‘Thank God,’ she said, stepping forward and suddenly yanking me into a close, tight embrace. The warmth, and sheer strength, of her arms wasn’t surprising given how muscular her frame was. Then, just as swiftly as she had grabbed me, she stepped back as if to correct herself. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. Sorry.’ She seemed flustered, a rare sight for the usually impeccably composed woman I had known for the past two years.
‘Would… would you like to come in?’ I asked, once I had found my voice, still shaking off the surprise of the spontaneous embrace.
She nodded silently, stepping into the entryway, removing hershoes and taking her usual seat when she came to visit at the dining table. I busied myself with the kettle, knowing perfectly well exactly how she liked her tea at this point. With tea, there comes a point where you’re locked in for life. If you’ve always had one sugar and a dash of milk, that’s it, that’s your tea now, forever. You ever want to maybe experiment and dabble in having it black? No. That’s it. No takebacks.
‘So,’ I began as the water boiled, ‘if you don’t mind me asking, what prompted that quite dramatic show of relief just now?’
Detective Carlota hesitated as she took a deep inhale through her nasal passageways.
‘When you didn’t answer your phone last night, I panicked. I couldn’t rest until Ben picked up and told me everything was okay.’
I was glad she couldn’t see my face as I poured the water into the pot. Why would she assume something had happened to me? There was no way she could have known the heart, or the voice recording, had come direct from me, right?
I tried stretching and contorting my expression into one that looked like a mild surprise before placing the pot of tea in front of her.
‘Why?’ I asked bluntly. ‘Everyone misses calls, I was just out with some friends.’
She drew in another sharp breath and somewhat bashfully folded her arms, placing her palms around each respective rib.
‘Ruth,’ she paused, ‘darling, you know I’ve told you about as much as I can about this case, maybe far more than I should have at times.’
I nodded, that was true. She’d even skipped the department Christmas party the year before last to calm me down after I’d bombarded her with texts about a news clipping claiming to reveal the Telltale Killer’s secret identity was actually ex-deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
Detective Carlota shifted restlessly in her chair before speaking again, a little uncomfortable as I could see she was still trying to find the words to speak her mind.Looking more like she was about to try and explain to me how when a daddy and a mummy loved each other very much…
‘I do need to tell you that the investigation into the TellTale Killer hasn’t reopened, nothing has changed there…’ She said it as if she was trying to manage my expectations somehow but then her voice dwindled and faded as I poured the tea from the pot into our mugs.
‘But there have been some odd developments,’ she began, searching for the appropriate phrasing, clearly running through the police guidelines in her mind as she spoke. ‘Yesterday, the station received an anonymous recording. It was of a person who was clearly in some sort of pain. I was working late last night and the moment I heard it, I thought it was you and I just felt my whole body freeze. That’s why I called you so frantically; I genuinely thought you were in trouble. I’m sorry, but I just needed to come here and tell you the reason I called you two dozen times. It was… stupid of me.’
‘No, no, I completely understand. But that’s nuts. Who would do something like that?’ I muttered under my breath, feigning disbelief as best I could while using my mug to hide as much of my culpable face as possible. My audio manipulation clearly needed some work. I thought I had messed around with the pitch so it was basically unrecognisable, but there must have been something else in my cadence that almost gave me away. Damn you, BitrateBoffin, you’ve just earned yourself an unsubscribe.
‘Honestly?’ Carlota took a sip of her tea, like she could relax now she had finally ripped off the plaster. ‘In my line of work, nothing surprises me much anymore. But we have methods to work out where it came from.’ She paused, placing her mug down with a sigh while I felt my heart stall in my chest. ‘Probably just a stupid prank, we’ve had a few of those lately. But I’m just glad you’re okay. When Ben answered your phone and told me everything was all right, I don’t think I’ve ever felt such relief in my life.’
The faintest, tiniest glimmer of moisture in Carlota’s eyes as she spoke did make me feel a little bad, honestly. It was, at least,nice to know she cared about me. But I was too busy choking back the froth of frustration that my plan still hadn’t fucking worked. I’d given them a heart. I’d given them a recording of someone clearly being held hostage. What more did they want? My mind scrabbled for something else to say, anything that wouldn’t accidentally betray just how deeply I was involved to her.
‘I guess there really are some pretty sick people out there in the world,’ I remarked. You know who I was talking about.
I think this was the first time I’d ever properly lied to Detective Carlota since I had known her, and more than the toxic deluge of margaritas still stirring in my gut, that betrayal made me feel utterly sick.
‘Yeah,’ Carlota responded, resignedly. ‘There’ve been some odd things happening, some things that I just can’t seem to work out.’ She stopped herself, clearly realising she’d said way too much, forgetting I was just a limpet clinging onto her friendship, rather than an actual colleague or peer.
She paused for a moment before changing topics.
‘Did you at least have a good night, darling?’ she asked, rousing herself out of her mini reverie.
I did my best to force a tight smile. ‘Truthfully, Detective Carlota, I can’t say I did.’
Carlota only stayed for another ten minutes or so as I found out more about her kitchen renovation. She had been debating between halogen, LED and/or CFL lighting for her shelving, while making reference to this mysterious Albaagain, who she still didn’t refer to explicitly as a girlfriend. After she left, I dawdled over to the shed to change out of my clothes from the night before and grab my funeral director’s garb. Toast watched me slack-jawed the whole time, perv.
I took a second to open the one drawer I had in the shed and smooth my hand over the green piece of fabric again, the torn scrap from the coat Greta had worn practically everywhere. I remembered how that coat was the last thing my blurry vision could make out before she vanished into the crowds that night. The nextmorning they only found that torn piece of fabric, hanging on some wire fencing, about three quarters of a mile from Hammersmith Station.
I walked back into the house and stepped into the power shower Bill had installed a few months ago. As the hot water hit my skin, the drunken slur of my thoughts began to gradually lift, giving way to something that I assumed was probably a kind of sober clarity.
I realised, in that moment, how comforting the idea of an afterlife would be. The thought that all of this might be temporary, just a short, dismal prologue before some promised eternity. But I knew that wasn’t the case. The truth was simpler and colder: the case remained unsolved, the TellTale Killer was still out there, and Greta still unavenged.
As I ate a microwavable carbonara ready meal – because yes, youcaneat dinner for breakfast; not doing so is just what Big Food wants you to think – I realised that I knew it was a really stupid idea to continue in my mission. But the only thing left in my life with any real meaning to me, any real significance, was avenging Greta and making sure she wasn’t forgotten. And for that to happen… the faux TellTale Killer would need to strike again.
Just then, I heard a ping. Weird, it was an Instagram notification. I almost never got messages on there, mostly because I so rarely used it. I careered over to check, half expecting it to be something important. Domino’s? Domino’s? Domino’s? Why were they messaging me?
