Someone looking up might have seen her hanging in the tree, but people don’t look up unless something draws their attention, and she was almost completely hidden by broad green leaves. Now and then, a breeze caused the smaller boughs to shift and tremble, throwing on the body of the girl a dappled light which camouflaged her as effectively as the leaves.
Late spring in London and much too hot. It was shaping up to be a summer of drought. Newspapers carried long feature articles on global warming with artists’ impressions of the deserts soon to take over the south. If you were in any doubt about those predictions, you could sniff the air for the unmistakeable, scorchy smell of pollution hanging in the streets. The girls of London, leggy and stylish, had summer highlights in their hair; they wore crop-tops and micro-skirts and gold bangles that showed off their tans. The whores up on the Strip wore even less.
At eight in the evening it was still light and still hot. Couples strolled through the dusty streets arm in arm. There were people going home after a late shift at the office; people on their way to a bar or a restaurant; people with things on their minds. Bikers went by, and kids on roller-blades; traffic went nose-to-tail.
A boy sat with his girl on the back seat of the top deck of a bus. They were new as a couple: everything fresh and exciting and slightly feverish. Even in public, they found it tough to keep their hands off one another. He kissed her and, just briefly, put his hand to her breast. The bus was slowing down, backed up in a line of vehicles waiting at a junction; as it came to a stop, its uppermost windows lightly brushed the leaves of a roadside tree. The girl smiled and touched the boy’s cheek then, for no good reason except that they had stopped, looked beyond him to the tree.
Sunlight glanced off the leaves throwing jittery fragments of white light and the girl saw what she thought, at first, was a fork in the tree-trunk; the leaves rustled and shuffled and the shape became a broken branch twisting gently in the breeze.
Then, as the breeze quickened, she saw the naked torso as it turned and, a moment later, the face staring across at her, dark as a ripe plum.
***
Stella Mooney and John Delaney were eating at Machado’s, a restaurant in a small square just off Notting Hill Gate. Tables had been set up on the edge of the square and strings of white lights sparkled in the branches of ornamental trees. Candles on the tables shuddered, throwing buttery pools of yellow light in the near-dusk, and swifts were flying wall-of-death circuits, shrieking as they skimmed the brickwork.
Stella said, ‘Well, fuck you Delaney.’
It was the end of a conversation that had gone like this: ‘Are you happy with us?’
‘With us?’ Stella had been eating langoustine and, when Delaney asked his question, was holding the little creature between the forefinger and thumb of each hand and picking at it with her teeth. She wondered if the question had an edge to it. ‘Why wouldn’t I be happy with us?’
‘No reason.’
‘So… Are you happy with us?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Delaney had nodded and smiled at her like a man with a secret to keep.
‘Just a minute. You’re not about to fetch a ring out of your pocket, are you?’
‘No.’ And Delaney had started to laugh. ‘A ring? Jesus Christ, no.’
Which is when she said, ‘Well, fuck you, Delaney,’ then leaned across the table and stifled his laughter with a kiss.
He topped up their wine glasses and they ate in silence, his eyes on her. She said, ‘Then what–?’ in the same moment that her mobile phone rang.
Delaney said, ‘Don’t answer it’, more suggestion than instruction, but she had already taken the call. For the most part, she listened and when she spoke, spoke softly. Then she got up, kissed Delaney again, and walked across the square towards the side-street where her car was parked.
One or two men at other tables paused to watch her go. Delaney noticed this and smiled, watching her also, making an inventory of his own. Stella was thirty-three: still young enough to use only a touch of makeup. Dark hair, blue eyes, tall and slim but not skinny; her mouth a little too broad, perhaps, and her nose a fraction long: little imperfections that made all the difference. Delaney stayed to finish his meal. He drank the rest of the wine, then ordered a single malt whisky with his coffee as the cut of sky above the square darkened to lilac. He sat back in his chair and looked up, as few people do, because the swifts had caught his attention. They circled at madcap speeds, shrieking, shrieking, shrieking.
***
Andy Greegan’s job was to create an uncorrupted approach to the body, which wasn’t easy when it hung sixteen feet above the ground. Sorley and Stella discussed a game-plan.
‘Portable scaffolding,’ Sorley said, ‘and drape the tree.’ They were staring straight up, like star-gazers. Pete Harriman joined them. ‘How did he get her up there?’ he wondered.
‘Yes,’ Stella said, ‘and when? There’s traffic up and down this road all day. People are out and about, especially in this weather.’
‘He arrives with a body and a rope,’ Harriman said, ‘no one sees him or, if they do, they notice nothing unusual. He strings her up… How does he do that? Throw her over his shoulder and shin up the tree?’
‘What makes you think he came with a body?’ Stella asked.
Sorley’s phone rang: a contractor with scaffolding and net-drape. He wandered off to take the call.
Harriman said, ‘You think he killed her at the scene?’
‘Easier for him in some ways: he hasn’t got a corpse to deal with: deadweight. If she’s alive, she’s more portable.’
‘Or else, easier if she’s dead. The killing’s done.’ They were still looking up. Stella’s neck was paining her. Harriman added, ‘So – alive or dead, it must have been under cover of darkness, yes?’
‘Seems that way.’
‘In which case, she’s been up there since before dawn.’
Stella lowered her head and massaged the nape of her neck. She was thinking of the way some birds of the air had with flesh.