no reckoning’s wrath.
Which led me to understand,
There is no divine law except the ones we force upon ourselves.
I mean, what an utter load of horseshit, right? Who did this guy think he was? Anyone who knows their serial killers will see it for what it is: his own perverse equivalent of winking at himself in the mirror mid-coitus, a calculated, overindulgent flourish meant to show he’s flirting with capture while giving the perception to the media that he was completely untouchable.
The rest of the victims’ notes were similar once I decoded them using the same method. They were mostly the killer’s musings on the murders he had committed and his general thoughts on death as a whole. They very much veered into the whole ‘life is meaningless, existence is insignificant, the most notable thing a person can do is die’ kind of territory. But despite cracking the code, eighteen months later I was still no closer to tracking him down; no one was, apparently.
I found my gaze drawn to the mass of leathery brown and olive green rhythmically moving in the corner of my room, the only piece of interior decoration I had in the shed that wasn’t somehow TellTale Killer related. That was Toast. Goodness me, where do I even start in explaining Toast to you?
See, amidst everything happening with Greta, my part-time helicopter mum read in a magazine that animals are a great way for people to deal with grief-related trauma. Given the choice, I would have loved a dog, but my mum had a family spaniel growing up, called Sam. He was a lovely, docile lapdog for anyone who spared him a glance, but he had the unfortunate habit of barking aggressively at people in wheelchairs. I think all the social embarrassment she had endured over the years with the dog, including him growling at a young child in a wheelchair at Woolworths, was a significant factor in her deciding not to get me any kind of canine.
So, as a natural alternative, she’d gone with a Russian tortoise. And I don’t know if you know much about tortoises, but they truly are dumber than a bag of hammers. Toast didn’t do much other than roam around the shed and garden, eat, poo and one time, bitea chunk off the tip of my finger, leading to a frenzied trip to A&E. So here I was, stuck living in a yet-to-be repurposed Airbnb with only Toast the flesh-eating trauma tortoise for company, who at the moment had decided to rather energetically hump her hide in her tank.
This was the other thing about my trauma tortoise: she had some kind of neurological tic that meant she liked to hump everything, seemingly not for any carnal desire but just because she really liked the motion. She humped her food dish, her water bowl, her substrate. Last Christmas, I earned ‘owner of the year’ status with the gift of a partially deflated football that she just loved to go at for hours at a time.
For a creature famed for its slow, deliberate nature, Toast’s sudden bursts of thrusty vigour were, frankly, astonishing. I asked the vet about it; apparently, it’s not uncommon for Russians, though it is, she admitted, incredibly strange. Sometimes, Toast would make eye contact with me and the sight would haunt every moment of my waking hours. Her bulbous eyes glaring at me, unflinching, while her lower half assaulted a piece of lettuce.
A knock at the door yanked me abruptly out of revulsion towards my first and only pet. Someonewashome. I silently prayed it was Ben; I really couldn’t deal with any of Bill’s scrupulous pedantry right now.
‘Hello, dear,’ Ben (phew) greeted me as he crept through the door of the shed. ‘Heard you come in. Thought you might want a cup of tea?’
‘Thanks, love,’ I replied with a sigh of relief and a subsequent scowl at my use of the term ‘love’. No matter how hard I desperately tried, I couldn’t seem to stop calling him that. ‘Thought you weren’t home, though, no cars in the driveway,’ I said as he passed me a rather well-brewed cup of Yorkshire tea. He knew how I liked it.
‘Bill’s is in for an MOT and service, so he took mine to work today and obviously won’t be home until late,’ Ben said, as he perched himself on the end of my hastily – and poorly – made bed.
Bill had two jobs. One was as some kind of software engineer, and I had no idea what the other one was, except that it seemed to take up most of his nights, even on a Saturday.
‘How was your day? You’re late, I almost made you decaf,’ Ben asked.
‘Oh, you know, dull,’ I said, 50 per cent truthfully. Other than my rapid descent into criminality, most of the dayhadbeen a bit of a lethargic slog. After a year or so of working at Camborne and Sons, my uncle’s funeral director’s business, it was clear this particular career path wasn’t for me. But what else was I going to do? It wasn’t like going back to being a journalist was viable.
‘Goodness me, she’s still going at that hide,’ Ben said, nodding at Toast. I guffawed, not even bothering to look at what she was doing. ‘Hope she bought it dinner first.’ Ben recycled that line at least once a week. I didn’t find it funny, not even the first time, but I thought it was polite to my host to pretend I did.
‘So, how was your day?’ I asked.
‘It was… a day,’ Ben said with a shrug, which was a slightly subdued response for him. ‘And you’re still feeling okay, Ruth? With everything about the case?’ he asked with one part concern and another part pity that he completely failed to hide, I could see his thinly masked concern by the way the corners of his inner eyebrows tilted upwards as he spoke. I hated the fact that I still knew his face so well. Ben was here this morning before work when Detective Carlota had come round to tell me that they were pulling the plug on the investigation.
‘Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?’ This time I was 100 per cent lying, speaking like I was flabbergasted that he was even asking the question.
Ben gestured with an incredulous flick of his hand to the crime wall, covered in my notes, clippings and scribbles; I guess he knew my face too. I just hoped he wouldn’t clock onto the fact that I very much wasn’t all right considering what I had done only an hour or so ago. I watched his eyes glancing and then examining the clutter of notes.
‘It’s grown, hasn’t it, Ruth? Donotlet Bill see.’
‘Bill is still paying his reparations. He can deal with a bit of mess in the shed.’
‘You know Bill’s not the one to blame for what happened,’ Ben said, a little too firmly for my liking. There was a coldness and warning in the clear and even tone he used.
I mean, to some extent, he was right, but it was still easier to blame Bill. Even so, I had the consolation of knowing that for the rest of their lives (because they were devoted to each other and showed no signs of stopping), their coupledom would forever be associated with Bill and Ben the famous Flowerpot Men of 90s’ children’s TV. No one had ever hidden a sly smile after being introduced to Ruth and Ben, and in that aspect as least, our marriage had excelled.
‘Whatever,’ I said, flicking my wrist dismissively, trying to brush off the very conversation I started. ‘It’s not like it matters anymore.’
I know sleeping in my ex-husband and his new boyfriend’s shed wasn’t the best living situation, but honestly, it was the best I had. Mum had worked for the Foreign Office for most of her career and, about a year ago, landed her dream gig: becoming an ambassador. And do you know where? The Maldives. Yes, she was now the British High Commissioner to the Maldives.
Fun pub quiz fact: embassies in Commonwealth countries are called High Commissions.
‘Oh no,’ I often teased her, ‘another meeting… on the beach. What a nightmare.’
