TWENTY-ONE
‘Ruth, we need to go now,’ I heard Carlota’s voice order from the outside the toilet.
‘Coming,’ I replied as I still tried to make some sense of this really messed-up version ofYou’ve Got Mail. It certainly wasn’t a dreamy, swoonworthy Nineties Tom Hanks on the other end of this line.
The idea that the TellTale Killer might have been lurking there on the dark web all this time, watching his admirers from a distance – that made a chilling kind of sense to me. He wanted to see people guessing and theorising how he had gotten away with it. I bet he saw this as his personal fan community that he had secretly been a part of, like Tom Cruise turning up toMission Impossible’s opening night in a baseball cap and a fake moustache, nodding along as people whispered about how great he was.
I had attempted to look at the photo of the corpse closely in the short time I had, zooming in as much as I could to try and deduce who it could have been. Of course, I would have known instantly if it was Greta, but it also didn’t seem to be any of the three females of the six original victims. This was someone new, he was still killing.
‘Ruth. Now,’ Detective Carlota barked again from outside the toilet.
‘Sorry. It’s the burritos! Extra spicy!’ I blurted out. What a ridiculous thing to say, it was ten in the morning.
I stuffed my phone back into my trouser pocket as quickly as I could, and tried to arrange my face in the mirror into something I hoped looked innocent. I needed, just for the moment, to clear my mind of what I had just seen if I was going to avoid any more of Detective Carlota’s suspicion that I was behind this. I know she’d said I wasn’t a suspect, but I couldn’t shake the feeling this was just her playing good cop, trying to guilt me into a confession of my recreation of the heart scene inTemple of Doom. Did she know I knew? Did she think I knew that she knew? It was all far too complex for my already, frankly, feeble mind.
While I still had access to the DarkCell forum account I’d been using for the past two years, I silently thanked every long-forgotten lucky star that I had thought ahead. By posting with a secondary account before posting the photo to cover my tracks, using a fake email and routing everything through a VPN, at least, I hoped, my identity was protected. I didn’t know how skilled the TellTale Killer was when it came to tracking someone down on the internet.
As I unlocked the toilet door, Detective Carlota was standing just inches away. The door swung open and almost hit her square in the face as though she had been trying to peer through the subatomic particles of the door to see exactly what I was doing in there. I don’t think she would have even believed me if I told her.
‘Ruth, I need to talk to you alone. I’ve found something.’
Nervously, I followed Carlota a few feet away from the loading bay to the car park outside where small specks of snow were beginning to descend from the blank white sky above us. ‘God’s dandruff,’ I knew Greta would call it.
I watched as officers herded a few reporters away; Tasha was among them. Clearly, others had had the same idea she’d had,craning for a glimpse of whatever might be happening inside the parlour.
‘What else did you find?’ I asked Detective Carlota, who seemed unbothered by the mild tussle between the journalists and the police.
‘Not a lot,’ she said evenly. ‘Nothing here looks out of the ordinary and, between you and me, forensics haven’t seemed to find anything major as of yet.’
I lifted a hand to my mouth and let out a tiny belch. It tasted of mild, temporary relief.
‘There’s a scalpel unaccounted for,’ Carlota said matter-of-factly, outstretching a hand to watch one of the small flakes dance through the air, drop and then melt on the centre of her palm.
‘Okay?’ I said as I felt my guts start to move south, while I continued to try and feign some level of perplexity and look unfussed by her statement. Inside, I was working very hard not to panic. I had forgotten all about that fucking scalpel. In the rush to clear up before Uncle Phil got back, when I was extracting Justin’s heart, I had thrown it out with the soiled kit and it would have gone for incineration the next morning. ‘Do you think that means anything?’ I asked,faux naif.
Detective Carlota grimaced. She didn’t meet my eye; she kept watching the snowflakes flutter down from the heavens, as if I was only present as a spare body to bounce her own predetermined thoughts off.
‘Your uncle. He seems like a nice man,’ she said. I didn’t think it was meant as a question, but I hurried to agree.
‘Yes, yes, he is. Absolutely,’ I responded.
I was maybe a little too keen in my affirmation that Uncle Phil was a buoyant ray of sunshine.
She let out a soft grunt, followed by the deliberate exhale of a mind made up.
‘I’m going to bring him in for questioning, Ruth. Something isn’t right here: a scalpel is missing from where Justin’s body was kept, where only a few people had access. Tell me, frankly, do youthink your uncle is simply getting too old and careless – that he innocently misplaced a scalpel and Camborne and Sons has become a crime scene through simple ineptitude? Or do you think he had a hand in it? Do you think he’s a part of this whole sick operation? I mean, can you see how bad this looks for him?’
I was stunned. I had no idea how to respond. Every word I could think of might incriminate me or, worse, damn Uncle Phil for something he hadn’t done. Did Detective Carlota know exactly what she was doing, pulling my strings like some crazed puppet master? Or was this all in my head? Maybe my view of things was skewed by the guilt and anxiety gnawing constantly at me.
‘I don’t understand, why would you bring him in for questioning?’ I asked, a little dumbfounded, while ignoring the question she had asked. ‘Come on, you know he didn’t have a part to play in all of this. This is a sweet old man. He is the walking definition of harmless.’
‘You’d be surprised by how many people seem harmless,’ Carlota said stoically, her tone cool and unruffled. ‘Look, I know it seems harsh, and I don’t take any pleasure in this, but if the TellTale Killer is back, then the only way to catch him is to apply a bit of pressure on people who I think could be involved, which in my opinion, is everyone who works here.’
It was the way she tilted her head slightly, as if to catch more of me in her peripheral vision, that unsettled me. It felt as though she were studying my reaction, testing how I would respond to what she was saying. Surely, deep down, she knew Uncle Phil couldn’t have been involved. By now she knew him; honest, decent, incapable of operation: Hearts and Crafts. All I could do was trust the justice system to recognise it too, clear my dear old uncle, and somehow avoid dragging me into the mess I had created. Maybe that was a bit too much to ask, though.
‘I’m just terrified things are going to get worse,’ she muttered just as I realised that the silence between us had continued to stretch.
‘Worse?’ I asked, confused by what exactly she meant by that.
