‘It’s all going to be all right,’ he said when I didn’t respond to his remark as he took a glance at his watch and then gestured for Sophie to get in as she diligently wiped a small smudge offthe bumper, making sure way too obviously that he would spot her assiduousness. Rumour was, Uncle Phil was keen to retire in the next year or so and she was, obviously, the heir apparent.
Good for you, babe, you’ve just inherited a building chock full of dead people, hope it makes you happy.
‘Ooops, you missed a petal,’ Uncle Phil said, crouching down as much as he could without his belt buckle snapping, and holding the tiniest petal from the hearse aloft for both Sophie and me to look at. Sophie didn’t say anything, her eyes fixed on me as Uncle Phil turned to see who the suspect was.
It was a pretty tense rest of the morning after the hearse bearing Uncle Phil, Sophie and most of Mrs Lambert’s remains left, and I found myself anxiously tapping my fingers or rapping my feet as I watched the computer clock creep gradually towards eleven. Surely, I wasn’t in trouble. Detective Carlota wouldn’t have called ahead if she was going to arrest me, that’s not a thing the police did, right? Or was it? I’d never been arrested before. Would this ruin my mum’s ambassadorial posting? I hadn’t thought about that on Saturday, but then, I hadn’t thought about much other than finding a way to stop the police from closing the case.
She arrived at 10.56, as always impeccably punctual. I’d always imagined detectives would wear dark flowing trench coats with loosely knotted ties wrapped around their necks, but Detective Carlota was different. Notably, she had a penchant for the most fabulous jumpers, they were always professional, usually cashmere, with a range of varied necklines. V-neck, roll-neck, cowl, you name it. She was a stunning woman, with sharp, defined cheekbones and long, dark, voluminous hair threaded with small glimpses of grey all while standing at a height that must have been close to, if not, six feet, with a muscular, verging on stocky build that I imagined put most of her colleagues to shame. If I’m honest, I think part of me might have been a little bit in love with Detective Carlota.
It’s funny I still called her Detective Carlota. She’d told me, as soon as we began to correspond several times a week about the TellTale Killer after Greta, to call her ‘Cecilia’ or ‘Cis’, as her friends and colleagues did; but for some reason, perhaps out of awe or respect, I kept calling her Detective Carlota.
But even my awe of her couldn’t outweigh my stifling anxiety that she was here to arrest me. In her classic ‘no nonsense’ manner, she almost immediately gestured for us to head into one of the office meeting rooms, ones we usually reserved for talking to the bereaved about whether they wanted Grandpops chucked in a hole or deep fried in the flames of a thousand suns.
I offered Detective Carlota tea or coffee, but she politely declined both as I sat down, mentally reminding myself not to tap my fingers or feet too much. She was a detective, after all; she’d know instantly something was up if my body made it too obvious.
‘So, something’s up,’ Detective Carlota said, rather matter-of-factly.
Oh dear.
‘Wha… Wha… what do you mean?’ I stammered, struggling to hurl the words out of my throat. ‘Nothing’s up,’ I reassured her.
‘Something is up,’ Carlota repeated more assertively, holding my gaze with no intention of breaking it. ‘For the last two years, you’ve texted, emailed, faxed me – who even uses fax? – at least every other day. You sent me every bit of evidence, every time the case was mentioned inMetro, every time Jago Jones writes an article, every crazy conspiracy theory, and then, when I tell you it’s gone cold, I hear nothing from you for four days. So, something’s up.’
I quickly analysed her words in my head. Was this a trick? Some kind of detective mind game?
‘I mean, what do you want me to say, Detective Carlota?’ I replied with a nervous chortle. I felt she could sense my unease as she reached across the table and, to my relief, gently wrapped her hand around my own.
‘Ruth, it’s okay,’ she whispered, tenderly. ‘I’m here for you.’
I felt my heartbeat ease ever so slightly as my shoulders gradually unknotted and relaxed. Okay, maybe I wasn’t about to be arrested after all.
‘I wish I had an update for you, I really do,’ Carlota continued. ‘I hope you know how hard I fought to keep this case going, for Greta, but there was honestly nothing I could do. They took it out of my hands before I even had a chance to say my piece. I’m not even allowed to have any exposure to anything else that comes in regarding it.’
I shrugged my shoulders airily as if to say,Well, what can you do?
‘I’m going to get this guy, I hope you know that, Ruth. Even if it’s the last thing I do in my career, I’ll catch him and make sure he spends the rest of his miserable existence locked up in a three metre by three metre cell.’
I nodded as if I understood her determination, but my heart rate hadn’t settled enough for me to respond in a coherent fashion quite yet. In the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake the lingering thought: surely, they’d found the heart by now. There’s no way they could have missed it, lying there right outside the station doors. Or maybe Detective Carlota knew and wasn’t telling me, or maybe they’d given it to another detective and she had no knowledge of it at all.
I knew Detective Carlota had transferred from another station outside of London about five years or so ago after some sort of scandal. Since I had known her, all I could infer from Detective Carlota was that she had cocked up in some catastrophic way which led to the relocation. Furthermore, from the little she’d let slip, it was obvious her current employers were yet to fully recognise her talents, not helped by the fact she was the lead on the TellTale Killer case two years ago. But I knew how hard she’d tried to catch him, none of this was on her.
I couldn’t tell by the way she spoke if she was blaming herself or itching to prove she could still nail the case, most likely a bit of both. What I did know was that she was wrapped up in it farbeyond professional duty; her throwaway remarks made it clear her career never really recovered after everyone at the station decided she was the one who’d let the Telltale Killer slip past them. That can’t have been easy to bounce back from.
‘Are you with me, Ruth, or off daydreaming again?’ Detective Carlota asked warmly, snapping me abruptly back to the present.
‘I’m sorry, I was… whatever,’ I mumbled, still distracted.
‘I just really want to make sure you’re okay, Ruth,’ Carlota said. ‘You’ve been through so much, and I know how important this is to you. I know how much Greta meant to you.’
Most people didn’t mention her name. They only referred to Greta obliquely, as if even uttering it would feel like an iron-gloved fist to the gut. But Detective Carlota never had that instinct. I’m not sure why. People were remarkably peculiar about others’ grief, maybe because grief was remarkably peculiar.
I felt like most of the people I spoke to considered losing a friend not quite on a par with losing a parent, spouse or a child; that wasreal loss, I could almost hear them thinking as they tried to prevent their face shifting into a sneer. Look, I’m not vying for a shiny gold medal in the Grief Olympics here, but I couldn’t recall a time where Greta wasn’t practically industrially superglued to my hip. From nursery to university, and even when she pulled strings to get me my first lowly job at the paper, we were always inseparable, always making our life plans to ensure we’d never be too far away from one another.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but I had always imagined my final days (Ben was bound to ‘pop his clogs’ in one of his usual harebrained mishaps), unfolding with her; the two of us blind drunk and dosed up on pensioner-strength painkillers, swaddled in industrial-grade adult nappies, hopelessly senile, watching the sunset and spitting at any teenagers who dared make a racket in the park whileCash in the Atticwas on. It never felt like a fantasy, just the natural order of how things would go. And without any kind of warning, she was ripped from my life.
I tried not to get myself too upset, I couldn’t let DetectiveCarlota see me cry again. I could tell she wasn’t here on official police business; she had made this visit specially to make sure I was doing okay. Maybe it was because Detective Carlota came into my life just as Greta left it and so without meaning to, she had become something of my friend, therapist, my confidante, and everything in between over the past two years in some attempt to fill the void. Sometimes I forgot that, for the most part, she was only doing her job.
‘But if something changed, if something big happened, you would tell me, right?’ I asked, still not certain if Carlota was being ignorant or deceptive regarding the heart. She could be a hard woman to read.
