‘Checked what, exactly?’ I asked, a little confuddled as to how, unless you were me and had certain insider knowledge, anyone could have foreseen this happening.
‘His heart, Ruth! That he still had a heart!’ Uncle Phil burst out with a sudden intensity that made me reel, nearly toppling from the tiny chair I was perched on. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought him capable of frustration. Worry, yes, but any kind of anger had never really seemed in his nature.
‘I’m sorry,’ he added almost immediately, his tone softening and mellowing quickly. ‘I’m a bit stressed.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said, leaning forward to place a hand on his remarkably hairy arm, hoping it would feel somewhat reassuring to him. ‘It is a very stressful situation.’
‘This Justin fella… he died in a not-so-nice way,’ Uncle Phil muttered, running a hand over his silver stubbled chin and then across both of his cheeks. ‘Maybe that’s something to do with it. They found his body in the Thames a few weeks ago. Drowned, they think.’
‘Oh?’ I said, keeping my eyes firmly on the corpse in the centre of the room. Not making eye contact with Uncle Phil, or, for that matter, with the guest of honour we were so rudely discussing.
I watched one of the policemen, donning one of their standard high-vis jackets, interviewing someone wearing a very elegant black dress. My eyes lingered on a face that I could only describe as ‘sharp’ as she delicately dragged out the last tissue from a crumpled packet, to gently dab her eyes as the policeman continued to mutter something to her. I noticed the mascara that had been impeccably applied was ever so slightly staining the tear trough. I had the conversation at least once a month about people asking me what mascara they would recommend for a funeral, worried that it may run during the service. I could tell by the way the mascara had blotched on her skin that this was one of the ones they had advertised as cry-proof. However, unfortunately, they hadn’t ever really made a mascara that could cope with the very real impact of grief.
My conscience ached a little as I watched the woman take another glance at the coffin, her face quivered slightly as her eyes flicked away from it.
One of Uncle Phil’s favourite impromptu lectures, usually delivered whenever we were stuck in traffic, was that while most cultures believe the soul departs the body the instant death arrives, nearly all still treat the corpse with dignity. I couldn’t quite share that instinct. I really shouldn’t care, there was no real meaning to a dead body otherthan the one society had prescribed onto it. But I’d convinced myself that all of my efforts were something of a victimless crime, that no one was getting hurt. But now I knew this was completely my fault: I had taken the last memory this woman would have of her loved one and warped and twisted it into a grotesque, mangled version of its former self. I wish I could say that realisation stopped me in my tracks, made me pause and reconsider what I was doing, but it didn’t. Greta would have told me to stop now, if she’d been here. She’d have told me I’d gone too far, but Greta wasn’t here, was she?
From behind the woman, a familiar figure began to appear within my peripheral vision. Dressed in one of her signature spectacular jumpers that seemed to hug her muscles, Detective Carlota was something of a pleasant sight for my sore eyes until I had the unfortunate realisation that this would probably be the woman who might very well be reading me my rights before escorting me to a police car in the not-too-distant future.
‘Detective,’ Uncle Phil said, running his hand through his floppy, dishevelled hair and stepping forward to greet her. He knew her well from her various visits to see me at the office over the years. She returned his greeting with a warm smile and a shake of his hand before he politely excused himself to fetch yet another Capri-Sun from the hearse glove compartment. If there were a twelve-step programme for Capri-Sun addiction, Uncle Phil would’ve been the perfect candidate.
As my uncle slipped from her sight, I expected that warmth to linger when Detective Carlota turned to face me. It didn’t. I could almost see her expression crystallise, her features sharpening, her eyes narrowing and lips tightening as though I’d just casually mentioned at a fancy dinner party that I liked mayo on my roast dinner.
‘Ruth,’ she said, pausing as if weighing each of her words carefully. ‘So how are you doing?’
Oh, I didn’t like her use of ‘so’. I could tell from the sibilant hiss of the word that she was beginning to see me througha different lens. If even I’d picked up on it, her change in tone must have been glaring.
‘Been better,’ I replied, eager to skip any chit-chat. ‘Not exactly the kind of thing you want to happen when working at a funeral. Not great for business.’
‘No, I can’t imagine it is,’ she said with a level of fake decorum that I could easily see through. ‘I’ve been chatting to some of the other officers – from a cursory glance, it looks like the man’s body has been tampered with in a way that the post-mortem didn’t pick up or, more likely, it happened afterwards.’
She inhaled sharply, then slipped her hands deep into her pockets.
‘And again, from this cursory glance, his heart is obviously missing. Awfully peculiar, right?’ she asked. ‘Even more peculiar that you’re here.’
I stumbled over my words as I tried to answer her, caught off guard by her interrogatory tone as well as her frosty demeanour. Some awkward guttural gibberish slipped past my lips as I scrambled to reorient my thoughts.
‘Detective, we at Camborne and Sons are the largest and most popular funeral directors across three London boroughs. If someone dies, it’s very likely their paperwork will come across my desk.’
I thought that was some good reasoning to come up with in the moment and I hoped I sounded unperturbed. Her expression flickered for a moment, an ever so slight recoil at the eloquence and maybe my own frostiness in my response.
‘I suppose that’s true,’ she replied. ‘I’ll be interested to see what the examination reveals when they compare the body now with the original post-mortem.’
I couldn’t quite believe her words, I felt as if she was accusing me, as if she thought I was the one behind it. I mean,Iwasthe one behind it but still, I would have appreciated at least a modicum of trust. From her perspective, why would the person obsessed with catching the TellTale Killer be the one involved with this? Weremy plans to pretend to be a serial killer really that transparent to a police detective?
‘So will I,’ I said, keeping my tone as steady as I could. ‘I imagine the records will tell us what may have happened. Besides, we have 24-hour CCTV in the office, so it’ll be useful to see if anything was tampered with on our end.’
Why on earth did I say that? I was practically inviting an investigation onto myself.
‘So you…’ she began, her eyes contracting slightly as if she were about to ask the question of my involvement outright. But then she stopped herself, her expression softening into a smile that made me feel deeply disconcerted.
‘It was nice to see you, Ruth,’ was all she said as she walked backwards for a few steps before rotating and joining her small congregation of police officers to presumably discuss some kind of organisation around the crime scene. I kept my eyes locked on her as she received instructions from whoever was in charge, rather begrudgingly. We both knew she should’ve been the one giving the orders.
As the conversation between the officers seemed to drag on, she tilted her head barely perceptibly, eyes flicking towards me to pin me with a very particular kind of look. That was the moment I realised just how spectacularly I’d cocked this part of the plan up.
Yet each time the faintest pang of remorse or regret tugged at me, some small urge to turn back, I reminded myself: the killer was still out there, and I remembered what he’d said to me that night on the phone. That was when I muttered to myself, almost as a little tiny vow,in for a penny, in for a pound.
FOURTEEN
