‘He won a Nobel Peace Prize, Ruth.’
I harrumphed as my form of a playful contemptuous snort.
I told her that her current obsession with Obama was fine, but if she started creating a shrine to him within her flat, I was going to start preparing to stage an intervention.
We both tried to tune out the constant adverts on billboards or posters hung up about curfews and safety warnings, but as hard as we tried, it was quite difficult to push something like an active serial killer out of your brain. There was a foreboding feel to the air knowing he was still out there. When you hear about serial killers, it’s usually in the past tense: the police caught them, or they died or faded into obscurity. But this one was still very, very real. Even in the safety of your own home, there was an ominous, lingering feeling that you were the one that could be next, the name that would dominate every headline and news ticker.
He had killed three men and two women so far, no real connection between them, but no major differences either. The youngest victim had been twenty-five, the oldest fifty. The sheer randomness of it all was what made it so terrifying. There was no way to convince or fool yourself that you were any less of a target.
One more kill and the TellTale Killer would be the most prolific UK serial killer of the twenty-first century. That was a scary thought.
‘Are those new glasses, by the way?’ Greta asked as we tried to ignore the foreboding feeling in our guts and tried to settle into the cosy, wholesome ambience of Sabroso to have our pre 6 p.m. dinner like we were pensioners who had escaped the care home.
‘Oh, these ones, they are indeed,’ I replied, trying not to get distracted as I took my new wire-rim soft square glasses off and handed them to Greta for inspection.
‘They’re lovely,’ Greta said, admiring them before placing them back on my side of the table. I could just about function without glasses, but they were handy if I wanted anything beyond twenty feet to not be a blurry mess of shapes.
We distracted ourselves from the TellTale Killer by talkingabout our morally dubious decision not to invite Chlo to my pre-birthday meal as she had been a tad annoying of late, then we spoke about Greta’s search for a roommate, how her dad and her brother were doing, her current love-life predicaments, and briefly touched on my own. But it’s never very interesting to discuss or gossip about your spouse with a single friend, is it? You just seem to end up moaning about how content and stable you are. I never wanted to be the sort of person who moaned that their loving partner had forgotten to put the dishwasher on to someone who was still frantically swiping right on dating apps. I did tell her how I thought it was peculiar that Ben had been weirdly generous about doing the dishes lately and wearing a new type of aftershave, but that was all I really could add to the state of my relationship. If there was one word I could use to describe my relationship with Ben from day one, it was ‘stable’. But though conversation with Greta always flowed remarkably easy with the twenty-odd years of vernacular shorthand we had developed between us, I still didn’t feel like I could totally relax, even within the confines of a very safe restaurant with plenty of people about. I knew Greta had noticed my nervousness.
‘Are you worried?’ Greta asked attentively. ‘You do seem quite worried about all this.’
‘I guess I feel… weird about it,’ I admitted. ‘I think it’s mostly work, just how I can’t get away from itandhow we seem to be covering it.’
‘I did see the headline from the other day,’ Greta said, with a knowing nod and a shuffle of her butt into the back of her plastic chair. ‘I mean, we’re making bank at the moment but no one on our floor feels great about the reason.’
‘I don’t think any staff other than big Double J and Deborah does,’ I said with a grunt. ‘Even my dad called me to complain about the headline.’
‘“He Will Hunt Again,”’ she intoned, mimicking a deep, dramatic voice with some kind of thunderous bass behind it.
‘“He Will Kill Again,”’ I corrected with a dry almost-laugh. ‘And yet we had the highest-ever daily readership on that day. The board apparently cracked champagne. It’s kind of revolting, isn’t it?’
‘Do you know if they’re closing in on him or anything? I saw the Home Secretary talking about it yesterday,’ Greta asked, as she took a dainty sip of her chai. ‘But don’t know if the police are saying any different?’
Frankly, any scrap of news I managed to wrangle from my contacts at the Met was about as useful as a jalapeño-flavoured lubricant. No matter how hard I pressed for details, anything that might help me track the killer down, or at least help someone else in doing so, was always frustratingly vague and unhelpful, like they were verbally redacting everything as they said it in real time. All I’d really ascertained was a) every victim had been travelling alone when abducted, b) each attack occurred not too far away from a Tube station when they were last sighted, and finally c) the killer seemed to move and operate in plain sight, which was hard to do in London; somehow he had found a way to just completely blend in.
I think I had been channelling all my nervous and anxious energy into the belief that I could gain some sense of agency by trying to track down the TellTale Killer and play some kind of significant part in his downfall. But no matter what I did, I just didn’t seem to be getting anywhere and the feeling of being the next person on his hit list seemed to feel ever more omnipresent. I couldn’t stifle the almost suffocating feeling that I would be the next person to die.
‘Would you speak at my funeral?’ I asked Greta as she took a bite of her club sandwich, her favourite. She rolled her eyes as she munched, her exasperation delightfully exaggerated.
‘Ruth, you’re doing it again,’ she responded, covering her mouth to hide her vigorous chewing.
‘Doing what?’
‘You’ve gone off on some very tangential train of thought and assumed I’ve followed you, but alas, I am not telepathic, petal.’
‘Well, you know me well enough that you should be,’ I retorted with a smirk.
Greta snickered and took another bite, letting out a big sigh as she chewed heartily, her thoughts mulling over my question to distract her from the bread being a little stale. I took a glance at the window behind me while she continued to eat. I hadn’t realised how dark it had got; we ought to have been home by now.
‘There’s just so much I could say about you, Ruth. Too much to fit into a eulogy. I’d need to write a whole biography, I’d call itTea, Biscuits and a Long, Long Life of Bad Decisions.’
It’s like I said before, I really wished that Greta would do a secondment in Editorial, she was truly gifted at headlines.
‘You could say whatever you wanted in a eulogy,’ I continued. ‘I mean, you could say she was an absolute dickhead to me on a vast variety of occasions.’
‘Well, can’t speak ill of the dead, now can I?’ she replied glibly.
‘I don’t know why people are so sensitive about not talking ill of the dead. I mean, it’s not like I’ll be able to hear anything you say about me anyway, so what’s the matter?’
