‘There is a killer on the loose, Ruth.’ Ben vociferating again, gesticulating wildly. ‘This isn’t safe. Please.’
‘I don’t care. Just looking at you makes me feel sick,’ I shouted,throwing open the front door and slamming it shut behind me with all the force I had. The Christmas wreath, previously perched on the door, went flinging into the bushes from the impact.
Yanking my phone from my pocket, I scrambled to call Greta. I’m sure she was still furious with me from earlier tonight, after what I had asked her at Sabroso. She still hadn’t responded to my apology text, but this was now beyond our petty arguments. Extenuating circumstances and all that, surely. She had to put her anger at me aside for this, I know I would for her.
The phone rang and rang, but she didn’t answer. My rage only growing, I fired off a quick text as I continued storming down the street, desperate to get as much distance between Ben and I as possible.
Look, I’m so sorry for tonight, but please, I really need to talk to you.
I could see something in my peripheral vision and glancing over my shoulder, I saw Ben stepping out of the house and beginning to follow me.
‘You don’t have to speak to me,’ he called after me, his voice loud enough to reach me fifty or so feet ahead of him. ‘But I can’t let you be out here by yourself. Please, just let me drive you somewhere.’
‘Fuck off!’ I roared back at him as loud as the roughness in my throat would allow.
I called Greta again, hoping my text would put my incessant calling into context. I picked up the pace of my footsteps to try and outwalk my soon-to-be ex-husband as I kept my phone compressed tightly against my cheek, waiting for the moment the aggravating buzzing sound of an outgoing call would finally end. Still nothing.
Please, please, I need to talk to you. Ben has been cheating on me.
My fingers were fumbling over the touch keys of my phone as my walk became dangerously close to a jog to outrun Ben’s muchlonger legs. But the messages were still only showing as delivered so her phone must not have been out of charge? Maybe she was in the loo, but then everyone brought their phone to the loo with them, what else would they do with their time? But just as I was about to try sending yet another text, the read receipts popped up. She was seeing my messages, shewas reading them.
My breath faltered as I stared at the screen, waiting for her response, any kind of response from her. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing. Not even the little icon showing she was typing a message. She must just be… staring at them.
‘Please, Greta,’ I begged under my frantic breath, my finger hovering over the call button again.
I waited until I reached the end of the cul-de-sac before I jabbed my finger into the phone icon again, pushing the phone tight to my ear. I glanced over my shoulder to see Ben was still behind me like he was some kind of covert bodyguard for a billionaire.
‘Leave me alone,’ I screamed at him as, at last, the ringing finally came to an abrupt stop, and I heard the small pocket of silence after she’d picked up, but instead of her sweet-sounding voice who would apologise for not answering and then tell me everything was going to be all right, all I heard was this long, low, croaky breathing on the other end of the line.
‘Greta?’ I asked.
Still, all I heard was wheezy, raspy breaths. Was this her idea of some kind of joke?
‘Are you kidding me? Seriously? Are youkiddingme?’ I snapped, my voice trembling with hurt and fury. ‘After all that, now you pick up? You leave me stranded in the middle of Hammersmith with a killer on the loose, ignore all my calls and texts, and then just – what? Decide to answer? You know, you can be an absolutely terrible, terrible friend sometimes, Greta.’
The moment the words left my mouth, I deeply regretted them. I knew I was just projecting onto her, letting all my anger at Ben spill out onto Greta; she didn’t deserve that.
‘Hello, Ruth,’ said a voice. A deep, baritonemalevoice.
‘Who is this?’ I asked, frenzied, as my nape prickled with a sudden, bristling chill.
‘You know, you really should be nicer to your friends, Ruth; you never know when it’s going to be the last time you’ll speak to them.’
SIXTEEN
PRESENT DAY
A pair of elderly Chinese tourists found Greta’s heart the next day on a road in Hammersmith about three quarters of a mile away from the station, presumably near where she’d been taken by the killer. I imagine they must have thought it some quaint British custom when they first saw the box, perhaps expecting a poem, or a little knitted character left by a kind-hearted stranger. They couldn’t have known that it was the Telltale Killer at work, or that Britons are rarely so innocently kind; we are, after all, a cruel, cold people, hardened by unruly weather and an absence of flavourful cuisine. I had begged and prayed it wouldn’t be her, but the police identified the heart only a few days later as belonging to Greta. I hadn’t even realised it was possible to identify someone from a heart, but apparently cardiac muscle yields genomic DNA – whatever the hell that is – that can be profiled against relatives of suspected victims. In this case it was her dad, Aleks, who confirmed that Greta had been the latest – and unknown to us, the last – victim of the TellTale Killer.
Honestly, it was his voice that haunted me most. In my mind, I’d always imagined it would be a growl – the verbal form of the sound of sharp, jagged metal being dragged over rugged coal – but it wasn’t. It was ordinary, the kind of voice you’d expect from anyrun-of-the-mill chap I might encounter every day. And that was what I couldn’t forget for most of my waking moments: that voice.
As I tentatively slid the headphones from the top of my head down to around my neck, I realised that I could still hear Bill and Ben arguing relentlessly with each other, even from the detached shed. This wasn’t like their usual bickering about Bill’s smoking habit, this was much, much worse. It made me wonder if Bill had ascended to a new plane of arseholery by kicking me out without even consulting his boyfriend first. But now, it all made sense. I did think it was odd and unlike Ben not to be there when Bill delivered the news that they were booting me out of their casa and why it all seemed quite so out of the blue. While Ben had been cowardly before, I knew that he wasn’t intrinsically a coward. I hated to admit it, but Ben was sort of a good man.
‘You can’t keep pretending it’s going to get better,’ I managed to hear but the moment I heard my name from Bill’s mouth in what could only politely be described as a rather curt tone, I swiftly slid my noise-cancelling headphones back over my ears to try and block him out, this time playing ‘MMMBop’ by Hansen at max volume as I slumped down on my chair with a long, beleaguered sigh. Please don’t judge my happy place song.
CerealKillerCornflakes and I had gone back and forth a few times on the message board on DarkCell. He was trying to lecture me on serial killer psychology again, probably something he’d picked up from a bunch of YouTube videos. I’d have called it mansplaining if he knew I was a woman, but that thought probably hadn’t crossed his mind.
The thing we were discussing – like we often seemed to – was howhechose his victims. It was something that I’d thought about myself, as I ripped the hearts out of Mrs Lambert and Justin, wondering if there was some common thread I was inadvertently snipping by picking the two of them.
