’t afford a car, so the local bus was her chariot into town, the local stop just a minute’s walk around the block. As she reached the bottom of the stairwell and stepped over Old Al’s sleeping bag, bundled up against one wall and Al snoring off the effects of last nights’ White Lightning, her mood lightened considerably as she realised that the weather outside was just somewhat damp rather than wet. Small mercies.

  The bus ride into work was through busy city streets, the roads slick with water and dead leaves. Kelly tried to forget about everything and just watch the world going by but she could not forget about the note she had found beside her door. Why had someone chosen to deliver it today, of all days? Kelly was looking for closure, not to drag up the past that had haunted her for so long. She knew damned well that the pain of all that she had lost would not go away all on its own, and it had cost her a fortune in psychologists’ fees to figure out what she could have done on her own in five minutes.

  Post–traumatic stress disorder. Acute anxiety. Survivor guilt.

  The specialists she had seen had all sorts of names for the afflictions that had plagued her for the past two years, but she rejected all of them in favour of her own personal diagnosis: you’re one fecked up dude, Kelly, and you need to get a grip on yourself.

  The bus stopped a hundred yards from where she worked, and she stepped off and walked to the entrance of the Huron Street Centre. A grand building in the centre of the city, all polished granite walls, sparkling glass and chrome, it housed dozens of businesses populated by men and women in suits who spent their days concentrating on their own self–importance.

  Kelly hated her job. More than that she hated the vacuous, narcissistic colleagues with whom she shared an office in a small company on the third floor called the Tormant Advertising Agency Ltd. Her job was as a branding assistant to Alicia Tormant, who viewed herself as the bedrock of the company’s very existence. The company had several high–value clients on the books at the moment, including celebrities, security firms and politicians who liked to ensure that their public appearances went according to plan or their brand reached the widest possible audience. Alicia’s only genuine skill, as far as Kelly could tell, was getting these high–profile clients, and there were plenty of whispered rumours about how she was doing it.

  Kelly took the elevator up to the third floor and walked through reception. Betty, the elderly lady who looked after the front desk, looked up and smiled at her with the only genuine warmth in the entire building.

  ‘Morning Kelly, you look cheerful this morning.’

  Kelly couldn’t work out whether Betty meant it or was being sly, but she smiled in gratitude.

  ‘Thanks Betty, how’s the Tyrannosaur this morning?’

  ‘Hungry for vengeance,’ Betty replied with a roll of her eyes.

  Tyrone “Tyrannosaur” Corsa was the head of advertising and the man who looked after the big clients that Alicia attracted to the agency in return for brand work. As Kelly walked into the main office she spotted him parading up and down, his big arms waving this way and that and his voice booming, lightly accented with his native Italian.

  ‘Big words for big clients! C’mon people, liven this jig up and start letting those creative juices flow!’

  His eyes settled on Kelly. He launched himself toward her like a black–suited torpedo, his gray hair laced with white and his rosy cheeks flushed with vigour. A poster of a sun–drenched Caribbean beach was thrust under her nose. In the rollers beside the beach was a discarded workout bench and weights.

  ‘Ten seconds, Lawson! A grab–line for this company’s flagship resort destination!’

  Kelly’s mind flipped. This was precisely the kind of confrontational crap that set off her anxiety attacks. The entire office stopped to watch her. Her heart skipped a beat and she felt prickly heat rise up her neck. Having sensed it, it promptly got worse.

  ‘C’mon Lawson!’ Tyrone roared. ‘If anyone can do it, you can! What’s the saying? No pain, no gain, right?’

  Kelly looked at the resort image and an answer popped into her mind of its own accord. She shrugged.

  ‘No pain, no pain.’

  Tyrone stared at her. The other workers in the office fell silent. Kelly wondered if she was about to get fired on the spot. Tyrone looked at the poster, then back at Kelly, and then his face burst into booming laughter.

  ‘Brilliant! You see?’ He turned to the rest of the office. ‘That’s how you write good copy!’

  Tyrone barrelled off toward his office as Kelly’s heart hammered against the wall of her chest. She tossed her bag behind her desk and got her breath back. One of her colleagues, a young girl named Sally, shot her a withering look.

  ‘You probably just made him ten thousand pounds for that, of which you’ll get precisely zero.’

  Kelly slumped into her chair and turned on her computer. ‘Story of my life.’

  Sally baulked and one hand flew to her mouth. ‘Sorry, Kelly, I didn’t mean to…’

  ‘Forget it,’ Kelly replied.

  Before Sally could put her foot any further in her mouth, the door to the managing director’s office opened and Alicia Tormant yelled out.

  ‘Lawson!’

  Kelly sighed, the other workers in the office again watching her as she walked toward the office and the door shut firmly behind her.

 

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