It was sort of frowned upon for children over eighteen to tag along on postings, though, which is why, after I fell behind on the payments for my temporary piece-of-shit flat after the divorce, they lovingly pushed me and Toast into Bill and Ben’s rather guilty and certainly reluctant embrace. I had a slight feeling they were trying to rather indelicately push me into adulthood when they didn’t get me an advent calendar last year.
But I wasn’t too shocked at the turns which had led me here.Since Greta, my life hadn’t really been about brilliant new chapters; it had been one long exercise in selecting the least terrible alternative.
‘So, you’re fine, right?’ Ben asked, reaching out to curl his fingers around the back of my hand. ‘Look, just because they’ve labelled it a cold case doesn’t mean he’s never getting caught. Forensics is improving all the time; it’s only a matter of time before they nab him and he spends the rest of his miserable life rotting in some prison cell.’
I hoped Ben was right. I prayed the heart I’d deposited at the station would wrench the police out of their complacency, make them pull the old files, examine every scrap of evidence, see what they had missed, and finally make an arrest. I was also praying that somehow it wouldn’t end up coming back to me.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ I repeated, knowing full well this was me just deflecting, pretending I was apathetic to the thing that literally never stopped ricochetting around my brain.
‘Right,’ Ben said, sensing the brick wall I’d just erected between us. My ex-husband was a charismatic and effusive man. I’d always thought of him as the human form of champagne – but his ultimate skill, I believe, was that he could also work out when he wasn’t wanted. ‘I’ll leave you alone, but Bill won’t be back until early tomorrow morning, so just let me know if you need anything, okay?’
‘Thanks, love,’ I said as I took a sip of the tea he’d made for me while I began booting up my VPN to access DarkCell. Damn, there it was again. I really needed to find some way to stop calling him that.
THREE
I’ve always had something of an issue with belching when I’m feeling particularly nervous and it’s a very real, reasonably common problem, I’ve googled it. Greta liked to make fun of it a lot. But that was fair as I would always mock her for still sleeping with three different teddy bears each night well into her late twenties. Apparently, stress can make you swallow more air without realising it, and it can even affect how the brain communicates with the gut. So, I was quietly pleased that as I hung up the call, only a short little burp, easily muffled by keeping my lips tightly shut, escaped my throat. I shoved my phone back into my pocket and switched on the vacuum to start hoovering up any of the stray petals left against the hearse window.
‘Who was that, Ruth?’ Sophie, my cousin-cum-frenemy, asked, peering down the length of the vehicle from the passenger seat as she sprayed another healthy dose of cleaner onto the console and began wiping it vigorously across the cheap faux-leather dashboard. Sophie, too, had been drafted into the family business by dint of not knowing what else to do with herself. None of Uncle Phil’s three sons had any interest in dealing with the dead, so his nieces from his two younger brothers – Sophie and me – hadstepped, somewhat resignedly, into the gap. She was, by far, the more capable between us and she liked to remind me so as unsubtly and as often as she could. Truth is, she had always been my least favourite cousin, and we had one who put a hamster in the microwave to see if it would work as a hand warmer.
The hamster, miraculously, was fine.
‘Oh, it’s just the detective who worked on Greta’s case,’ I replied. ‘She says she wants to speak to me at eleven today.’
‘Maybe it’s good news?’ she said in a tone that was a bit too faux perky for my liking. It wasn’t as if Detective Carlota was going to tell me they’d managed to resurrect Greta in some Frankenstein’s monster-like experiment now, were they? How good could the news really be? My hope, of course, was that she was going to say they were reopening the case. My worry, of course, was that she knew what I had done to poor Mrs Lambert.
But I didn’t want to be rude to Sophie, so I just nodded and made some sort of agreeable ‘mm-hm’ sound and focused instead on ensuring no rogue petals had got stuck into the one of the hearse’s many grooves.
There was a definite chance that Detective Carlota – whose phone voice never gave anything away – might be coming to ask me some very particular and specific questions, like where I was on Saturday night, or maybe more directly: why I’d decided to impersonate a serial killer, and why I’d left an extracted human heart outside the police station. When I woke up on Sunday morning three days ago, it felt like the strangest kind of hangover as I slowly came to terms with what I’d done the night before, or more accurately, the potential consequences of what I had done. I’d had similar mornings full of regret in my life, only this time, at least there wasn’t a flaccid dry-mouthed stranger in my sheets, asking whether I believed in thelizard people. But now, with Detective Carlota’s impending visit, the murky crimes I’d committed on Saturday – the blurry haze of a woman possessed – were slowly hardening into stone-cold memory in my mind.
‘Coming through,’ I heard the annoyingly chipper voice of Clive call out as he and Eddie rolled a very familiar-looking coffin from the morgue. Oh dear, I knewexactlywho was in there.
Urgh. Clive and Eddie, the two trainee funeral directors Uncle Phil had hired just before me, both had what I liked to describe as room temperature IQs. They flicked on the brakes, hoisted it up from the gurney by the huckle and slid it into the hearse with far less delicacy than they’d show in an hour’s time in front of the family that had gathered for their last goodbyes.
‘And how are you doing, Ruth? Did you have a nice evening last night?’ Clive asked as he began tightening the car pins around the edges of the coffin. Don’t be fooled by his pleasant-seeming words, his tone was dripping with a vile saccharine ooze that we both knew was insincere. The man often liked to crack glib jokes in the break room about my abysmal lack of social life. Clive gave off that deeply unappealing vibe of someone who clearly peaked in high school and was desperately trying to cling onto it at the ripe old age of twenty-eight.
‘I did, Clive. How about you?’ I replied. I know I came off as a bit mechanical with how I spoke, but I had always struggled with the right tone of voice with almost everyone, and it was especially bad with Clive, who seemed to find everything I said somehow worthy ammunition for mockery. He shot a look at Eddie, and the two of them broke into an overly masculine baritone laughter. I’m sure they’d both had a very wholesome Tuesday evening researching the best mirror-selfie angles. Their brains, as you can probably ascertain, were mostly protein shake with a very light dusting of oxygen.
I tried not to let their remarks faze me, and rifled through my memories for something comforting: the time Eddie, when he thought no one was looking, picked his nose with such zest he gave himself a nosebleed.
Clive swaggered back inside, quickly conducting his body language into something more proper, as Uncle Phil emerged from the office into the loading bay in his full funeral directors’ regalia. Hisblack top hat perched smartly on his head, and a whipcord coat, which his protruding belly now eked and strained against, was wrapped around him.
‘How we doing, gang? All set?’ he asked, I think trying to instil some spirit into all of his employees who were, to be honest, just there for the pay check.
‘Yep, all good,’ I was the only one to reply. ‘After lunch, I’ll make sure everything’s buffed, fluffed and casket stuffed.’
Unfortunately, there was a reluctant acceptance of gallows humour in this place.
‘Perfect, perfect. Thank you, sweetheart,’ Uncle Phil said with his signature warm smile. I noticed him glance discreetly at the car, double-checking for any stray flower petals; we all knew that was his pet peeve. ‘And how are you feeling? After, you know…?’
Urgh. You know what really pisses me off? Mum, Dad and Ben, myex-husband, mind you, had a group chat all about me. With Mum and Dad so far away, Ben would give them regular updates on theRuth-Reporton my ‘well-being’ and, clearly, Uncle Phil now had the same level of intel on how I was.
‘Oh, the case? It’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ I said with a scoff and an indifferent wave of my hand. Much like Ben, Uncle Phil clearly knew me well enough that he didn’t buy my supposed apathy towards the news that the case had been put on ice. He placed a gentle hand on my shoulder.
‘It’s okay not to be okay,’ he remarked softly. ‘You do know that, right, Ruth?’
He must have taken the mental health first aid training to heart.
I’m 100 per centnotokay, I thought to myself as I stared back at his prolonged eye contact, realising he had one eyelid that drooped further down than the other. But I was doing significantly better than Mrs Lambert, so there was that.
